RIT alumna develops hands-free tech at Meta

Try funky ideas and see what happens. That’s the mindset that has guided much of Dorrene Brown’s career, including a recent launch of the Meta Neural Band.

As a technical program manager at Meta, Brown ’13 (software engineering) leads software, firmware, and artificial intelligence (AI) teams developing cutting-edge devices. In 2025, their wrist-based controller was selected as one of Time magazine’s best inventions of the year.

Brown helped create the Meta Neural Band that pairs with Meta’s Ray-Ban Display smart glasses. Together, the wearable devices allow users to view texts, navigate maps, and interact with AI without holding a phone.

“When you’re a software person working on hardware, you help get things out the door but you’re also so far downstream that any kind of hardware, electrical, or battery issue kind of propagates to you,” said Brown. “I find that the problems that come out of that are really interesting and fun because you need to have a deep understanding of the whole stack.”

Brown’s leadership roles date back to her time at RIT. As president of the Society of Software Engineers and the university’s Fencing Club, she enjoyed working on fun group projects and learned how to network with people from different majors. Networking led to a co-op at Microsoft, which turned into her first full-time job.

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Carlos Ortiz/RIT

The Meta Neural Band is an electromyography wristband that can be used to control the Meta Display glasses.

There, she defined the developer experience for the Cortana Skills Kit by integrating language models and web services. She also worked on the Microsoft Surface experimentation team and led Microsoft Mesh from incubation to a product now used by hundreds of millions of users.

After leaving Microsoft, Brown worked at a gaming and entertainment startup and then joined Unity to drive AR and VR development tools with Apple Vision Pro. She also grew program management, quality assurance, and experimentation teams with Napster.

“I’ve jumped all over the industry and I chalk that up to the flexibility you learn in the software engineering department,” said Brown. “I feel like learning how to learn quickly and how to synthesize information and act on it has been the cornerstone of my success.”

In 2024, she joined Meta to solve a problem. How can users interact with wearable devices without traditional input methods, like a keyboard or joystick?

The Neural wristband measures the activity of muscles at the wrist when gesturing. The wristband detects signals based on what users intend to do, including clicking, selecting, or scrolling. This helps control the smart glasses.

Brown has focused on bringing together hardware, firmware, software, and quality assurance teams to move the wristband from prototype to shipped product.

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Carlos Ortiz

"It feels a world away from where the technology was just a few years ago.” - Time magazine on the Meta glasses and wristband.

“My role has been to look across the system and understand what is working and what isn’t,” said Brown. “And then problem solve to make sure everything comes together.”

Brown said she uses the wristband and glasses herself every day. She explained that dogfooding—short for “eating your own dog food” in the tech industry—is an important way for developers to evaluate products and improve quality.

Last year, Brown came back to RIT to give the keynote speech at WiCHacks, the annual Women in Computing hackathon. She enjoys mentoring people who were in her shoes just 15 years ago.

“If we have a wider diversity of thought in the tech industry, it’s almost always going to lead to a more successful product,” she said.