Daniel Wagner

Daniel Wagner, Director at Snap Inc.

Daniel Wagner is currently the Director of Computer Vision Engineering at Snap Inc., where he leads the Spectacles software development including the operating system, computer vision, hand tracking, application, and mobile.2 He has held this position since November 2019.2

Prior to his current role, Wagner was the CTO and Chief Scientist at DAQRI, a company that opened a new research center in Vienna (DAQRI Austria) in 2016, which he headed until the takeover by Snap in late 2019.12 At DAQRI, he grew the Vienna office to 30 people.1

Wagner has a long history in augmented reality research and development. He is well known for pioneering the research area of augmented reality on mobile phones during his PhD studies at Graz University of Technology.13 He developed the first tracking library running in real-time on PDAs and mobile phones, created the well-known Invisible Train game, and presented the first 6DOF natural feature tracker running in real-time on a mobile phone.1

Wagner has authored over 35 peer-reviewed papers published at international conferences and journals and has 27 granted US patents.1 He has given more than 100 talks around the world to academic and commercial audiences.1

In 2018, Wagner received the prestigious IEEE ISMAR Impact Paper Award for his 2008 paper on natural feature tracking on mobile phones, which had a long-lasting impact on the field of augmented reality.1

Wagner holds an MSc in Computer Science from Vienna University of Technology and a PhD in Computer Science from Graz University of Technology.12