Dr. David Levitt is a cognitive scientist, software engineer, AI researcher, virtual and augmented reality innovator, entrepreneur, musician, physicist and writer.
Dr. Levitt is co-founder, president and CEO of Pantomime Corporation, and a Research Fellow at Stochastic Labs. He earned his B.S. in Engineering and Applied Science at Yale, and his masters in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and doctorate in Artificial Intelligence at MIT.
At MIT, on a Bell Labs fellowship with Prof Marvin Minsky, Levitt pioneered the field of algorithmic music generation for traditional classical and jazz styles. His AI description languages ranged across rhythmic concepts like syncopation, swing, and waltz, melody and counterpoint terms, and the harmonic cadences and progressions common to so many styles. Levitt and Stephan Schwanauer co-edited the MIT Press book Machine Models of Music, a collection of AI papers about software that shows how we perceive and create music, including Levitt’s thesis A Representation of Musical Dialects.
Dr. Levitt was on the founding team of the MIT Media Lab, where he led MIT’s first Mac lab, focused on real-time media, graphical programming kits and music. When he joined the team that invented virtual reality at VPL Research, Levitt created the first VR worlds with realistic gravity, object collisions and 3D sound.
Levitt has been a research scientist and product developer at Atari, VPL, Viacom and Interval Research, has taught at NYU and MIT, and co-founded three startups.
In 2014 Dr. Levitt and Don Hopkins co-founded Pantomime, delivering augmented reality experiences that feature realistic physics and real-time multi-player interaction, and winning a Launch Silicon Valley Tech Challenge World Cup. In 2022 Pantomime launched Reality Construction Kit app software that uses the LiDAR depth sensors in Pro iPhones and iPads to create interactive augmented reality, with uncannily realistic physics that reflects to the user’s unique environment.
Dr. Levitt, who has worked in physics since his time at Bell Labs, is passionate about physics education and misconceptions about relativity. In the fall of 2023 he presented Accelerometer Experiments Clarify Einstein’s Gravity Theory at the ACP 2023 Conference on Fundamental and Applied Physics. His approach provides easy ways to use smart phones to show gravity is a fictitious force arising from spacetime curvature, simplifying explanations of general relativity. He followed this with the invited paper Completing Feynman’s Gravity Lecture at the ISGAC 2024 conference.
In 2023 Levitt joined Stochastic Labs in Berkeley as a Research Fellow, renewing his focus on algorithmic music and physics. Levitt fluently plays and improvises music on keyboards and vocals. He lives with his family in Sebastopol, California.
