Rylan

Rylan Pozniak Daniels is an award-winning AR/VR creator and futurist.

Rylan has worked with NASA, Apple, Stanford University, Snapchat, Google, and Niantic on XR development and is on a mission to democratize XR to the masses. Rylan spearheaded a team selected by NASA to develop an augmented reality-equipped spacesuit for astronauts going to the Moon on the Artemis mission, the first crewed Moon mission in over 50 years. After stints working on XR at Apple and Niantic, Rylan has won several XR hackathons, including the 2023 MIT Reality Hack for Best Shareable Experience, and the 2022 Stanford TreeHacks for Best in Accessibility. In 2021, Rylan was invited to be an AR Artist-in-Residence at the AR House in Los Angeles, where he won the Grand Prize in Niantic’s Lightship Challenge. In 2020, Rylan was hired by Stanford’s Skull Base and Pituitary Center to create a VR neuroanatomy app to train Stanford medical students on how to perform specialized brain surgeries. That same year, Rylan received the Nextant Prize for AR/VR Social Impact at Silicon Valley’s Augmented World Expo, the largest AR/VR conference in the world.

In 2019, Rylan collaborated with Alex McDowell, production designer of Spielberg’s Minority Report, on developing an AR visualization of a floating city. This was a direct response to a prediction that by 2050, millions of people globally will be displaced by climate change. In 2018, Snapchat invited Rylan to create one of the first AR lenses for Lens Studio, Snap’s AR development tool. In 2016, Rylan won 1st place in a UploadVR juried competition for Best VR app, where he created a VR adventure through the human brain.

Rylan is also a prolific music composer, having been named as a Los Angeles Philharmonic Composer Fellow. His original pieces were premiered by the LA Phil Orchestra and the LA Master Chorale at Walt Disney Concert Hall. Rylan continues to integrate his musical compositions and sound environments into ground breaking
XR experiences.

Rylan has written articles on AR/VR for the LA Times HS Insider covering events like SIGGRAPH, VRLA, AWE, and others. In 2014, as a chosen TIME For Kids reporter, Rylan discovered his passion for AR/VR when interviewing Shigeru Miyamoto, the creator of Super Mario video games, who praised AR/VR as the next evolution of gaming.