By: Adam Debreczeni
We’re excited to welcome Avi Cieplinski, formerly of Apple and Twitter, as our new Head of Design for AR. Avi comes to us with 14 years at Apple, where he worked on human interaction design, focusing on how we interact with future hardware with a diverse set of inputs like multitouch, trackpads, cameras, keyboards, and other emerging tech.
In his 14 years at Apple, Avi focused on interaction design for experiences never existed before. He worked directly on creating interfaces for the iPhone and iPad. His small team invented and developed Apple’s 3D Touch and the Taptic Engine hardware and interactions. 700 million iPhone users around the world type using these technologies every single day.
More recently, Avi was a senior engineer at Twitter where he worked on UI design and prototyping, feature development, and building a new set of tools to prototype and implement modern, dynamic UIs.
Location-based AR is a unique challenge in which design principles have not yet been cemented. The most basic interactions still have to be explored and prototyped. Avi brings a wealth of knowledge on this front and will lead design on Mapbox’s AR effort to augment the world with location information.
Avi joins us at the perfect time. With the launch of our Reactive Native AR SDK and our Apple SceneKit SDK, we’re opening location-based AR to every developer. Avi’s unique skill set of building for platforms as they emerge will help us continue to provide developers with the best tools and frameworks to explore this new venue.
“Designing for AR is in its infancy, but it’s clear that location is a fundamental aspect of AR. That’s why I’m excited to be joining the Mapbox team. Mapbox is the perfect place for me to combine my passion for exploring new technologies and my love for connecting people with the world around them.” — Avi Cieplinski.
Welcome to the team Avi, we’re excited to see you tackle these challenges!
Apple 3D Touch and Taptic Engine Designer, Avi Cieplinski, to Lead Mapbox AR Design was originally published in Points of interest on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.