Scott Fisher is Professor and Chair of the Interactive Media Division in the USC School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California, and a Fellow of the Annenberg Center for Communication there. He is an artist and technologist who has worked extensively on virtual reality, including stints at NASA, Atari Research Labs, MIT's Architecture Machine Group and Keio University.
Fisher was educated at MIT, receiving a Master of Science degree in Media Technology in 1981. His thesis advisor there was Nicholas Negroponte. There he participated in the creation of the Aspen Movie Map.
Much of Fisher's career has been in pioneering virtual reality. Between 1985 to 1990, he was founding Director of the Virtual Environment Workstation Project (VIEW) at NASA's Ames Research Center. They attempted to develop a simulator to enable space station maintenance rehearsal. The gloves and goggles often associated with virtual reality were developed there, along with the dataglove, head-coupled displays and 3D audio.
In 1990, with Brenda Laurel, Fisher founded Telepresence Research, a company specializing in first-person media, virtual reality and remote presence research and development.
Fisher was Project Professor in the Graduate School of Media and Governance at Keio University. There he led a project to allow users to author and view location-based data superimposed over the physical world.
In 2001, Fisher moved to the University of Southern California to spearhead their new Interactive Media Division within the School of Cinema Television. There, he established the division's research initiatives in the mediums of immersive, mobile and video games. He is presently head of the department.
Fisher is also fascinated with stereoscopy and 3D imaging, as well as Jamaican music.
Fisher lives in Southern California with his wife, Mizuko Ito, a cultural anthropologist studying media technology, and their two children.
Famous quotes containing the words scott and/or fisher:
“A great social success is a pretty girl who plays her cards as carefully as if she were plain.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)
“People ask me: “Why do you write about food, and eating, and drinking? Why don’t you write about the struggle for power and security, and about love, the way the others do?”... The easiest answer is to say that, like most other humans, I am hungry.”
—M.F.K. Fisher (1908–1992)