Coordinates | 34°03′″N118°15′″N |
---|---|
name | Jaron Lanier |
birth date | May 03, 1960 |
birth place | New York City |
known for | Virtual reality |
occupation | Computer scientist, composer, visual artist, author. |
employer | Microsoft Research |
website | }} |
Jaron Zepel Lanier is an American computer scientist, best known for popularizing the term virtual reality (VR). A pioneer in the field of VR, Lanier and Thomas 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. More recently, he has acted as an advisor to Linden Lab on their virtual world product Second Life, and as "scholar-at-large" at Microsoft Research where he has worked on the Kinect device for Xbox 360.
Lanier is also known as a composer of classical music and 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 a festival-worthy experimental short film, and teamed with Mario Grigorov to compose the soundtrack to the documentary film, The Third Wave (2007). As an author, Lanier has written a column for Discover magazine; his book, You Are Not a Gadget (2010), is a critique of Web 2.0. In 2010, Lanier was nominated in the TIME 100 list of most influential people.
At the age of 14, 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. From 1979-1980, 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.
At the end he warns that the biggest problem of any theory (esp. ideology) is not that it is false, "but when it claims to be the sole and utterly complete path to understanding life and reality." The impression of objective necessity paralyzes the ability of humans to walk out of or to fight the paradigm and causes the self-fulfilling destiny which spoils people.
His criticism aims at several targets which are at different levels of abstraction:
This critique is further explored in an interview with him on The Philosopher's Zone radio program where he is critical of the denatured effect which "removes the scent of people".
In December 2006 Lanier followed up his critique of the collective wisdom with an article in Edge titled "Beware the Online Collective". Lanier writes:
:I wonder if some aspect of human nature evolved in the context of competing packs. We might be genetically wired to be vulnerable to the lure of the mob.
and that:
: What's to stop an online mass of anonymous but connected people from suddenly turning into a mean mob, just like masses of people have time and time again in the history of every human culture? It's amazing that details in the design of online software can bring out such varied potentials in human behavior. It's time to think about that power on a moral basis.
Lanier argues that the search for deeper information in any area sooner or later requires that you find information that has been produced by a single person, or a few devoted individuals: "You have to have a chance to sense personality in order for language to have its full meaning." That is, he sees limitations in the utility of an encyclopedia produced by only partially interested third parties as a form of communication.
He also writes chamber and orchestral music. Current commissions include an opera that will premiere in Busan, South Korea, and a symphony, Symphony for Amelia, to be premiered by the Bach Festival Society Orchestra and Choir in Winter Park, Florida, in October 2010. Recent commissions include “Earthquake!” a ballet that premiered at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco in April 2006; “Little Shimmers” for the TroMetrik ensemble, which premiered at ODC in San Francisco in April 2006; “Daredevil” for the ArrayMusic chamber ensemble, which premiered in Toronto in 2006; A concert-length sequence of works for orchestra and virtual worlds (including "Canons for Wroclaw," "Khaenoncerto," "The Egg," and others) celebrating the 1000th birthday of the city of Wroclaw, Poland, premiered in 2000; A triple concerto, "The Navigator Tree," commissioned by the National Endowment for the Arts and the American Composers Forum, premiered in 2000; and "Mirror/Storm," a symphony commissioned by the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, which premiered in 1998. Continental Harmony was a PBS special that documented the development and premiere of “The Navigator Tree” won a CINE Golden Eagle Award.
In 1994, he released the classical music album Instruments of Change on POINT Music/Philips/PolyGram Records. The album has been described as a Western exploration of Asian musical traditions by Stephen Hill on "The Crane Flies West 2" (episode 357) of Hearts of Space. Lanier is currently working on a book Technology and the Future of the Human Soul, and a music album Proof of Consciousness, in collaboration with Mark Deutsch.
Lanier's work with Asian instruments can be heard extensively on the soundtrack of Three Seasons (1999), which was the first film ever to win both the Audience and Grand Jury awards at the Sundance Film Festival. He and Mario Grigorov are currently scoring a new film called The Third Wave, which premiered at Sundance in 2007. He is working with Terry Riley on a collaborative opera to be titled Bastard, the First.
Lanier has also pioneered the use of Virtual Reality in musical stage performance with his band Chromatophoria, which has toured around the world as a headline act in venues such as the Montreux Jazz Festival. He plays virtual instruments and uses real instruments to guide events in virtual worlds. In October 2010, Lanier collaborated with Rollins College and John V. Sinclair's Bach Festival Choir and Orchestra for his Worldwide Premiere of “Symphony for Amelia.”
Lanier contributed the afterword to Sound Unbound: Sampling Digital Music and Culture (The MIT Press, 2008) edited by Paul D. Miller a.k.a. DJ Spooky.
In mid-1997, he was a founding member of the National Tele-Immersion Initiative, an effort devoted to utilizing computer technology to give people who are separated by great distances the illusion that they are physically together. Lanier is a member of the Global Business Network, part of the Monitor Group.
Category:1960 births Category:Living people Category:People from New York City Category:American computer scientists Category:Virtual reality pioneers Category:Columbia University faculty Category:Dartmouth College faculty Category:University of California, Berkeley people Category:American musicians Category:Wired (magazine) people Category:Guzheng players Category:Computer graphics researchers Category:SGI people Category:Internet critics Category:Critics of Wikipedia
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