User Portlet
Dr. David Levitt is a cognitive scientist, experimental and theoretical physicist, software engineer, AI researcher, virtual and augmented reality innovator, entrepreneur, musician and writer.
Levitt earned his B.S. in Engineering and Applied Science at Yale; and his masters in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and doctorate in Artificial Intelligence at MIT. Dr. Levitt is co-founder, president and CEO of Pantomime Corporation, and a Research Fellow at Stochastic Labs.
At MIT, on a Bell Labs fellowship with Prof Marvin Minsky, Levitt pioneered the field of algorithmic music generation for traditional classical and jazz styles. His AI description languages ranged across rhythmic concepts like syncopation, swing, and waltz, melody and counterpoint terms, and the harmonic cadences and progressions common to so many western styles. Levitt and Stephan Schwanauer co-edited the MIT Press book Machine Models of Music, a collection of AI papers about software that shows how we perceive and create music, including parts of Levitt’s MIT doctoral thesis A Representation of Musical Dialects.
Dr. Levitt was on the founding team of the MIT Media Lab, where he led MIT’s first Mac lab, focused on real-time media, graphical programming kits and music. In 1991 Levitt joined the team that invented virtual reality at VPL Research, developing key simulation tools and the first VR worlds with realistic gravity, object collisions and 3D sound.
Levitt has been a research scientist and product developer at Atari, VPL, Viacom and Interval Research, has taught at NYU and MIT, and co-founded three startups.
In 2014 Dr. Levitt and Don Hopkins co-founded Pantomime, delivering augmented reality experiences that feature realistic physics and real-time multi-player interaction, and winning a Launch Silicon Valley Tech Challenge World Cup. In 2022 Pantomime launched Reality Construction Kit app software that uses the LiDAR depth sensors in Pro iPhones and iPads to create interactive augmented reality, with uncannily realistic physics that reflects to the user’s unique environment.
Dr. Levitt, who has worked in physics since his time at Bell Labs, is passionate about physics education and misconceptions about relativity. In the fall of 2023 he presented Accelerometer Experiments Clarify Einstein’s Gravity Theory at the ACP 2023 Conference on Fundamental and Applied Physics. His approach provides easy ways to use smart phones, Mathematica notebooks and 3D animation to show gravity is a fictitious force arising from spacetime curvature, simplifying explanations of general relativity. He followed this with the invited paper Completing Feynman’s Gravity Lecture at the International Summit on Gravitation, Aerospace and Cosmology 2024 conference in Florence, and was Keynote speaker at ISGAC 2025 in Valencia, Spain. At ISGAC 2026 in Frankfurt, Germany, Dr. Levitt was co-Chair and presented an intuitive new digitally-enabled General Relativity curriculum, was well as physics projects significantly enhanced by artificial intelligence in Advancing Einstein's Gravity with AI Colleagues.