Hello, my name is Alec Pierce and I’m an XR Engineer. I started my journey with XR products starting in 2014 with the Oculus DK2. A club called the Undergraduates Projects Laboratory was where I frequently spent my time between classes while attending the University of Wisconsin - Madison; in pursuit of my Bachelors of Computer Sciences. In this club/lab were many devices and gadgets students could play, tinker, and hack on. Myself and a friend named John Detter would occasionally try to get something made/running on the Oculus DK2, but at the time we decided the nausea created by the framerate was not worth it.
In 2016 I picked up an HTC Vive, which was the product that really kickstarted my passion for XR. After showing it off to my brother, he pressed myself and John to try and make a coop RPG for the Vive, and so we formed a small LLC called Vixonix Studios in pursuit of this cooperative RPG. 2 years later, we published our first game to the Steam Store and all decided to go our seperate ways.
My passion for XR never slowed down though. I quickly moved onto working in VR Healthtech with a startup called Karuna Labs. There I built a very solid foundation for everything Unity and VR and met some great people that I’m still in contact with today. In 2020 the pandemic hit and times became a bit rough for everyone, I moved to Portland where I found my next job opportunity with ForgeFX. I was able to get experience with AR headsets there before landing a job with Meta Reality Labs Research.
Outside of my work I enjoy playing guitar, golfing, snowboarding, playing video games, collecting trading cards, and tinkering/hacking different devices and applications to fundamentally understand how they work. This site should be a great opportunity to read up on the things I’ve done and continue following what I’ll be pursuing next!