Hacker News Reader

Comment by mwfunk | Hacker News Reader

Maybe less the Kim Kardashian of VR and more the Ray Kurzweil of VR? I’ve had similar experiences, he’s been talking about this stuff for 25 years but he’s more like a philosopher or creative thinker/talker type of person. AFAIK his main achievements are getting speaking engagements and writing the occasional article, but he’s often presented as some sort of VR pioneer or some sort of big deal in the world of VR, which I’m pretty sure he is not.

View on HN

> AFAIK, "I’m pretty sure"

But what if you don't know anything about his work in VR?

I mean he has worked his whole live in VR as founder in startups, Atari, Sun Microsystems, Silicon Graphics, National Telepresense initiative, Microsoft Research...

https://patents.justia.com/inventor/jaron-lanier

Unfortunately (?) for him, I only know him as the media-targeted spokesperson for VR in the Wired/Mondo2000 heyday before the dot-com bust. VR helmets and power-gloves were the future. Until they weren't.

Until they were again.

The fading of VR twenty years ago has made me a rather staunch skeptic of this new craze for VR.

Or has it too faded again already?

I'm pretty sure he is.

You may have him confused with Palmer Luckey, if you think he was just in the right place at the right time with a big mouth.

I'm no fan of Palmer Luckey but didn't he do some actual engineering for Oculus though? I know Jaron Lanier had some success in academia in the '80s but I thought the past 30 years for him has almost exclusively been speaking engagements and interviews and writing think pieces. He was all over the mainstream media during the first wave of VR hype back in the early '90s and he always just seemed to be talking about how neat it would all be someday and how we all have to think about what it means and how it's going to change everything and maybe we should buy his book or go to one of his talks to learn more about his amazing predictions about the amazing future.

To be clear, I'm not down on anyone for being a thinker or a philosopher, we need those people as much or more than we need engineers when it comes to understanding how technology can (and should, and should not) change society. But sometimes people talk about Jaron Lanier as if he's been doing way more tangible, impactful stuff than speaking engagements, interviews, and think pieces over the last 30 years, and so far I haven't found much evidence of anything.

> we need those people as much or more than we need engineers

I don't know about "more than". Eloquent yappers who can't code are a dime a dozen, and largely fungible. Jaron IS an engineer. And also an artist, and a musician.

Scientific American invited him to illustrate the cover of their 1984 issue on Computer Software, showing a visual music program.

>Jaron designed the musical visual program (which Scott Kim cited in his thesis) on the cover of the September 1984 Scientific American on Computer Software (a wonderful issue, with many articles about programming languages and software by some amazing people).

https://www.scientificamerican.com/magazine/sa/1984/09-01/

For more concrete examples of the kind of software development and visual programming and hardware research and development that Jaron has done, see my post below with all the links:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24266722

You have the right to your opinion but I appreciate Jaron quite a bit. It dismays me though that people with contributions, no matter how recent or which were significat once are now being dismissed and compared to socialites with negative contribution. It says quite a bit about where we are at this point, the era of shitting on while sitting on the shoulders of giants.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com