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Jaron Zepel Lanier (/ˈdʒeɪrɪn lɪˈnɪər/, born May 3, 1960) is an American computer scientist, visual artist, computer philosophy writer, technologist, futurist, and composer of contemporary classical music. Considered a founder of the field of virtual reality,[1] Lanier and Thomas G. Zimmerman left Atari in 1985 to found VPL Research, Inc., the first company to sell VR goggles and wired 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. In 2006 he began to work at Microsoft, and from 2009 has worked at Microsoft Research as an Interdisciplinary Scientist.

Lanier has composed contemporary classical music and is a collector of rare instruments (of which he owns one to two thousand[3]); 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 teamed with Mario Grigorov to compose the soundtrack to the documentary film The Third Wave (2007).

In 2005, Foreign Policy named Lanier as one of the top 100 Public Intellectuals.[4] In 2010, Lanier was named to the TIME 100 list of most influential people.[5] In 2014, Prospect named Lanier one of the top 50 World Thinkers.[6] In 2018, Wired named Lanier one of the top 25 most influential people over the last 25 years of technological history.

Early life and education

Born Jaron Zepel Lanier[8] in New York City, Lanier was raised in Mesilla, New Mexico.[9][10] Lanier's mother and father were Jewish;[11] his mother was a Nazi concentration camp survivor from Vienna, and his father's family had emigrated from Ukraine to escape the pogroms.[12] 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.

At the age of 13, Lanier convinced New Mexico State University to let him enroll. At NMSU, he 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 to 1980, Lanier's NSF-funded project at NMSU focused on "digital graphical simulations for learning". Lanier also attended art school in New York during this time, but returned to New Mexico and worked as an assistant to a midwife.[16] The father of a baby he helped deliver gave him a car as a gift, which Lanier later drove to Santa Cruz.

In California, Lanier worked for Atari Inc., where he met Thomas Zimmerman, inventor of the data glove. After Atari 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.[10] In 1999, Sun Microsystems bought VPL's virtual reality and graphics-related patents.

Family

Jaron Lanier and his wife, Lena, have one child, a daughter.

Awards

Jill Watson Festival Across the Arts Wats:on? Award in 2001

Finalist for the first Edge of Computation Award in 2005[48]

Honorary doctorate from New Jersey Institute of Technology in 2006[citation needed]

IEEE Virtual Reality Career Award in 2009[58]

Named one of Time magazine's Time 100, one of the most influential thinkers in 2010[59]

Honorary doctorate from Franklin and Marshall College in 2012[60]

Awarded the Goldsmith Book Prize for best trade book in 2014[61]

Peace Prize of the German Book Trade in 2014

Courtesy – Wikipedia

- Jaron Lanier

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