Is is just me or is Jaron Lanier the Kim Kardashian or Paris Hilton of VR? Journalists seem to dig him up every few years for some puff piece, but I have never really seen what he's done other than managing to be available when someone needs a quote about VR. This is from someone who worshipped Wired magazine and moved to SF to be around all the visionaries and "techno-pagans" and what not in 1994.
He has become better known for his views on social media and data collection, but his contributions to VR are very real.
Your comparison seems inartful at best. If he’s the version for VR, what fields are Hilton and Kardashian meant to represent? Or were you just naming two celebrities?
Maybe less the Kim Kardashian of VR and more the Ray Kurzweil of VR? I’ve had similar experiences, he’s been talking about this stuff for 25 years but he’s more like a philosopher or creative thinker/talker type of person. AFAIK his main achievements are getting speaking engagements and writing the occasional article, but he’s often presented as some sort of VR pioneer or some sort of big deal in the world of VR, which I’m pretty sure he is not.
I'm no fan of Palmer Luckey but didn't he do some actual engineering for Oculus though? I know Jaron Lanier had some success in academia in the '80s but I thought the past 30 years for him has almost exclusively been speaking engagements and interviews and writing think pieces. He was all over the mainstream media during the first wave of VR hype back in the early '90s and he always just seemed to be talking about how neat it would all be someday and how we all have to think about what it means and how it's going to change everything and maybe we should buy his book or go to one of his talks to learn more about his amazing predictions about the amazing future.
To be clear, I'm not down on anyone for being a thinker or a philosopher, we need those people as much or more than we need engineers when it comes to understanding how technology can (and should, and should not) change society. But sometimes people talk about Jaron Lanier as if he's been doing way more tangible, impactful stuff than speaking engagements, interviews, and think pieces over the last 30 years, and so far I haven't found much evidence of anything.
You have the right to your opinion but I appreciate Jaron quite a bit. It dismays me though that people with contributions, no matter how recent or which were significat once are now being dismissed and compared to socialites with negative contribution. It says quite a bit about where we are at this point, the era of shitting on while sitting on the shoulders of giants.
> we need those people as much or more than we need engineers
I don't know about "more than". Eloquent yappers who can't code are a dime a dozen, and largely fungible. Jaron IS an engineer. And also an artist, and a musician.
Scientific American invited him to illustrate the cover of their 1984 issue on Computer Software, showing a visual music program.
>Jaron designed the musical visual program (which Scott Kim cited in his thesis) on the cover of the September 1984 Scientific American on Computer Software (a wonderful issue, with many articles about programming languages and software by some amazing people).
For more concrete examples of the kind of software development and visual programming and hardware research and development that Jaron has done, see my post below with all the links:
But what if you don't know anything about his work in VR?
I mean he has worked his whole live in VR as founder in startups, Atari, Sun Microsystems, Silicon Graphics, National Telepresense initiative, Microsoft Research...
Unfortunately (?) for him, I only know him as the media-targeted spokesperson for VR in the Wired/Mondo2000 heyday before the dot-com bust. VR helmets and power-gloves were the future. Until they weren't.
Until they were again.
The fading of VR twenty years ago has made me a rather staunch skeptic of this new craze for VR.
If you're implying he's just famous for being famous, you're dead wrong.
Jaron's actually done a huge amount of pioneering VR programming, VR hardware research and development, and interactive musical and visual artwork and live performances. I've used and worked on the same realtime visual VR programming language he used and helped develop with Chuck Blanchard at VPL, called Body Electric (aka Bounce), and we've had some interesting discussions about it, which I've quoted and written about here in the past.
>Here are some notes I wrote about some visual programming languages and real time performance tools for music and video that I wrote to the LEV mailing list in 2000 (and some additional notes and email I saved over the years).
>That link also includes some interesting discussion with Jaron Lanier about visual programming language design.
[...]
>While working at VPL, David also integrated the MMP library into Body Electric (below) to make Bounce (also below). The MMP player plug-in is what eventually became Macromedia Shockwave once it was plugged into the web browser (which wasn't nearly as fun as plugging it into a full fledged real time interactive visual programming language).
>Body Electric is a real time visual programming language for VR and music and hardware control, developed at VPL by Chuck Blanchard, which Jaron Lanier and others used to create virtual reality simulations and virtual interactive musical instruments.
>Body Electric supported all kinds of interesting input and output devices, including MIDI, sending and receiving UDP packets over Ethernet, loading Swivel3D 3D skeleton files and animating them, sending their state over the network to a pair of SGI workstations for rendering with the Isaac rendering engine to the VPL "EyePhones" VR headset (one SGI workstation per eye, with a Mac to run the simulation), VR input devices like VPL's DataGlove and Body Suit, 3D input devices like the Ascension Flock of Birds, Polhemus, and Spaceball, 3D audio output devices like the Convolvotron, and lots of other cool stuff.
Ok, so maybe I'm being a bit flippant. It seems like he's done a bunch of pioneering work, but I ask to what end? I've worked on VR hardware development a couple times over the years. I'm still waiting for VR to actually be useful or fun beyond niche applications. It seems like one of those things that's always right around the corner, but it's always a tech push. Maybe I haven't seen the right demos or applications, but it still seems like VR is either useful in vertical markets (e.g. training), the arts, or an enthusiast toy. I work with a lot of very tech oriented people, and I only know one guy with a VR headset, and I'm not sure he even uses it that much. Looking at the PSVR sales, there were only 5 million units. I wonder how many of those are in a drawer somewhere? The Wii or even Guitar Hero guitars sold orders of magnitude more, and most of those end up as landfill.
In our July 1999 discussion about Body Electric, Jaron mentioned:
[...]
>There IS a community of Body Electric users. It is STILL building the most interactive 3D virtual worlds of any tool (though Alice, from Carnegie Mellon, is the other hot contender). That's SHAMEFUL! While BE sucks in every other way, all the more recent vr design tools, especially the vrml ones, simply avoid the problem of deep interactivity. How could the community be so whimpy, at this late date?
[...]
>The body electric community is surprisingly NOT entertainment oriented, though I and a few others still use it that way. There are people hidden away who are still using it for ergonomic simulations, simple surgical planners (because the fancy systems are too rigid to model some situations), cognitive test rigs, and some work with kids.
Come on, Kardashian or Paris Hilton? I personally find Jaron Lanier to be the antithesis to those self centered and inane celebrities. He actually raises some very interesting points and even if his ideas were wrong, they are very interesting to think about. I also find him quite caring and humane, quite contrary to a lot of SV celebs
It's not just you. Lanier is mostly famous for being famous: he is an inveterate social climber which is why he has so many juicy Epstein anecdotes[0]. In my experience (I used to live in Berkeley and have been to his house and otherwise in his presence a couple of times via mutual friends) he rarely knows what he's talking about. Saw him stiff two grad students on a split check as well, back when he was at SGI; couldn't believe it, and that's always how I'll remember him.
He's totally right about social media of course. Sadly. It would be a simpler world if all men of bad character were also wrong, but he's right as rain on this one.
In case anyone is taken in by this, here is the relevant part of the link:
"Jaron Lanier, a pioneer in the field of virtual reality, told the Times that at a dinner at Epstein’s townhouse, a NASA scientist mentioned that Epstein’s goal was to impregnate 20 women at a time, having “based his idea for a baby ranch on accounts of the Repository for Germinal Choice, which was to be stocked with the sperm of Nobel laureates who wanted to strengthen the human gene pool.” Lanier said that he got the impression that Epstein used his dinner parties, where guests included “attractive women with impressive academic credentials,” to screen potential candidates to knock up, like the sociopath he is."
Not exactly something an Epstein friend would point out to media. A grand total of one anecdata. And, that was in 2006, before Epstein's predilections were known.
I once saw Scott Locklin smear a guy by associating him with Epstein before Lanier could possibly have known his character, even though it's clear they weren't friends. And that's how I'll always remember him.
He socialized with Epstein (post conviction? looks like he did![0]), ran in the same circles (publishing in that that ridiculous "Edge foundation" thing[1]) and threw him under the bus only after he was safely declared dead, apparently seeing nothing wrong with Epstein's grotesque antics as long as the spice was flowing[2].
It's not the worst thing I can say about him, and in fact isn't the worst thing I said about him above, but, well SOMEBODY is a little sensitive. I think "social climber" is a pretty accurate, even generous description for this sort of behavior.
@S1mon - I think that is unfair, though he is a first class media hacker and quote giver. He has had a high-ish industry profile from his time as a developer at Atari Research in the early 1980s. He, Thomas Zimmerman and Mitch Altman et al formed one of the first commercial VR companies - VPL Research in 1984 and developed early generations of the data glove, eyephone (VR Headset) and datasuit (body tracking) and a visual programming language (VPL -BodyElectric) for building early VR apps. And its this which propelled him into the press visibility.
He got popular with press because he can give a great quote, hold an interesting conversation / PoV / interview and was accessible and very visible with the first generation of VR hype. VPL Research ended in bankruptcy circa 1991/92 with its patents eventually going to Sun Microsystems. After VPL - he worked on Tele-immersion at Internet 2 - doing remote telepresence over high bandwidth networks and also did some telepresence stuff with SGI. Since then he is probably better known by his books, industry commentary, press quotes (or music depending on your interests). However a bunch of the tools we use today (Occulus/Vive, visual programming in the likes of Unreal, telepresence robots etc) can be considered descendants of some of the stuff he helped pioneer or at least the ideas he helped plant for later generations of developers to run with.
Please see Don Hopkins note below for more history and correct product names :-)
>Here’s an excerpt from the Jaron Lanier chapter in the book [Pioneers of Digital]:
>“In the early 1990s, Lanier got a call from movie director Brett Leonard saying he’d got the film rights to Stephen King’s short story, ‘The Lawnmower Man’. Lanier remembers that Leonard told his reluctant celluloid subject that he’d leverage the King story option to get the project funded but then do a ‘weird science fiction biography of you and your company.’ All the director needed was some explanation of how virtual reality kit worked and some old prototype gear from the era that ended up actually being used in the film.
>Lanier’s entrepreneur character was played by then unknown actor Pierce Brosnan, and real life appears to have mirrored the outlandish plotline as Lanier claims ‘it turned out VPL was part of a justice department investigation later, on the French Intelligence Service using the investment arms of French companies to do industrial espionage on American start-ups in Silicon Valley’.
>Mr. Lanier, who discourses eloquently on subjects like limerence and lust in his book, says: “The future I’d prefer to see is one where people use VR together to make really crazy imaginative experiences that might be sexual or might not. Where you turn into fantastical creatures and that sort of thing. Or when your bodies merge in some ways. That to me is so much more interesting than the porn. Porn is a product of the cinema era. It’s an old-fashioned way of thinking, locked in the 19th century.”
I don't know a thing about Kim Kardashian, but I've never read anything by Lanier that I thought was worth reading. Whatever people see in his commentary, I don't.
I don't know about Jaron Lanier specifically (other than that he was once passing through a place where I was working, and greeted one of my colleagues warmly, so he seemed nice), but a few thoughts on the more general question...
Some of the computer-related visionaries of the last few decades earlier thought big, original things -- and we first heard of them because something they did was not only significant, but also conspicuous, and had their name on it -- then they went into relative obscurity, but continued to work quietly.
That's not the only scenario, but it's one of the best ones. Some of the least-appealing scenarios that come to mind, anecdotally, are delicate (e.g., human frailties; life happens), or things people otherwise don't like to talk about.
Regarding the "magazine visionaries", and people who wanted either to be those, or to be part of whatever movements/scenes they heard about, Patrick S. Farley's story is the best public explanation I know of. http://electricsheepcomix.com/almostguy/
I am a big fan of Lanier. I think he provides a very interesting perspective on social media and the future that I haven't found elsewhere. I really recommend watching this recent talk he gave, long, but worth it:
Jaron Lanier: How the Internet Failed and How to Recreate It
I remember first reading a profile on Lanier in the Beyond Cyberpunk! hypercard, touted as a visionary for VR. I'm glad his takes on the dangers of social media have held up, but also relieved he's optimistic on the recent wave of social justice knowledge sharing.
I’ve heard of hypercards but had never actually seen one or interacted with one. Here’s the web version the beyond cyberpunk HyperCard for any others who are curious: http://www.streettech.com/bcp/
As far as I can tell, Lanier's big idea is that tech companies should compensate us for our data and we could all live happily on that money while helping build our robot future. Well, Facebook's revenue per user per year is thirty bucks. Is this simple innumeracy or is there more to it?
> That anytime you are provided with a service, like Facebook, for free, you are in fact the product being sold. That social media companies are basically giant behavior-modification systems that use algorithms to relentlessly increase “engagement,” largely by evoking bad feelings in the people who use them.
42 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 71.9 ms ] threadThen there’s the history:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaron_Lanier
Your comparison seems inartful at best. If he’s the version for VR, what fields are Hilton and Kardashian meant to represent? Or were you just naming two celebrities?
You may have him confused with Palmer Luckey, if you think he was just in the right place at the right time with a big mouth.
To be clear, I'm not down on anyone for being a thinker or a philosopher, we need those people as much or more than we need engineers when it comes to understanding how technology can (and should, and should not) change society. But sometimes people talk about Jaron Lanier as if he's been doing way more tangible, impactful stuff than speaking engagements, interviews, and think pieces over the last 30 years, and so far I haven't found much evidence of anything.
I don't know about "more than". Eloquent yappers who can't code are a dime a dozen, and largely fungible. Jaron IS an engineer. And also an artist, and a musician.
Scientific American invited him to illustrate the cover of their 1984 issue on Computer Software, showing a visual music program.
>Jaron designed the musical visual program (which Scott Kim cited in his thesis) on the cover of the September 1984 Scientific American on Computer Software (a wonderful issue, with many articles about programming languages and software by some amazing people).
https://www.scientificamerican.com/magazine/sa/1984/09-01/
For more concrete examples of the kind of software development and visual programming and hardware research and development that Jaron has done, see my post below with all the links:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24266722
But what if you don't know anything about his work in VR?
I mean he has worked his whole live in VR as founder in startups, Atari, Sun Microsystems, Silicon Graphics, National Telepresense initiative, Microsoft Research...
https://patents.justia.com/inventor/jaron-lanier
Until they were again.
The fading of VR twenty years ago has made me a rather staunch skeptic of this new craze for VR.
Or has it too faded again already?
If you're implying he's just famous for being famous, you're dead wrong.
Jaron's actually done a huge amount of pioneering VR programming, VR hardware research and development, and interactive musical and visual artwork and live performances. I've used and worked on the same realtime visual VR programming language he used and helped develop with Chuck Blanchard at VPL, called Body Electric (aka Bounce), and we've had some interesting discussions about it, which I've quoted and written about here in the past.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22788773
>Here are some notes I wrote about some visual programming languages and real time performance tools for music and video that I wrote to the LEV mailing list in 2000 (and some additional notes and email I saved over the years).
https://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/visual-programming/b...
>That link also includes some interesting discussion with Jaron Lanier about visual programming language design.
[...]
>While working at VPL, David also integrated the MMP library into Body Electric (below) to make Bounce (also below). The MMP player plug-in is what eventually became Macromedia Shockwave once it was plugged into the web browser (which wasn't nearly as fun as plugging it into a full fledged real time interactive visual programming language).
>Body Electric is a real time visual programming language for VR and music and hardware control, developed at VPL by Chuck Blanchard, which Jaron Lanier and others used to create virtual reality simulations and virtual interactive musical instruments.
http://www.jaronlanier.com/vpl.html
https://wiki.c2.com/?JaronLanier
https://www.vrs.org.uk/virtual-reality-profiles/vpl-research...
https://web.archive.org/web/20050228021115/http://www.well.c...
https://web.archive.org/web/20040414174418/http://www.well.c...
https://web.archive.org/web/20050211182929/http://www.well.c...
>Body Electric supported all kinds of interesting input and output devices, including MIDI, sending and receiving UDP packets over Ethernet, loading Swivel3D 3D skeleton files and animating them, sending their state over the network to a pair of SGI workstations for rendering with the Isaac rendering engine to the VPL "EyePhones" VR headset (one SGI workstation per eye, with a Mac to run the simulation), VR input devices like VPL's DataGlove and Body Suit, 3D input devices like the Ascension Flock of Birds, Polhemus, and Spaceball, 3D audio output devices like the Convolvotron, and lots of other cool stuff.
https://est-kl.com/manufacturer/ascension/flock-of-birds.htm....
[...]
>There IS a community of Body Electric users. It is STILL building the most interactive 3D virtual worlds of any tool (though Alice, from Carnegie Mellon, is the other hot contender). That's SHAMEFUL! While BE sucks in every other way, all the more recent vr design tools, especially the vrml ones, simply avoid the problem of deep interactivity. How could the community be so whimpy, at this late date?
[...]
>The body electric community is surprisingly NOT entertainment oriented, though I and a few others still use it that way. There are people hidden away who are still using it for ergonomic simulations, simple surgical planners (because the fancy systems are too rigid to model some situations), cognitive test rigs, and some work with kids.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23012948
He's totally right about social media of course. Sadly. It would be a simpler world if all men of bad character were also wrong, but he's right as rain on this one.
[0]https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/07/jeffrey-epstein-tran...
"Jaron Lanier, a pioneer in the field of virtual reality, told the Times that at a dinner at Epstein’s townhouse, a NASA scientist mentioned that Epstein’s goal was to impregnate 20 women at a time, having “based his idea for a baby ranch on accounts of the Repository for Germinal Choice, which was to be stocked with the sperm of Nobel laureates who wanted to strengthen the human gene pool.” Lanier said that he got the impression that Epstein used his dinner parties, where guests included “attractive women with impressive academic credentials,” to screen potential candidates to knock up, like the sociopath he is."
Not exactly something an Epstein friend would point out to media. A grand total of one anecdata. And, that was in 2006, before Epstein's predilections were known.
I once saw Scott Locklin smear a guy by associating him with Epstein before Lanier could possibly have known his character, even though it's clear they weren't friends. And that's how I'll always remember him.
It's not the worst thing I can say about him, and in fact isn't the worst thing I said about him above, but, well SOMEBODY is a little sensitive. I think "social climber" is a pretty accurate, even generous description for this sort of behavior.
[0] https://www.edge.org/events/master-class-2011the-science-of-... -and a snapshot Edge tried to remove: https://imgur.com/fVs3jSp
[1]https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/peteraldhous/jeffrey-ep...
[2] https://www.motherjones.com/crime-justice/2019/08/jeffrey-ep...
He got popular with press because he can give a great quote, hold an interesting conversation / PoV / interview and was accessible and very visible with the first generation of VR hype. VPL Research ended in bankruptcy circa 1991/92 with its patents eventually going to Sun Microsystems. After VPL - he worked on Tele-immersion at Internet 2 - doing remote telepresence over high bandwidth networks and also did some telepresence stuff with SGI. Since then he is probably better known by his books, industry commentary, press quotes (or music depending on your interests). However a bunch of the tools we use today (Occulus/Vive, visual programming in the likes of Unreal, telepresence robots etc) can be considered descendants of some of the stuff he helped pioneer or at least the ideas he helped plant for later generations of developers to run with.
Please see Don Hopkins note below for more history and correct product names :-)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Glove
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4RJetzDyOY&t=28m18s
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VPL_Research
https://www.pioneersofdigital.com/about-book/about-pioneers/...
>Here’s an excerpt from the Jaron Lanier chapter in the book [Pioneers of Digital]:
>“In the early 1990s, Lanier got a call from movie director Brett Leonard saying he’d got the film rights to Stephen King’s short story, ‘The Lawnmower Man’. Lanier remembers that Leonard told his reluctant celluloid subject that he’d leverage the King story option to get the project funded but then do a ‘weird science fiction biography of you and your company.’ All the director needed was some explanation of how virtual reality kit worked and some old prototype gear from the era that ended up actually being used in the film.
>Lanier’s entrepreneur character was played by then unknown actor Pierce Brosnan, and real life appears to have mirrored the outlandish plotline as Lanier claims ‘it turned out VPL was part of a justice department investigation later, on the French Intelligence Service using the investment arms of French companies to do industrial espionage on American start-ups in Silicon Valley’.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/08/style/jaron-lanier-new-me...
>Mr. Lanier, who discourses eloquently on subjects like limerence and lust in his book, says: “The future I’d prefer to see is one where people use VR together to make really crazy imaginative experiences that might be sexual or might not. Where you turn into fantastical creatures and that sort of thing. Or when your bodies merge in some ways. That to me is so much more interesting than the porn. Porn is a product of the cinema era. It’s an old-fashioned way of thinking, locked in the 19th century.”
Also: Studies show availability of porn reduces incidents of rape. As a rape survivor, I'm very pro all things that reduce incidents of it.
If you don't enjoy porn yourself, then don't consume it.
I bet Jerry Falwell Jr. wishes he and his wife stuck with porn, instead of going into business and the bedroom with their pool boy in reality.
Some of the computer-related visionaries of the last few decades earlier thought big, original things -- and we first heard of them because something they did was not only significant, but also conspicuous, and had their name on it -- then they went into relative obscurity, but continued to work quietly.
That's not the only scenario, but it's one of the best ones. Some of the least-appealing scenarios that come to mind, anecdotally, are delicate (e.g., human frailties; life happens), or things people otherwise don't like to talk about.
Regarding the "magazine visionaries", and people who wanted either to be those, or to be part of whatever movements/scenes they heard about, Patrick S. Farley's story is the best public explanation I know of. http://electricsheepcomix.com/almostguy/
Highly recommend his books!
Jaron Lanier: How the Internet Failed and How to Recreate It
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNOlqzMd2Zw
Fascinating. Twitter is a public health hazard