Eric Cheng is an award-winning photographer, creative technologist, producer, cellist, and author. He works at Meta Reality Labs as Director of Immersive Media. A hands-on executive producer, domain leader, and pioneer of cutting-edge production techniques, Eric has supported and produced numerous immersive media projects for VR, including 8 Emmy-nominated films and experiences.
Eric straddles his passions for storytelling, entrepreneurship, technology and communication. Before returning to the tech industry, Eric was a widely-published professional photographer and CEO of Wetpixel, the leading underwater-photography community. Eric is featured in 2 episodes of the Netflix series, Tales by Light (Season 2), which showcase his underwater work with big animals. He has led dozens of photography expeditions and workshops around the world, and has given seminars and lectures internationally at events including TEDx, EG, TTI/Vanguard, the Churchill Club, DEFCON, NASA UTM, Photoshelter Luminance, Photographers@Google, CES, NAB, SXSW, AsiaD, Creative Mornings, Oculus Connect, ICCCP, DEMA, and others.
Previously, Eric was Director of Aerial Imaging at DJI and Director of Photography at Lytro. Eric also served on the Board of Advisers of Wirecutter, and is a Field Associate at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, California.
Eric also has a passion for ocean conservation, and served on the Board of Directors of Shark Savers (now part of WildAid) and the Board of Advisors of Sea Shepherd Conservation Society. He was head photographer for Operation Musashi, Sea Shepherd's 2008-2009 anti-whaling campaign in Antarctica, which was featured in season 2 of the TV show, Whale Wars.
In October 2015, Peachpit published Eric's first book, Aerial Photography and Videography Using Drones.
Eric holds BS and MS degrees in computer science from Stanford University, where he also studied classical cello performance. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife and two sons.
Find Eric on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Vimeo, and X.
2023: Ocean of Light: Dolphins VR (Talbot Films), Galapagos with David Attenborough VR (Atlantic Productions)
2022: Alex Honnold: The Soloist VR (Jon Griffith Productions, Cannes XR "Best VR Story"), David Attenborough's Conquest of the Skies VR (Atlantic Productions), You Destroy. We Create. (NowHere Media, Emmy-Nominated, 84th Peabody Award Winner)
2021: David Attenborough's First Life (Atlantic Productions, Emmy-Nominated)
2020: Inside COVID19 (WisdomVR, Emmy-Nominated), Rebuilding Notre Dame (TARGO, Emmy-Nominated), When We Stayed Home (TARGO, Emmy-Nominated), Micro Monsters with David Attenborough (Atlantic Productions, Emmy-Nominated x2)
2019: Everest VR (Jon Griffith Productions), Adam Savage's Tested VR (Tested), Raw: Emotions Unite Us (PHORIA, Emmy-Nominated, Webby Winner), Surviving 9/11: 27 Hours Under The Rubble (TARGO, Webby Winner), The Slow Mo Guys VR, ecosphere (PHORIA), WisdomVR Project
In March 2026, Eric was inspired to show more of his photography online and built a portfolio site from scratch with the goal that it should be faster than any local image viewer and have a native feel on both computers and mobile devices. The site is deployed on the edge via Cloudflare and is optimized for humans, search engines and AI crawlers. Images can be freely downloaded but are both visually and invisibly watermarked.
Use of AI: Each image is analyzed locally using a vision AI model (Qwen3-VL) that examines the image contents alongside camera metadata and any captions or keywords entered manually. The AI generates searchable descriptions, tags, and location guesses to make the archive browsable. Text marked with a star is from AI-based image analysis; unmarked captions were written by Eric.
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