Jaron - Wired 1.02

The guy helps spearhead one of the most sensational new media technologies extant -- one with profound social and philosophical implications for the 21st century. He launches a company that enters the marketplace powered by such a hot media buzz that panting investors are lined up to hand him huge wads of cash. He becomes a cult-figure-media-star by enthralling audiences with his articulate, if overheated visions of the vast applications of his magical new toy.

Even if you're totally cyber-illiterate, unplugged, and offline; even if you only recognize the names of the top luminaries in the Silicon Valley pantheon -- Gates, Jobs, Sculley -- it was always Lanier, the visionary high priest of VR, who seemed to possess the most compelling and mysterious personality; the one who engendered the most heated reactions, pro and con. But you have to wonder: Why all the controversy? Why the dedicated Jaron-watching? Why the inordinate fascination with the personal details of his life?

"virtual reality is a major indicator of the coming paradigm shift, and Jaron Lanier is identified with it like no one else. He's set the standard for the industry and the culture by making VR systems that work, and by providing accessible software. And in the public mind he's been the guy who's hyped it into the ground.

"I was interested in using interactive animated computer graphics to represent mathematics in notation -- partially to teach it better, but also to see if you could represent math without all these symbols and instead use these sort of graphical models as the fundamental representation."

To do the study he had to learn computer programming, and although he says programming per se bores him stiff, he quickly recognized its similarity to mathematical notation in that both depend upon a language of symbols that may not be necessary.
"The truth is," he says, "programming language sucks. In mathematics, even on the deepest levels, it's not clear that you can get rid of notation, whereas with programming it's really clear that the language is junk and all you're doing is telling the computer to do something and there might be a hundred other ways to tell it."

The basic problem that he kept running into while developing his new programming language was that a computer screen simply wasn't big enough to encompass the visualizations he wanted to employ. So, together with some friends like Tom Zimmerman, Chuck Blanchard, Young Harvill, and Steve Bryson -- the initial research cadre of VPL -- Jaron built a primitive little virtual reality system with a head-mount display containing the TV screen eyepieces and a wired glove for manipulating the "virtuals object" in electronic cyberspace.

What's the matter with real reality? "We as a culture are deeply, hopelessly, insanely in love with gadgetry. And you can't fight love and win. I think of it in this way: The 20th century has been a unique time, a critical, transitional century and also a weird one in that for the first time, most interaction between people has ceased to take place in one-on-one conversations and has started to take place through media technology. However, very early, premature forms of media technology, such as TV, didn't allow for two-way communication and encouraged central bottlenecks of information flow. I'm hoping that in our work, not just at VPL, but in the Silicon Valley world of media technology, weUll build a stage in the next century that has the same niche between people that the physical world does, but that also has an enormously quick flexibility.

But with VR, when the tools for creating the content of the virtual world become good enough, all of a sudden you have a new, shared objective world where people can co-create the interior with a facility similar to language. And this is what I call post-symbolic communication, because it means that instead of using symbols to refer to things, you are simply creating reality in a collaborative conversation, a waking-state, intentionally shared dream. You're going directly to the source, avoiding the middleman of the symbol and directly apprehending the craftsmanship of that other person combined with your own, without the need for labels."