Ari Hollander
Biography
Ari plays wrecklessly in the unruly intersection of art, technology, interface, and perception. He has been building virtual worlds for clinical research, education and Serious Games since before the dawn of the Milliennium and will help create the future even if it kills him.
In the early 1990's Ari emerged from the Tester’s Pit at George Lucas’ Games Division, finished his B.A. in Astrophysics at UC Berkeley, and then headed North to the University of Washington. Hell-bent on fleshing-out a degree program in Applied Science Fiction with a Master’s in Virtual Environments and Advanced Interface Engineering he did his Master’s Thesis project on synthesis and perception of Auditory Shapes: letters and geometric figures “drawn” using 3D sound technology. Promptly thereafter he was hired as the Creative and Technical Director of the UW Human Interface Technology Lab’s Learning Center where he lead research projects in virtual reality input systems and helped to bring Virtual Reality technology into 120 public schools.
In 1995 Ari co-founded Firsthand with two other members of the HIT Lab: Howard Rose and Dr. Kimberley Osberg. Together they worked on research projects including some of the earliest VR therapy applications and did consulting and educational VR projects for clients including Boeing, Microsoft, Edmark, Hewlitt-Packard, and Disney.
Ari took a brief detour during the Dot Com Era to work on two start-ups, one in 3D eCommerce and the other in dramatic, story-focused massively multi-player online game technology. After a subsequent stint involving the Unreal Engine and art tools design in the Microsoft Game Studios, he decided to get back into virtual reality and build his first Post-traumatic Stress Disorder therapy application, for suicide bomb attack victims (instead of building computer games that allowed people to pretend they were terrorists).
Ari lives on a small Meme Farm in Seattle with his partner Laura and their two children Lumen & Nyla.
Although he had already received his first Gold Record at age 21 Ari has yet to earn a second one.
Publications
*All rights to the documents listed below are held and maintained by the author or Firsthand Technology Inc. unless otherwise noted.
Hollander, Ari J., Rose, H., Kollin, J., & Moss, W. (January 2011) Attack of the S. Mutans!: a stereoscopic-3D multiplayer direct-manipulation behavior-modification serious game for improving oral health in pre-teens. Proceedings of the SPIE Vol. 7863. Stereoscopic Displays and Applications XXII. SPIE Publications
Kollin, Joel and Hollander, Ari (February 2007) Re-engineering the Stereoscope for the 21st Century. Proceedings of the SPIE Vol. 6490. Stereoscopic Displays and Virtual Reality Systems XI. Short online version in the SPIE Newsroom
Hollander, Ari. (March, 2006) Playing Games with Painful Memories: Designing VR Exposure Therapy Simulations for PTSD. Presented at the Serious Games Summit at the Game Developer’s Convention in San Jose, CA. Also reprinted in the Serious Games Source and the Defense Management Journal. HTML
Rose, H., Osberg, K., & Hollander, A. (1999). Taking Charge of Technology. LNT Perspectives. HTML
Hollander, Ari J. (1994). An Exploration of Virtual Auditory Shape Perception, masters thesis. HTML | Macintosh Microsoft Word 5.1 format (at HIT Lab site)
Hollander, Ari J., & Furness, Thomas A. (1994). Perception of Virtual AuditoryShapes. Proceedings of the International Conference on Auditory Displays. November, 1994. HTML (at HIT Lab site)
Hoffman, H.G., Groen, J., Rousseau, S., Hollander, A.,Winn, W., Wells, M., & Furness III, T. (1996). Tactile Augmentation: Enhancing Presence in Virtual Reality with Tactile Feedback from Real Objects. Presented at the Meeting of the American Psychological Society, Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Society. HTML (at HIT Lab site)
Winn, William, Hoffman, Hunter, Hollander, Ari, Osberg, Kimberly, and Rose, Howard. (1997). The Effect of Student Construction of Virtual Environments on the Performance of High- and Low-Ability Students. Presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Chicago, March 1997 HTML (at HIT Lab site)
Osberg, K., Winn, W., Rose, H., Hollander, A., Hoffman, H., Char, P. (1997). The Effect of Having Grade Seven Students Construct Virtual Environments on Their Comprehension of Science. Presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, March 1997. HTML (at HIT Lab site)