Ed Lantz is an entertainment technology engineer, entrepreneur, immersive experience designer and innovator in giant-screen digital cinema. He left aerospace engineering in 1990 to transform traditional planetariums into 360-degree immersive visualization environments, designing over a dozen dome theaters worldwide while at Spitz, Inc. including the Library of Alexandria in Egypt, National Space Center in Leicester, UK, the Glasgow Science Center in Glasgow, Scotland and Papalote Museo del Nino in Mexico City. He also led the product development of the popular SciDome digital planetarium. Ed founded Vortex Immersion Media in 2007 to bring 360-degree immersive and interactive experiences into mainstream arts and entertainment markets. Vortex has produced 360 venues and programming for concerts, EDM festivals, VR Cinemas and experiential marketing for numerous Fortune 500 companies including AT&T, CAA Experiential, Condé Nast, EMC2, IBM, Live Nation, Microsoft, NBC Universal, Nestle, NFL, Nike, Nokia, Sprint, Turner Broadcast and Paul Allen's Vulcan. Vortex also operates the Vortex Dome, the first commercial immersive media events venue located in downtown Los Angeles which has hosted a wide range of special events and arts and entertainment productions. Ed has published numerous articles on immersive media and virtual reality, is a public speaker on panels and keynotes and is a regular contributor to ACM/SIGGRAPH. Ed holds two U.S. patents on immersive theater technologies, holds a Master's degree in Electrical Engineering from Tennessee Tech University, is co-founder of the trade association IMERSA and a board delegate on the Producer’s Guild of America’s New Media Council.