John F. Akers

About Me

Hello, my name is John Akers and I am the Director of Research and Education for the UW Reality Lab. I was previously researching extended reality and accessible technology at the Taskar Center for Accessible Technology.

My areas of focus are extended reality, computer science education, and user experience engineering with twelve years of experience developing software programs ranging from low-level systems to client-facing websites, and seven years of experience teaching undergraduate and masters level computer science courses. My most recent work has predominantly been in the area of innovative virtual and augmented reality applications as well as some exploration into applications of traditional machine learning and neural nets.

To learn more about the work I have done please refer to my project pages.

Skills

• Computer Graphics
• Computer Vision
• Extended Reality
• User Experience Engineering
• User Research
• Interaction Design
• 3D Modeling
• Graphic Design
• Data Visualization

Known Tools and Frameworks

• Unity 3D
• Android
• ReactJS
• A-Frame
• Redux
• Jupyter Notebook
• PyTorch

Known Languages

• Java
• C#
• Javascript
• C++
• C
• Python
• SQL