The Company

Jacquelyn Ford Morie Founder and Chief Scientist. MS, MFA, PhD. With degrees in both art and computer science, Dr. Morie has 25 years experience in developing innovative techniques for rich, emotionally evocative virtual reality (VR) environments. As part of this pioneering work, she invented a scent collar to bring the emotional power of smell to immersive experiences, and developed new types of functions for VR, such as connections to multiple sensor and feedback systems to make VR more effective. Dr. Morie spent 13 years as a Sr. Research Scientist at USC’s Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT), which she helped found. While there, she created novel VR telehealth care activities using her deep understanding of art, computer animation and human behavior to enhance patient engagement with these programs. In the mid-1990s, Dr. Morie started comprehensive computer animation training programs at Walt Disney Feature Animation combining art and technology topics, which she later expanded to the special effects industries at studios such as Rhythm and Hues. Prior to that, Morie worked at UCF’s Institute for Simulation and Training, where she developed techniques to make VR environments more immersive and emotionally compelling, and helped lead a group of innovative students called The Toy Scouts. She has been expanding her VR research to include neuroscience and avatars, developing methods to determine how such technologies can effect positive change in those who use them.

In 2022 Dr. Morie was awarded the Accenture Lifetime Achievement Award for her work in Virtual Reality.

Edward Kip Haynes
Lead Technologist Kip earned his degree in Computer Engineering from WVU in 1998, and spent the early part of his career developing high performance parallel distributed rendering applications for large-scale data visualization. He joined USC’s ICT in 2003 as manager for a research project investigating parallel and distributed systems for ARMY training and simulation efforts. Subsequently, he oversaw the technical integration and implementation of several high profile ICT military training systems including: JFETS (Joint Effects Call for Fire Training), INOTS (Immersive Naval Officer Training Simulation), ELITE (Emergent Leader Immersive Training Environment) and TOPSS (Transitional Online Post-deployment Soldier Support in Virtual Worlds).
Eric Chance
Virtual Worlds Lead Designer Eric is a USC film program alumnus who specializes in user-generated content for virtual worlds such as Second Life (where he has been a resident since early 2004) and OpenSim. In addition to design and building he is expert in scripting and developing new functionality for a wide range of purposes. His past clients in SL include Linden Lab, blueair.tv, Eyebeam, and ICT. He has worked in the film and live audio industries, theatrical set construction, and in comic book design from 1997-1998 at Antarctic Press. He is passionate about interactivity, sound, game design, art, and learning.
DianePiepol Diane Piepol
Project Director, Strategist As a producer, digital educator and digital compositing artist, Diane’s credits encompass work on digital research projects [mixed reality, virtual reality, speaking interactive characters], feature films, commercials and music videos.
Specialties:
-Project management, business development
-Leading-edge, creative tech projects
-Interactive technologies, virtual reality, virtual humans
-Collaborative brainstorming, public presentation
-Digital visual effects, computer animation
-Visual arts & culture, digital community leadership & volunteerism