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Comment by atdrummond | Hacker News Reader

Jaron has an amazing publicist. I challenge anyone to read Wikipedia’s history of VR (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_reality#History) and assess him to fairly be called a founder. There was serious work being done for over a decade before he even started his firm; VPL never came close to being a standard and the VR tech today has hardly any relation to his “post symbolic” language.

He’s certainly a very smart and interesting guy but my alarm bells go off when his supposed achievements are used as justification for the piece being valid rather than… well, any of the arguments he made.

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It's absolutely ludicrous nonsense. It's like saying someone invented the idea of 'wondering what would happen if the sun blew up'.

VR is a trivial idea that pretty much everyone has thought about at some point. It's implementation is hard to do, and if I had to point to anyone there, it'd be Carmack who's probably done the most.

> VR is a trivial idea that pretty much everyone has thought about at some point.

I agree, but to be fair, grandiose misattributions are just how the field of philosophy works. Plato is commonly credited with the idea that humans have an immortal soul. I'm 100% sure that idea is tens of thousands of years old, and when I hear academics attribute it to him, I immediately discard everything else that comes out of their mouths because such claims just demonstrate a complete lack of critical thinking.

He did have a team that produced an early VR system. It took two expensive Silicon Graphics machines to run the headgear. I got to try it, with him present. There was a second person wired up, driving a model of a lobster or octopus or something, and I could sort of interact with them. All the right parts were there. But it didn't work very well. Too slow, and too low-rez. Turn head, wait for tracker and rendering to catch up. 80s VR was pretty marginal.

VPL Research did do real work and everyone I've interacted with from that era was impressed with what they achieved given their limited resources. That said, it is pretty clear from looking at modern VR systems how little they relate to the future he predicted. Not discounting his accomplishments at all - I actually think a lot his output was pretty incredible!

I certainly think Palmer Lucky could in many ways have at least a legitimate claim to being a founder of modern VR; his Oculus not only completely revived the industry but also showed other companies that there was indeed a market for this tech.

he hasn’t given up on VPL, though, only few years back Vi Hart’s eleVR team was working on “sculptural” programming languages within VR, at Microsoft Research under Jaron. (…but I think that team disbanded a couple years back)

His thinking seems much clearer than most of the discourse around this technology.

But I think that a better way of thinking about these systems is an imperfect world model analogy. Not a made-of-people analogy.

These models are not made of people. People helped gathering data about the world around us. And that data allowed to build a world model. Which includes models of people, along with everything else.

And it’s a world model, not a human civilization model. Data goes through the funnel of The Pile and the likes, but ultimately the predictive model is of the universe, not that of humans.

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