Posted by 
In November 2015, Tom Furness, considered the grandfather of virtual reality, sat down with the team at Voices of the VR Podcast for an in depth interview called “#245: 50 years of VR with Tom Furness: The Super Cockpit, Virtual Retinal Display, HIT Lab, & Virtual World Society.” It’s still worth a listen and read.
Tom Furness has been thinking about virtual reality longer than most VR users have been alive. He built some of the first helmet-mounted displays for the US Air Force, and what would become the Super Cockpit. Leaving the military, he helped found the Human Interface Technology Lab at the University of Washington in Seattle, and created the non-profit, educational association, the Virtual World Society.
From the University of Washington Faculty bios:
[Tom Furness] is the inventor of the personal eyewear display, the virtual retinal display, the HALO display and holds 19 patents in advanced sensor, display and interface technologies. With his colleagues Dr. Furness has started 27 companies, two of which are traded on NASDAQ at a market capitalization of > $8 B (USD). In 1998 he received the Discover Award for his invention of the virtual retinal display.
In addition to his academic appointments, Dr. Furness was the Chairman and President of the first Augmented Reality Company: ARToolworks Inc. recently acquire by DAQRI. He also runs his own ‘skunkworks’ company: RATLab LLC (RAT = rockin’ and thinkin’) where he and his colleagues develop advanced technologies for spinoff companies. His current projects deal with developing pulse diagnosis as an early warning system for cardiovascular disease and the start-up of the Virtual World Society, a non-profit for extending virtual reality as a learning system for families.
Tom is also co-inventor of the SPM (spectral matching) technology licensed to Visualant Inc. He continues to serve as a Senior Scientific Advisor for the company and recently received the 2013 SPIE Prism Award for his invention of the ChromaID technology.
Projects by the Virtual World Society include helping 28 sixth grade students at Robert Eagle Staff Middle School in Seattle, overseen by a team of University of Washington engineering students, build virtual worlds that teach STEM subjects related to gravity, light, scale, and momentum.
The About 13 Voices is a project for an Appalachian community, designed to discover the “hidden talents in Appalachian youth” through technology like VR for creative expression and to reverse the trend of early drug addition for teenagers and women.
Launched this January, Virtual World Society is developing the Learning Living Room for home schooling or parent-controlled education through the use of technically advanced learning landscapes in the community.
Education in VR founders, Daniel Dyboski-Bryant and Lorelle VanFossen, have been meeting with him to discuss how Educators in VR and the Virtual World Society can work together, and we are getting close to making some announcements so stay tuned.
In the interim, listen to the podcast and read some of these articles about the great work and influence Tom Furness has had on virtual reality to help it become what it is today and into the future.
- Thomas A. Furness III – Wikipedia
- Virtual Reality Pioneer Tom Furness on the Past, Present, and Future of VR in Health Care – IEEE Journals & Magazine
- Where VR should go from here, according to ‘the grandfather of VR’ – TechRepublic
- Grandfather Of Virtual Reality: The Virtual Can Show The Beauty Of The Real : All Tech Considered : NPR
- The impact of Mixed Reality on education – like splitting the atom | Digital Bodies
4 comments