I was very sad to read about the passing of Vernor Vinge. He was truly a person of rare and great vision.
I know that in the world of ideas he is most known for his thoughtful essays about “the singularity” — the hypothetical moment in the future when general artificial intelligence will surpass human intelligence and will then continue to accelerate at an exponential rate.
But the work of his that had the most profound influence on me was Rainbows End, a novel about a future where ubiquitous mixed reality has reached a point of maturity. Reading that novel changed the course of my research.
That was when I stopped thinking of interactive computer graphics as something on a screen, and started to see it as something that will eventually simply be part of the world all around us.