Mark Bolas

Mark Bolas (Mark T. Bolas) is an American virtual reality researcher, designer and engineer. In 1988 he co-founded the VR hardware company Fakespace with Ian McDowall and Eric Lorimer, which built the BOOM (Binocular Omni-Orientation Monitor) stereoscopic viewer, the Pinch glove and other tools used in research labs. He later taught at the USC School of Cinematic Arts and directed the Mixed Reality Lab (MxR) at the University of Southern California's Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT). There his team built low-cost, open-source smartphone head-mounted display designs such as FOV2GO, and the lab hired Palmer Luckey as a lab assistant before Luckey founded Oculus VR. In 2016 he joined Microsoft, where he worked on its mixed reality platform.

Bolas received the first IEEE VGTC Virtual Reality Technical Achievement Award in 2005 and the IEEE VGTC Virtual Reality Career Award in 2018.

Reviewed 4 October 2026. Checked education, Fakespace history, patents, papers (via Crossref), Wide5, MxR Lab and FOV2GO claims, Luckey hiring, Microsoft titles and IEEE awards against the cited CV, USC, ICT, IEEE, UploadVR, AWE and Google Patents pages. About review dates.

Early life and education

Bolas grew up in the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles. In a 2016 USC profile he recalled skipping a high school summer-school class, wandering around USC, finding an unlocked computer lab and teaching himself to program there.

He received a B.A. in physics with a minor in music technology from the University of California, San Diego in 1983 and did further study in digital signal processing and computer music at UC San Diego in 1986-87. Before graduate school he worked as a junior developmental engineer at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography (1982-1984), led the electronics group at Bentex on a subsea remotely operated vehicle (1984-1986), and ran a design engineering consultancy, the Nickolas Agency (1985-1988).

In 1989 he completed an M.S. in mechanical engineering (product design) at Stanford University. His thesis, "Design and Virtual Environments", was supervised by Rolf Faste in Stanford's design program and by Scott Fisher at NASA Ames Research Center. Fisher ran the virtual reality lab at Ames, and Bolas told USC Today that Fisher let him use it freely after hours, which became his thesis project; he also helped build NASA's prototype Virtual Environment Workstation. The IEEE VR 2018 award biography summarizes the thesis as concluding that the medium's power to transport a user depends on balancing realism and abstraction.

Career

Fakespace

Bolas co-founded Fakespace with Ian McDowall and Eric Lorimer to build instrumentation for VR research labs. Most sources, including his own CV, give 1988 as the founding year; his USC faculty profile gives 1989. According to the CV, the company's founding client was the Virtual Environment Workstation project at NASA Ames, and Fakespace Labs designed the BOOM family of viewing devices and the Molly telepresence camera platform.

The BOOM was a CRT-based stereoscopic viewer suspended on a counterbalanced boom, which the user moved to control the viewpoint in a virtual environment. An early description of the counterbalanced display appeared at the SPIE Stereoscopic Displays and Applications conference in 1990, in a paper by McDowall, Bolas, Steven Pieper, Fisher and Jim Humphries. Bolas and Russell C. Mead Jr. received U.S. Patent 5,253,832 for a spring counterbalanced boom suspension system for suspending a viewer in a visual virtual environment system; it was filed in July 1991 and granted in October 1993. Bolas described the human factors behind the BOOM's design in IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications in 1994.

Fakespace's other products included the Pinch glove, the RAVE and the VLIB software. A related Fakespace patent covers a data glove with electrodes made of flexible conductive fabric that sensed contact between any combination of electrodes; it names McDowall, Bolas, Mead and Christian Greuel as inventors (U.S. Patent 6,128,004, filed 1996, granted 2000). In 1998 Bolas co-founded Fakespace Systems, a spin-off that commercialized projection-based immersive systems including the CAVE, RAVE and Immersive Workbench, and he was its chairman until 2000. He was also chairman and co-founder of Sonicbox, an internet radio appliance company, in 1999-2000. His CV lists him as co-chair of the SPIE conference "The Engineering Reality of Virtual Reality" from 1991.

Academic posts and the Wide5

Bolas lectured in Stanford's product design program in various years from 1994 to 2002 and was a consulting assistant professor there in 2003-2004. He was an assistant professor at Keio University's Graduate School of Media and Governance in 2001-2002, a visiting scholar at USC's School of Cinema and Television in 2003 and a visiting associate professor there in 2004-2005. By 2008 he was an associate professor of interactive media at the USC School of Cinematic Arts and director of its Interactive Narrative and Immersive Technologies (INIT) Lab, and that year he gave a keynote, "Growing the Medium of VR", at the IEEE Virtual Reality conference.

With McDowall at Fakespace Labs, Bolas developed the Wide5 head-mounted display, built between 2004 and 2007. ICT's account says it had a field of view of more than 150 degrees horizontally and about 130 degrees vertically, used small LCD panels, and rendered an extra low-resolution image for peripheral vision, an approach the essay calls a precursor to foveated rendering. The ICT essay says the work was funded by the Office of Naval Research; on his portfolio site Bolas credits sponsors at the Naval Research Lab and describes the design choices: small LCD panels instead of microdisplays, which relaxed the optical design; lens optimization that assumed software correction; and distortion maps tuned by eye. The ICT essay says the headset cost close to US$50,000 to build and its optical tracking system twice that.

Mixed Reality Lab at ICT

Bolas directed the Mixed Reality Lab (MxR) at ICT, a lab linked to both ICT and the School of Cinematic Arts. A 2016 USC Today profile described him as an associate professor in the School of Cinematic Arts and associate director of ICT, and said the lab released the blueprints of its work for free. The lab's research included redirected walking. One example is the "Impossible Spaces" technique, which uses self-overlapping virtual architecture to fit large environments into a small tracked area; the paper by Evan Suma, Zachary Lipps, Samantha Finkelstein, David Krum and Bolas received an honorable mention at IEEE VR 2012. The lab later released an open-source Redirected Walking Toolkit. Bolas also worked with Krum and Suma on augmented reality using personal projection onto retroreflective surfaces; on his site he notes that the CastAR company was developing a similar approach.

Smartphone HMDs and FOV2GO

Bolas writes that in 2011 he set the lab the goal of replacing the Wide5 with designs that could be made at consumer prices. In his account, he built a prototype one weekend from two iPhones and a set of LEEP lenses taken from his earlier BOOM display. The resulting poster, "A design for a smartphone-based head mounted display" by J. Logan Olson, Krum, Suma and Bolas, was presented at IEEE VR 2011.

At IEEE VR 2012 the lab handed out foam-core FOV2GO viewers that held a single smartphone showing a stereo pair, together with a Unity software library. The MxR Lab won the conference's best demo award for FOV2GO, described by ICT as "a fold-out 3-D viewer for the creation of immersive virtual reality experiences using smartphones". Bolas says the team on the viewer included Palmer Luckey and Thai Phan. The cheap lenses gave a narrow field of view, so the lab moved on to wider designs. Bolas and the ICT essay say he reused an old Fakespace trick of placing hand-held aspheric magnifiers backwards and pairing them with remapping software, which led to the wider FOV2GO-D viewer. The lab released its open-source hardware and software designs at Maker Faire in 2012.

Bolas states on his site that the Oculus Rift DK1 used the FOV2GO-D lens design and the lab's remote-drive display, that the first prototypes of the Samsung Gear VR used FOV2GO-D optics, and that Google used a folded-cardboard design similar to the FOV2GO-A. UploadVR reported in 2016 that the lab's phone-based viewer predated Google Cardboard by years.

Palmer Luckey

According to USC Today, Luckey visited the MxR Lab after reading a research paper by the team, impressed Bolas, and joined a team of lab students, programmers and professors. ICT's 2024 essay says the lab hired him as a temporary lab assistant, that Bolas was struck by his knowledge of VR hardware history, and that Luckey left ICT in June 2012 to launch a Kickstarter campaign for his own headset. Bolas writes that before joining the lab Luckey had said of the Wide5, "I would absolutely kill to get my hands on it, along with a screwdriver, for an hour." UploadVR reported that Bolas hired Luckey to work at the lab, and the Augmented World Expo XR Hall of Fame entry calls him "Palmer Luckey's Mentor". The lab's makeshift prototype headsets, the "Scuba HMD" and the "Antler HMD", were also used for student work such as Nonny de la Peña's "Hunger" and early games by Nathan Burba and James Iliff, who went on to found the VR game company Survios.

Microsoft

In September 2016 Microsoft hired Bolas as Partner Director of Program Management in Microsoft Research. UploadVR described the move as a "sort of sabbatical". By April 2017 UploadVR reported his title as Director of Program Management for Mixed Reality, responsible for the vision strategy of the Windows Mixed Reality platform shared by Microsoft HoloLens and partner VR headsets. Alex Kipman said of him, "he's amazing, and I think as a collaborator, he can help us create an amazing future there." The 2018 IEEE VR awards biography described him as a partner and director at Microsoft in charge of incubation and user experience for mixed reality products. His AWE USA 2021 speaker profile listed him as Partner Director of Incubation in Microsoft's Cognition group. The USC School of Cinematic Arts faculty directory lists him as Professor of Cinematic Arts, Director of the INIT Lab and a Ph.D. advisor in the Media Arts + Practice Division.

Recognition

Year	Recognition	Notes
2005	IEEE VGTC Virtual Reality Technical Achievement Award	First recipient of the award
2012	IEEE VR Best Demo Award (Mixed Reality Lab)	For FOV2GO and gesture work with the FAAST toolkit
2018	IEEE VGTC Virtual Reality Career Award	Award talk published in the IEEE VR 2018 proceedings

The 2018 award biography also lists best research demo, best tech-note and best paper awards, a Top Ten Products of the Year honor for the Immersive WorkWall and an Industry Excellence award for the Immersive Workbench. Microsoft Research's 2015 speaker biography says he holds more than twenty patents. AWE's XR Hall of Fame lists him as "Co-Founder of Fakespace, USC Professor and Palmer Luckey's Mentor".