David Yann Robert

David Yann Robert started working in film in the mid to late 90s when computer animated feature films were first being created. He worked under Richard Hollander, a visionary and veteran who helped create the visual effects for the original Blade Runner. During his 10+ year career in film, David worked on creating visual fx and character animation on feature film projects. He was on the earliest 3D animation team tasked with developing alien musculature facial animation rigs for 20th Century Fox's first 3D animated feature. David was approached by Academy Award-winning procedural animation software company Side Effects to head up their expansion in the San Francisco Bay Area where he consulted on projects for Pixar, PDI/DreamWorks, Industrial Light and Magic (ILM), Electronic Arts, Lucas Arts and Tippet Studios-at the same time exploring possibilities for next-generation, real-time CG production. In 2009, David left the film industry to follow his dream of 'animating off the screen' and was admitted to MIT into the Personal Robots Group at The Media Lab to do research on the forefront of Human-Robot-Interaction (HRI), which he did for 5 years, serving as a Teaching Fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Education where he supplemented his scientific and engineering education with a focus on informal learning in children as he was building robots back at MIT to engage children in playful learning scenarios. Under his mentor, Joe Blatt, David was able to serve as part of a teaching team at Harvard that taught a class on Sesame Street (with the creators). Through the process, he learned the importance of nurturing the whole human as a developing 'user' of HRI (or any other) design. These insights later helped him develop a series of robot products as a professional robot designer. David releases music under the name Animated Matter, the latest album 'Selkie' is an ambient lullaby for the subconscious- listeners are encouraged to be horizontal during playback.