Make computer fun.
An afternoon can disappear into a screen. It can also leave behind something only you could have made.
Dave Otte is an artist, leader, and technologist with 20+ years in animation and virtual reality at DreamWorks, Google, Microsoft, and Meta. Today he paints, and helps media and entertainment companies use AI to give people more room to create.
He spent nearly 15 years at DreamWorks Animation, beginning in film production and later working as a character technical director and software engineer. He invented animation systems and built rigs for characters including Donkey in Shrek Forever After and Marty the zebra in Madagascar 3.
At NOVA, a DreamWorks startup, he conceived a machine-learning approach to character deformation that let complex feature-film characters run in real time using only an iPad’s processing power. The work led to a patent and a SIGGRAPH 2018 paper.
At Google, he built an automated system that turned massive 3D CAD datasets into VR environments.
At Microsoft, he conceived and built a system that generated facial animation directly from speech.
At Meta’s Reality Labs Research, he built and led a team of technical artists to accelerate research. He hired and coached the team, helping people develop their strengths and do their best work.
His approach to AI is grounded in that hands-on experience: understanding how creative work is made, how to automate its repetitive parts, and how to help people take it further.
In his studio near Seattle, he paints in oil. His current series draws on old photographs to explore the gap between how things were and how they are remembered, an interest that reaches back to his degree in psychology. He builds his own frames and prints his own editions.