Young Harvill is a co-founder of Pulse Mobile, and is responsible for the company's technology vision. He holds an MFA from Stanford University, where he was involved in exploring the intersection of art and technologies, and received a research grant for work in computer controlled holography. A fascination with light, vision and illusion compelled Harvill to join VPL Research in 1985 and to work on the first generation of Virtual Reality systems. He wrote Swivel, one of the first 3D modeling and animation packages for the desktop and, with Chuck Blanchard and Jaron Lanier, pioneered the first VR authoring environment (RB2).
Harvill is also co-inventor of the Data Glove, with Tom Zimmerman, and was principal investigator for several patents at VPL involving fiber optic sensing, optical tracking, and parallel rendering. Harvill joined Paracomp as VP of R&D in 1989, and with Bill Woodward and Fred Angelopoulos, built one of the first multimedia companies in San Francisco. After Paracomp merged with Macromind to form Macromedia, Young was tasked with integrating core technologies as a research fellow. Projects included architectural design of multimedia players, and the design of next generation multimedia systems.