Controller Masks with Sensorimotor Implants - Text 1
In the 1970s and 80s, with the rise of computer technology and following Sutherland’s inaugural work, research into up-close and individual viewing systems grew in university, military and industrial research centres, particularly in the United States: at the University of North Carolina (for scientific visualization – representation of molecular splicing, medical imagery and architectural pre-visualization – with Frederick Brooks, Stephen Pizer and Henry Fuchs); at the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base and then the Human Interface Technology Lab (HITLab) of the University of Washington (for flight simulators, with Thomas A. Furness III); in the MIT’s Architecture Machine Group (Arch-Mac) (with Nicholas Negroponte, Richard Bolt and Scott Fisher); but also and especially at the Atari Research Lab (where for a time there worked Scott Fisher, Jaron Lanier, Brenda Laurel, Michael Naimark and Thomas G. Zimmerman); at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and the Human Factors Lab of NASA’s Ames Research Center (with Scott Fisher, David Em and Michael McGreevy); and at VPL Research (with Jaron Lanier and Thomas G. Zimmerman).
From this inaugural moment, research was carried out not only into headsets but also into haptic gloves and suits, as if the horizon of this research and development program was a complete immersive and interactive system whose technological interface would cover the entire natural interface while offering maximum sensory and motor extension.
In fact as early as 1977, in their Electronic Visualisation Laboratory at Illinois State University in Chicago, Daniel J. Sandin, Thomas DeFanti and Richard Sayre developed the Sayre Glove, which used light, flexible tubes and light-sensitive cells to detect the movements of the fingers. In 1981, Gary Grimes of Bell Laboratories filed a patent application for a “digital data entry glove interface device” which would add tactile sensors, tilt sensors and inertia sensors to optical sensors. Soon afterwards, in 1982, Thomas G. Zimmerman, who worked at the Atari Research Center (with Scott Fisher, Jaron Lanier, Brenda Laurel and Michael Naimark), filed a patent application for a similar “optical flex sensor” which would make it possible to follow not just the fingers but the whole body.
