Kipman was born in
Curitiba in 1979.[1][3] The son of a Brazilian diplomat, Kipman grew up around the world.[4] When he was seven or eight, he learned how to program the Atari 2600.[5] Later on he would go to
RIT, graduating in 2001 with a degree in
software engineering and joined Microsoft that same year,[6][7] starting development on Microsoft's integrated development environment (
IDE)
Visual Studio. Starting 2005, he helped in the development of
Microsoft Windows, until joining the Xbox department in 2008,[8] where he oversaw the acquisition of the technology for the
Xbox Kinect from an Israeli company,[9]PrimeSense.[10] The product was finished two years later.[5]
In 2016, he gave a
Ted Talk on mixed reality, called "A futuristic vision of the age of Holograms".[3][17][18] In a 2017 interview with Alice Bonasio, he emphasized his passion for mixed reality, stating how it gives him a sense of "displacement superpowers".[19] During the Hololens 2 reveal at the
Mobile World Congress in 2019, Alex Kipman talked about how the Hololens 2 would be the "next era" of
mixed reality, making it more culturally relevant.[20]
In 2019 while he was developing metaverse technologies, the
Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C named Kipman the winner of an American Ingenuity Award, calling him a pioneer of holographic and augmented reality technology.[21] Later that year he gave a speech in Shanghai announcing that Microsoft's second-generation HoloLens would ship later that year.[22]
In May 2022, it was announced Kipman would leave Microsoft later in the year. A report from Business Insider (now rebranded as Insider) accused Alex Kipman and other Microsoft execs of harassment,[24][25] later reporting that Kipman would resign his position at Microsoft after a two-month transitional period.[26]