Chris Dunaetz

Videos of the work

Disney+ environments: a tourI led bringing these ILM-built worlds into Disney+ and was primary engineer on their RealityKit runtime. Walkthrough by Spatial Insider · starts at 3:38 Alien: Earth, featured by AppleApple showcases the Alien: Earth environment on Disney+, which I brought to Vision Pro. Meet with Apple, 2025 · starts at 58:13 WWDC23: Disney+ on Vision ProApple and Disney announce Disney+ for Vision Pro, including the viewing environments. WWDC 2023 keynote · starts at 1:40:51

Experience

• 96 FPS on Meta Quest 3 rendering a 3D environment around a 4K stereo film at 48 FPS, on an XR2 Gen 2 that also runs tracking and passthrough, with about half the peak GPU compute of Vision Pro's M2.
• Under 200 ms from tap to first frame on average for 800 MB environments on Vision Pro, using GPU-ready ASTC/KTX textures, front-half-first loading and deferred custom-shader compilation.
• Alien: Earth environment runs dynamic lighting, shadows, skeletal animation, particle simulation, vertex-displacement shaders, anisotropic reflections and volumetric lighting at the same time.
• Foveated Gaussian splatting: moved a Metal splat renderer onto RealityKit through LowLevelMesh to gain foveated rendering and hybrid rendering with traditional meshes.
• On-device AI: real-time semantic segmentation with custom PyTorch models on Core ML, composited with the live camera feed in custom Metal shaders.

Disney+ immersive viewing environments: Apple Vision Pro and Meta Quest

• Led the effort to bring ILM-built 3D worlds into Disney+ as immersive viewing environments, announced in Apple's WWDC 2023 keynote and live on Vision Pro's launch day; primary engineer on the RealityKit runtime.
• Brought FX's Alien: Earth environment to Vision Pro with little project structure: got the vendor's models and animation running in headset and hand-authored the dynamic lighting, particles and some of the sound. Featured by Apple in a 2025 Meet with Apple session.
• Ported the environments to Meta Quest in the new Meta Spatial SDK: rewrote surface and vertex shaders, kept color accurate between Vision Pro's P3 displays and Quest, and built the test-bench app used to debug them for Quest and future Meta hardware before Disney+ integration.

Immersive video, R&D and AR

• Built a 180° stereo video format ahead of Apple Immersive Video; rendered, encoded and shipped films in it.
• Wrote Swift tooling to encode MV-HEVC and Apple Immersive Video on Apple silicon's hardware encoder (VideoToolbox), and streamed Apple Immersive Video over HLS. Used NVIDIA hardware encoders (NVENC) to cut bitrate for other experiences.
• Built a Vision Pro flight-sim test bench measuring which motions feel fun versus cause motion sickness.
• Built the SwiftUI App Clip for Marvel's Eternals AR companion app.

• Led features and the largest UI overhaul for the FOXNOW, FXNOW and Nat Geo TV streaming apps (15M users).

Talks

• USD Summit, Pixar headquarters (2025): delivering Vision Pro runtime assets via USD in RealityKit.
• Disgraph 2024 (Disney's internal graphics conference): co-presented the viewing-environment pipeline with ILM.

Skills

Graphics, video and AI

Metal, RealityKit, Meta Spatial SDK, OpenUSD, shaders, ASTC/KTX, GPU profiling, Gaussian splatting, VideoToolbox (MV-HEVC, Apple Immersive Video), NVENC, HLS, P3 color management, YCbCr pixel formats, PyTorch, Core ML

Languages and tools

Swift, Python, C++, Objective-C, Claude Code, Cursor

Game engines and DCC tools

Unity, Unreal Engine, Blender, Maya, RenderMan

Education

B.S. Business Administration, University of Southern California, 2014