Jaron Lanier, A Prophet of Virtual Reality

JARON LANIER — DAWN OF THE NEW EVERYTHING, ENCOUNTERS WITH REALITY AND VIRTUAL REALITY — 2017

A very surprising book from an extremely surprising person, best known for his public appearances as a public speaker or lecturer, as a musician innovating all the time in styles and with new at times exotic instruments, and as one of the historic founders of Virtual Reality. The book then is a typical likeness of the author. It contains fifty-two definitions of Virtual Reality from page 3 to page 309. You can sort them out, but it will be hard for you to make any global sense of them all because every single one is dictated by its environment in the book and the book follows many tracks. Personal recollections of his childhood, youth, and life in general. The personal approach of cybernetics, informatics, computer science, coding, in the perspective of Virtual Reality. Personal reflections on Silicon Valley and other cybernetic sites, places, and locales where computers are not a simple tool to process a text or an image but a complex and complicated network of machines trying to create a virtual universe that would feel haptically real for a Persona…