Jaron Lanier
Jaron Zepel Lanier (/ˈdʒɛərɨn lɨˈnɪər/, born May 3, 1960) is an American computer philosophy writer, computer scientist, and composer of classical music. A pioneer in the field of virtual reality (a term he is credited with popularizing), Lanier andThomas G. Zimmerman left Atari in 1985 to found VPL Research, Inc., the first company to sell VR goggles and gloves. In the late 1990s, Lanier worked on applications for Internet2, and in the 2000s, he was a visiting scholar at Silicon Graphics and various universities. From 2006 he began to work at Microsoft, and from 2009 forward he works at Microsoft Research as Interdisciplinary Scientist. ^[2]
Lanier has composed classical music and is a collector of rare instruments; his acoustic album, Instruments of Change(1994) features Asian wind and string instruments such as the khene mouth organ, the suling flute, and the sitar-like esraj. Lanier was the director of an experimental short film, and teamed with Mario Grigorov to compose the soundtrack to the documentary film, The Third Wave (2007). In 2010, Lanier was nominated in the TIME 100 list of most influential people.[3]
- 1Early life and education (1960–1982)
- 2Atari Labs, VPL Research (1983–1990)
- 3Internet2, visiting scholar (1997–2001)
- 4Philosophy, criticism of Web 2.0
- 5Music
- 6Memberships
- 7In the media
- 8Awards
- 9Works
- 10References
- 11External links
Early life and education (1960–1982)
Born Jaron Zepel Lanier[4] in New York City, Lanier was raised in Mesilla, New Mexico.[5][6] Lanier's mother and father were Jewish immigrants from Europe; his mother was a concentration camp survivor from Vienna and his father's family had emigrated from Ukraine to escape the pogroms.[7] When he was nine years old, his mother was killed in a car accident. He lived in tents for an extended period with his father before embarking on a seven-year project to build a geodesic dome home that he helped design.[8] At the age of 13, Lanier convinced New Mexico State University to let him enroll. At NMSU, Lanier met Marvin Minsky and Clyde Tombaugh, and took graduate-level courses; he received a grant from the National Science Foundation to study mathematical notation, which led him to learn computer programming.[9]
From 1979 to 1980, the NSF-funded project at NMSU focused on "digital graphical simulations for learning". Lanier also attended art school in Manhattan during this time, but returned to New Mexico and worked as a midwife. The father of a baby he helped deliver gave him a car as a gift; Lanier drove the car to Los Angeles to visit a girl whose father happened to work in the physics department at the California Institute of Technology, where Lanier met and conversed with Richard Feynman and Murray Gell-Mann.[10]
Atari Labs, VPL Research (1983–1990)
In California, Lanier worked for Atari, where he met Thomas Zimmerman, inventor of the data glove. After Atari Inc. was split into two companies in 1984, Lanier became unemployed. The free time enabled him to concentrate on his own projects, including VPL, a "post-symbolic" visual programming language. Along with Zimmerman, Lanier founded VPL Research, focusing on commercializing virtual reality technologies; the company prospered for a while, but filed for bankruptcy in 1990.[6] In 1999, Sun Microsystems bought VPL's virtual reality and graphics-related patents.[11]...