Jack McCauley is an Innovator in Residence at the Jacobs Institute for Design Innovation, where he mentors students, lectures in courses focused on product design and design for manufacturing, and leads research and development projects focused on applications of augmented, virtual, and mixed reality for design professionals and students.
McCauley graduated from Berkeley Engineering with a B.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in 1986, and credits the time he spent at Berkeley as an undergraduate with helping to ignite his career. McCauley’s inventions, intellectual property and patents bridge diverse technologies. He was one of the inventors of the Universal Serial Bus (USB) specification. He created the original scrolling feature for a computer mouse. As director of research for the electronic entertainment company, RedOctane, he was the chief engineer behind the Guitar Hero game series, as well as at least eight other highly successful digital games. In 2012, McCauley co-founded Oculus VR and manufactured Oculus Rift, the head-mounted virtual-reality display. Oculus was later acquired by Facebook.