Jaron Lanier
Jaron Zepel Lanier (born May 3, 1960) is an American computer scientist, author, composer, and visual artist who is one of the central figures in the early history of virtual reality. He is widely credited with popularizing the term "virtual reality" during the 1980s, and he founded VPL Research, the first company to sell commercial VR products, including the DataGlove wired glove and the EyePhone head-mounted display.[1][2] He later spent much of his career at Microsoft Research and became a prominent author and critic of digital technology and the internet economy.[1]
Early life and education
Lanier was born on May 3, 1960, in New York City and was raised in Mesilla, New Mexico, near the city of Las Cruces.[1] His parents were of European Jewish descent; his mother, a survivor of a Nazi concentration camp who had emigrated from Vienna, died in a car accident when Lanier was nine years old.[1] After her death, Lanier and his father lived for a period in tents and then spent several years designing and building a geodesic dome house in the New Mexico desert.[1]
Lanier enrolled at New Mexico State University at the age of thirteen, where he took graduate-level courses and received a National Science Foundation grant for work on mathematical notation, which led him into computer programming.[1] He did not complete a traditional undergraduate degree.[1]
VPL Research
In the early 1980s Lanier worked at the video game company Atari, where he met Thomas G. Zimmerman, the inventor of an early data glove. Beginning around 1983 the two collaborated on improving the glove's design.[2] Lanier founded VPL Research in 1984, and in 1985 he and Zimmerman left Atari to develop the company's products full time.[1][2] The name "VPL" stood for Virtual Programming Languages. The company began in Lanier's cottage in Palo Alto, California, and later moved to nearby Redwood City.[2] Some of its early research received funding connected to the artificial intelligence pioneer Marvin Minsky.[2]
VPL Research is generally described as the first company to sell virtual reality products commercially.[1][2] Its hardware included:
| Product | Description |
|---|---|
| DataGlove | A wired glove that used fiber-optic bundles running along the fingers to measure hand and finger movement, letting a user manipulate objects in a virtual environment.[2] |
| EyePhone | A head-mounted display with separate LCD screens for each eye and head tracking, one of the first commercially sold VR headsets.[2][3] |
| DataSuit | A full-body suit fitted with sensors that tracked movement of the arms, legs, and torso.[2] |
| AudioSphere | A spatial audio system that processed sound to create the impression of three-dimensional sources around the listener.[4] |
VPL also built the Reality Built for Two (RB2) system, a shared virtual environment that allowed two people wearing EyePhone displays and DataGloves to occupy the same virtual space at once, an early example of networked multi-user VR.[5] On June 7, 1989, VPL publicly demonstrated its commercial VR systems on a day the company called "Virtual Reality Day."[5] Complete RB2 setups, including the workstations needed to drive them, could cost well over $250,000, which kept the technology confined to research institutions and a small number of companies.[2][5]
VPL licensed its glove technology to the toy maker Mattel, which used it to produce the Power Glove, a low-cost controller for the Nintendo Entertainment System that sold more than one million units.[2] VPL Research filed for bankruptcy in 1990, and in 1999 Sun Microsystems acquired the company's virtual reality and graphics-related patents.[1]
Later career
After VPL, Lanier held a series of research roles. He served as a lead scientist at the National Tele-immersion Initiative and worked with Advanced Network and Services, and he later acted as a visiting scientist at Silicon Graphics.[1] He joined Microsoft in 2006 and from 2009 worked at Microsoft Research as an interdisciplinary scientist.[1][6] At Microsoft he contributed to research behind the Kinect motion-sensing controller for the Xbox 360 and, later, to the Together Mode feature in Microsoft Teams.[6] His Microsoft title is Prime Unifying Scientist in the Office of the Chief Technology Officer, a description that abbreviates to "OCTOPUS," a reference to his interest in cephalopods.[6]
Books
Lanier is the author of several books that examine the social and economic effects of computing and the internet:
| Title | Year | Publisher |
|---|---|---|
| You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto | 2010 | Alfred A. Knopf[1] |
| Who Owns the Future? | 2013 | Simon & Schuster[1] |
| Dawn of the New Everything: Encounters with Reality and Virtual Reality | 2017 | Henry Holt and Co.[1] |
| Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now | 2018 | Henry Holt and Co.[1] |
You Are Not a Gadget criticizes aspects of web design and online culture that, in Lanier's view, diminish individual creativity. Who Owns the Future? argues that the concentration of data and value in a small number of large technology companies undermines the middle class. Dawn of the New Everything is part memoir of his childhood and the early Silicon Valley VR scene and part general introduction to virtual reality.[1] Who Owns the Future? and You Are Not a Gadget were international bestsellers.[1]
Music
Lanier is a pianist and a collector and performer of musical instruments, with a particular interest in the wind and string instruments of Asia. He has said he owns a large collection of rare instruments.[1] In 1994 he released the album Instruments of Change, which featured Asian instruments such as the khene mouth organ, the suling flute, and the esraj.[1] As a musician he has performed or recorded with artists including Philip Glass, Ornette Coleman, George Clinton, Terry Riley, and Sean Lennon.[1]
Recognition and influence
Lanier is often referred to in popular accounts as a "father of virtual reality" because of his early work at VPL and his role in bringing the term "virtual reality" into wider use.[1][4] He received a Lifetime Career Award from the IEEE in 2009 for his contributions to virtual reality.[7] In 2010 Time magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world.[8] In 2014 he was awarded the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade for his writing on the social consequences of digital technology.[9]
References
- ↑ 1.00 1.01 1.02 1.03 1.04 1.05 1.06 1.07 1.08 1.09 1.10 1.11 1.12 1.13 1.14 1.15 1.16 1.17 1.18 1.19 1.20 1.21 "Jaron Lanier". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaron_Lanier.
- ↑ 2.00 2.01 2.02 2.03 2.04 2.05 2.06 2.07 2.08 2.09 2.10 "VPL Research". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VPL_Research.
- ↑ "Jaron Lanier's EyePhone: Head And Glove Virtual Reality In The 1980s". https://flashbak.com/jaron-laniers-eyephone-head-and-glove-virtual-reality-in-the-1980s-26180/.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 "VPL Research and Jaron Lanier". https://www.vrs.org.uk/virtual-reality-profiles/vpl-research.html.
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 "Reality built for two: a virtual reality tool". 1990-03-01. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/91394.91409.
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 "Jaron Lanier". https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/people/jalani/.
- ↑ "Jaron Lanier". https://history.siggraph.org/person/jaron-lanier/.
- ↑ "The 2010 TIME 100: Jaron Lanier". 2010-04-29. https://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1984685_1984745_1985490,00.html.
- ↑ "Jaron Lanier Wins German Book Trade's Peace Prize". https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/jaron-lanier-wins-german-book-trades-peace-prize/.