Ann Lasko-Harvill
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Ann Lasko-Harvill is a designer and virtual reality researcher who worked at VPL Research, where she designed the company's full-body DataSuit in the late 1980s. She was the first-named author of "From DataGlove to DataSuit" (1988), the IEEE conference paper that described the suit, and a co-author of the 1990 paper describing VPL's multi-user "Reality Built for Two" (RB2) system.[1][2] Some of her work is credited to Ann Lasko.[2]
The Augmented World Expo (AWE) XR Hall of Fame lists her as VPL's "Chief Designer of Data Suits" and credits her with leading development of the RB2 whole-body VR suit.[3] Jaron Lanier has credited her with modeling a lobster avatar at VPL in the 1980s, an experiment in controlling a virtual body with more limbs than a human has.[4] She is the first-named inventor on four related United States patents, assigned to Sun Microsystems, for a low-cost VR system that uses a mountable head-tracking frame and interchangeable display optics.[5]
Career
DataSuit
Lasko-Harvill's 1988 paper, written with C. Blanchard, W. Smithers, Young Harvill and A. Coffman and presented at the IEEE Computer Society's COMPCON Spring 88 conference in San Francisco (29 February to 3 March 1988), extended VPL's hand-based DataGlove input to the whole body, as its title indicates.[1] The abstract describes a system that "captures, records, and renders" human body movement: sensors on the DataSuit, "a garment covering the body from neck to ankles", register the position and orientation of the body's joints, and an absolute positioning system tracks the wearer in six degrees of freedom within the room.[1]
A 1990 paper in the Ars Electronica festival catalog, written by Chuck Blanchard, Lasko-Harvill and Lou Ellyn Jones, describes the suit as part of the RB2 system. It was a one-piece, full-body stretch garment with sensors that measured joint bend and the rotation of the hips and shoulders. Polhemus sensors on the head, back and pelvis tracked bending of the spine and the wearer's position in space, and the suit included left and right DataGloves and sandals with heel pressure sensors that detected contact with the floor.[6] The AWE Hall of Fame entry says she designed the DataSuit and VPL's Microcosm system among the user interface devices she created for networked virtual reality.[3]
Reality Built for Two
RB2 was VPL's complete VR system. In the 1990 Ars Electronica paper, its hardware is a DataGlove Model 2, a EyePhone head-mounted display with earphones, an accelerated Macintosh II as the control workstation, two Silicon Graphics IRIS computers (one per eye) and Polhemus trackers. Its software consisted of RB2 Swivel for modeling objects, Body Electric for processing sensor input and animating the world through a visual programming language, and ISAAC for real-time rendering.[6] The same paper describes RB2 as the first VR system to support more than one person at a time: each participant wore an EyePhone and DataGlove, was represented in the world by a body image, and saw a shared world state kept in sync mainly over Ethernet.[6] The authors proposed scientific visualization, collaborative design, surgical planning and multi-user games as uses.[6]
The short paper "Reality built for two: a virtual reality tool", published in Computer Graphics in 1990, lists Lasko (as Ann Lasko) among its seven authors, alongside Blanchard, Scott Burgess, Young Harvill, Jaron Lanier, Mark Oberman and Mike Teitel.[2]
The lobster avatar
Writing for Edge's 2006 annual question, Lanier recalled that in the 1980s VPL built virtual worlds in which more than one person could be present at a time and full body suits drove the participants' virtual bodies, and that people adapted quickly to bodies very unlike their own. He wrote that "the most curious experiment involved a virtual lobster (which was lovingly modeled by Ann Lasko.)" To drive the lobster's three small arms on each side, signals from several parts of the wearer's body, such as a touch of elbow twist or knee flex, were combined into one control signal for each extra joint.[4] A 2015 essay by Andrea Stevenson Won, Jeremy Bailenson and Lanier gives more detail: Lasko had seen a postcard of people in lobster suits at a festival, created a lobster avatar and began programming a body map for it. Because the body suit did not measure enough parameters to drive the avatar one to one, its degrees of freedom were remapped onto the lobster's; early mappings were unusable, but with refined algorithms and practice, people slowly learned to control the lobster.[7] The essay presents the experiment as part of the history of "homuncular flexibility", the idea that the brain's map of the body can adapt to bodies with extra appendages or appendages that move in atypical ways.[7]
Writing and medical simulation
Lasko-Harvill wrote the essay "Identity and Mask in Virtual Reality", published in 1992 in volume 14, issue 2 of Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture. Its acknowledgments thank Chuck Blanchard of VPL Research and Young Harvill, then at Paracomp.[8]
With Chuck Blanchard, Jaron Lanier and Dale McGrew she wrote "A Fully Immersive Cholecystectomy Simulation" for the 1995 Medicine Meets Virtual Reality III conference.[9] The paper describes a fully immersive VR simulation of open abdominal gallbladder removal, with the abdomen, biliary system and several surgical instruments modeled in a virtual operating room; state-machine interaction programming let the user perform the whole sequence of surgical tasks, based on a task analysis of the operation.[10]
Patents
Lasko-Harvill, Michael Teitel and Lanier are the inventors of a family of US patents assigned to Sun Microsystems. The chain of applications goes back to one filed on 30 November 1990. The shared abstract describes apparatus for viewing computer-generated images while tracking the user's head and hand: a versatile frame carries short-range, inexpensive sensors for head tracking of a user whose movement is confined to a small area, all tracking and input electronics sit in a mobile pack, and the display takes interchangeable optical elements, including a bicolor polarizer that lets an LCD show two colors without loss of resolution.[5][11]
| Patent | Title | Filed | Granted |
|---|---|---|---|
| US 5,850,201 | Low cost virtual reality system | 6 October 1994 | 15 December 1998[5] |
| US 6,124,838 | Hood-shaped support frame for a low cost virtual reality system | 17 July 1998 | 26 September 2000[11] |
| US 6,452,574 B1 | Hood-shaped support frame for a low cost virtual reality system | 19 September 2000 | 17 September 2002[12] |
| US 6,414,731 B2 | Low cost virtual reality system | 7 February 2001 | 2 July 2002[13] |
Recognition
Lasko-Harvill is an inductee of the AWE XR Hall of Fame, run by the Augmented World Expo. Its entry credits her work on VPL's data suits and networked VR interfaces with advancing VR interface design.[3]
Selected publications
| Year | Title | Venue |
|---|---|---|
| 1988 | "From DataGlove to DataSuit" (with C. Blanchard, W. Smithers, Y. Harvill and A. Coffman) | COMPCON Spring 88, IEEE, pp. 536-538[1] |
| 1990 | "Reality built for two: a virtual reality tool" (as Ann Lasko, with Blanchard, Burgess, Harvill, Lanier, Oberman and Teitel) | Computer Graphics, vol. 24, no. 2, pp. 35-36[2] |
| 1990 | "What's New in Reality Built for Two" (with Chuck Blanchard and Lou Ellyn Jones) | Ars Electronica 1990 festival catalog[6] |
| 1992 | "Identity and Mask in Virtual Reality" | Discourse, vol. 14, no. 2[8] |
| 1995 | "A Fully Immersive Cholecystectomy Simulation" (with Chuck Blanchard, Jaron Lanier and Dale McGrew) | Medicine Meets Virtual Reality, IOS Press[10] |
See also
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 A. Lasko-Harvill, C. Blanchard, W. Smithers, Y. Harvill, A. Coffman (1988). "From DataGlove to DataSuit". Digest of Papers, COMPCON Spring 88: Thirty-Third IEEE Computer Society International Conference, pp. 536-538. IEEE. https://doi.org/10.1109/CMPCON.1988.4925. Retrieved 2026-10-13.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 Chuck Blanchard, Scott Burgess, Young Harvill, Jaron Lanier, Ann Lasko, Mark Oberman, Mike Teitel (1990-02). "Reality built for two: a virtual reality tool". ACM SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics, vol. 24, no. 2, pp. 35-36. ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/91394.91409. Retrieved 2026-10-13.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 "Ann Lasko-Harvill". AWE XR Hall of Fame. AWE XR. https://www.awexr.com/hall-of-fame/24-ann-lasko-harvill. Retrieved 2026-10-13.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 Jaron Lanier (2006). "Homuncular Flexibility". Edge, Annual Question 2006: What Is Your Dangerous Idea?. Edge Foundation. https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11182. Retrieved 2026-10-13.
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 Ann Lasko-Harvill, Michael A. Teitel, Jaron Z. Lanier (1998-12-15). "US Patent 5,850,201 - Low cost virtual reality system". United States Patent and Trademark Office. Sun Microsystems, Inc. (assignee). https://image-ppubs.uspto.gov/dirsearch-public/print/downloadPdf/5850201. Retrieved 2026-10-13.
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 Chuck Blanchard, Ann Lasko-Harvill, Lou Ellyn Jones (1990). "What's New in Reality Built for Two". Ars Electronica 1990 festival catalog. Ars Electronica. https://webarchive.ars.electronica.art/en/archives/festival_archive/festival_catalogs/festival_artikel.asp%3FiProjectID=8974.html. Retrieved 2026-10-13.
- ↑ 7.0 7.1 Andrea Stevenson Won, Jeremy N. Bailenson, Jaron Lanier (2015-05-15). "Homuncular Flexibility: The Human Ability to Inhabit Nonhuman Avatars". Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences (Wiley), doi:10.1002/9781118900772.etrds0165. Stanford Virtual Human Interaction Lab. https://vhil.stanford.edu/sites/g/files/sbiybj29011/files/media/file/won-etsbs-homuncular-flexibility.pdf. Retrieved 2026-10-13.
- ↑ 8.0 8.1 Ann Lasko-Harvill (1992). "Identity and Mask in Virtual Reality". Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture, vol. 14, no. 2. https://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/discourse/vol14/iss2/13/. Retrieved 2026-10-13.
- ↑ Jaron Lanier. "Jaron Lanier Publications, Patents, etc". jaronlanier.com. https://jaronlanier.com/pubs.html. Retrieved 2026-10-13.
- ↑ 10.0 10.1 Ann Lasko-Harvill, Chuck Blanchard, Jaron Lanier, Dale McGrew (1995). "A Fully Immersive Cholecystectomy Simulation". Interactive Technology and the New Paradigm for Healthcare, Studies in Health Technology and Informatics. IOS Press. https://doi.org/10.3233/978-1-60750-862-5-182. Retrieved 2026-10-13.
- ↑ 11.0 11.1 Ann Lasko-Harvill, Michael Teitel, Jaron Z Lanier (2000-09-26). "US Patent 6,124,838 - Hood-shaped support frame for a low cost virtual reality system". United States Patent and Trademark Office. Sun Microsystems, Inc. (assignee). https://image-ppubs.uspto.gov/dirsearch-public/print/downloadPdf/6124838. Retrieved 2026-10-13.
- ↑ Ann Lasko-Harvill, Michael Teitel, Jaron Z Lanier (2002-09-17). "US Patent 6,452,574 B1 - Hood-shaped support frame for a low cost virtual reality system". United States Patent and Trademark Office. Sun Microsystems, Inc. (assignee). https://image-ppubs.uspto.gov/dirsearch-public/print/downloadPdf/6452574. Retrieved 2026-10-13.
- ↑ Ann Lasko-Harvill, Michael A Teitel, Jaron Z Lanier (2002-07-02). "US Patent 6,414,731 B2 - Low cost virtual reality system". United States Patent and Trademark Office. Sun Microsystems, Inc. (assignee). https://image-ppubs.uspto.gov/dirsearch-public/print/downloadPdf/6414731. Retrieved 2026-10-13.