Warren Robinett

Most Recent Affiliation(s):

• The Learning Company, Designer of Interactive Computer Graphics Software and Hardware

Other Affiliation(s):

• University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

• Virtus, Inc

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Bio:

• SIGGRAPH 1993

  Warren Robinett is a designer of interactive computer graphics software and hardware. He was educated at Rice University and Berkeley receiving a BA in “Computer Applications to Language and Art” in 1974 and an MS in Computer Science in 1976. In 1978 he designed the Atari video game Adventure, the first graphical adventure game. In 1980 he was co-founder and chief software engineer at The Learning Company, a publisher of educational software. There he designed Rocky’s Boots, a computer game which teaches digital logic to 11 year-old children. Rocky’s Boots won Software of the Year awards from three magazines in 1983. In 1986 Robinett worked as a research scientist at NASA Ames Research Center where he designed the software for the Visual Environment Workstation NASA’s pioneering virtual reality project. In 1989 he came to the University of North Carolina to direct the Head Mounted Display Project. In 1992 he became co-director of the Nanomanipulator Project at UNC which interfaces a scanning tunneling microscope to a head mounted display to allow micro teleoperation at atomic scale on the surface of a sample beneath the microscope.