Urs
Dönni
Professional Software Engineer
Professional Software Engineer
I'm Urs Dönni, a professional software engineer with focus on C++, Java, OpenGL and CUDA.
I have an MSc in Computer Science in Visual Computing from ETH Zurich.
My current position is Software Engineer at Google. I'm tech lead for Google Lens' text experience.
I love programming, and have 15+ years of C++ and 5+ years of Java experience.
I love Visual Computing. Not only is programming itself fun, but having a great looking visual result is awesome. I used CUDA for various image processing and GPGPU tasks.
I used to be team lead for Viz Libero for a team of 5 developers. However, I love coding too much and have gone back to it full time.
I love crafting polished user experiences. I go the extra mile to make sure what users experience is intuitive, efficient and delightful.
During my studies and my work at Vizrt and Google, I have done various projects. Below you find a small selection.
I have worked on Google Lens for over five years, and have helped it grow from a small project to a product that's helpful to hundreds of millions of users.
My main focus is on text and translation experiences. The video on the right was part of Google's I/O keynote and showcases text selection features I've built. It is amazing to see that my work changes people's lives all over the world.
Viz Libero is the world's most advanced sports analysis system.
As Lead Software Engineer and Team Lead of Viz Libero, I have led the development and advancment of Viz Libero for several years, before I left the company at the end of 2018.
The most important addition in recent years had been a complete overhaul of the graphics pipeline, allowing the customers to create fully customized graphics. As an example, this has been used by NBC for the 2018 Super Bowl
For the 2018 World Cup, we created Viz Libero AR, which brings the analysis directly into live studios.
Farbray was a student project from my time at ETH Zurich.
The raytracer features soft shadows, light maps for caustics and depth of field effects. The textures, caustics, terrain and water are all fully procedurally generated.
Farbray won the audience award in the visual computing course.
Sea Blast is an XBox game created in the ETH Game Programming Lab.
My main contribution was the GPU based fluid simulation for the game. Not only do the currents look awesome, but they influence the movement of ships and cannons.
This was my first heavy use of GPGPU programming, and I have loved doing it ever since.