Trevor Berninger

USA  [email protected]  trevor-h-berninger  https://trevors.website

EXPERIENCE

Director, Interactive Software | Light Field Lab | San Jose, CA | December 2021 - July 2025

• Directed, managed, and hired software engineers for the development of custom holographic rendering engines and plugins targeting custom in-house 10 gigapixel holographic light field displays.

• Managed team and architected redesign of display calibration pipelines to a distributed workflow by focusing on render farm compatibility.  Brought processing of hundreds of gigabytes of geometric and color calibration data down from a multi-day process to a few hours.  Created test charts to evaluate pixel-level accuracy of 3D video-wall calibrations.

• Created specifications and worked with server hardware vendors to develop and validate a million-dollar data center solution optimized for distributed GPU and storage bandwidths exceeding 1.2TB/s of image data across 30 servers for 120 GPUs before finalizing hardware acquisition.

• Partnered with AAA game studios to increase compatibility of real-world Unreal Engine content within our real time light field rendering software plugins.

• Used Open Sound Control to bridge live mo-cap performance interactions in Unreal Engine to synchronized physical lighting and audio systems on a theme-park style theatrical set.  Abstracted physical-world actions into Blueprint nodes.

• Stand-in actor for live scripted performances combining mo-cap, voice acting, and improvisation during key technology demonstrations.

 

Lead Engineer | Light Field Lab | San Jose, CA | July 2019 - December 2021

• Designed and maintained a from-scratch real time distributed rendering engine specifically optimized for ray traced light field rendering on video walls developed in Rust using the Vulkan rendering API.

• Created a distributed video player optimized for custom light field video formats using Vulkan with NVMe DMA optimizations.  Later migrated custom Linux exFAT driver-based DMA code to NvidiaFS with EXT4 and RDMA over fiber support.

• Maintained internal fork of Blender adding GPU and CPU optimized support for fast direct-to-light-field rendering instead of extremely slow camera rig based solutions used by other companies and products.

• Trained Intel® Open Image Denoise AI models on custom light field image datasets and integrated results into render farm pipelines greatly reducing overall render times for highest-quality light field renders.

• Architected and implemented audio hardware setup and game engine technology to facilitate live-performance demonstrations of body and face tracking inside light field rendering systems.

• Participated in physically deploying and troubleshooting demo technology at customer’s location.

 

Software Engineer (Real-Time) | Light Field Lab | San Jose, CA | April 2018 - July 2019

• Ported existing full light field renderer from Nuke to Unity and Unreal Engine 4 to bring down render times from 1 day to a few minutes.

• Created prototype 60fps Unity-based GPU-accelerated light field video playback system.

• Developed novel real-time multi-axis light field approximation renderer within Unity using normal rasterization pipelines enhanced with ray tracing within compute and fragment shaders.

• Integrated hand tracking into real time light field rendering games and demonstrations.

• Setup and maintained Arch and Ubuntu Linux video-wall servers, software, and Nvidia driver settings and optimizations.

EXPERIENCE (Continued)

Software Engineer | Lytro (Acquired by Google) | Mountain View, CA | December 2017 - March 2018

• Collaborated with post production teams to integrate light field data into Unreal and Unity game engines.

• Developed techniques for cross-platform, including mobile, AR rendering of custom compressed point cloud data from light field videos.

 

Engineer | Limitless Ltd (Acquired by Lytro) | Bellevue, WA | May 2016 - December 2017

• Architected and implemented a fully VR interactive experience content development platform in partnership with a major Hollywood studio.  Featured at SIGGRAPH 2017 Real-Time Live! in which an interactive VR experience was created live on stage within 6 minutes.

• Responsible for PS4 port of Cinequest award winning VR game Gary The Gull for show at SIGGRAPH 2016 Real-Time Live!.

• Utilized Google Cloud Platform for storing analytics data, save files, and other user-account data.

• Created and managed a load balanced and auto-scaled speech recognition streaming service based on Google services with built-in analytics for use via a thin client library built for Unreal Engine 4 using experimental gRPC C++ integrations.

• Released a Unity VR keyboard plugin with English word suggestions, support for German and other languages through configurable keyboard layouts, and full Japanese support including Kanji.

• Designed and integrated a JavaScript based branching narrative framework for High Fidelity, Inc.

PATENTS

• Light field display system for video games and electronic sports | US11938398B2 | Granted | 2019

• Scan line refresh for modular display systems | US20220277684A1 | Pending | 2020

EDUCATION

Bachelor of Video Game Programming | University of Advancing Technology | Tempe, AZ | 2016

SKILLS

Languages: Rust, C, C++, C#, Python, LUA, JavaScript, PHP, GLSL, HLSL, SQL, Shell

Content Creation: Blender, Unity, Unreal, Godot, Fyrox, Maya, Octane

Rendering APIs: Vulkan, OpenGL

Web Technologies: Cloudflare, Google Cloud, Caddy, nginx, Apache, HTML, CSS, IPv6 networking, MTLS

Platforms: Linux, Android, PS4, PS2, Windows, macOS, iOS

Linux Distributions: Arch, NixOS, Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu, Alpine

Linux Packaging: PKGBUILD, AppImage, Nix

Containers: systemd nspawn and portabled, Docker

Human Languages: English (native), toki pona (Proficient), Japanese (<=N5)