JARON LANIER
COMPUTER SCIENTIST, COMPOSER, VISUAL ARTIST AND AUTHOR

Jaron Lanier is a computer scientist, composer, visual artist and author whose name is most often associated with virtual reality research. He coined the term “virtual reality” and in the early 1980s founded VPL Research, the first company to sell virtual reality products. In the late 1980s Lanier led the team that developed the first implementations of multi-person virtual worlds using head-mounted displays for both local and wide area networks, 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 and virtual sets for television production. He led the team that developed the first widely used software platform architecture for immersive virtual reality applications. He also is working with physicists on “digital” approaches to fundamental theories.

Lanier is an external fellow at the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley, California and a visiting faculty member with adjunct appointments at major universities. He was 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. From 2001 to 2004 Lanier was a visiting scientist at Silicon Graphics Inc., where he developed solutions to core problems in telepresence and tele-immersion.

As a musician, Lanier has been active in the world of new “classical” music since the late 1970s. He is a pianist and a specialist in unusual musical instruments—especially the wind and string instruments of Asia—and maintains one of the largest and most varied collections of actively played rare instruments in the world. He also writes chamber and orchestral music and has pioneered the use of virtual reality in musical stage performance with his band Chromatophoria, which has toured around the world as a headline act. He plays virtual instruments and uses real instruments to guide events in virtual worlds.

Lanier’s paintings and drawings have been exhibited in museums and galleries in the United States and Europe. In 2002 he co-created (with Philippe Parreno) an exhibit illustrating how aliens might perceive humans for theMuseum ofModern Art of the City of Paris. In 1994 he directed the film Muzork under a commission from ARTE Television. His 1983 Moondust is generally regarded as the first art video game and the first interactive music publication. Lanier is a well-known author and speaker on numerous topics, including high-technology business, the social impact of technological practices, the philosophy of consciousness and information, Internet politics and the future of humanism. He writes a monthly column for Discover Magazine and his writing has appeared in The New York Times, Discover, TheWall Street Journal, Forbes, Harpers Magazine, The Sciences,Wired Magazine (where he is a founding contributing editor) and Scientific American. Lanier was the recipient of CarnegieMellon University’s Watson Award in 2001 and has received numerous other awards, including the first Virtual Reality Industry Award for Applications with VPL clientMatsushita in 1992. He was selected as one of the top 100 public intellectuals in the world by Prospect and Foreign Policy magazines in 2005. The Encyclopedia Britannica includes him in its list of history’s 300 or so greatest inventors.

In recognition of his outstanding professional achievements in computer science and the visual and performing arts, New Jersey Institute of Technology is pleased to confer the degree of Doctor of Science, honoris causa, upon Jaron Lanier.