Mr. Brian McClendon

Brian "Bam" McClendon is the Chief Technology Officer at Niantic Spatial, where he leads the engineering development of the company’s groundbreaking Large Geospatial Model. Building on a legacy of innovation in mapping technologies, Brian is developing a new generation of geospatial maps to transform the way we understand and interact with the physical world.

He previously served as Senior Vice President of Engineering at Niantic Labs, where he brought AR to life in popular mobile games like Pokémon GO, one of the most popular mobile games of all time with 100 million+ unique players each year.. Under his leadership, Niantic advanced its Visual Positioning System (VPS), built upon a precise and detailed 3D map of the world. These innovations enabled developers to create immersive, cross-platform extended reality (XR) experiences that overlay digital content with the physical environment.

Brian brings nearly four decades of experience in computer graphics, mapping, computer vision and machine learning, and has made significant contributions to geospatial technology with 40 patents to his name.