Brenda Laurel

Overview

Most people who shaped the AR/VR industry came from engineering. Brenda Laurel came from theater, and that difference changed everything. With a background in drama rather than computer science, she joined Atari's research lab in 1980 and brought an entirely different lens to the question of what computers should feel like to use. Her 1991 book Computers as Theatre argued that interactive experiences should be designed the way playwrights design drama, with attention to character, tension, and emotional arc, a radical idea at a time when most software design was purely functional. She later co-founded Purple Moon, a company that created games specifically designed for girls at a time when the industry assumed its audience was exclusively male, and conducted pioneering research into gender and technology that changed how the industry thought about who it was building for.

Why She Matters

Brenda Laurel's work established something that every AR/VR developer now takes for granted: that the experience of being inside an interactive environment is fundamentally emotional and theatrical, not just technical. Her insistence that design should start with the human rather than the hardware gave the field a vocabulary and a framework for thinking about presence, immersion, and engagement that still shapes how developers approach their work. Her research into gender and technology challenged an industry that had long assumed it was building for a single type of user and helped open the door to a broader, more diverse audience for interactive experiences. Her career demonstrated that the most important contributions to technology often come from people who bring perspectives the field did not know it needed. Asking who technology is being built for, she showed, is just as important as asking how it works.