National Academies Press: OpenBook

Virtual Reality: Scientific and Technological Challenges (1995)

Chapter: A Biographical Sketches

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Suggested Citation:"A Biographical Sketches." National Research Council. 1995. Virtual Reality: Scientific and Technological Challenges. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4761.
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A
Biographical Sketches

NATHANIEL DURLACH (Chair) is a senior scientist in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and has been co-director of the Sensory Communication Group in the Research Laboratory of Electronics there for over 20 years. He has also been a visiting scientist in the Biomedical Engineering Department of Boston University for five years. He received an M.A. degree from Columbia University in mathematics and took courses at Harvard University in psychology and biology. He is the author (or coauthor) of numerous book chapters and refereed articles in such journals as Perception and Psychophysics and the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America; he continues to review articles, proposals, and research programs in the field of psychophysics; and he has received the silver medal award for outstanding work in psychoacoustics by the Acoustical Society of America. Recently, his research interests have focused on teleoperator and virtual environment systems, with special emphasis on the human-machine interfaces used in such systems. He is cofounder and director of the MIT Virtual Environment and Teleoperator Research Consortium, as well as cofounder and managing editor of the new MIT Press journal Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments.

STEVE BRYSON is an employee of Computer Sciences Corporation working under contract for the Applied Research Office of the Numerical Aerodynamics Simulation Systems Division at the NASA-Ames Research Center. His current research involves the application of virtual reality

Suggested Citation:"A Biographical Sketches." National Research Council. 1995. Virtual Reality: Scientific and Technological Challenges. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4761.
×

techniques for scientific visualization, of which the virtual wind tunnel is the main focus. He began work in the virtual reality field in 1984 at VPL Research, working on a graphics-based programming environment using the prototype DataGlove for input; later he was involved in work on the DataGlove model II. He joined the VIEW lab at the NASA-Ames Research Center in 1987, where he was involved in integrating the various input-output and graphics systems into a virtual environment. This included research in software architectures for virtual reality systems and human factors. In 1991, he was cochair of the IEEE Symposium on Research Frontiers in Virtual Reality and is program cochair of the IEEE Virtual Reality Annual International Symposium.

NORMAN HACKERMAN is chairman of the Scientific Advisory Board at the Robert A. Welch Foundation. He is president emeritus of Rice University, where he was president and a professor of chemistry for 15 years. Prior to that, he had a long and distinguished career at the University of Texas at Austin, where he served as president and held various positions, including director of the Corrosion Research Laboratory and on state boards and on committees focusing on various aspects of research and education. He was technical editor and then editor of the Journal of the Electrochemical Society from 1950 to 1990. He has served on a dozen National Academy of Science/National Research Council panels and committees and is a past chairman of the Board on Energy Studies and of the Commission on Physical Sciences, Mathematics, and Applications. He is the author or coauthor of more than 200 publications. He has a Ph.D. in chemistry from Johns Hopkins University.

JOHN M. HOLLERBACH is professor of computer science at the University of Utah. From 1989 to 1994 (including his time of membership on the committee) he was the natural sciences and engineering/Canadian Institute for Advanced Research professor of robotics at McGill University. From 1982 to 1989 he was on the faculty of the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and a member of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He received a Ph.D. in computer science from MIT in 1978. He was a member of the Administrative Committee of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society from 1989 to 1993. He is a technical editor of the IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation, treasurer of the IEEE/ASME Journal of Microelectromechanical Systems, and a senior editor of Presence.

JAMES R. LACKNER is Riklis professor of physiology and director of the Ashton Graybiel Spatial Orientation Laboratory at Brandeis University. He received B.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of

Suggested Citation:"A Biographical Sketches." National Research Council. 1995. Virtual Reality: Scientific and Technological Challenges. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4761.
×

Technology. He has served on the National Research Council's Committee on Vision from 1986 to 1992 and the Committee on Space Biology and Medicine from 1990 to the present. From 1986 to 1990 he was provost of Brandeis University. He is the section editor for spatial orientation of the Journal of Vestibular Research and is on the editorial board of Presence. His research interests concern human movement and orientation control in unusual sensory and force environments.

HERBERT S. LIN is senior staff officer for the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board. Previously he was a professional staff member for the House Armed Services Committee under Representative Les Aspin working on strategic modernization and arms control issues. He has also worked as a researcher, instructor, and visiting scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cornell University, and the University of Washington. He received a Ph.D. in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

ANNE S. MAVOR is study director for the Committee on Virtual Reality Research and Development and for the Committee on Human Factors. Her previous work as a National Research Council senior staff officer has included a study of modeling cost and performance of military enlistment, a review of federally sponsored education research activities, and a study to evaluate performance appraisal for merit pay. For the past 25 years her work has concentrated on human factors, cognitive psychology, and information system design. Prior to joining the NRC she worked for the Essex Corporation, a human factors research firm, and served as a consultant to the College Board. She has an M.S. in experimental psychology from Purdue University.

J. MICHAEL MOSHELL is associate professor of computer science at the University of Central Florida. He received a Ph.D. in computer science from Ohio State University in 1975 and spent the next 10 years at the University of Tennessee. He currently serves as chief scientist of the Visual Systems Laboratory in the Institute for Simulation and Training of the University of Central Florida. He is active in the Association for Computing Machinery and is an associate editor for the journal Presence. His research interests concern the application of simulation and virtual environments to education and training.

RANDY PAUSCH is an associate professor of computer science at the University of Virginia. He received a B.S. in computer science from Brown University and a Ph.D. in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University. He is a National Science Foundation presidential young investigator

Suggested Citation:"A Biographical Sketches." National Research Council. 1995. Virtual Reality: Scientific and Technological Challenges. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4761.
×

and a Lilly Foundation teaching fellow. His primary interests are human-computer interaction and undergraduate education.

RICHARD W. PEW is a psychologist with Bolt Beranek and Newman, Inc., where he is principal scientist and manager of the Cognitive Sciences and Systems Department. From 1960 to 1974 he was at the University of Michigan, where he received a Ph.D. and was on the faculty for 11 years. He was the first chairman of the National Research Council's Committee on Human Factors. Throughout his career he has been concerned with issues related to human performance and system design, ranging from the design of a control panel for an advanced music synthesizer to the impact of the introduction of automation into aircraft cockpits.

WARREN ROBINETT is a designer of interactive computer graphics software and hardware and president and founder of Virtual Reality Games, Inc., a developer of virtual reality video games for the home market. In 1978, he designed the Atari video game Adventure, the first graphical adventure game. In 1980, he was cofounder and chief software engineer at The Learning Company, a publisher of educational software. There he designed Rocky's Boots, a computer game that teaches digital logic design to 11-year-old children. Rocky's Boots won software of the year awards from three magazines in 1983. In 1986 Robinett worked as a research scientist at the NASA-Ames Research Center, where he designed the software for the Virtual Environment Workstation, NASA's pioneering virtual reality project. From 1989 to 1992 at the University of North Carolina, he directed the virtual reality and nanomanipulator projects. He is an associate editor for the journal Presence.

JOSEPH ROSEN is an associate professor of plastic and reconstructive surgery at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center and chief of the section on plastic and reconstructive surgery at the Veterans Administration Medical Center in White River Junction, Vermont. He is also adjunct professor of engineering at the Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth College. His clinical specialty is complex microsurgical reconstructions of congenital and acquired problems in plastic and reconstructive surgery. He operates on and reconstructs all parts of the body and interacts with surgeons in every specialty. His research interests include bionics, human-machine interfaces, nerve repair and evaluation, artificial nerve grafts, transplantation of limbs, and computer simulations of complex surgical procedures.

MANDAYAM A. SRINIVASAN is a principal research scientist in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a member of the Sensory Communication Group in the

Suggested Citation:"A Biographical Sketches." National Research Council. 1995. Virtual Reality: Scientific and Technological Challenges. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4761.
×

Research Laboratory of Electronics at MIT. After receiving degrees in civil and aeronautical engineering in India, he received a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from Yale University. Before moving to MIT in 1987, he was a member of the research faculty in the Department of Anesthesiology at the Yale University School of Medicine. His research interests include all aspects of human sensorimotor interactions with environments, especially in the context of human and machine haptics. He is a founding member of the MIT Virtual Environment and Teleoperator Consortium and is on the editorial board of the journal Presence.

JAMES J. THOMAS is a technology manager at the Applied Physics Center at Battelle Pacific Northwest Laboratories in Richland, Washington. He specializes in the research, design, and implementation of innovative information systems technology. Prior to working at Battelle, he worked at General Motors Research Laboratories. He has been named among the Top 100 Scientific Innovators by Science Digest and among the Top 100 Innovators in Science and Technology by Research and Development. In addition, he was awarded the Federal Laboratories Consortium technology transfer award for innovation in transferring research technology to industry and universities. He publishes, has been editor of scientific journals, gives invited talks, teaches as an adjunct associate professor for Washington State University, lectures for professional short courses, and is actively involved as a motivator and leader in computer graphics and human interface technology at the professional society SIGGRAPH. He was cochair for the SIGGRAPH annual conference in 1987, vice chair for SIGGRAPH from 1987 to 1989, and chair of ACM SIGGRAPH from 1989 to 1992.

ANDRIES VAN DAM is L. Herbert Ballou university professor and professor of computer science at Brown University. He has been on Brown's faculty since 1965 and was one of the founders of the Department of Computer Science and its first chairman, from 1979 to 1985. His research has concerned computer graphics, text-processing and hypermedia systems, and workstations. He has been working for more than 25 years on systems for creating and reading electronic books, based on high-resolution interactive graphics systems, for use in teaching and research. He received a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. Introduction to Computer Graphics, coauthored with J. Foley, S. Feiner, J. Hughes, and R. Phillips, was published in 1993. He has also authored or coauthored numerous other books and papers.

ELIZABETH WENZEL is director of the Spatial Auditory Displays Lab in the Aerospace Human Factors Research Division at the NASA-Ames Research Center, directing development of real-time display technology and

Suggested Citation:"A Biographical Sketches." National Research Council. 1995. Virtual Reality: Scientific and Technological Challenges. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4761.
×

conducting basic and applied research in auditory perception and localization in three-dimensional virtual acoustic displays. She is an associate editor of the journal Presence and has published a number of articles and spoken at many conferences on the topics of virtual acoustic environments. She received a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology with an emphasis in psychoacoustics from the University of California, Berkeley. From 1985 to 1986 she was a National Research Council postdoctoral research associate at NASA-Ames, working on the auditory display of information for aviation systems.

ANDREW WITKIN is a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University. Previously he was director of the perception and graphics groups at Schlumberger's Palo Alto Research Lab. He received a B.A. in psychology from Columbia College and a Ph.D. in psychology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has published extensively in the areas of computer vision and computer graphics. He serves as an associate editor for ACM Transactions on Graphics, has served on numerous conference program committees, and is a fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence. His awards include best paper prizes at the National Conference on Artifical Intelligence and the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence; the grand prix for animation at the 1987 Parigraph competition in Paris, France; and the grand prix for computer graphics at the Prix Ars Electronica 1992 in Linz, Austria.

EUGENE WONG is the pro vice chancellor for research and development at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology; during his time of service on the committee he was at the University of California, Berkeley. He assumed his current position upon his recent retirement as professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of California, where he had a 32-year career as a faculty member, most recently as department chairman. In January 1993, he completed a three-year stint as associate director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. His research interests have spanned a wide range of topics, two principal ones being stochastic processes and their applications and database management systems. He was one of the architects of INGRES, a pioneering relational database management system, and contributed to the development of query processing, database semantics, and distributed systems. He has been a consultant to a number of major corporations and was a founder of the INGRES Corporation. He received B.S., A.M., and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from Princeton University.

Suggested Citation:"A Biographical Sketches." National Research Council. 1995. Virtual Reality: Scientific and Technological Challenges. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4761.
×

MICHAEL ZYDA is a professor in the Department of Computer Science at the Naval Postgraduate School. He is also the academic associate and associate chair for academic affairs in that department. His main focus in research is in the area of computer graphics, specifically the development of large-scale, networked, three-dimensional virtual environments and visual simulation systems. He is the senior editor for virtual environments for the quarterly Presence; for that journal, he has coedited special issues on Pacific Rim virtual reality and telepresence.

Suggested Citation:"A Biographical Sketches." National Research Council. 1995. Virtual Reality: Scientific and Technological Challenges. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4761.
×
Page 519
Suggested Citation:"A Biographical Sketches." National Research Council. 1995. Virtual Reality: Scientific and Technological Challenges. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4761.
×
Page 520
Suggested Citation:"A Biographical Sketches." National Research Council. 1995. Virtual Reality: Scientific and Technological Challenges. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4761.
×
Page 521
Suggested Citation:"A Biographical Sketches." National Research Council. 1995. Virtual Reality: Scientific and Technological Challenges. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4761.
×
Page 522
Suggested Citation:"A Biographical Sketches." National Research Council. 1995. Virtual Reality: Scientific and Technological Challenges. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4761.
×
Page 523
Suggested Citation:"A Biographical Sketches." National Research Council. 1995. Virtual Reality: Scientific and Technological Challenges. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4761.
×
Page 524
Suggested Citation:"A Biographical Sketches." National Research Council. 1995. Virtual Reality: Scientific and Technological Challenges. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4761.
×
Page 525
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Virtual Reality: Scientific and Technological Challenges Get This Book
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Despite widespread interest in virtual reality, research and development efforts in synthetic environments (SE)—the field encompassing virtual environments, teleoperation, and hybrids—have remained fragmented.

Virtual Reality is the first integrated treatment of the topic, presenting current knowledge along with thought-provoking vignettes about a future where SE is commonplace.

This volume discusses all aspects of creating a system that will allow human operators to see, hear, smell, taste, move about, give commands, respond to conditions, and manipulate objects effectively in a real or virtual environment. The committee of computer scientists, engineers, and psychologists on the leading edge of SE development explores the potential applications of SE in the areas of manufacturing, medicine, education, training, scientific visualization, and teleoperation in hazardous environments.

The committee also offers recommendations for development of improved SE technology, needed studies of human behavior and evaluation of SE systems, and government policy and infrastructure.

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