It's just you.
If you're implying he's just famous for being famous, you're dead wrong.
Jaron's actually done a huge amount of pioneering VR programming, VR hardware research and development, and interactive musical and visual artwork and live performances. I've used and worked on the same realtime visual VR programming language he used and helped develop with Chuck Blanchard at VPL, called Body Electric (aka Bounce), and we've had some interesting discussions about it, which I've quoted and written about here in the past.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22788773
>Here are some notes I wrote about some visual programming languages and real time performance tools for music and video that I wrote to the LEV mailing list in 2000 (and some additional notes and email I saved over the years).
https://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/visual-programming/b...
>That link also includes some interesting discussion with Jaron Lanier about visual programming language design.
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>While working at VPL, David also integrated the MMP library into Body Electric (below) to make Bounce (also below). The MMP player plug-in is what eventually became Macromedia Shockwave once it was plugged into the web browser (which wasn't nearly as fun as plugging it into a full fledged real time interactive visual programming language).
>Body Electric is a real time visual programming language for VR and music and hardware control, developed at VPL by Chuck Blanchard, which Jaron Lanier and others used to create virtual reality simulations and virtual interactive musical instruments.
http://www.jaronlanier.com/vpl.html
https://wiki.c2.com/?JaronLanier
https://www.vrs.org.uk/virtual-reality-profiles/vpl-research...
https://web.archive.org/web/20050228021115/http://www.well.c...
https://web.archive.org/web/20040414174418/http://www.well.c...
https://web.archive.org/web/20050211182929/http://www.well.c...
>Body Electric supported all kinds of interesting input and output devices, including MIDI, sending and receiving UDP packets over Ethernet, loading Swivel3D 3D skeleton files and animating them, sending their state over the network to a pair of SGI workstations for rendering with the Isaac rendering engine to the VPL "EyePhones" VR headset (one SGI workstation per eye, with a Mac to run the simulation), VR input devices like VPL's DataGlove and Body Suit, 3D input devices like the Ascension Flock of Birds, Polhemus, and Spaceball, 3D audio output devices like the Convolvotron, and lots of other cool stuff.
https://est-kl.com/manufacturer/ascension/flock-of-birds.htm....
http://www-cdr.stanford.edu/DesignSpace/sponsors/Convolvotro....
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/253921765_The_Convo....
Bounce is a derivative of Body Electric, that David Levitt integrated with the MMP player, and that I helped him develop, and used for some fun projects. Extremely weird and esoteric, but still one of the must productive, delightful visual programming languages I've used!
https://medium.com/@donhopkins/bounce-stuff-8310551a96e3
https://wiki.c2.com/?BounceLanguage
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23012948
>I had a discussion in 1999 with Jaron Lanier about the 3D tree node data structure (Swivel3D trees) and plug-in COM data structures in Body Electric / Bounce, and he raised some interesting points about visual thinking and explicit visual representation of data, which parallel what Scott was exploring in his Viewpoint thesis.
Jaron, who founded VPL Research, developed and used Body Electric extensively, programming real time virtual reality simulations and musical instruments by integrating data gloves, body suits, eyephones, two separate SGI workstations to render for two eyes, 3d input trackers, music synthesizers, convolvotrons, and other i/o devices.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaron_Lanier
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VPL_Research
In case you're not familiar with his work, here is a classic 1986 interview with Jaron from the book "Programmers at Work" (which also interviews Scott):
>Today I posted the Jaron Lanier interview from his early days as a young programmer in California. Back then, this free-spirited guy was touting Virtual Reality to disbelieving stares. Jaron has become a great spokesman and sage for the industry, questioning where we are going and where we have come from. He is an author, computer scientist, and gadfly of the industry. You can read all about his recent work here.
https://programmersatwork.wordpress.com/jaron-lanier-1986/
>INTERVIEWER: What are you doing with programming languages now?
>LANIER: Well, basically, I’m working on a programming language that’s much easier to use.
>INTERVIEWER: Easier because it uses symbols and graphics?
>LANIER: It needs text, too. It’s not exclusively graphics. With a regular language, you tell the computer what to do and it does it. On the surface, that sounds perfectly reasonable. But in order to write instructions (programs) for the computer, you have to simulate in your head an enormous, elaborate structure. Anytime there’s a flaw in this great mental simulation, it turns into a bug in the program. It’s hard for people to simulate that enormous structure in their heads. Now, what I am doing is building very visual, concrete models of what goes on inside the computer. In this way, you can see the program while you’re creating it. You can mold it directly and alter it when you want. You will no longer have to simulate the program in your head.
>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/
>To draw a parallel, pixels are to Viewpoint as the Swivel3D scene graph is to Body Electric, and they both share the ideal that "the virtual world and the knowledge base were the same thing" and "it's user interface all the way to the bottom":
>"I had always thought the swivel tree was ridiculous, of course, but on the other hand I liked the idea that the virtual world and the knowledge base were the same thing- that unity encourages the visibility and grabbability of the underlying concepts. I think the brain works that way- there isn't some barrier behind which everything gets abstract- instead, it's user interface all the way to the bottom! What I think would be the coolest long-term destination of BE would be extending the scenegraph so that it was as powerful a knowledge base as you'd want..." -Jaron Lanier
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More details and discussion and links:
Ok, so maybe I'm being a bit flippant. It seems like he's done a bunch of pioneering work, but I ask to what end? I've worked on VR hardware development a couple times over the years. I'm still waiting for VR to actually be useful or fun beyond niche applications. It seems like one of those things that's always right around the corner, but it's always a tech push. Maybe I haven't seen the right demos or applications, but it still seems like VR is either useful in vertical markets (e.g. training), the arts, or an enthusiast toy. I work with a lot of very tech oriented people, and I only know one guy with a VR headset, and I'm not sure he even uses it that much. Looking at the PSVR sales, there were only 5 million units. I wonder how many of those are in a drawer somewhere? The Wii or even Guitar Hero guitars sold orders of magnitude more, and most of those end up as landfill.
In our July 1999 discussion about Body Electric, Jaron mentioned:
[...]
>There IS a community of Body Electric users. It is STILL building the most interactive 3D virtual worlds of any tool (though Alice, from Carnegie Mellon, is the other hot contender). That's SHAMEFUL! While BE sucks in every other way, all the more recent vr design tools, especially the vrml ones, simply avoid the problem of deep interactivity. How could the community be so whimpy, at this late date?
[...]
>The body electric community is surprisingly NOT entertainment oriented, though I and a few others still use it that way. There are people hidden away who are still using it for ergonomic simulations, simple surgical planners (because the fancy systems are too rigid to model some situations), cognitive test rigs, and some work with kids.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23012948