Re-Enter The Matrix

Provocations of a virtual reality juggernaut

- Zach Baron

Jaron Lanier may not have sired the term virtual reality – that honour generally goes to French playwright Antonin Artaud in 1938 – but he’s one hell of a father figure. As the founder of legendary VR company VPL Research, he both popularised the term and helped create most of the enduring icons of early VR, from The Lawnmower Man’s snazzy headset and gear to the ill-fated Nintendo Power Glove. Now, 25 years after stepping away from the VR field, Lanier has re-entered the alternate universe he so famously evangelised. His new book, Dawn Of The New Everything, is part coming-of-age chronicle (he lived with his father in a DIY geodesic dome), part swinging Silicon Valley memoir (rich anecdotes from his time at VPL), and it’s stuffed with enough fantastical soothsaying to fill a Holodeck. Or at least an expansive, occasionally vaporous conversation in avatar-free meatspace.

You thread the book with more than 50 definitions of virtual reality: “magic tricks, as applied to digital devices”, “a training simulator for Information Age warfare”. Which is your favourite?

It’s this notion – and this is very hard to express in words and I don’t claim that I’ve ever succeeded in capturing it – that virtual reality is a future trajectory where people get better and better at communicating more and more things in more fantastic and aesthetic ways that becomes this infinite adventure without end that’s more interesting than seeking power and destroying everything. [Laughs.]