Trained as a theatre architect. Constructing a cognitive ladder to virtual experiences that go beyond the limitations of physical venues.

Alex Coulombe is the co-founder and CEO of Agile Lens, a New York immersive design studio that one client described as "XR SEAL Team Six." With a B.Arch from Syracuse (with a drama minor that turned out to be load-bearing), and years at firms like Rafael Viñoly and Zimmer Gunsul Frasca designing real buildings, then a jump to Fisher Dachs Associates: Theatre Planning & Design — where, in 2013, he strapped on an Oculus DK1 and pioneered the world's first VR theatrical sightline tests with a rigor to give all stakeholders confidence in the final design.

Since co-founding Agile Lens with Joshua Dachs: photoreal VR holodecks driving nine figures in pre-construction real estate sales, a mixed-reality rehearsal tool for the Royal Shakespeare Company, and A Christmas Carol VR — five holiday seasons performed live in headsets, now retired as an annual show and living on as a recorded experience finding its way to Apple Vision Pro. SIGGRAPH-published research on VR performances come from hard-won lessons from real stages, not just theoretical ones.

These days it's the interplay of game engines and AI agents: Unreal optimized for visionOS, pushing Godot to the limits of XR photorealism, and a fleet of machines running AI coding agents that build, test, and ship to TestFlight overnight.

Alex also teaches all of it — as a top-rated Epic Games Authorized Instructor running Manhattan's first Unreal Authorized Training Center, as the lead organizer of the Unreal NYC meetup (1400+ members), and as host of The (Unofficial) Unreal Engine Podcast.