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About

Christopher Reidy

Founder of Excité Engineering, an active loudspeaker company in Bellevue, Washington.

Previously: Display architecture at Apple, image quality for Meta's AR program, laser metrology and lasers at HoloLens. Patents at Microsoft and Meta. The work has nominally been in three different fields — audio, display, sensing — and one actual field: measurement-led systems engineering of perceptual signal chains.

01 The thread

Twenty years at the boundary where signal meets perception

Display, audio, and sensors look like different problems until you look at the engineering. They are all perceptual signal chains — a transducer that interacts with the human nervous system, a pipeline that drives it, and a measurement question at every joint. The same approach works on all of them: characterize the physics of the transducer, model the non-linearity, measure what actually matters, correct in real time with hardware proportionate to the problem.

That thread runs from the lasers in HoloLens 2, to display architecture work at Apple, to the end-to-end display pipeline for Meta's AR product line, to the loudspeakers Excité is building now. Different transducers, same engineering discipline.

Microsoft · 2015–2018

Sensor architecture, then laser design

Began as sensor architect for the Microsoft Band 2 and 3 — wearable optical heart rate, electrocardiogram, and motion sensing on a small consumer device. The Band 3 was not launched; the architecture work informed years of subsequent wrist-worn biosensing.

Moved to HoloLens. Ran the laser metrology lab. Personally designed the RGB laser sources used in HoloLens 2 — including the fast-modulation strategy and the short-pulse approach that suppressed fringing in waveguide-fed imagery. Six US patents from this period, ranging from EKG saturation correction through depth-sensing in low light to the laser optics in the headset itself.

Apple · 2018–2020

Display architect

Display architecture across Apple's product line. Most of this work remains under NDA.

Meta · 2020–2025

Image quality for Meta AR

Ran the image quality group for Meta's AR program. Built the end-to-end display pipeline architecture for the AR product line from scratch — conversion, gamut and tone mapping, waveguide color correction, brightness adaptation.

Developed psychophysically optimized, ultra-low-power algorithms; integrated them into FPGA; co-designed the ASICs that would land them in silicon. Patents from this period cover combined tone-and-gamut mapping for AR display and waveguide correction across the visible band.

02 Selected patents
AR display · image quality (Meta)
AR optics · laser sources (Microsoft HoloLens)
Depth & motion sensing (Microsoft HoloLens)
Biosensing (Microsoft Band)
03 Selected talks
04 Now

Excité, and outside work

At Excité Engineering, applying the same architecture-first, measurement-led approach to loudspeakers. The first products — the Origin and Reference lines — are in development.

I also take on selected outside work through the Excité Practice: consulting, custom speaker design, and display & imaging systems engagements. If you have a hard systems-engineering problem at the boundary between signal and perception, I would like to hear from you.

See the Practice → Get in touch →