Clifford Champion

Chief Technology Officer

Clifford Champion

Chief Technology Officer

Clifford lives and breathes technical innovation, bringing to Storyland Studios 15 years of experience leading and problem solving in diverse areas of technology and R&D, including games, interactive media, AR/VR experiences, cloud applications and AI/machine learning.

Early in his career, Clifford pushed boundaries of immersion and entertainment in AAA games on PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and Nintendo Wii while working at industry-leading middleware company Havok (Intel, Microsoft). There he designed real-time physics and animation solutions for franchise like Bethesda’s Fallout, and developed scalable simulations for the virtual world Second Life.

Later at PlainJoe Studios, Clifford led the engineering and architecture for MediaSocial, an innovative and groundbreaking live video and virtual conference platform that empowered customers with an incredibly powerful palette of content programming and audience moderation tools, predating products like YouTube Live and Facebook Live.

Before joining Storyland Studios, Clifford was pivotal at Silicon Valley-based AR/VR & Education company zSpace as Senior Engineer for platform technologies and later Product Director for platform and experience development. He went on to lead the product and engineering team, producing dozens of award-winning STEM experiences for classroom-based VR that reached more than one million (1M) students worldwide. He worked with teachers and partners around the world in the United States, China and the Middle East, leading product localization within the uncharted boundaries of VR. Finally, Clifford spearheaded multiple innovation projects for the company in the areas of computer vision and user experience design, authoring key patents in AR/VR UX and VR hardware.

Clifford earned his Bachelor of Science in Mathematics from University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and Master of Science in Computer Science from University of California, San Diego (UCSD), specializing in computation and machine learning (ML) respectively. He is a frequent traveler and student of modern China and has studied at the prestigious Peking University in Beijing.