To Focus on the Essay
To focus on Jaron Lanier is easy. To completely comprehend him is slightly more difficult. He is soft-spoken, well-liked, but very opinionated. In fact, the tone of his book and the tone he takes when speaking seem completely contradictory. Jaron Lanier is considers himself a musician first, but is also known as an artist, a public speaker, a programmer, a scientist, and may even be considered a digital philosopher.
To give a brief background, Jaron Lanier was born in on May 3rd, 1960, making him fifty and three days at the time of this posting. He was raised in an agrarian setting in Messila, New Mexico, born of Bohemian Jewish parents, his mother was killed in a car crash when he was very young. Lanier has stated that the setting for his childhood was unfavorable, and that he cannot quite understand the point of view in which someone might romanticize an agriculturally-charged upbringing. Luckily for the digital world, he “latched onto a great local resource, New Mexico State University” and “got on this kick of science and technology.” Despite never earning an academic degree, Lanier has held many nontenured positions over the years, at such prestigious higher education facilities such as Columbia University and New York University. (UCtelevision)
In 1984, when Lanier was 24, he started a company out of his home called VPL Research, Incorporated. Through VPL, Lanier developed a virtual reality “system” that could be purchased off the shelf for home users called Reality Built for Two (Brarwyn). In an interview with Harry Kreisler of UCtelevision, Lanier describes his inspiration as follows:
My initial motivation for virtual reality is a little different from what’s come to be my primary motivation over the years. But my initial motivation had to do with trying to come up with a vernacular access path to mathematics […] The language of mathematics is almost cruel in its obscurity… Because it had to be written down by pencil, a lot of complicated ideas had to be compressed into little symbols that could be written down on a page… As I was trying to do this on conventional computer screens, I ran into the problem of running out of the end of the screen, so I wanted to be able to be immersed inside it. (UCtelevision)
So, as he was trying to design this virtual space for utilitarian purposes, his audiovisual aesthetic persona started steering the project to become a work of art, a device used for entertainment by even those who couldn’t understand the complex algorithms and principles behind the virtual world.
Reality Built for Two manifested in five distinct parts; three software works and two pieces of hardware. Integral to the entire suite was The Body Electric, the actual software to be rendered; the tracking software, logic software, et cetera. Coupled closely to The Body Electric was Isaac, the software that translated the logic and information of Body into a render that was easily discernible to human perceptive instincts.
Both programs ran on an Apple Macintosh computer and were linked to the other three pieces of RB2. The first unique piece of hardware was the Dataglove. This consisted of a wired glove that the user/participant wore on her right hand. The Dataglove was capable of not only tracking acceleration and its position in three-dimensional space, but the individual movements of the user’s fingers as well. It’s interesting to note that the Dataglove was a direct inspiration for the Nintendo Company, Ltd’s Power Glove peripheral. Though the Power Glove was much more crude than the Dataglove, it was more affordable, allowing a wider range of audience to get a tactile experience with a virtual reality situation, even if this rendering wasn’t fully immersive.
The second piece of hardware that was integral not only to Reality Built for Two, but to Virtual Reality lore in general, was the EyePhone. This piece of hardware was a Head Mounted Display, or HMD, that the user would wear on her head to obscure her vision from the outside world. Inside the HMD was two separate LCD screens, one of each eye, which would project slightly different images, quite successfully producing a stereoscopic illusion. Combined with the Dataglove, the EyePhone not only provided a three-dimensional environment, but could produce a hand avatar that tracked the hand of the glove’s wearer in the EyePhone‘s 3D space, creating somewhat of a three-dimensional illusion of overlay.
The final unit within the RB2 package was Audiosphere. This was integrated into the EyePhone‘s physical headset and provided for three-dimensional surround sound. These sound effects coincided with the 3D projection of the EyePhone and the spacial sense of the Dataglove to produce an environment that, for all intents and purposes, was truly immersive, if not as graphically realistic as we expect videogames to be today. (Blanchard, Burgess and Halvill)
The founding of VPL and the creation and popularity of Reality Built for Two firmly established Lanier as the “Father of Virtual Reality.” This, however, is not the only achievement that Jaron Lanier is known for. He is also quite the public speaker, and his attitudes toward his own medium are quite thought-provoking.
Lanier has written a manifesto in the form of a book entitled You are Not a Gadget (ISBN 978-0-307-26964-5) in which he discusses human nature in comparison to machines, the negative effects of computing cloud and Web 2.0 culture, and the problems with using programs as a basis for building other programs.
Jaron Lanier has some specific ideas on artificial intelligence and the separation between humans and machines:
When developers of digital technologies design a program that requires you to interact with a computer as if it were a person, they ask you to accept in some corner of your brain that you might also be conceived of as a program. (Lanier)
In relation to this, he discusses how some computer scientists envision an apocalyptic “singularity event” in the future where machines will become so advanced that they surpass us and integrate us at best, destroy us at worst. They use this example to try to further the idea of a humanlike AI system, in which humans (the creators) and machines (the created) are equal in emotion, ingenuity, intelligence, and reflex. Lanier, however, argues that humans and machines can never be truly synonymous based on just that idea of the creator vs. the created.
Lanier reasons that, although there are, in fact, bits of data in an empirical sense, written upon a hard drive, what they mean can only be interpreted by their human authors. He discusses the event in which Deep Blue defeated champion chess player, Gary Kasparov. While some argue that Deep Blue was a pinnacle of achievement for machines, Jaron Lanier looks behind the machine to its programmers. Deep Blue didn’t beat Kasparov. Without its programmers, Deep Blue would just be a fancy, blinking monolith. It is a question as to whether computers will eventually be able to observe and be self aware, but even those programs will only be as good as their programmers.
That is, of course, providing that the program is built from scratch. See, another point discussed by Lanier in his book is lock-in. Lock-in happens when an idea or program comes about that’s amazing for the time, but is also really the only [economical] option. Therefore, you end up with ideas like simplistic MIDI files limiting the space-complexity ratio of digitalized music, or the folder system organizing effectively, but not always efficiently.
As programs get more popular, they may become integrated into other programs. This causes any bugs that were in the original program to become further locked-in and to cause exponentially extrapolating glitches upon the “parasite” program that take even longer to debug. This tangle of logic “paths” not only wastes time, but energy. For this reason, many independent programmers choose to design applications from scratch, just so they’ll run better.
Finally, Lanier talks about the Web2.0 community and computing clouds. A computing cloud is a group of servers and computers, nonlocalized, that trade information and work as a unit, whereas Web2.0 includes social sites and personalized niches in the cyberspace that make up and/or allow for these computing clouds.
See, the problem Lanier has with these two concepts is that they all too often produce unintelligent, unoriginal, and relatively violent mob mentalities in their users. People will trade pieces of information amongst themselves, try to distort these pieces into entire paragraphs, and end up, as a group, twisting the information into the worst available shape. Because the users contribute to the unintelligent or hateful side of issues once or twice, even in a jesting manner, they don’t see themselves as the problem, rather as “not as guilty.” However, these little bits and bytes build up, and the mob, as an entity, gains power.
Jaron Lanier is a very interesting man to study, very opinionated, and extremely intelligent. His ideas can be difficult to understand at times, but he is a good enough writer that his explanations don’t get lost in the grammatical foci of a scholarly aura. Jaron Lanier is not a gadget. He just makes some for TV.
Works Cited
Blanchard, Chuck, et al. “Reality Built For Two: A Virtual Reality Tool.” March 1990. LYRASIS Consortium: LOUISIANA STATE UNIVERSITY. 23 April 2010 <http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=91394.91409>.
Brarwyn, Gareth. VPL Research, Inc. 1998. 26 April 2010 <http://www.streettech.com/bcp/BCPgraf/StreetTech/VPL.html>.
Lanier, Jaron. You are Not a Gadget. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010.
UCtelevision. Conversations with History: Jaron Lanier . 3 May 2010 <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8FYj1wKyaY>.
Reality Built for Two diagram
There may be a description if I have time.
VPL’s products
To be edited when time permits…
REALITY BUILT FOR TWO: An off-the-shelf Virtual reality system.
Included
VPL Dataglove was a hand-tracking piece of hardware, could sense fingers bending, hand rotating, and relative placement in space. Was the basis for Nintendo’s Powerglove, and arguable contemporary Wii remotes and 3D mice.
VPL EyePhone was an HMD (Head-mounted display). It had two separate LCD screens in a headset, each providing a slightly different image in order to produce the illusion of depth.
VPL Audiosphere was a personal surround-sound unit, providing the illusion of sounds coming from any XZ-plane direction.
Body Electric was the program that all of these pieces of hardware were used to experience, and Isaac is the rendering software.
Hello world!
Welcome to WordPress.com. This is your first post. Edit or delete it and start blogging!
To Focus on Jaron Lanier 
