Kari Volkmann-Carlsen
The year I was born (1985), Scott Fisher's "Telepresence" is highlighted as symbolic of the times. His aim was to create/ enhance virtual realities, and his term telepresence meant "the projection of the self into a virtual world." Though virtual realities were already popping up, he added to his work headphones and microphones so that sounds could be both heard and created, as well as collaborating with another artist, Tom Zimmerman, to create the dataglove, which allowed people to "feel" and "grab" things in the virtual world. We hear about virtual worlds and realities today, though I myself have never experienced something like this in totality. I have had "virtual" experiences, such as art exhibits that incorporate the sense of smell, but nothing like the dataglove. This leads me to think that this concept of immersion (entering into an a simulation or suggestion of an alternate 3D world) will be elaborated on in the future, even though things like this may exist, they are clearly not well-distributed forms of art, and time may change that.
Roughly a decade before I was born in 1972, Alan Kay was working on developing the Graphic User Interface (GUI), which is considered one of the most crucial advancements in human and computer interaction because he assigned icons to how we use the computer (the folders and overlapping windows that we still use today). No doubt other icons could have been formed; last Tuesday we talked about the "desktop", as if the computer were a physical space. Perhaps this particular icon stuck because the original use for computers and the main function even today, is a workspace, as is a desktop.
As I wrote before, I think that a decade more of technology will show even more enhanced forms of immersion. We are already seeing elaborate and surprisingly accurate 3-dimensional worlds, such as on video games and animated movies. The next step is to combine Scott Fisher's ideas of incorporating all of the senses. And I am sure this is already happening, but as technology advances, virtual realities will be fine-tuned and become more and more "real". In a way, it's a little scary, but perhaps I am bit old-fashioned.