Mahesh Kallahalla
Senior Director | Google XR
Developers and the complexity of XR
Mahesh Kallahalla, Google XR
Abstract
The promise of XR spans a vast hardware continuum, from immersive, high-fidelity headsets to lightweight, everyday smart glasses. However, this hardware diversity introduces a "complexity tax" for developers, who must navigate disparate input modalities, fragmented system services, and varying performance envelopes. For XR to move beyond a niche market and truly thrive, we must lower the barrier to entry, ensuring that developers can build sustainable, profitable businesses without being overwhelmed by platform fragmentation. This talk explores the current state of developer complexity in the XR landscape, the critical importance of a unified ecosystem, and strategic approaches to building the tools and services necessary to make spatial computing truly successful.
Biography
Mahesh is a Distinguished Engineer and Senior Director of Engineering at Google. He co-leads Android XR Engineering, overseeing both the Platform (including the OS, AI/vision services, cloud, and developer tools) and Experiences (system UI, input, and core applications). Android XR successfully debuted on Galaxy XR in October 2025, with plans to expand across additional headsets and smart glasses in the near future.
Before his work in XR, Mahesh headed Engineering for Stadia, Google’s cloud gaming platform. He previously led Networking Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) at Google, where his teams managed the global network infrastructure and services powering Google and YouTube.
Earlier in his career, Mahesh was a researcher at HP Labs (Storage Systems Program) and NTT DoCoMo Research, focusing on topics ranging from large-scale distributed systems to handheld and embedded systems. He holds a Ph.D. from Rice University and a Bachelor’s degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras.