Brenda Laurel

Brenda Laurel is an interaction designer, researcher and author who has worked in interactive media since 1976, including the computer game industry from Atari to Activision and research labs at Atari, Interval Research and Sun Microsystems. Trained in theatre, she wrote Computers as Theatre (1991), a book on human-computer interaction that she has said drew on Aristotle's Poetics. In virtual reality, she co-founded Telepresence Research with Scott Fisher in 1990, and with Rachel Strickland she created Placeholder, a two-person VR environment produced at the Banff Centre for the Arts in 1993 with support from Interval Research.

Laurel later co-founded Purple Moon, a company that made games for preteen girls, and designed and chaired graduate design programs at Art Center College of Design and California College of the Arts. She is listed in the XR Hall of Fame maintained by Augmented World Expo.

Reviewed 4 October 2026. Every claim checked against her CV and website pages, the 2017 Smithsonian oral history, the 1994 Placeholder paper and DOI, the 1991 Stanford abstract, AWE pages and the other cited sources. About review dates.

Early life and education

Laurel earned a BA in speech and theatre from DePauw University in 1972, graduating magna cum laude. At Ohio State University's Department of Theatre she earned an MFA in acting and directing in 1975 and a PhD in theory and criticism in 1986. Her dissertation was titled "Toward the Design of a Computer-Based Interactive Fantasy System." From 1972 to 1979 she taught general theatre, acting and directing at Ohio State, Otterbein College and the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point.

Career

CyberVision and Atari

At CyberVision, Inc., Laurel was a software designer and programmer from 1977 to 1978 and manager of educational product design from 1978 to 1980. She told the Smithsonian's oral history project that CyberVision's founders, Joe Miller and John Powers, both moved to Atari and brought her with them. At Atari she was manager of software strategy and marketing in the home computer division from 1980 to 1982 and then a member of the research staff at the Atari Sunnyvale Research Lab from 1982 to 1984. She has said she asked Alan Kay, who had just taken over the lab, to let her join because she "was starting to think about what we now think of as VR," and that Scott Fisher was in the same lab, starting to become interested in VR from a background in stereoscopic imagery. Her work on computer-based interactive fantasy began at the Atari Research Lab in 1982 and was published in her 1986 dissertation.

Activision and consulting

From 1985 to 1987 Laurel was director of product development for learning and creativity at Activision. Between 1987 and 1992 she worked as an interaction design consultant for clients including Apple, LucasArts Entertainment, Epyx, Brøderbund, Carnegie Mellon University, Fujitsu Labs and Sony Pictures. Her own biography lists her Apple work from 1988 to 1991 as including the Vivarium and Guides projects. In this period she edited The Art of Human-Computer Interface Design (Addison-Wesley, 1990) and co-founded the Computer Game Developers' Conference, serving on its board from 1988 to 1991.

Telepresence Research

In 1990 Laurel and Scott Fisher founded Telepresence Research, Inc., a company for research and development in virtual environments and remote presence systems; she was its co-founder and president until 1991. In the Smithsonian interview she said that a consulting client of hers in the late 1980s was interested in funding VR work, that she recruited Fisher from NASA, and that the first round of funding came from a Japanese investor. She named the core team as Fisher, Michael Naimark, Scott Foster (whom she credited with much of the 3D audio system called the Convolvotron), Mark Bolas of Fakespace Lab, Rachel Strickland, Steve Saunders and herself. According to Laurel, the company built demonstrations of three-dimensional audio and other technology and made a documentary film, Be There Here, which she and Strickland scripted. She left when the company ran short of cash and could not meet payroll.

While at Telepresence Research she gave a Stanford seminar in November 1991, "Be There Here: Telepresence and Virtual Reality," which defined telepresence as technology that lets a person "feel as if he or she is physically present in a different place or time" and named head-coupled stereoscopic displays, three-dimensional audio environments and body- or hand-coupled input devices as its usual components. Her CV lists other talks on telepresence and VR in 1991 and 1992, including lectures in Tokyo, Australia and Montpellier, France.

Placeholder

Placeholder was a virtual reality project directed by Laurel and Rachel Strickland and produced by Interval Research Corporation and the Banff Centre. Laurel dated it to the summer of 1993 in the 2017 oral history, as does Strickland's project page; Laurel's own project page gives 1992. She said that she and Strickland had already had a low-budget proposal accepted by the Banff Centre when she joined Interval, and that Interval's David Liddle then put substantial funding into the production. Their stated aim was to show the medium as a context for art and play at a time when most VR work they saw was training simulation.

The project is described in "Placeholder: Landscape and Narrative in Virtual Environments" by Laurel, Strickland and Rob Tow, published in ACM SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics in May 1994. Its three virtual worlds were based on real places near Banff National Park: the Middle Spring (a sulfur hot spring in a cave), a waterfall in Johnston Canyon, and hoodoos overlooking the Bow River. Two physically remote participants wearing head-mounted displays could visit the landscape at the same time, walk about, speak, and use both hands to touch and move virtual objects.

The paper describes these design elements:

Element	Description in the 1994 paper
Smart costumes	Four animated spirit Critters (Spider, Snake, Fish and Crow) could be "worn" by a participant, changing appearance, voice, perception and way of moving; Crow flew by flapping its wings.
Voiceholders and Voicemarks	Rock-like objects with faces recorded and played back spoken messages (Voicemarks) that later visitors could hear and rearrange.
Gaze and movement	Gaze direction came from the head sensor, while desired direction of locomotion was inferred from a sensor on a belt worn below the waist; the paper notes that as of 1993 standard practice inferred both from a head-mounted sensor.
Hands	Hand-held "Grippees," designed by Steve Saunders of Interval, measured the distance between thumb and finger for a simple grasping interface on both hands.
Portals	Spiral portals moved participants between worlds and played ambient sound from the destination.
The Goddess	A character improvised live by a performer who watched both participants' views from a booth.

According to Tow's section of the paper, the system used Virtual Research helmets with added microphones, Polhemus position sensors on each participant's head, hands and torso within circles about ten feet across, an SGI Onyx Reality Engine running the University of Alberta's Minimal Reality Toolkit (modified at Banff for two users with two hands each), and Crystal River Engineering Convolvotrons for spatial audio. Banff's Precipice Theatre Society, an environmental improvisational company, helped develop the characters, and its actors were the first participants.

The authors reported that the smart costumes "immediately and strongly influenced participants' behaviors," but that the Voiceholders were hard to use because sensor sampling was tied to a display frame rate that sometimes fell to 5 Hz. In the oral history Laurel said that the team wanted participants to have an explicit body, prompted partly by a gender difference she perceived in how early users described VR, and recalled participants swapping Critter bodies with each other, behavior the designers had not foreseen.

Interval Research and Purple Moon

Laurel was a member of the research staff in technology and culture at Interval Research Corporation from 1992 to 1997, where she managed a four-year study of gender and technology among children and teens. That work led to Purple Moon, which she co-founded in 1996 and where she was vice president of design and a board member until 1999. The company made CD-ROM games, a website and toys for preteen girls. On 18 March 1999 Mattel announced it would buy Purple Moon, including its website, CD-ROM games and related merchandise, a month after Purple Moon had shut down for financial reasons. Laurel was also a script consultant for Oliver Stone's ABC miniseries Wild Palms in 1992-93.

Teaching and later work

At Art Center College of Design she was principal designer of a new curriculum for the New Media Program from 1999 and chair and professor of the Graduate Media Design program from 2000 to 2006, according to her CV; AWE's 2019 biography dates her time as chair from 2001. In 2005-2006 she was a Distinguished Engineer and senior director at Sun Microsystems Laboratories, where her projects included life-sized video interaction at a distance. From 2006 to 2012 she was chair and professor of the Graduate Program in Design at California College of the Arts. Her undated website biography lists her as an adjunct professor in the computer science department at UC Santa Cruz and describes a focus on distributed sensing and augmented reality in STEAM learning.

In the 2017 Smithsonian interview she described herself as "gently retired" and working as an independent scholar on VR and AR, and named smooth transitions between VR and AR as one of the medium's challenges. In a May 2019 interview with Kent Bye at Augmented World Expo, published in 2025, she discussed Computers as Theatre, ethics, and VR as a way to encourage ecological thinking. At that time AWE's speaker biography listed her on the boards of the Virtual World Society, IxDA and the Communication Research Institute in Australia.

Writing

Computers as Theatre was published by Addison-Wesley in 1991, with a revised paperback in 1993. Her 1986 dissertation informed the book. A second edition was published by Addison-Wesley Professional on 27 September 2013; its publisher says it integrates key ideas about virtual reality and covers augmented reality and distributed and participatory sensing. In his foreword to the second edition, Don Norman quotes its first chapter: "Thinking about interfaces is thinking too small. Designing human-computer experience isn't about building a better desktop. It's about creating imaginary worlds that have a special relationship to reality". Her other books include Utopian Entrepreneur (MIT Press, 2001) and, as editor, Design Research: Methods and Perspectives (MIT Press, 2004).

Her CV lists these articles on VR and immersion from the early 1990s:

Year	Title	Venue
1990	"Virtual Reality Design: A Personal View"	Multimedia Review, Summer 1990
1991	"Art and Activism in VR"	Verbum, vol. 5, no. 2
1992	"Artistic Frontiers in Virtual Reality"	Proceedings of SIGGRAPH '92
1993	"Immersion Technologies"	Wired, December 1993
1994	"Placeholder: Landscape and Narrative in Virtual Environments" (with Rachel Strickland and Rob Tow)	Computer Graphics, vol. 28, no. 2
1995	"Commentary: Virtual Reality"	Scientific American, vol. 273, no. 3

Recognition

Laurel received IndieCade's 2015 Trailblazer Award, given for "standing on the shoulders of giants and being one"; Indie Game Reviewer's report of the winners list described her as "a VR pioneer, interactive design expert, and leading advocate for developing video games for girls." She received the Virtual World Society's Nextant Prize in 2017. Augmented World Expo's XR Hall of Fame lists her as a "Visionary in Narrative-Driven and Inclusive Gaming and VR Experiences" and cites her co-design of Placeholder. Earlier honors listed in her CV include the American Association for Higher Education's Equity Award (2004) and recognition as one of Working Woman's 25 most influential working women (1997).