Rebecca Allen
3D CG and VR pioneer artist
Rebecca Allen, artist, scientist, technologist. Allen was a pioneer of early computer graphics as well as early VR. She did the famous 3D cg heads for the German band Kraftwerk in the 1980s. From 1978–1980 she worked at MIT’s Architecture Machine Group (the predecessor to the MIT Media Lab), where she contributed to the pioneering Aspen Movie Map.
Allen was an early innovator in VR, exploring how simulated environments redefine our sense of reality. Here works include: The Bush Soul (1997–1999): Using her custom-built Emergence software, she created some of the first emotion-driven virtual worlds, where users navigated immersive abstract landscapes as avatars via tactile interfaces. This was a series of 3 virtual immersive works.
Mixed Reality & Haptics: Her work often blurs physical and virtual boundaries, as seen in Coexistence (2001), which used breath sensors and head-mounted displays to create shared sensory experiences.
Her recent VR works, such as The Tangle of Mind and Matter (2017) and Inside (2016), use MRI data to immerse viewers in a "powerful illusion machine" that examines consciousness.
She founding chair of the UCLA Department of Design | Media Arts and was a researcher at the world-renowned NYIT Computer Graphics Laboratory. She was the founding director of the Nokia Research Hollywood Lab, where she was responsible for the lab's vision and building multiple research teams. This work resulted in several patents and numerous papers regarding natural language understanding, the Internet of Things (IoT), and new forms of social gaming. Her work is held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the Whitney Museum, and Centre Pompidou.
Allen was an early innovator in VR, exploring how simulated environments redefine our sense of reality. Here works include: The Bush Soul (1997–1999): Using her custom-built Emergence software, she created some of the first emotion-driven virtual worlds, where users navigated immersive abstract landscapes as avatars via tactile interfaces. This was a series of 3 virtual immersive works.
Mixed Reality & Haptics: Her work often blurs physical and virtual boundaries, as seen in Coexistence (2001), which used breath sensors and head-mounted displays to create shared sensory experiences.
Her recent VR works, such as The Tangle of Mind and Matter (2017) and Inside (2016), use MRI data to immerse viewers in a "powerful illusion machine" that examines consciousness.
She founding chair of the UCLA Department of Design | Media Arts and was a researcher at the world-renowned NYIT Computer Graphics Laboratory. She was the founding director of the Nokia Research Hollywood Lab, where she was responsible for the lab's vision and building multiple research teams. This work resulted in several patents and numerous papers regarding natural language understanding, the Internet of Things (IoT), and new forms of social gaming. Her work is held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the Whitney Museum, and Centre Pompidou.
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