About

Nicolas Barone is the Founder and Product Owner of Universe, a leading virtual reality (VR) education company that teaches VR app development in VR. He is also the CEO and Founder of the company, which has grown to become the 5th largest VR event producer in the world. Nicolas is responsible for instructing VR courses that have a 5/5 user rating and 4x the graduation rate of online courses, and he has formed partnerships with Oculus and AltspaceVR to feature Universe’s courses. With a background in product management, Nicolas leads a team of 3 engineers in creating and maintaining technical products such as Universe's VR assessment system, VR tutoring app, and VR computer science experiences. He uses Agile development practices through Jira to decrease launch times by 70%. Nicolas has also created a VRQuiz system using Microsoft Mixed Reality Extensions (MRE) SDK in JavaScript, hosted on a Heroku server, which increased reliability of quizzing in VR by 67%. He has developed 30 VR experiences using Unity that 90% of users said was very helpful or helpful, and he has developed AltspaceVR worlds using Unity that have 2,000+ joins from users. Nicolas is skilled in user research, using analytics from 500+ user experience surveys to grow monthly user count by 22%. He also uses user stories to design technical requirements that increased user satisfaction by 12%. Prior to founding Universe, Nicolas worked as a Software Developer for Cornell University Autonomous Bicycle Team, where he developed the bicycle’s navigation algorithms using PID controls with an engineering team of 3. He also created the bicycle’s starting and ending sequence in C that reduced test crashes by 75%, and implemented asynchronous data communication and storage software using Robot Operating System (ROS). Additionally, Nicolas worked as a Product Manager Intern for Hexagon LLC, where he led an engineering team of 5 in the research of a radio transmission security system and managed the prototyping of a Raspberry Pi product to show to stakeholders during his internship. Nicolas holds a Bachelor of Science (B.S.) in Computer Science from Cornell University College of Engineering, which he is expected to complete in 2021. He also holds an International Baccalaureate from Miami Beach Senior High School. Nicolas is skilled in research science, Javascript, product management, software engineering, and testing, with 2.20 years of relevant experience.