Michael Naimark

Michael Naimark (born 1952) is an American media artist, inventor and researcher who has worked on virtual reality, interactive cinema and new media art since the late 1970s. He calls the thread running through his work "place representation": recording real places with custom camera systems and playing them back as interactive or immersive experiences. As a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology he was responsible for the cinematography of the Aspen Movie Map (1978-1980), an early interactive "surrogate travel" system that the Computer History Museum treats as a forerunner of Google Street View.

Naimark went on to make interactive "moviemaps" of Paris, the San Francisco Bay Area and the tram network of Karlsruhe, room-sized film projection installations that his biography describes as precursors of today's large-scale projection mapping, and the stereoscopic panorama installation Be Now Here (1995) at Paul Allen's Interval Research Corporation. He was a founding editorial board member of the MIT Press journal Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments. In 2015 he became the first resident artist in Google's new VR division, and from 2017 he taught VR and AR at NYU Shanghai, where he led research on glasses-free 3D telepresence.

Reviewed 7 October 2026. Checked every claim against the cited naimark.net bio, CV and project pages, ZKM, Computer History Museum, MIT Technology Review, SIGGRAPH History, Debevec, ZHdK, MIT Media Lab, USC ICT, NYU Shanghai, Gray Area, the TeleWindow paper, the Google Patents record and Crossref metadata for all eight papers. About review dates.

Early life and education

Naimark was born in 1952 in Detroit, Michigan. He earned a B.S. in cybernetic systems, an independent major, from the University of Michigan in 1974, and an M.S. in visual studies and environmental art from MIT in 1979. His CV lists him as an instructor and co-founder of the Future Worlds Program at Michigan's College of Literature, Science, and the Arts from 1972 to 1975.

At MIT he was based at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies, where he was a research fellow in 1979-1980, and he was a technical instructor for film and video at the Architecture Machine Group (ArcMac) in 1978-1979. His biography names Gyorgy Kepes, filmmaker Ricky Leacock, ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax, geographer Bernard Nietschmann and media and academic activist Red Burns as mentors.

Career

Aspen Movie Map and MIT

The Aspen Movie Map began as an idea of MIT undergraduate Peter Clay in collaboration with graduate students Bob Mohl and Naimark. Clay "moviemapped" the hallways of MIT in early 1978 as the Architecture Machine Group's second videodisc demo. ArcMac then filmed Aspen, Colorado, in fall 1978, winter 1979 and again in fall 1979, with Nicholas Negroponte securing funding from DARPA's Cybernetics Technology Office and Andrew Lippman as principal investigator. Naimark, then at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies, was responsible for cinematography design and production. His project notes describe 16 mm stop-frame cameras on a gyroscopic stabilizer on top of a camera car, triggered every 10 feet by an encoder on a fifth wheel, with filming limited to 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. each day to keep lighting consistent. The Computer History Museum's account credits Lippman and "cinematographer Michael Naimark" with customizing the stop-motion camera rig that took a full panorama about every 10 feet.

Looking back in 2008, Naimark told MIT Technology Review: "One could argue that the roots of two movements went through the Aspen movie map in the earliest days: the roots of multimedia and the roots of virtual reality." He later wrote about the project and its relevance to virtual heritage in "Aspen the Verb: Musings on Heritage and Virtuality" in Presence (2006).

Another ArcMac experiment, Talking Head Projection (shown in 1980), was a telepresence study made with Negroponte and Chris Schmandt. The recorded head movements of a speaker drove a face-shaped screen on a pan-tilt gimbal while the speaker's filmed image was projected onto it.

Projection installations

Displacements (1980-1984) is an immersive film installation. Naimark furnished a living room in an exhibition space, filmed two performers in it with a 16 mm camera on a slowly rotating turntable, then replaced the camera with a film loop projector and spray-painted the entire room white so the footage fell back onto the objects it showed. In his description, everything looked "strikingly 3D" except the people, who appeared ghostlike. The piece was produced three times, the last at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1984, and a digital-video version was made in 2005. Naimark's CV lists a First Award in SF MOMA's SECA "Film as Art" program in 1984. The related Eyepiece (1979) projected film of a human eye onto a custom rear-projection dome.

He described the optics behind this work in "Spatial Correspondence in Motion Picture Display" (SPIE, 1984) and returned to it in "Two Unusual Projection Spaces", published in a 2005 special issue of Presence on projection.

Consulting and moviemaps, 1980-1992

Between 1980 and 1992 Naimark worked as an independent media artist and consultant. His CV lists full-time consulting for the Atari Research Lab (1982-1984) and the Apple Multimedia Lab (1987-1990), and consulting for Panavision (1985-1986) and Lucasfilm (1986-1990), among other clients. His biography says he was on the original design team for the MIT Media Lab in 1980 and a founding member of the Atari Research Lab (1982), the Apple Multimedia Lab (1987) and Lucasfilm Interactive (1989).

During this period he produced several more moviemaps:

Year	Work	Commissioned by or shown at	Capture method
1986-1988	Paris VideoPlan	RATP (Paris Metro), kiosk in Madeleine station	35 mm stop-frame camera on an electric cart, one frame every 2 meters along the sidewalks of the Madeleine district; a mime at each intersection pointed out possible turns
1987	Golden Gate Fly-Over	Exploratorium, San Francisco (permanent collection)	Gyro-stabilized helicopter camera and satellite navigation, flying a ten-by-ten-mile grid centered on the Golden Gate Bridge; navigated with a single trackball
1991	Karlsruhe Moviemap	ZKM Karlsruhe; SIGGRAPH Tomorrow's Realities Gallery 1991	Camera on a tramcar triggered by the tram's odometer at 2, 4 or 8 meters per frame, covering more than 100 km of track in both directions; playback allowed speeds up to one kilometer per second

The ZKM lists the Karlsruhe Moviemap (1991) among his works, along with its own 2009 reshoot of the route, The Karlsruhe Moviemap 09. Naimark's project notes say the installation was first exhibited at the ZKM in 1991 and entered its permanent collection in 1997. The interface hardware for the Karlsruhe installation came from Fake Space Labs. In 1991 Naimark proposed a taxonomy of "real-space imaging" at an SPIE stereoscopic displays conference.

He was also active in the early VR community. He taught "Virtual Environments" (1989) and "Immersive Virtual Environments" (1990) classes at the San Francisco Art Institute. At Cyberthon, the 24-hour VR event organized in San Francisco in 1990 by Stewart Brand and Jon McIntyre, he directed the video documentation. With Warren Robinett he wrote a report on artists exploring virtual reality during the Bioapparatus residency at the Banff Centre for the Arts, published in the second issue of Presence in 1992. His CV lists service on the Presence editorial board from 1991 to 2006 and on the program committee of IEEE's first Virtual Reality Annual International Symposium (VRAIS) in 1993.

Interval Research

Naimark joined Interval Research Corporation, the Palo Alto research lab funded by Paul Allen, when it opened in 1992, and stayed until 2001; his CV describes him as one of its first 15 employees and project coordinator for its "Immersion" and "New Media" projects. The Immersion '94 project, led by Naimark with John Woodfill, Paul Debevec and Leo Villareal, used stereo imagery and image-based modeling and rendering to create a virtual hike along trails near Banff, Canada, from stereo pairs Naimark shot in 1993; he presented it at SIGGRAPH 95.

SEE BANFF! (1993-1994), made with the Banff Centre for the Arts and Interval's Immersion project, is a stereoscopic installation built to look like an Edison kinetoscope. Naimark filmed it in autumn 1993 with two stop-frame 16 mm cameras mounted on a "super jogger" baby carriage, triggered either by an intervalometer or by an encoder on a wheel; viewers turn a crank to move back and forth through the footage. The Computer History Museum holds his stereoscopic 16 mm camera assembly from the project on loan and calls the work a "3D movie map".

Be Now Here (Welcome to the Neighborhood), produced by Interval with the cooperation of the UNESCO World Heritage Centre, is an installation about public gathering places. Two 35 mm motion picture cameras mounted side by side for stereoscopy, with wide-angle lenses and synchronized 60 frame-per-second motors, filmed plazas in Jerusalem, Dubrovnik, Timbuktu and Angkor, four World Heritage sites listed as "in danger", several times over a single day. Visitors wore 3D glasses in front of a stereoscopic projection with surround audio and stood on a 16-foot floor that rotated in sync with the imagery, so the space seemed to rotate rather than the audience. It was shown at SIGGRAPH 1996 and in the ZKM's Future Cinema exhibition from 16 November 2002 to 30 March 2003. Naimark described the camera systems behind Be Now Here and SEE BANFF! in "3D moviemap and a 3D panorama" at SPIE's Stereoscopic Displays and Virtual Reality Systems IV conference in 1997. In 2008 the original footage was transferred to high-definition video for a three-screen version, Be Now Here Triptych, commissioned by Ars Electronica as a preview for its Linz09 project.

Near the end of his time at Interval, Naimark started Kundi.com, a spin-off that worked on real-time alerts for live webcam and streaming events. Interval closed in April 2000; Kundi launched a beta site in February 2001 and lost its funding that April.

USC, MIT and NYU, 2001-2016

Naimark received the World Technology Award for the Arts in 2002. From 2004 to 2008 he was on the full-time faculty of the Interactive Media Division at the USC School of Cinematic Arts, first as visiting and then as research associate professor. There he directed Viewfinder, a collaboration between the Interactive Media Division and the USC Institute for Creative Technologies. His biography says the project, which he initiated in 2006, received a Google research award in 2007; his CV lists the 2007 Google Research Award, for "Collective Photo Mapping", with Paul Debevec as secondary recipient. Viewfinder let users place photographs into 3D mapping software such as Google Earth at the location and angle from which they were taken; the team's stated usability goal was that a 10-year-old could pose a photo in under a minute.

In 2009 he taught "Representing Earth" at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program and was project director of "80+1: A Journey Around the World", an Ars Electronica project for Linz09, the European Capital of Culture. In 2011 he was a visiting associate professor in MIT's Program in Media Arts and Sciences, on leave from USC, and his Media Lab talk that May proposed a single "One Earth" model into which all real-world representations could be cross-correlated by latitude, longitude, altitude and time. He remained a Media Lab affiliate until 2014. His CV also lists consulting for Hasbro on its My3D stereoscopic viewer in 2011 and for Jaunt VR in 2016.

Google VR

Shortly after Google launched its VR division in 2015, Naimark became its first "VR Resident Artist". The proposed project was discontinued, but in 2016 he published the VR cinematography studies made during the residency. Writing in Presence in 2016, he described the division as "white hot", first known for its Google Cardboard headset, and his Google colleagues as mostly under 30. The same essay, written for the journal's 25th year, uses Cyberthon and his time at Interval and Google to argue that early VR artists and researchers should reach out to younger developers and entrepreneurs.

NYU Shanghai

In fall 2017 Naimark joined NYU Shanghai's Interactive Media Arts program as Visiting Associate Arts Professor, a full-time post he held until 2021. He taught a VR/AR Fundamentals class there. In a 2017 interview with the university he said: "The hype of VR has been thicker than anything I've seen in my career, and, frankly, I think it does more harm than good."

With NYU Shanghai colleagues Cameron Ballard and David Santiano, he developed TeleWindow, a frame holding up to four volumetric cameras that attaches to a 3D display for immersive video conferencing. Presented by the three at the International Symposium on Electronic Art in Barcelona in June 2022, the system used Intel RealSense depth cameras and aimed to keep material costs and required technical knowledge low. A related US patent, 12,069,408 B2, filed on 15 April 2019 with Naimark as first-named inventor and assigned to NYU Shanghai, was granted on 20 August 2024. It covers a set of cameras on a display frame whose 3D pixel arrays are merged by an interpolator for local display or transmission to a remote device; the patent describes video teleconferencing on displays that may be glasses-free 3D displays.

Later work

Since 2021 Naimark's CV lists him as principal of Michael Naimark & Company. In May 2022 he taught a six-hour VR/AR Fundamentals course at the Gray Area Foundation for the Arts in San Francisco, adapted from the course he first developed for NYU Shanghai's Interactive Media Arts program in 2017 and built around the principles of mediated presence. His CV lists him as a lecturer for "Designing XR Experiences" at the Jacobs Institute for Design Innovation, UC Berkeley, in 2023, and as a member of Gray Area's advisory board since 2018.

Selected publications

Year	Title	Venue
1984	"Spatial Correspondence in Motion Picture Display"	Proceedings of SPIE, vol. 462
1991	"Elements of real-space imaging: a proposed taxonomy"	Proceedings of SPIE, vol. 1457
1992	"Artists Explore Virtual Reality: The Bioapparatus Residency at the Banff Centre for the Arts" (with Warren Robinett)	Presence, vol. 1, no. 2
1997	"3D moviemap and a 3D panorama"	Proceedings of SPIE, vol. 3012
2005	"Two Unusual Projection Spaces"	Presence, vol. 14, no. 5
2006	"Aspen the Verb: Musings on Heritage and Virtuality"	Presence, vol. 15, no. 3
2016	"Being Early: Challenges and Opportunities as VR Grows Up"	Presence, vol. 25, no. 2
2022	"TeleWindow: A Flexible System for Exploring 3D Immersive Telepresence Using Commodity Depth Cameras" (with Cameron Ballard and David Santiano)	ISEA 2022, Barcelona

Recognition

The Computer History Museum's 2012 history of surrogate travel and Google Street View features his Aspen cinematography and his SEE BANFF! stereoscopic camera. The ZKM in Karlsruhe lists him as a collection artist, and his own biography says his work is also in the permanent collections of the American Museum of the Moving Image in New York and the Exploratorium in San Francisco. His CV lists a National Endowment for the Arts Media Arts Fellowship (1980), the World Technology Award for the Arts (2002) and a Rockefeller Foundation Creativity & Culture grant (2002). His biography says he has been awarded 16 patents relating to cameras, display, haptics and live video.