Scott Fisher — NASA Ames Virtual Interface Environment Workstation

1985

Artists: Scott Fisher · Year: 1985 · Medium: Research VR system — head-mounted display, dataglove, 3D spatial-audio, networked multi-user environments · Substrate: Custom NASA hardware and software; partnership with VPL; early immersive VR research platform · Place: Moffett Field, California, USA · Institution: NASA Ames Research Center Scott Fisher arrived at NASA Ames Research Center in 1985, hired by Michael McGreevy to lead the newly-formed Virtual Environment Workstation (VIEW) project. The VIEW lab's brief was explicit: build a usable virtual-reality system for NASA applications — astronaut training, telerobotics, data visualization — and do it faster and cheaper than the Air Force's flight-simulator programs that had dominated HMD research since the 1960s. Within eighteen months Fisher's team had assembled the first recognizable "VR system" in the modern sense: a head-mounted stereoscopic display (built with liquid-crystal television pixels from two Sony Watchman portable TVs), a six-degree-of-freedom tracker (Polhemus), a DataGlove licensed from Jaron Lanier's VPL, real-time 3D graphics rendered on an Evans & Sutherland system, and spatialized audio from the Convolvotron (a custom HRTV-based audio engine). The VIEW lab built, in other words, a system. Every subsequent commercial VR setup — from VPL's consumer line, to Virtuality's arcade systems, to the Oculus Rift of 2012, to the Apple Vision Pro — is a direct architectural descendant of what Fisher and his team assembled in 1985–87 at NASA Ames. The components have changed. The architecture — head-tracked stereoscopic display, hand-tracked input, spatialized audio, real-time rendered 3D environment — is the one Fisher built. Fisher's background matters. He had been at MIT's Architecture Machine Group under Nicholas Negroponte in the late 1970s, the Atari Research Lab under Alan Kay in the early 1980s, and had been thinking about spatial displays and human-computer interaction for ten years before NASA hired him. He brought to Ames not a set of engineering skills but a coherent vision: the computer display should surround the user; the input should match the body's actual movements; the graphics should be generated in real time from a model the user could inhabit. The vision was complete in his head. The VIEW project was the first system to realize it. Fisher left NASA in 1990 and has since taught at the University of Southern California, where he founded the Interactive Media & Games Division in the cinema school. The original VIEW hardware — in pieces — lives at the Computer History Museum and NASA Ames History Office. Fisher is still active. Lore The first VIEW lab budget was roughly $300,000 — a fraction of what the Air Force's analogous programs spent on comparable hardware — and Fisher's team famously hacked together components in a 1970s-vintage Ames Research Center warehouse. The two Sony Watchman televisions that became the stereoscopic display were bought at a Sunnyvale Radio Shack for $99 each; Fisher's team cracked them open with screwdrivers and extracted the LCD panels. The first full system demonstration, given to NASA leadership and to a rotating cast of visitors (including Lanier, who was bringing DataGloves up from VPL), happened in a converted closet in the Human Factors building. Fisher has said, in a 2013 oral history, that the project's entire success came from being small enough and underfunded enough that no one paid attention until the demos started working. Sources • Ellis, Stephen R. (ed.) — Pictorial Communication in Virtual and Real Environments (Taylor & Francis, 1991; includes VIEW lab technical papers). • Rheingold, Howard — Virtual Reality (Summit, 1991). • NASA Ames History Office — VIEW project files.