Scott Fisher

Scott Fisher (Scott S. Fisher) is an American media artist and researcher who directed the Virtual Environment Workstation Project (VIEW) at NASA's Ames Research Center from 1985 to 1990. The project combined a head-tracked stereoscopic head-mounted display, instrumented gloves, 3D sound and speech input into a single virtual reality system. Before NASA he worked at MIT's Architecture Machine Group, where he took part in the Aspen Movie Map, and at Atari's research laboratory under Alan Kay. After NASA he co-founded Telepresence Research with Brenda Laurel, led an early wearable augmented reality project at Keio University in Japan, and in the early 2000s became the founding chair of the Interactive Media Division at the University of Southern California's School of Cinematic Arts.

As of October 2026, USC lists Fisher as a professor of cinematic arts, founding chair of the Interactive Media Division, former dean of research of the School of Cinematic Arts, and director of the USC Mobile & Environmental Media Lab. He was inducted into the XR Hall of Fame of the Augmented World Expo in 2025.

Reviewed 4 October 2026. Career dates, NASA VIEW project details, Telepresence Research, Keio WEM and USC roles checked against Fisher's 2016 Presence essay, his VSMM 2001 paper, USC/UCLA/MEML/AWE bios, Polygon and Crossref metadata for every cited paper. About review dates.

Education

Fisher studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he held a research fellowship at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies from 1974 to 1976 and was a member of the Architecture Machine Group (the forerunner of the MIT Media Lab) from 1978 to 1982. He told Polygon in 2016 that he had become "very obsessed with stereoscopic imagery" as a teenager and had explored ways to represent binocular imagery in his undergraduate work.

At the Architecture Machine Group, led by Nicholas Negroponte, he worked on the Aspen Movie Map surrogate travel videodisc project and on several stereoscopic display systems for teleconferencing and telepresence. Polygon also describes a 3D drawing experiment that used magnetic trackers to follow the hand within a space of 10 by 10 feet. His master's thesis, "Viewpoint Dependent Imaging: An Interactive Stereoscopic Display", was supervised by Negroponte; MIT's library catalogs it in the Department of Architecture as a Master of Science in Visual Studies thesis dated 1982, while Fisher's own biography gives a 1981 Master of Science in Media Technology. A paper with the same title in SPIE's Processing and Display of Three-Dimensional Data proceedings describes the system as a life-size, interactive stereoscopic image that acted as a window into a three-dimensional environment: as a body-tracking device detected the viewer's movements, matching viewpoints were retrieved from a stereoscopic image array stored on a computer-controlled optical videodisc, so that the image updated continuously. According to Polygon, the scenes showed an island off the coast of Maine.

Career

Atari Research

Fisher then joined Atari's Sunnyvale research laboratory as a research scientist under Alan Kay. According to his 2016 account, he focused on immersive video games and educational environments with Atari's coin-op division and on longer-term research into head-mounted displays and first-person technologies for home and entertainment uses; this included work on a consumer version of Eric Howlett's LEEP wide-angle optics (LEEP Systems) for a low-cost 3D arcade game loosely based on Morton Heilig's Sensorama. He told Polygon that the lab had been in the process of hiring Heilig when Atari closed it in 1984.

NASA Ames and the VIEW project

Fisher first visited NASA Ames in early 1984 for a workshop on human factors for the planned U.S. space station, where he met Dave Nagel of the Aerospace Human Factors Research Division. After Atari's lab closed, Nagel had a new research position announced for which Fisher formally applied; NASA took almost nine months to process the application and security checks, and Fisher started at Ames at the beginning of 1985. Before joining, he had shown the LEEP optics to Ames researchers Stephen Ellis and Michael McGreevy. When he arrived he found that McGreevy and contractor Jim Humphries had built a prototype head-mounted display around those optics, the VIVED.

Fisher set out to expand the VIVED into an interactive, multisensory system that could act as a general user interface for space station tasks. In his account, this work included specifying a glove input device based on Tom Zimmerman's finger-bend sensor and negotiating VPL's first contract to build it (the first "dataglove"), ordering a Polhemus head tracker, and working with Elizabeth Wenzel to add 3D sound and speech input and output. The glove was custom built for NASA by Zimmerman at VPL Research and later sold by VPL as the DataGlove. Team members he recruited included Mark Bolas, Scott Foster, Steve Bryson and Warren Robinett; he also tried, without success, to hire Brenda Laurel. The first head-tracked wireframe demonstrations ran at 100 by 100 resolution late in 1985, and the project showed its first demo tape at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas in January 1986. Nagel then made the work a formal project and appointed Fisher project director.

Fisher, McGreevy, Humphries and Robinett co-authored the paper "Virtual Environment Display System" for the 1986 ACM Workshop on Interactive 3D Graphics in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Fisher also published an SPIE paper on a "telepresence master glove controller" for dexterous robotic end-effectors.

Over the following four years the lab built two further revisions of the headset, had a custom graphics system made to render filled polygons, and contracted Ascension for a high-powered tracker so that users could move around larger virtual environments in the lab while both hands were tracked. The lab also built an interactive 3D sound processor, which Fisher calls the first of its kind: the Convolvotron, developed at NASA by Scott Foster and Elizabeth Wenzel and later sold by Foster's company Crystal River Engineering (see Head-related transfer function). Humphries also built the first BOOM, an alternative head-coupled display later commercialized by Mark Bolas's company Fakespace.

The finished Virtual Interface Environment Workstation combined a wide-angle stereoscopic display with magnetic head and limb tracking, gloves for multiple degree-of-freedom input, connected speech recognition and speech synthesis, a 3D auditory display, and dual synchronized image channels (one per eye) generated at up to 30 frames per second. For live video of remote environments, two miniature CCD cameras supplied stereoscopic imagery. The project's applications included:

Application	Description
Telepresence	The operator called up views from free-flying or robot-mounted cameras, then switched to a mode in which the headset was linked to a stereoscopic camera on a telerobot and the glove and voice commands drove the robot arm and end-effector.
Dataspace	Information windows and virtual control panels were arranged in 3D space around the operator and moved, opened or deleted by speech and gesture.
Surgical simulation	A virtual skeleton with tendons and muscles attached to the bones, developed with the MIT Media Lab and Stanford Medical School for surgical planning and education; Joseph Rosen, Scott Delp and Steve Pieper were its main creators, and a 1991 SPIE paper describes its use to simulate leg surgery.

Fisher writes that the VIEW system was widely covered, including in a Scientific American cover story in October 1987. In the Polygon interview he said the stated goal was to let astronauts control robots outside the space station by telepresence, that the system never flew, partly because of the 1986 Space Shuttle disaster, and that he left because the team "spent all of this time building hardware, but we wanted to build the content".

Telepresence Research

Fisher left Ames at the beginning of 1990 and co-founded Telepresence Research, Inc. with Laurel to continue work on first-person media and to build virtual environment and remote presence experiences, mostly for theme parks and museums. The company's own history lists Laurel as co-founder and managing director from 1990 to 1991 and Fisher as co-founder and managing director until 1998, with development facilities in Beverly Hills and the San Francisco Bay Area.

Projects from this period included:

• Menagerie, an installation in which visitors could interact with virtual characters, described in a 1994 SPIE paper by Fisher, Susan Amkraut, Michael Girard and Mark Trayle. Fisher describes it as the first immersive VR installation in an art museum (Centre Pompidou, Paris, 1992).
• The Virtual Brewery Adventure at the Sapporo Beer Museum in Tokyo (1994), which Fisher describes as the first permanent VR installation in a public museum.
• A remote presence system built with Fake Space Labs, in which a stereoscopic camera head on a mobile robot followed the motion of a BOOM viewer.

Fisher was also a visiting professor in UCLA's School of the Arts and Architecture, and from 1997 to 1999 he directed the Virtual Explorer Project in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at UC San Diego, where undergraduates built a VR framework for teaching science; its first module, on immunology, was installed at San Jose's Tech Museum of Innovation and at the Heinz Nixdorf computer museum in Germany. His stereoscopic work was shown at the Galeries Contemporaines of the Centre Georges Pompidou and at the 1995 Kwangju Biennale.

Keio University

In 1999 Fisher moved to Tokyo to work at Keio University, where he was a project professor in the Graduate School of Media and Governance at the Shonan Fujisawa campus. There he led Wearable Environmental Media (WEM), an augmented reality project funded in part by NTT DoCoMo that aimed to let a mobile user browse, post and view location-specific information in the physical world. The 2001 prototype was a backpack system: a head-mounted display with two CCD cameras fed video through a wireless analog link to a lab workstation, which added graphics and sent it back, while GPS rover and base stations located the user to about 2 centimeters. In the "Virtual Field Guide" demonstration, 3D icons were superimposed on trees and plants at a campus test site and opened information about local insects and plants. The USC Mobile & Environmental Media Lab dates the WEM project to 1999-2005.

University of Southern California

Fisher returned to the United States to start the Interactive Media Division of USC's School of Cinematic Arts (then the School of Cinema-Television). His 2016 essay dates the move to 2002, while the Polygon profile gives 2001. One of his first faculty hires was Mark Bolas from the NASA team. In 2004 Electronic Arts announced a multi-million dollar gift to the school to fund an Electronic Arts Interactive Entertainment Program, a three-year MFA, and an endowed faculty chair in the division, which the announcement said was headed by Fisher; Fisher later told Polygon the gift was $8 million.

At USC he directs the Mobile & Environmental Media Lab, which works on location-based and "ambient" storytelling with virtual, augmented and mixed reality. Its projects include YOKAI! (2017), a mixed reality story viewed on Microsoft HoloLens; Memory Space: ChinatownAR (2019-2024), which uses the 8th Wall mobile AR platform to place historic photographs of Los Angeles's first Chinatown on the site now occupied by Union Station; and the Immersive Archive (2024), which builds simulations that restore and exhibit historic XR devices. Fisher presented the Chinatown project at AWE USA 2024. The ACM SIGGRAPH History Archive records courses, panels and emerging technology contributions by Fisher at SIGGRAPH from 1989 through 2023, including Menagerie (1993) and Virtual Explorer (1997) in the Emerging Technologies program.

Recognition

The AWE XR Hall of Fame entry credits Fisher with leading the development of head-coupled displays, data gloves and 3D audio as founding director of the VIEW project, and with work on robotic VR, remote presence and early augmented reality at Telepresence Research. He was one of ten 2025 inductees whom AWE announced would be honored on 11 June 2025 at AWE USA 2025.

See also

• History of virtual reality
• Head-coupled perspective