Jaron Lanier

Jaron Lanier is an American computer scientist, futurist and composer, born in New York City on 3 May 1960 and raised in Mesilla, New Mexico. He is considered a founder of the field of virtual reality: in 1985 he and Thomas G. Zimmerman left Atari to found VPL Research, the first company to sell virtual reality goggles and wired gloves. In the late 1990s he worked on applications for Internet2, in the 2000s he was a visiting scholar at Silicon Graphics and several universities, and from 2006 he worked at Microsoft, as an Interdisciplinary Scientist at Microsoft Research from 2009. He has composed contemporary classical music, owns a large collection of rare instruments, and released the acoustic album Instruments of Change in 1994. Foreign Policy named him one of the top 100 Public Intellectuals in 2005 and TIME included him in its 2010 list of the 100 most influential people.