According to Jared Finder, working as a senior software engineering manager at Google is a little like being a time traveler.
“One thing that I heard someone say at work that resonated with me is the idea that we’re like reverse archaeologists,” Finder says. “You know how an archaeologist goes into the past to find something cool? It feels like at a big tech company, we’re able to go into the future to find something cool and bring it back to the present.”
Over the course of his 10 years with the tech giant, the 2004 DigiPen graduate has indeed played a key role in bringing forth several future-facing Google projects within the field of extended reality (or XR) technologies. Some of those projects you might recognize by name, such as Google Cardboard and Google Glass — two pioneering efforts in making virtual reality (VR) experiences and mixed reality (MR) hardware available to the masses. Other projects he’s worked on, such as the ARCore software development kit, have similarly revolutionized augmented reality (AR) applications on billions of Android and iOS smart devices around the world.
“I just like building cool stuff,” Finder says. “It’s really, really cool to feel like you’re building something new — that didn’t exist before — and will be useful to people.”
Like many of his DigiPen peers past and present, it was a drive to build “cool stuff” in the form of video games that led Finder to the BS in Computer Science in Real-Time Interactive Simulation degree program roughly 25 years ago. And for the first half of his career, Finder did just that.
In his first post-college job at Glu Mobile, Finder spent close to three years creating some of the earliest digitally distributed cell phone games to hit the market — before Apple’s iPhone and App Store even existed. “This was in the pre-smartphone era, so this involved developing on these super constrained systems,” Finder says. “Every team was about six to eight people, and that was the entire team — engineering, art, design, testing, the whole thing.”
In addition to shipping a slew of quick-turnaround game projects — from original IPs to the first mobile port of the popular Diner Dash game — Finder also drew heavily on his DigiPen education to program a 2D rasterizer that would end up powering the graphics and effects for multiple titles across a wide range of phone models.
His next job was at California-based Cryptic Studios, where he spent close to eight years building tools and features for massively multiplayer online games like Star Trek Online and Neverwinter. Among his many contributions, Finder says his proudest was the creation of a user-generated content system that allowed players to design and customize their own missions that could exist within the live, persistent world of the games.
“Generally, MMOs had only allowed you to customize your character and buy different things to make your character look cool,” Finder says. “And this was a way to customize the world at a detailed level.”
Around the same time, Finder also began working as an adjunct professor in California, teaching one class on making games in Unity and another focused on how to write a custom game engine from scratch. Eventually, Finder’s career took a turn in 2015 when recruiters from Google reached out to him with an opportunity to help expand their capabilities in game-related technology and 3D rendering.
“At the time, Google had their VR/AR side of things and an early version of what would become Stadia,” Finder says. “I ended up going to the VR/AR side and working on their game engine integration, basically leveraging the experience I had writing custom game engines and also from my teaching.”
Google’s ARCore Geospatial Creator lets users place custom 3D objects in augmented reality anchored to Google Earth locations.
The initial goal, Finder says, was to merge the power and accessibility of existing 3D game engines like Unity with Google’s burgeoning AR and VR technology — empowering developers to create fully immersive 3D worlds and mixed reality experiences. After starting out as a team of one, it wasn’t long before Finder was growing and managing a small group of fellow Google engineers, a pattern he would go on to repeat for similar projects over the years.
Today, Finder continues to support various XR platforms like ARCore through a mix of hands-on software engineering, subject matter expertise, and long-term technical planning.
“Recently, I’ve been trying to get people aligned on how we want to evolve some of our AR tech over the coming years,” he says.
One recent ARCore feature Finder worked closely on was the Geospatial API, which gives developers access to the same 3D map data used by Google Earth. This allows them to create custom 3D art assets and overlays that can be anchored to real-life buildings and locations in geographically based AR experiences.
“We made this thing, the Geospatial Creator, which lets you — inside a game engine like Unity — load up Google’s 3D representation of the world and position things directly in it,” Finder says. “You want to put augmentations around the Statue of Liberty? You can! So I personally did a lot of the design and scoping, as well as a decent amount of the implementation of the editor.”
Finder even had the opportunity to field test his handiwork during a visit to New York’s Times Square in 2023, when the world-famous intersection played host to an AR-powered concert by British virtual band Gorillaz — viewable through a specialized mobile app built with ARCore’s geospatial capabilities.
“I was able to go out to New York for other reasons, and I figured I’ve got to try out the thing I made, right?” Finder says. “The [animated] band members would appear on the top of the buildings and be performing there, and you could look around and see them. And they were all giants. … I was like, ‘Wow! This is really cool.’”
While the use cases for the technology Finder works on are wide-ranging and diverse — from AR-enhanced museum exhibits to utilitarian applications, such as walking navigation assistance using AR overlays — some of the most memorable applications have been game experiences. One early example Finder recalls was a 2016 AR game called Woorld, designed by Keita Takahashi, the creator of Katamari Damacy. Made for Google’s Project Tango, a predecessor platform to ARCore, the game had players using a tablet camera to follow a cutesy virtual character as he explored the player’s real-life environment.
DigiPen, of course, has the rich 2D and 3D education. That really set me up to do well at Google in the whole AR/XR development space.
“He would walk around your world and walk up the walls and the ceiling. And one of the things that happens is that he discovers a pyramid that’s maybe the size of a kid’s pillow fort on your floor,’” Finder says. “So you have to get down on your hands and knees and crawl inside with him. And there’s a little treasure to get if you’re able to get inside. And that extra experience of actually moving around, like having it be on your floor as you’re crawling inside, was really cool.”
Through another more recent partnership, Finder’s team at Google joined with Japanese developer TAITO to transform an arcade classic into a location-based mobile experience called Space Invaders: World Defense. In addition to the primary mode of the game, which used the phone’s camera to show aliens entering through portals in the player’s surroundings, a second mode allowed players to pursue the invaders through a stylized interdimensional environment in which the buildings were based on real 3D map data of the area.
Space Invaders: World Defense turned players’ real surroundings into an intergalactic battleground.
“That’s the cool thing about being at Google is that you really can leverage that world-scale understanding to create a world-scale experience,” Finder says.
Whereas the computer science behind traditional video games and AR experiences does overlap, Finder says there are some unique challenges on the AR side of things, which sometimes delves into other technologies such computer vision, accelerometers, and global positioning data.
“The big difference is that in AR, you don’t really have an accurate understanding of the world. You’re always trying to ingest more information to really understand it, whereas in a video game, you know the world perfectly because you built it,” Finder says. “But a lot of the tech is otherwise very similar. You’re doing all your 3D math in a 3D world. You end up thinking about things moving around in 3D.”
In that regard, Finder says, his game development background has continued to serve as a solid foundation for everything he’s since gone on to do.
“At Cryptic it was working on MMOs, so all 3D, all on PC. And DigiPen, of course, has the rich 2D and 3D education,” he says. “That really set me up to do well at Google in the whole AR/XR development space, and now I am a technical lead for about 40 people, serving as kind of a general expert for all sorts of things.”