Scott Fisher is the Professor and Founding Chair of the

Interactive Media Interactive media refers to digital experiences that dynamically respond to user input, delivering content such as Text (literary theory), text, images, animations, video, Sound, audio, and even Artificial intelligence, AI-driven interactions. O ...

Division in the

USC School of Cinematic Arts The USC School of Cinematic Arts is an academic unit of the University of Southern California, in Los Angeles, California, Los Angeles. With a history that dates to the first years of Sound film, talkies, the school descends from America's first ...

at the

University of Southern California The University of Southern California (USC, SC, or Southern Cal) is a Private university, private research university in Los Angeles, California, United States. Founded in 1880 by Robert M. Widney, it is the oldest private research university in ...

, and Director of the Mobile and Environmental Media Lab there. He is an artist and technologist who has worked extensively on

virtual reality Virtual reality (VR) is a Simulation, simulated experience that employs 3D near-eye displays and pose tracking to give the user an immersive feel of a virtual world. Applications of virtual reality include entertainment (particularly video gam ...

, including pioneering work at

NASA The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA ) is an independent agencies of the United States government, independent agency of the federal government of the United States, US federal government responsible for the United States ...

, Atari Research Labs,

MIT The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Established in 1861, MIT has played a significant role in the development of many areas of modern technology and sc ...

's Architecture Machine Group (now the

MIT Media Lab The MIT Media Lab is a research laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, growing out of MIT's Architecture Machine Group in the MIT School of Architecture and Planning, School of Architecture. Its research does not restrict to fi ...

) and

Keio University , abbreviated as or , is a private university, private research university located in Minato, Tokyo, Japan. It was originally established as a school for Rangaku, Western studies in 1858 in Edo. It was granted university status in 1920, becomi ...

Early life

Scott S. Fisher was born in 1951 in

Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania Bryn Mawr (, from Welsh language, Welsh for 'big hill') is a census-designated place (CDP) located in Pennsylvania, United States. It is located just west of Philadelphia along Lancaster Avenue, also known as U.S. Route 30 in Pennsylvania, U.S. ...

, near

Philadelphia Philadelphia ( ), colloquially referred to as Philly, is the List of municipalities in Pennsylvania, most populous city in the U.S. state of Pennsylvania and the List of United States cities by population, sixth-most populous city in the Unit ...

. He was educated at

, receiving a Master of Science degree in Media Technology in 1981. His thesis advisor there was

Nicholas Negroponte Nicholas Negroponte (born December 1, 1943) is a Greek American architect. He is the founder and chairman Emeritus of Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab, and also founded the One Laptop per Child Association (OLPC). Negroponte ...

. There he participated in the creation of the

Aspen Movie Map The Aspen Movie Map was a hypermedia system developed at MIT that enabled the user to take a virtual tour through the city of Aspen, Colorado. It was developed by a team working with Andrew Lippman in 1978 with funding from ARPA. Features The ...

Career

Much of Fisher's career has focused on expanding the technologies and creative potentials of virtual reality. Between 1985 and 1990, he was founding Director of the Virtual Environment Workstation Project (VIEW) at NASA's

Ames Research Center The Ames Research Center (ARC), also known as NASA Ames, is a major NASA research center at Moffett Federal Airfield in California's Silicon Valley. It was founded in 1939 as the second National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) laborat ...

. They attempted to develop a simulator to enable space station maintenance rehearsal. The gloves and goggles often associated with

were developed there, along with the dataglove, head-coupled displays and 3D audio. In 1989, with

Brenda Laurel Brenda Laurel (born 1950) is an American interaction designer, video game designer, and researcher. She is an advocate for diversity and inclusiveness in video games, a "pioneer in developing virtual reality", a public speaker, and an academic. ...

, Fisher founded Telepresence Research, a company specializing in first-person media, virtual reality and remote presence research and development. Fisher, Joseph M. Rosen and Phil S. Green developed a robotic system called the Green SRI telepresence surgical system. Fisher and Joseph M. Rosen developed a virtual environment system for viewing and manipulating a model of the human leg. Fisher was Project

Professor Professor (commonly abbreviated as Prof.) is an Academy, academic rank at university, universities and other tertiary education, post-secondary education and research institutions in most countries. Literally, ''professor'' derives from Latin ...

in the Graduate School of Media and Governance at

. There he led a project to allow users to author and view location-based data superimposed over the physical world, a progenitor of what is now termed

augmented reality Augmented reality (AR), also known as mixed reality (MR), is a technology that overlays real-time 3D computer graphics, 3D-rendered computer graphics onto a portion of the real world through a display, such as a handheld device or head-mounted ...

. In 2001, Fisher moved to the

to spearhead their new Interactive Media Division within the School of Cinematic Arts. There, he established the division's research initiatives in the mediums of immersive, mobile and

video games A video game or computer game is an electronic game that involves interaction with a user interface or input device (such as a joystick, game controller, controller, computer keyboard, keyboard, or motion sensing device) to generate visual fe ...

. He chaired the division from its founding through 2011.

Personal life

Fisher lives in Southern California with his wife, Mizuko Ito, a cultural

anthropologist An anthropologist is a scientist engaged in the practice of anthropology. Anthropologists study aspects of humans within past and present societies. Social anthropology, cultural anthropology and philosophical anthropology study the norms, values ...

studying media technology, and their two children. In addition to his other interests, he harbors a fascination with

stereoscopy Stereoscopy, also called stereoscopics or stereo imaging, is a technique for creating or enhancing the depth perception, illusion of depth in an image by means of stereopsis for binocular vision. The word ''stereoscopy'' derives . Any ster ...

and

3D imaging In computer vision and computer graphics, 3D reconstruction is the process of capturing the shape and appearance of real objects. This process can be accomplished either by active or passive methods. If the model is allowed to change its shape i ...

, as well as Jamaican music.

Selected publications

Papers and conference proceedings

O'Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference
(2004).

by Glen Fraser and Scott S. Fisher in ''ACM SIGGRAPH Newsletter'' v.32, no.3 1998. *"An Authoring Tool Kit for Mixed Reality Experiences" in ''International Workshop on Entertainment Computing'' (2002), *"Micro Archiving and Interactive Virtual Insect Exhibit" in ''Stereoscopic Displays and Virtual Reality Systems IX'' (2002), *"Environmental Media: Linking Virtual Environments to the Real World" in ''Creative Digital Media: Its Impact on the New Century'' (2001), *"Environmental Media: Accessing Virtual Representations of Real-Time Sensor Data and Site-specific Annotations Embedded in Physical Environments" in ''Proc. of the Seventh Int'l Conf. on Virtual Systems and Multimedia, Berkeley'' (2001). *Fisher, Scott S. "Virtual Environments: Personal Simulations & Telepresence." ''In Virtual Reality: Theory, Practice and Promise'', S. Helsel and J.Roth, ed., Meckler Publishing, 1991. *Fisher, Scott S. "Virtual Interface Environments." In ''The Art of Human-Computer Interface Design'', B. Laurel, ed., Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., 1990. *Fisher, S. "Telepresence Master Glove Controller for Dexterous Robotic End-Effectors," ''Advances in Intelligent Robotics Systems'', D.P.Casasent, Editor, Proc. SPIE 726, (1986). PIE Cambridge Symposium on Optical and Optoelectronic Engineering, 26–31 October 1986. Cambridge, Massachusetts.*Fisher, S. S., McGreevy, M., Humphries, J., Robinett, W., "Virtual Environment Display System", ''ACM 1986 Workshop on 3D Interactive Graphics'', Chapel Hill, North Carolina, October 23–24, 1986. *Fisher, Scott S. "Virtual Interface Environment," ''IEEE/AIAA 7th Digital Avionics Systems Conference'', Fort Worth, Texas, October 13–16, 1986. *Fisher, S. ''Viewpoint Dependent Imaging: An interactive stereoscopic display''. Masters Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts. October, 1981.

Media appearances

* Cyberpunk (1990) Cyberpunk
/ref>

References

External links

Official page
at the USC Annenberg Center.
Scott Fisher Personal/Professional Site
at Telepresence. {{DEFAULTSORT:Fisher, Scott Year of birth missing (living people) Living people Virtual reality pioneers University of Southern California faculty MIT Media Lab people