Daniel Wagner is currently a director at the Snap Spectacles division and the head of the Snap Austria office. He received his MSc in Computer Science from Vienna University of Technology and his PhD on Augmented Reality from Graz University of Technology.

Daniel is well known for pioneering the research area of Augmented Reality on mobile phones. During his PhD study he developed the first tracking library running in real-time on PDAs and mobile phones. He created the well-known Invisible Train game, which was shown at several international events including SIGGRAPH, WiredNextFest and the Ars Electronica Festival. He presented the first 6DOF natural feature tracker running in real-time on a mobile phone, the first real-time mapping systems for mobile phones and designed the multi-platform Studierstube ES software stack.

Daniel is the author of over 35 peer reviewed papers published at international conferences and journals and 27 granted US patents. He gave more than 100 talks all around the world to academic and commercial audiences and was a visiting researcher at HITLab New Zealand.

Because of the success of Daniel’s PhD thesis, Graz University of Technology received funding for a Christian Doppler Lab with seven researchers of which Daniel was the deputy director. In 2010 Qualcomm acquired the IP of Daniel’s lab and opened the Qualcomm Austria research center with Daniel heading the RnD efforts - first as a Principal Engineer and later as a Senior Director of Technology. During this time Daniel worked on real-time tracking, mapping and reconstruction for Augmented Reality. Later Daniel led four teams located in California, Netherlands, Austria and South Korea on the topic of Computer Vision for self-driving cars. In 2016 DAQRI opened a new research center in Vienna (DAQRI Austria), which Daniel was heading. He grew the Vienna office to 30 people until the takeover by Snap end of 2019. At DAQRI Daniel was first Chief Scientist overseeing all research and Computer Vision and was appointed CTO in 2018. At Snap Daniel is currently heading all Spectacles software development (glasses, mobile & cloud).

In 2018 Daniel 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.