Violet Whitney

Violet Whitney has focused her career on bringing computing beyond the computer screen. Her research explores the spatial, social, and tangible potential of digital connectivity, providing an alternative to the individualist and de-contextualized nature of the dominant product design discourse. Today smart-home products, hybrid work, and even Yelp choreograph human movement and societal behaviors. By applying emerging technologies (ambient computing, LLMs, computer vision, and projection mapping) she creates user experiences that are beyond the screen, spatial, and grounded in our physical environment.

Violet co-leads Spatial Pixel, which designs AI to make digital experiences feel more integrated into our physical world. Spatial Pixel is building a new kind of spatial computing – one for your space, not for your face.

Today she teaches tangible and spatial computing at University of Pennsylvania, University of Michigan, and Columbia University. Outside of academia, she co-leads a group called Architechie, a network for urban technologists. Violet has been a Director of Product and an Associate Director of Design at Sidewalk Labs, the Google initiative focused on building future cities. There she started Delve, an AI product for neighborhood development (now part of Google Maps), developed computer vision applications for pedestrian tracking, and worked with teams on leveraging LLMs for urban-scale problems.