At the Crossroads of Art and Technology
Hometown: Redwood City, California
Age: 50
Years Diving: 31
Why I’m a DAN Member: I haven’t suffered a serious dive injury, but many of my colleagues have, and all of them have benefitted from DAN’s support in the moment. Most of the time I spend in the ocean is far from home, and DAN coverage is peace of mind that I will have critical support should I need it.
I remember the date clearly because it is embedded in the metadata of the images I shot that day: Sept. 13, 2004. I was in Bora Bora on a photo mission coordinated by Tahiti Tourisme and was meeting Lucien Schmidlin, who would be providing my dive services.
Our conversation flowed to our shared interest in underwater photography. Schmidlin asked if I knew an amazing, emerging talent in the field, Eric Cheng. He called Cheng “a renaissance man,” a classical cellist, a brilliant underwater photographer, a computer science expert, and the owner of Wetpixel — which was particularly meaningful at the time.
In the world of underwater imaging, he had splashed from zero to hero quite rapidly. Our first encounter was in 2001 at the first Digital Shootout in Manado, Indonesia. I was still shooting with a housed Nikon F100 film camera and a Nikonos RS, while Cheng and Jim Watt were using Canon D30 digital cameras in housings. Of the photographers at the event, Cheng was the first of our era who had never shot film underwater.
Cheng was born in Madison, Wisconsin, in 1975. His parents were from Taiwan, and his dad was pursuing a doctorate in nuclear engineering at the University of Wisconsin, while his mother was studying physics and physiology. The family relocated to San Diego, California, when Cheng was 2. He later earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in computer sciences from Stanford. He had one foot in tech with software engineering and technology innovation and the other foot in the arts as a concert cellist.
On a bit of a whim, he decided to get his scuba certification in 1995 and made about 20 dives over the next several years. In 2001 he got an Ikelite housing for his Nikon Coolpix 990 and booked a liveaboard trip to Palau, where he met Schmidlin. Cheng admired how Schmidlin was so calm and trimmed perfectly for underwater. Schmidlin noticed how crude Cheng’s skills were, convinced him he was wearing too much weight, and provided other tips that made him a better, safer diver before the week ended.
Digital photography was just taking off at that time. Cheng was excited about the new technology and created a website and online journal for underwater digital photography. Ike Brigham, founder of Ikelite, took note of this kid shooting with his Coolpix housing and sent him an email, marking the first dialog he had with the mainstream dive photo industry.
Cheng met fellow enthusiast David Breitigam in an online forum on digital photography that had a thread about underwater photography. Breitigam was running an early website devoted to underwater photography and encouraged Cheng to run live web coverage of a digital photo event hosted aboard the Kona Aggressor. Connectivity was slow over a satellite phone, but the shared images were only 640 pixels at the time.
Breitigam and Cheng decided to collaborate and create a web-based community for underwater digital photography, which became Wetpixel. Cheng wrote the code and had the vision for what at the time was a global meeting place for underwater imaging. He consensually assumed ownership and management of the site.
“There was a natural shift from software engineering to underwater digital photography. I felt like it chose me,” he said. The cadence for digital photography was different from film. Epiphanies were daily, and equipment releases were breaking news. Wetpixel offered dive trips that sold out immediately, and advertising was reasonably priced. Cheng could post daily on the site from anywhere.
He recalled a Wetpixel user who was the only person in his small Idaho town interested in underwater photography and who was so grateful to find camaraderie in the online community. They were building and nurturing a community where the hook was very specific: digital underwater photography.
While many people would have been content to ride the Wetpixel wave, the technologist in Cheng realized that all imaging would become computational. After a decade of running Wetpixel, he joined a start-up called Lytro that was building a lightfield camera. While there was more to it, a gobsmacking achievement of Lytro was the ability to assign focus in postproduction on a computer. About this time Cheng was giving a talk to the Northern California Underwater Photographic Society, where he met an intriguing young woman, Pam. They were introduced by a friend they had in common, and their love grew. Now they are married and the proud parents of two boys: Mako, 11, and Kai, 8.
Google eventually acquired Lytro, so he moved back to San Diego and started building quadcopters from hobby parts in his spare time. He partnered with fellow underwater photographer Keri Wilk to build GoPro camera gimbals. As he was doing gimbal stabilized video in 2013, his early drone footage of surfers in Santa Cruz went viral, and DJI took notice of him. He went to China to meet with the executive team and was tasked to open North America to the consumer drone market.
It was a stressful two years, full of talks and television appearances to help bring brand awareness to DJI, but now the name is synonymous with aerial imaging. Cheng again felt like the transition flowed organically based on the direction of this natural curiosity.
Cheng left DJI in late 2015 and joined Facebook (now Meta) as head of Immersive Media within the Oculus division, focused on augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR). By 2023 he was an executive in Meta Reality Labs as Director of Immersive Media. Here art once again merged with science as his new role allowed him to oversee executive production on film projects rooted in VR but integrating aerial, underwater, and 360-degree imaging.
He has produced at least eight Emmy-nominated films in this space, notably Alex Honnold: The Soloist VR (free soloing mountain climbing), Oceans of Light – Dolphins VR (in partnership with Bob Talbot), and several natural history films with Atlantic Productions and David Attenborough.
While the past 10 years at Meta have been busy, Cheng is finding his way back into the water. He just returned from the Philippines with a group of imaging celebrities hosted by Marty Snyderman and Howard Hall. His sons are almost old enough to consider scuba certification, so maybe one day soon he will have new dive buddies.
Art and science will remain his passions, and perhaps the full scope of his renaissance is yet to be realized.
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© Alert Diver – Q4 2026