Tobia Giani

I build virtual worlds for games, AI, and space.

Mathematician and programmer turning game-engine technology into validated simulation products for autonomous space missions, from CubeSat rendezvous to lunar landing.

My story starts with video games: five years shipping titles on pretty much every console out there. Then I brought the same tools—game engines, real-time physics, 3D graphics—into the aerospace and automotive industries, because it turns out that training an AI and entertaining a player require the same thing: a believable virtual world.

Today I’m Head of the Virtual Environments department at AIKO: Infinite ways to Autonomy, where I lead the Lab&VENV lineup. My work focuses on the simulation side of the stack: building virtual environments, synthetic data pipelines, training setups, validation workflows, and demo systems that support AIKO’s autonomy efforts.

In practice, my team and I work on real-time simulation technologies for aerospace and autonomy applications, with a strong emphasis on training, testing, validation, and demonstration rather than product development itself.

Before AIKO, I was an Autonomous Driving Engineering Specialist at Stellantis in the Simulation Team, working on L3 autonomous driving technologies for the Thunder project (in collaboration with BMW). There I integrated vehicle dynamics and sensor models into the SIL platform and managed large-scale simulation pipelines running on clusters to test AD functions.

Earlier, I spent five years at MixedBag as a Software Engineer and later Lead Game Programmer, shipping and porting titles on PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo and mobile platforms—including Secret Oops, awarded by IIDEA as best innovative game. My first job was at Mutabilis in Rome, porting interactive tales to Android and building a traffic-prediction visualization tool with the University of Rome “Tor Vergata”.

I hold an MSc in Computer Science (Virtual Reality) from the University of Turin (110 cum laude) and a BSc in Science and Technology for Media from the University of Rome “Tor Vergata”.

Off the keyboard: basketball, cycling, travel, history books—and, obviously, video games.