Jaron Lanier: Dawn of a new Everything
A couple of months ago I wrote a post about Jaron Lanier, one of the great pioneers of VR. Possible the person who invented the phrase Virtual Reality and certainly the CEO of the company that released the first commercial VR headset.
The reason that I wrote that post was that he was in London giving a talk, and the reason he was in London was to promote his new book “Dawn of the New Everything: a journey through Virtual Reality”.
I finally got around to reading the book and enjoyed it a lot, so I thought I would encourage others to read it. I’d really recommend it to anybody.
Here are some comments on the book. I’ve also written some longer pieces on Brain Implant VR, The Duplex Problem and Jaron’s views on AI.
An unusual life
It is partially a memior of his slightly strange but fascinating life, up until he left his VR company VPL in 1992. It is certainly an unusual life. He grew up across the Mexico/USA border and ended up designing and building, as a teenager, his own house based on geodesic domes, for him and his father.
As an adult he took on many personas and jobs including musician, teacher, technologist, and even something approaching a new age guru, but this eventual lead him to becoming a VR developer (before that was a job) which is what the other part of the book is about.
A philosophy of VR
The second half of the book tells of his time at the company he founded, VPL research, which was the first ever VR hardware companies and in many ways invented what we now think of as VR.
But it isn’t just a memoir, it also interweaves his philosophy of VR, told in layperson’s terms. He talks about the nature of VR as a medium. There are a lot of really interesting ideas here as well as clarifications of common concepts about VR. I think I will write about a couple in future blog posts.
Fascinating Tangents
The book also includes a lot of very interesting tangents, many less relevant to VR but related to my other interests. He talks about how AI is not a technology but a way of thinking about technology and that we can think of any technology that we call AI (like machine learning), in other ways, such as a human centered tool (I’ve written about this in various ways myself). He talks about automation and technological unemployment and his ideas about avoiding it, as well as his ideas on the perils of social media, that he has written about in his other books. He also talks about the future of programming in the era of VR. These are all things I could write about at length, but they aren’t really for my VR blog.
Input is More Important than Display
There are many things I could say about this book, but I think I will just highlight one important phrase:
Input is More Important than Display
VR is partly about the ability to present 3D views to both eyes and create a stereo effect, but in fact it is the interaction that is more important. What really makes the VR illusions is that your view of the world changes as you move your head. In general, how VR responds to input from users is more important that what is displayed. That is the reason that VPL research made an input device, the powerglove, before it made a head mounted display. It is also an important thing for all VR developers to remember.
And there’s more
If you are interested in Jaron’s work, you can see my more in depth posts about Brain Implant VR, The Duplex Problem and Jaron’s views on AI.
