About
About Dream Awake Labs
Dream Awake Labs is a creative technology studio in Santa Cruz, California. We design and build interactive experiences for screens, headsets, and physical spaces.
What we do
We make immersive environments, interactive worlds and games, characters people can talk with, and the intelligent systems that run them. Our projects combine AI, real-time 3D, XR, projection, and robotics.
Many projects need the same underlying tools: a way to understand a story, connect players in a room, or let an agent use an application. We build those tools and reuse them, including Story Engine, Spatial Venue, DASP, Agent Forge, and Agent City. We are bringing them together under the working platform name Farwhen.
The Rectangle in Santa Cruz is our lab, where we test mixed-reality games and interactive software on real hardware. Projection and robotic character experiences are part of the larger studio vision. The Rectangle
Founder
Filip Iliescu
Filip Iliescu
Founder
Filip Iliescu founded Dream Awake Labs after working on graphics developer tools at Apple, Metal support for Unity, AR and conversational characters at Niantic, and AI characters at Inworld AI. That work spans graphics engineering, developer tools, and interactive experiences—the foundations of the projects at Dream Awake Labs.
Selected contributions
Apple graphics tools
Named inventor on eight Apple patents for GPU performance analysis, frame capture and playback, and graphics debugging, filed 2010 to 2017, and co-presenter of the WWDC 2011 session “Tools for Tuning OpenGL ES Apps on iOS”.
SourcePatents listing Filip Iliescu as inventor (opens in a new tab)
Unity Metal rendering
Presented Unity’s deepened Metal support for iOS and macOS in the Unite 2016 keynote as Apple strategic partnership manager and R&D developer, including a live instancing demo on iPad Pro.
SourceUnite 2016 keynote recap (archived) (opens in a new tab)
Niantic AR and AI
Co-created “Spirit of the Ferry Building”, an AR character experience combining AR and conversational AI, recognized at a Niantic company hackathon and shown in Niantic’s GDC 2023 Developer Spotlight.
SourceNiantic GDC 2023 Developer Spotlight (opens in a new tab)
Inworld AI characters
Technical lead on Inworld’s Quinn Ambassador demo, the central experience at Inworld’s GDC 2024 booth: an Unreal Engine AI character using multi-character conversation, goals, and mutations. Author of Inworld’s engineering posts on the demo and on the Unreal Playground.
SourceInworld engineering post on the demo (archived) (opens in a new tab)
Dream Awake Labs is founder-led. Filip leads the engineering and brings in collaborators as each project requires.
Contact
Tell us what you want to build.
A few sentences is enough. We reply by email.