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 2011, Time magazine named him to its list of its 100 Most Influential People in the World, a list consisting of leaders, artists, innovators, icons and heroes. In a subsequent interview with Fast Company, he said "Software is the only art form in existence that is not bound by the confines of physics."^[11][8][12] In 2012 he was named Inventor of the Year by the Intellectual Property Owners Association.^[13][14]

In 2013, Kipman gave the commencement speech at his alma mater, the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT).^[15][16]

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 2021, he received the Longuet-Higgins Prize by the Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (PAMI) Technical Committee at the Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) for fundamental contributions in computer vision.^[23]

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]

• Popular Mechanics Breakthrough Award (2009)^[27]
• Producers Guild of America Digital 25: Visionaries, Innovators and Producers list (2010)^[28][29]
• Time's Top 25 Nerds of the Year (2010)^[30][3]
• Time's 2011 100 People of the Year^[6]
• Fast Company 100 Most Creative People in Business (2011)^[31]
• National Inventor of the Year, Intellectual Property Foundation (2012)^[6]
• Rochester Institute of Technology Innovators Hall of Fame (2013)^[32]
• Smithsonian American Ingenuity Awards (2019)^[33]
• Longuet-Higgins prize by IEEE for fundamental contributions in computer vision (2021)^[23]

• Fastcompany interview
• Ted speech