2025 Plenary Speakers
18 - 21 August 2025
Hyatt Regency Seattle
Seattle,
Ying 'Melissa' Geng
Meta Reality Labs Research, UNITED STATES
Pushing the limits of VR displays (without breaking them)
Over the last decade, VR displays grew from early prototypes — held together by duct tape — to compelling consumer products used by millions. This talk describes the optical innovations necessary to realize this transformation, including addressing longstanding challenges in contrast and form-factor. While pursuing practical display architectures, we also built a new wave of prototypes, ones that push beyond the current generation and show the experiential impact that further breakthroughs in FOV, resolution, brightness, contrast and accommodation may yet bring. We’ll report not just the technological developments, but also our efforts to widely share this work through better-than-duct-taped public demos, beginning the cycle anew.
About the Speaker
Ying "Melissa" Geng is a research manager of “Optics, Photonics and Light Systems” at Reality Labs Research, Meta, where she leads investigations into advanced optics and display technologies. Together with her team, Melissa has explored “pancake” optics, carrying them from early incubation in 2015 to a successful transfer to product. More recently, she has led efforts to create a hyperrealistic VR demo — featuring above-retinal resolution, high brightness, and high contrast — demonstrating a step change in visual experiences that is the closest to “passing the visual Turing test” yet. Melissa’s prior research also includes studies on high-resolution retinal imaging using adaptive optics. She holds a Ph.D. in Optics from the University of Rochester.
Pietro Ferraro
Institute of Applied Sciences and Intelligent Systems "Eduardo Caianiello" (ISASI-CNR), Italy
Beyond Labels: Enhanced 3D Live Cell Imaging Combined with Flow Cytometry
This presentation explores cutting-edge advancements in label-free 3D live cell imaging, integrating high-throughput flow cytometry with tomographic microscopy. We demonstrate how this combined approach overcomes limitations of traditional 2D and fluorescence-based methods, enabling detailed visualization of cellular architecture and dynamics without the perturbations of labeling. This label-free technique opens new avenues for studying cell cycle progression, cell-drug interactions and other dynamic biological processes, offering valuable insights into cellular function and behavior.
About the Speaker
Pietro Ferraro is Director of Research at the CNR Institute of Applied Sciences and Intelligent Systems (ISASI), Italy. He served as ISASI Director from 2014 to 2019 and President of CNR Research Area in Pozzuoli from 2012 to 2019. Ferraro has held leadership roles in various organizations and worked as Principal Investigator with Alenia Aeronautics from 1988 to 1993. His research spans holography, microscopy, micro-nanostructures, non-destructive testing and optical sensors, with over 350 journal papers, 20,000 citations and 14 patents. A Fellow of both Optica and SPIE, he received the SPIE Gabor Award and served on the Scientific and Technical Committee for the Italian Space Agency from 2018 to 2023.
