Computer scientists -- United States -- Biography. |
Virtual reality -- Philosophy. |
Virtual reality -- Social aspects. |
Lanier, Jaron |
Environments, Virtual |
Virtual environments |
Virtual worlds |
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Summary
Summary
Named one of the best books of 2017 by The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, & Vox
The father of virtual reality explains its dazzling possibilities by reflecting on his own lifelong relationship with technology
Bridging the gap between tech mania and the experience of being inside the human body , Dawn of the New Everything is a look at what it means to be human at a moment of unprecedented technological possibility.
Through a fascinating look back over his life in technology, Jaron Lanier, an interdisciplinary scientist and father of the term "virtual reality," exposes VR's ability to illuminate and amplify our understanding of our species, and gives readers a new perspective on how the brain and body connect to the world. An inventive blend of autobiography, science writing, philosophy and advice, this book tells the wild story of his personal and professional life as a scientist, from his childhood in the UFO territory of New Mexico, to the loss of his mother, the founding of the first start-up, and finally becoming a world-renowned technological guru.
Understanding virtual reality as being both a scientific and cultural adventure, Lanier demonstrates it to be a humanistic setting for technology. While his previous books offered a more critical view of social media and other manifestations of technology, in this book he argues that virtual reality can actually make our lives richer and fuller.
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Alternating between personal memoir and the history of virtual reality technology leading up to take, computer scientist Lanier (Who Owns the Future?) transports readers to the experimental, obsessive, and even messianic intellectual tech guru circuit of the 1970s and 1980s, where he first spawned the idea for virtual reality. Writing with a performative style of prose that switches between self-help book and self-involved philosophical treatise, Lanier spews optimism about human potential and cognitive enhancement, alongside stories of long-held grudges and bitterness about situations around the early history of his startup, VPL Research, and his frustration around the field's disinterest in what he feels ought to be the current focus of VR, somatic and haptic experience. Lanier's insights on the human parameters of VR experiences, the relationship between minds and bodies, and even the art of perfecting the tech demo suggest that he understands people well, but his stories of relationships-both professional and personal-gone bad imply otherwise. With this cleverly crafted autobiography of sorts, Lanier convinces readers that he's both brilliant and inspiring enough to keep the podium in a field that's gone from fringe to corporate. (Nov.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Guardian Review
The techno-sage and Silicon Valley insider sees VR as emancipatory and liberating but what does shared lucid dreaming actually mean? I experienced virtual reality for the first time the other day, at a training workshop for university lecturers. When I donned the Oculus Rift a sleek plastic headset with handheld controls I was presented with a desk on which sat some cartoonishly rendered objects: a ball, a toy car, a ray gun. I picked up the gun and fired off a few shots. I rolled the ball off the table. Then the lenses in the goggles misted up and I grew bored. I couldnt see how virtual reality was supposed to help with the teaching of literature, but the techno-apparatchiks who were our guides for the day assured me that this was the future of pedagogy (a word they liked). Just imagine, they said, one day your students wont just be able to read books: theyll experience what its like to be in them. In Dawn of the New Everything, his insightful (and often maddening) memoir-cum-manifesto, Jaron Lanier argues that we are on the brink of a golden age of virtual reality. It looks like this book might come out at about the same time that VR gets commonplace, he writes. But despite the best efforts of the evangelists, VR has so far failed to become ubiquitous. In 2014 Oculus was bought, with much fanfare, by Facebook for $2bn, but since then its felt as if they dont really know what they want to do with the technology. Google Glass (an experiment in wearable augmented reality first released in 2013) also limps on, but having a camera strapped permanently to your head feels intrusive, and early adopters were labelled glassholes. VR may well still be the future, but what becomes clear from Dawn of the New Everything is that it has been the future for a very long time, and that it is as much about selling visions as experiencing them. Lanier is a computer scientist turned writer and techno sage, and is often hailed as the father of VR. His previous two books Who Owns the Future (2010) and You Are Not a Gadget (2013) were bracing polemics against the dangers of what he identified as a new digital Maoism associated with the power of social networks, under the auspices of which algorithms become more important than people. Dawn of the New Everything lacks the directed energy of his previous books, fusing techno-utopian thought experiments with truncated memoir, but still contains plenty to argue with. Most immediately engaging are the autobiographical sections, for Lanier has led a fascinating life. His mother was a Viennese dancer who was killed in a car crash when he was nine, his father a high school teacher who lived with Gurdjieff in Paris and Huxley in California and studied with various Hindu and Buddhist teachers. After his mothers death Lanier had a slightly feral existence with his father, building theremins together and living in a geodesic dome house Lanier had designed. A sense of messianic mission permeates the descriptions of his childhood (and the book as a whole). Was it possible, he recalls thinking as a child, that every place in the whole universe was wondrous, but people just get worn out by the chore of perception? Is that why all the other kids just sat there, pretending that everything was normal? A talented mathematician and musician, Lanier talked his way into university without finishing high school. He worked at Atari in the 1980s, and later founded VPL, a company that sold expensive virtual reality bodysuits and software to various military and corporate entities, and dreams to the rest of us. The companys only foray into mass commercial production came in 1989 with the release of the Power Glove, a much-lampooned but fondly remembered device that allowed users to play computer games using hand gestures but that, as Lanier acknowledges, didnt actually work very well. Since then he has become a Silicon Valley insider, and now works for Microsoft as a research scientist. He is, it must be said, a quite incorrigible namedropper. I remember, he writes in a typical passage, Richard Feynman teaching me to make a tetrahedron with my fingers. Steve Jobs demonstrating how to amass the mysterious quality we call power by humiliating a hardware engineer Marvin Minksy showing me how to predict when a technology would become cheap and mature. The hobnobbing is endearing for a while, then becomes annoying. Selling the dream of virtual reality depends on showmanship, Lanier says, something he learned in the early years by giving demonstrations of the technology to Hollywood executives, Burning Man nabobs and anyone else who would listen. VR scientists are the illusionists of science, he writes, were honest when we tell you were fooling you, and you should take us seriously when we point out that were not the only one. Theres still something of the showman about him though, and after a while you begin to suspect this is a book built on patter. VR becomes, in his hands, something of a panacea, a catch-all term rendered almost meaningless by endless definition and redefinition. In his introduction Lanier calls it one of the scientific, philosophical, and technological frontiers of our era a means for creating comprehensive illusions that youre in a different place, perhaps a fantastical, alien environment, perhaps with a body that is far from human. Further definitions 52 in total punctuate the rest of the book. So VR is (or could be) a means of improvising reality or bringing about shared lucid dreaming; a cybernetic construction or a person-centred, experiential formulation of digital technology. In one of the most alarming definitions, Lanier calls VR a cross between cinema, jazz and programming, which sounds just about the worst thing I can imagine. You can see what hes getting at, most of the time, but after a while you wonder if the net has been cast too wide to make any meaningful generalisations. Inside VR you can experience flying with friends transformed into glittering angels soaring above an alien planet The enemy here, as in his previous books, is the model of a weightless internet anonymous, free, and therefore, Lanier writes, inherently manipulative that we live with today. The libertarian utopianism of Silicon Valley is a result of this frictionless internet, where nobody pays for anything so that we all become products. We ended up with an uncharted, ad hoc internet, he says. We made our lives easier during the period described in this book, but the whole world is paying a heavy price many years later. To fix things, he proposes that we should add a little gravity, a little skin in the game to the web, and one-way to achieve this quite how remains hazy is through the judicial deployment of VR. Lanier wants it to be emancipatory and liberating: it promises to allow us to experience what it might be like to be another person, or to inhabit alien phenomenologies (there is interesting work being done, he reports, on the ways humans can inhabit and manipulate non-human avatars we are, apparently, very good with tails). But at root the problem of virtual reality is the problem of realism. If the world be promiscuously described, Samuel Johnson wrote in the Rambler, I cannot see of what use it can be to read the account; or why it may not be as safe to turn the eye immediately upon mankind, as upon a mirror which shows all that presents itself without discrimination. If the technology of VR was perfect if it were possible to conjure a world as rich in sensory detail as the one we currently inhabit, but designed by us what kind of a world would we come up with? Laniers answers to this question left me cold. From inside VR you can experience flying with friends, all of you transformed into glittering angels soaring above an alien planet encrusted with animate gold spires, he writes at one point, which made me wonder why VRs visions should be well, so very kitsch. Despite Laniers gestures towards the benign singularity of universal oneness, the image of VR that emerges here feels decadent and isolating. A future in which relationships depend on locking yourself away in the prison of the self, arranging the world around you so that it confirms everything you want it to and never taking the goggles off, is a future of which I want no part. - Jon Day.
Kirkus Review
The author has seen the future, and it wears a headset.Perhaps better known for his hairstyle and hippie-ish ways ("in those days, it was super rare for white people to have dreadlocks, so I was quite exotic") than for any specific bit of technology, computer pioneer and civil libertarian Lanier (Who Owns the Future?, 2013, etc.) has two purposes here. The first is to offer a vision of what virtual reality is and the cool things it can do, while the second is an amiable tour through his life and his perhaps unlikely course through the very beginnings of VR. As to the former, suffice it to say that Lanier was a smart, geeky kid who was thinking outsize thoughts even as a child ("I was obsessed with what's usually called philosophy, and it helped"), and he had the benefit of growing up in an eccentric household that encouraged his explorations. As to the latter, working in a state university computer lab to wrestle out the secrets of code and algorithm, Lanier writes that he got hooked early onnot just by the nerdy coolness of the computer world, but also by the outright wonder of the sci-fi things it can bring to real life. In that aspect, the author is an evangelist for the good side of VR, which now offers insights into human perception and cognition that are forcing a radical re-evaluation of who we are. That's definitely cool stuff. In relating it, Lanier veers between the plainspoken ("the human brain is so finely tuned to watching the human face that if anything is slightly off, the strangeness quickly becomes creepy") and the mystical ("if the whole universe is your body, then talking would be beside the point"), with lots of solid tech-manual ponderings on phenotropic systems and formulas to boot. A spirited exploration of tech by a devotee who holds out the hope that bright things are just around the corner. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Digital pioneer, technological visionary, and Internet curmudgeon Lanier is also a best-selling author (Who Owns the Future?, 2013), popular speaker, and Silicon Valley legend. With his latest book, he digs deep into his own past, offering glimpses of a tragic childhood that was punctuated by his unique way of seeing the world around him. Lanier's many fans will be thrilled to learn of his often-otherworldly dreams as a young child and how he coped with the cruelty of classmates who could not understand the unique perspective he possessed. He covers his unorthodox, barely imaginable path to creative success that led him to create the start-up VPL Research, which brought virtual-reality products to the world and introduced numerous innovations, including the use of cyber avatars. From revisiting the devastating death of his mother to ruminating on virtual reality and reflecting on what's involved in running a business, Lanier impresses with his sincerity and insight. This culturally significant title with its compelling personal narrative proves yet again that Lanier is a thinker whose work should be read and contemplated.--Mondor, Colleen Copyright 2017 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
JARON LANIER'S book "Dawn of the New Everything" and Jeremy Bailenson's "Experience on Demand" discuss the history and present cutting edge of virtual reality technology, framing it as a potentially useful if not transformative tool for enlarging human empathy, perfecting skills, overcoming trauma and engaging with others. They spend much less time on the possible dangers of V.R. as we move into the future. Bailenson is the director of the Virtual Human Interaction Lab at Stanford, and most of his book reads like a remarkably interesting report on the cool new experiments he's conducting. He's found that virtual reality can help people overcome PTSD, endure painful skin-grafting procedures and practice surgery. An early chapter deals with quarterbacks using the technology to go over what they might have missed during practice. And although his discussion of certain applications of V.R. can sometimes read like an advertisement, he gets what it's really good at, at least for the time being: creating pricey, immersive experiences that are planned in advance, either by capturing something live or by creating it. The N.F.L. knows that the moment a quarterback gets the ball, a million things will happen over the next few seconds that can be caught by expensive cameras, and they made the bet that the cost of capturing those moments to train one person to be better at his job would be worth it. The other objective, committing the time and resources to build something immersive - say, underwater field trip experiences for children who would not otherwise have the chance to swim with sharks - needs more broad application to justify the currently steep price. Bailenson defines V.R. as a scientific and cultural tool. He explores the idea of creating interactive stories - and even has words of advice for their would-be directors - but it's clear that he's first and foremost a scientist, testing hypotheses and proposing new therapies. Lanier's book is, by contrast, intimate and idiosyncratic. He carries us through his quirky and fascinating life story, with periodic nerdy side trips through his early thinking on more technical aspects of virtual reality. If you liked Richard Feynman's autobiographical "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman" but thought it was rather self-indulgent, this book will prompt similar reactions. You could almost say that Lanier's vivid and creative imagination is a distinct character in this book, he discusses it so much. Midway through, Feynman himself makes an appearance, and it seems as if we're meeting an old friend. Lanier has been credited with inventing the term "virtual reality," and he founded one of the original companies to produce it, VPL Research. He goes over the technology's history in detail, outlining not only the obstacles to getting consistent hardware but some personalities and interpersonal conflicts that ultimately led to his company's breaking up. He also demonstrates the role personal connections and interactions play in Silicon Valley. This narrative illuminates the overlooked importance of women, referred to by Lanier as G.N.F.s, for Grand Networking Females, in making the connections and taking up the work essential to starting tech companies. For example, at the moment that Lanier was offered start-up funding and needed a corporate lawyer, a G.N.F. introduced him to the right people. Although Lanier goes out of his way to give credit to these women, I'm left with that familiar sinking feeling that, although successful in their own right, they formed the social glue upon which all companies depended but never became as famous as the men they helped. In the late 1980 s, Lanier was a soughtafter speaker in California, an enthusiastic supporter for theoretical, mind-bending experiences that technology would someday offer to audiences of blissed-out hippies. (Lanier discusses lots of drug use in the book but says he doesn't personally partake, "not even marijuana") Two consequences of this early guru persona come out in the book: First, he offers dozens of different definitions of V.R. as a holistic force and cure-all. Second, he comes off as both a technically savvy inventor and a cult leader. As cult leaders go, he seems nice, and certainly preferable to most of the current crop of would-be Silicon Valley cult leaders. His vision is humanistic, and he insists that the most important goal of developing virtual reality is human connection, although he does talk about the fascination of seeing his own hand in V.R. a bit too often to be convincing on that point. He takes on ideology. He dismisses what he describes as the libertarian ideals that have replaced his friends the hippies, and more recently he strongly objects to the new Silicon Valley religion based on the all-powerful possibilities of artificial intelligence. "Every time you believe in ??. you are reducing your belief in human agency and value," he claims, and goes on to define virtual reality as "-A.L," the inverse of A.I., although whether he's referring to technology or ideology he doesn't clarify. Where Bailenson makes virtual reality more approachable and less like magic, as you'd expect from an academic scientist, Lanier plows into philosophy and expands the limits of what V.R. might achieve, blurring definitional lines and sometimes making it all sound truly surreal. In focusing on their authors' own contributions to the development of this tool, these books miss a vital part of the discussion of virtual reality - the world of V.R. once the technology gets really good. They both mention the holodeck on "Star Trek," a realistic and boundless virtual environment requiring no headset and causing no "V.R. sickness," which stood as the background for countless episodes featuring tech failures and ethical dilemmas in subsequent "Star Trek" spinoff series. What "Star Trek" writers got right, and what both authors seem to miss or deliberately avoid, is that virtual reality is just a tool, and can be used for good or evil. Imagine the propaganda that can be developed once people can experience something almost firsthand. Far from being its opposite, V.R. can combine with A.I., creating realistic (and S.T.D. free!) virtual sex. This might be fantastic or terrible, depending on if we think sex with virtual robots is immoral, but imagine what would happen if abusive or pedophiliac makers got their hands on the controls. Instead of PTSD therapy, VR could be used for torture. I'm not trying to be cynical, just realistic: Once video became easy to manufacture, people started contributing widely to YouTtibe. And although I enjoy learning new knitting techniques on that platform, we have recently seen widespread propaganda and depraved cartoons that fool the recommendation algorithms into suggesting them for children. There's no reason to imagine this won't happen on a virtual reality platform when the time comes, which could be soon. Why the blind spot? I think it's because the authors are themselves the current gatekeepers of this exciting technology, and although they plan for it to go mainstream, they desperately want it to be good for society. But Bailenson and Lanier cannot have it both ways: insisting that VR is very realistic, and thus affecting and potentially therapeutic, but also that it will be used only for good. That will happen only if it remains expensive and if the technology stalls. Fat chance. People interested in the current state of virtual reality's applications will enjoy Bailenson, and people interested in the cultural and technological history of VR will likewise enjoy Lanier. As for my concerns about its possible future abuses, we might have to rely on science fiction writers for now. It can help people overcome PTSD, endure painful skin-grafting procedures and practice surgery. CATHY O'NEIL is the author of "Weapons of Math Destruction."
Library Journal Review
Lanier (Who Owns the Future), often considered the founder of virtual reality (VR), tells about his unconventional childhood in Las Cruces, NM, and his years creating this emerging discipline in Silicon Valley. In several challenging chapters, the author explains the science and applications of VR, alongside a mix of captivating family stories. Lanier's father escaped Ukrainian pogroms during World War II, and his mother was a concentration camp survivor who was killed in a car crash; a loss that has haunted Lanier throughout his life. As a teenager, Lanier became a teaching assistant at New Mexico State University. Much of the book recounts his years at VPL, a company he founded in 1984 to sell VR-related equipment. VPL and the author parted ways in 1992 when this self-acknowledged "laid back country hippie morphed into a high-stress CEO." Lanier writes with grace and humor; his empathy shines throughout. VERDICT The author patiently describes the scientific nuances of VR, but these chapters may be challenging for general readers. All audiences will enjoy Lanier's tales of his youth and the early years of Silicon Valley's emergence as an international center of VR and artificial intelligence.-Karl Helicher, formerly with Upper Merion Twp. Lib., King of Prussia, PA © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.