Claus Moberg is Vice President of Engineering at Roblox, where he leads the teams responsible for building Roblox's user-facing applications and social features. Roblox is the world's leading immersive social real-time co-experience platform, a product space increasingly referred to as the "Metaverse" . Claus joined Roblox in the summer of 2016. Prior to Roblox, Claus served for seven years as Founder and CEO of SnowShoe where he built physical transaction authentication devices for Smartphones. Claus attended the University of Wisconsin full-time from 2001-2011, earning his BS (Political Science and an Independent Major in Politics, Economics, and Environmental Science), MS (Atmospheric Science), and where he was pursuing his PhD (Environmental Science) when he decided to refocus his efforts on SnowShoe.  

Description:
The "Metaverse" is currently one of the hottest buzzwords in the internet technology space, but, as with many buzzwords, the concept is poorly defined and often misapplied to companies and products that are only tangentially related to the core concept. Roblox has spent the last 18 years building our version of the metaverse: a user-generated content platform powering online immersive human co-experience. In this talk, we'll explore the key feature set that any platform must have to be competitive within the metaverse platform space, and we'll take a look at Roblox's unique approach to satisfying this list of requirements. In doing so, we'll address several important issues that the industry as a whole is still grappling with: open source vs. vertical integration; monetization mechanisms and their impact on user safety; and how many triangles do you need to be truly immersive?

Day/Date:
Thursday, November 10th

Time:
4-5 PM

Where:
Room 1240 in CS department

Questions:
Contact Vasso Founta at founta@wisc.edu