Speakers

For over 15 years, Jeff Hesser worked on video games like Rock Band and Fortnite Festival at Harmonix and then Epic Games as a 3D Art Generalist with a focus on Gameplay/Interaction Prototypes and Environment Art/Level Design. Jeff is also an accomplished figure sculptor, and his sculptures have been featured in exhibitions at the Pennsylvania College of Art & Design, the Dahesh Museum, the National Sculpture Society and the Parrish Art Museum. In addition to his work as an artist, Jeff has more than a decade of experience as a teacher and received the Frazier Award for Excellence in Teaching at the Rhode Island School of Design. Over the past decade of GDC's Jeff has brought together his background as a game dev, teacher and sculptor to give talks and run roundtables on effective ways to give and receive feedback. He now runs workshops at schools and companies on this topic. In GDC summits, he's delivered talks about innovative ways to create gaze-reactive UI in virtual reality (VR) and integrate VR with public spaces. Jeff has also explored creative ways to use interactive, real-time rendering outside the context of video games. As a founding member of Secret Portal, he worked with an interdisciplinary team to create events at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston that combined virtual reality with physical spaces. In another side project called Circle, he worked with two musicians to design and prototype a zen-like, calming audio-visual experience in VR. As the founder of Slow Monkey, an independent studio developing mindfulness-focused digital tools and transformative, impact-oriented games, he's creating alternatives to traditional engagement loops with slow, deliberate digital interactions and gaming experiences that prioritize presence and slowing down over distraction and speeding up.

Presenting:

• Effective Feedback Workshop