52 Definitions of Virtual Reality
In his book Dawn of the New Everything, Jaron Lanier (“The Father of Virtual Reality”) takes a look back at his life as a VR entrepreneur in Silicon Valley. Lanier founded VPL research, the first VR company to ever exist. Luckily for us, he was not an average nerdy tech guy only interested in 1s and 0s. Lanier was an artist and a philosopher.
Throughout his book, he delivers 52 unconventional definitions of Immersive Virtual Reality. In this article, I will present each one of them, and discuss how Lanier’s ideas can help us to imagine the true potential of Virtual Reality — for better and for worse.
VR Definition #1
The first definition came from Lanier’s wondering what a mass culture of expression would be like in VR:
A twenty-first century art form that will weave together the three great twentieth-century arts: cinema, jazz, and programming.
Lanier writes how VR can be an approach to a holistic form of expression and a way out of the dull persistence of physicality; a way of being that isn’t tied just to our given circumstances in the world. VR opens up a vast new creative space for humans to realize themselves technologically.
