Lanier, Jaron

1960–

Virtual-Reality Pioneer, Artist

Jaron Lanier has been described as a Renaissance man of the Digital Age. Though he considers himself to be primarily a musician, to the world he is the pioneer of virtual reality (VR). But he also is a cyberspace theorist, a mathematician, a programmer, a painter, a composer of classical music, a writer, and a recent pioneer in the burgeoning field of tele-immersion technology, a kind of VR writ large.

Lanier grew up in a small New Mexico town. He was raised by his father, who was a science writer, after his mother, a concert pianist, died while Lanier was still a child. It was this background that made him unique: a loner and social misfit who immersed himself in his music and an endless stream of science projects. Bored, he dropped out of high school very early, but at age 14, he charmed New Mexico State University officials into allowing him to take classes there. He received a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) commissioning him to study whether mathematical notation is truly needed. (Lanier believes that the symbols of mathematics obscure its meaning and keep its “beauty” inaccessible to normal people.) In order to perform the math study, Lanier needed to learn computer programming. As he learned, he began to see that the problems of programming were similar to those of mathematics—both are languages that rely on symbols that may not be their best manifestation. This idea propelled him onto the possibility of designing “a post-symbolic ‘visual’ programming language,” which would allow people to program computers by interacting with graphical icons in various shapes, such as kangaroos, melting ice cubes, and chirping birds. This new programming language would be called Mandala.

In addition to working on Mandala and his musical projects, Lanier also did freelance ideo-game programming for Atari, and created the first successful “art” videogame, Moondust, in 1983. Lanier took his money from Moondust and started his own company, VPL (Visual Programming Language) Research, the first commercial VR company.

VPL made VR an industry. The company introduced the first interface gloves, or “data gloves,” in 1984; these programmable gloves served, in part, as the interface through which interaction with Mandala programs was conducted. In 1987, VPL invented the head-mounted displays that have since become, for many people, synonymous with VR. VPL also introduced “eye phones,” as well as a networked “virtual world” system. Meanwhile, Lanier's company helped develop the first popular software platform architecture for immersive VR applications. By 1991, the company had sales of $6 million, and Lanier himself was a millionaire.

Lanier had many dreams for the role of technology in humanity's future. His oldest abiding dream was the idea that computers could allow people to exchange simulations in the form of images, sounds, and dynamic models, just as they normally exchange written and spoken words. This is the essence of VR. Lanier has held onto that dream, and many of his other ideas have come alive over the years, even as his role at VPL ended rather ignominiously when Thomson CSF, a French company with interest in VPL, seized the firm's patents and ousted Lanier as part of the settlement of $1.6 million in debts.

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