Jaron Lanier
Jaron Lanier is an American Computer Scientist, Visual Artist, Computer Philosophy Writer, Technologist, Futurist, and Composer of Contemporary Classical Music. He is the Prime Unifying Scientist (OCTOPUS) at Microsoft’s Office of the Chief Technology Officer and is widely regarded as the “Father of Virtual Reality.”
With over four decades of experience at the intersection of technology, art, and philosophy, Jaron has pioneered innovations that transformed human-computer interaction while simultaneously emerging as one of the most influential critics of the digital culture he helped create.
Jaron either coined or popularized the terms “Virtual Reality” and “Mixed Reality” and is the founder of VPL Research, the first company to sell commercial VR products. He was a founder or principal of four startups that were acquired by Oracle, Adobe, Google, and Pfizer.
As a writer, Jaron is one of the most celebrated technology writers in the world, known for charting a humanistic approach to technology appreciation and criticism. His books include You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto (2010), Who Owns the Future? (2013), Dawn of the New Everything: Encounters with Reality and Virtual Reality (2017), and Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now (2018).
In 2014, Jaron received the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, one of the world’s highest literary honors. The award recognized his lifelong work spotlighting the threats open society faces when individuals are reduced to digital categories. He became the first author of the digital era to win this prestigious prize, joining past recipients including Orhan Pamuk, Susan Sontag, Václav Havel, Hermann Hesse, and Albert Schweitzer. Read Jaron Lanier Wins German Book Trade’s Peace Prize.
In 1985, Jaron and Thomas G. Zimmerman left Atari to found VPL Research, Inc., the first company to sell VR goggles and wired gloves. The company developed groundbreaking products including the DataGlove, the EyePhone head-mounted display, and the DataSuit. VPL licensed the DataGlove technology to Mattel, which used it to manufacture the Power Glove.
In the late 1980s, Jaron led the team that developed the first implementations of multi-person virtual worlds using head-mounted displays, as well as the first “avatars” or representations of users within such systems. While at VPL, he and his colleagues developed the first implementations of virtual reality applications in surgical simulation, vehicle interior prototyping, skill training, and virtual sets for television production. He led the team that developed the first widely used software platform architecture for immersive virtual reality applications. In 1990, VPL Research filed for bankruptcy, and in 1999, Sun Microsystems acquired VPL’s seminal portfolio of patents related to Virtual Reality and networked 3D graphics.
From 1997 to 2001, Jaron was the Chief Scientist of Advanced Network and Services, which contained the Engineering Office of Internet2, and served as the Lead Scientist of the National Tele-immersion Initiative, a coalition of research universities studying advanced applications for Internet2. The Initiative demonstrated the first prototypes of tele-immersion in 2000 after a three-year development period.
From 2001 to 2004, he was Visiting Scientist at Silicon Graphics, where he developed solutions to core problems in telepresence and tele-immersion. He was also a Visiting Scholar with the Department of Computer Science at Columbia University between 1997 and 2001, a Visiting Artist with New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, and a founding member of the International Institute for Evolution and the Brain.
In 2006, Jaron began working at Microsoft, serving as Scholar at Large until 2009, and has worked at Microsoft Research as an Interdisciplinary Scientist from 2009 forward. His current role ““OCTOPUS” at Microsoft’s Office of the Chief Technology Officer Prime Unifying Scientist reflects his fascination with cephalopod neurology. At Microsoft, he contributed to the development of Kinect for Xbox 360 and Microsoft Teams’ Together Mode.
Jaron appeared in the 2020 Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma, which was viewed in 38 million homes within the first 28 days of release. In the film, he warns about the dangers of social media algorithms and behavior modification, stating that social media companies research how their algorithms can change human behavior and continue using these methods because they are extremely profitable. Watch The Social Dilemma Official Trailer.
Jaron has appeared in numerous other documentaries, including the 1990 documentary Cyberpunk, the 1995 documentary Synthetic Pleasures, and the 2004 television documentary Rage Against the Machines. He was credited as miscellaneous crew for the 2002 film Minority Report by Steven Spielberg, where his role was to help create the gadgets and scenarios. He also served as a creative consultant for The Circle (2017).
Jaron is a musician and visual artist who has been active in the world of new classical music since the late 1970s. He is a pianist and a specialist in unusual and historical musical instruments, maintaining one of the largest and most varied collections of actively played rare instruments in the world, numbering between 1,000 and 2,000 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. His 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 worked with Mario Grigorov to compose the soundtrack to the documentary film The Third Wave (2007), for which, in 2008, Sean Penn joined as Executive Producer. Recent works include Symphony for Amelia, with full choral settings about William Shakespeare’s contemporary and friend, Amelia Lanier, commissioned for the Bach Festival Society of Winter Park and premiered in October 2010.
Other commissions include Mirror/Storm, a symphony commissioned by the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra and premiered in 1998, and The Navigator Tree, a triple concerto commissioned by the National Endowment for the Arts and the American Composers Forum, which premiered in 2000. Using multiple intonation systems, the work pays tribute to one of our continent’s tallest trees, felled by loggers in the California hills in the mid-1800s. The theme reflects the environmental goals of communities in the San Francisco Bay Area. Continental Harmony, a PBS special that documented the development and premiere of The Navigator Tree, won a CINE Golden Eagle Award.
He has performed or recorded with a wide range of musicians, including Philip Glass, Yoko Ono, Ornette Coleman, George Clinton, Steve Reich, T Bone Burnett, Sara Bareilles, and Jon Batiste. Jaron has also pioneered the use of Virtual Reality in musical stage performances with his band Chromatophoria, which has toured around the world as a headline act in venues such as the Montreux Jazz Festival.
His paintings and drawings have been exhibited in museums and galleries in the United States and Europe. His first solo exhibition took place in 1997 at the Museum of Modern Art in Roskilde, Denmark. His 1983 video game Moondust (which he programmed in 6502 assembly) is generally regarded as the first art video game and the first interactive music publication.
Jaron was born on May 3, 1960, in New York City and was raised in Mesilla, New Mexico. His mother and father were Jewish; his mother was a Nazi concentration camp survivor from Vienna, and his father’s family had emigrated from Ukraine to escape the pogroms. When he was nine years old, his mother was killed in a car accident. He lived in tents with his father for an extended period before embarking on a seven-year project to build a geodesic dome home that he helped design.
At the age of 13, Jaron convinced New Mexico State University to let him enroll, where he took graduate-level courses. At NMSU, he met Marvin Minsky, who became his mentor, and astronomer Clyde Tombaugh, the discoverer of Pluto.
He received a grant from the National Science Foundation to study mathematical notation, which led him to learn computer programming. From 1979 to 1980, Jaron’s NSF-funded project at NMSU focused on “digital graphical simulations for learning.” He also attended art school in New York during this time. In California, he worked for Atari after creating a game called Moodust for the Commodore. At Atari, he met Thomas Zimmerman, inventor of the data glove, and together they founded VPL Research.
In 2009, Jaron received a Lifetime Career Award from the IEEE for contributions to Virtual Reality, the preeminent recognition from the world’s largest professional organization of electrical and electronics engineers. In 2010, he was named to the TIME 100 list of most influential people in the world.
In 2014, Prospect named him one of the top 50 World Thinkers. In 2018, Wired named him one of the top 25 most influential people over the last 25 years of technological history. He has also been named one of the top 100 public intellectuals in the world by Foreign Policy magazine in 2005, and one of history’s 300 or so greatest inventors in the Encyclopedia Britannica.
Jaron has received honorary doctorates from the New Jersey Institute of Technology in 2006, Franklin and Marshall College in 2012, and the University of Basel’s Faculty of Business and Economics in 2018. He was the recipient of Carnegie Mellon University’s Watson Award in 2001, was a finalist for the first Edge of Computation Award in 2005, and received Harvard’s Goldsmith Book Prize in 2014 for Who Owns the Future?
His book You Are Not a Gadget was named one of the 10 best books of the year by Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times and won top honors at the San Francisco Book Festival. Who Owns the Future? was named the most important book of 2013 by Joe Nocera in The New York Times. Dawn of the New Everything was named one of the best books of 2017 by The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, and Vox. Read Is the Internet good or bad for democracy? and Review: The Promise of Virtual Reality.
Jaron’s scientific interests include the use of Virtual Reality as a research tool in cognitive science, biomimetic information architectures, experimental user interfaces, heterogeneous scientific simulations, advanced information systems for medicine, and computational approaches to the fundamentals of physics.
His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Discover, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Harper’s Magazine, The Atlantic, Wired Magazine (where he was a founding contributing editor), and Scientific American. He has appeared on television shows such as The View, PBS NewsHour, The Colbert Report, Nightline, and Charlie Rose, and has been profiled on the front pages of The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times multiple times. The nation of Palau has issued a postage stamp in his honor.
Watch Jaron Lanier Looks into AI’s Future | AI IRL, Jaron Lanier interview on how social media ruins your life. and Jaron Lanier on the Lex Fridman Podcast. Listen to Who Owns Your Data? Jaron Lanier Has the Answer on the Yang Speaks podcast.
Read ONE HALF A MANIFESTO, How virtual reality proves we are real, and What My Musical Instruments Have Taught Me. Read The Visionary in The New Yorker. Jaron lives in Berkeley, California, with his wife Lena and their daughter.
Visit his Homepage, Microsoft Research profile, Wikipedia page, and Edge.org profile. Follow him on Instagram.