A computer scientist, composer, artist, and author who writes on numerous topics, including high-technology business, the social impact of technology, the philosophy of consciousness and information, Internet politics, and the future of humanism.
He has been on the cusp of technological innovation from its infancy to the present. A pioneer in virtual reality (a term he coined), Lanier founded VPL Research, the first company to sell VR products, and led teams originating VR applications for medicine, design, and numerous other fields. He is currently the "octopus" (which stands for Office of the Chief Technology Officer Prime Unifying Scientist) at Microsoft. He was a founder or principal of startups that were acquired by Google, Adobe, Oracle, and Pfizer.
He is also a musician and artist. He has been active in the world of new "classical" music since the late '70s and writes chamber and orchestral works. He is a pianist and a specialist in unusual and historical musical instruments; he maintains one of the largest and most varied collections of actively played instruments in the world.
As a writer :
Lanier is one of most celebrated technology writers in the world, and is known for charting a humanistic approach to technology appreciation and criticism.
He was awarded the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade in
2014. His book "Who Owns the Future?" won Harvard's Goldsmith Book Prize in 2014.
As a technologist :
He either coined or popularized the term 'Virtual Reality' and in the early 1980s founded VPL Research, the first company to sell VR products. In the late 1980s he led the team that developed the first implementations of multi-person
virtual worlds using head mounted displays, as well as the first "avatars," or representations of users within such systems.
Lanier has been a founder or principal of four startups that were either directly or indirectly
acquired by Oracle, Adobe, Google, and Pfizer.
He was Scholar at Large for Microsoft from 2006 to 2009, and Interdisciplinary Scientist at Microsoft Research from 2009 forward.
As a musician :
Lanier has been active in the world of new "classical" music since the late seventies. Lanier co-composed the soundtrack to "The Third Wave," a documentary released in Sept. 2009 to critical acclaim after winning awards at film festivals around the world.
Lanier has performed with artists as diverse as Yoko Ono, Philip Glass, Ornette Coleman, George Clinton, Sean Lennon, Vernon Reid, Ozomatli, Barbara Higbie, Terry Riley, Duncan Sheik, Pauline Oliveros, and Stanley Jordan.
As a visual artist :
Lanier's paintings and drawings have been exhibited in museums and galleries in the United States and Europe. In 2002 he co-created (with Philippe Parreno) an exhibit illustrating how aliens might perceive humans for the Museum
of Modern Art of the City of Paris.
He helped make up the gadgets and scenarios for the 2002 science fiction movie Minority Report by Steven Spielberg.