Publication
Vintage (2018), 368 p.
Original publication date
2017-11-21
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Description
The Microsoft interdisciplinary scientist largely credited with popularizing virtual reality reflects on his lifelong relationship with technology, showing VR's ability to illuminate and amplify our understanding of our species and how the brain and body connect to the world. By the author of You Are Not a Gadget. --Publisher. "Through a mesmerizing look back over his life in technology, Jaron Lanier, the scientist who is said to have either coined or popularized the term virtual reality, exposes VR's ability to illuminate and amplify our understanding of our species and gives readers a new perspective on how the brain and body connect to the world. An inventive blend of autobiography, science writing, philosophy, and advice, Dawn of the New Everything tells the wild story of Lanier's personal and professional life as a scientist. Raised in the UFO territory of New Mexico, Jaron lived with his father in a geodesic dome they built together in the desert after the sudden death of his mother. Attending college at age fourteen, Lanier was immediately hooked on computers, and from then on his life became entwined with technology. He forged an unconventional career path that eventually led him to the early frontier days of Silicon \/alley, where he founded the first VR start-up. An intense and imaginative dreamer, he retained a fierce humanism that continues to guide his innovative work and thought. Understanding virtual reality as being both a scientific and cultural adventure, Lanier demonstrates it to be, in fact, one of the most humanistic settings for technology. In this illuminating book, he cautions against certain computational beliefs such as AI, even as he explains the dazzling possibilities of \/R and argues that it can make our lives richer and fuller."--Dust jacket flap.… (more)
User reviews
LibraryThing member gmicksmith
One of the biggest steps forward in computing is virtual reality. In this volume the author examines the tremendous impact that this development will have on the field. How this field will unfold is still unclear but the author provides his ruminations.
LibraryThing member Cherylk
I was very looking forward to reading this book. I have not gotten too much into virtual reality but it is something that intrigues me. Therefore I was very interested in what Mr. Lanier had to say as one of the first to experience virtual reality.
What I got was some history about his childhood.
What I got was some history about his childhood.
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Not that I did not find it interesting that he and his father lived in the desert for years. Yet, for the most part I really did not find that much interesting. The further that I read the more I started to get turned off. After getting a third of the way into the book and not finding myself looking forward to reading anymore, I put this book down. If it had been just about the history of virtual reality, without the memoir aspect, I may have stuck with this book longer. Show Less
LibraryThing member Tytania
Although I had devoured three other of Lanier's books, I originally wasn't going to get this one, because I'm not terribly interested in virtual reality. But having read a sample of his personal memoir, I was hooked enough to make the purchase. Lanier seems remarkably un-self-conscious about what
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an extraordinary upbringing he had. As a young teen, he was allowed by his single parent father to DESIGN their house. Which they then BUILT. And LIVED IN - I think his father was there till his old age. You have to see the picture and read the descriptions of this structure. Moving on, Lanier also downplays what an extraordinary polymath he is; his young adult years are full of wonder and interest in almost everything life throws his way. What an extraordinary individual! Alas, I'm still not very interested in virtual reality; and he dwells an awful lot on the his company in the 80s, the people and the physical surroundings, which really don't make as good a read as the multi-dome structure in the middle of the desert designed and built by a lunatic teenager. The appendices trod over territory familiar to those who've read his other books, but serve as excellent summaries of his positions on AI and social media, which endear him to me. Show Less
LibraryThing member Razinha
I'd requested an advance review copy of this book from LibraryThing back in 2017 and was selected, but for some reason never received it. So it sat in my unreviewed queue. I don't shotgun requests because I'm not interested in "free" books, rather I request books on topics I am interested in, and I
Not what I expected (and I had to remember why I requested it in the first place, to recall what my expectations actually were). Semi-meandering, Lanier weaves in his life with that of the early world of VR. Really, he offers definitions of VR as he goes along and relates the starts, stops, and evolution (up to 1992) of VR as he saw, led and experienced it. I think it a bit sad that while technology has vastly improved since the 1980s, VR is still seen primarily as visual. Better and better graphics and software, but still no real haptics. Anyway, an interesting read. BTW, he ends with 51 definitions.
Some highlighted highlights:
[on death, in this case, of his mother] "Therapists, daytime TV hosts, and social networks all counsel that we should talk. It’s a luxury when you can afford to do it. "
Interesting perspective. I find it is exceedingly rare that “talk” helps more than it hurts. But I find myself in a minority on that.
[On chance encounters] "Who are these strange creatures who walk among us? Today I would Google or Bing, but in those days one moved from mystery to mystery."
I like his writing.
"Becoming an adult does not mean a total loss of creative power. It just means you have to put up with an enormous amount of inconvenience."
Preach, brother!
"Exotic road stories are fun to tell and fun to hear, but they depend on not having had a deep stake. When you alight in a place, you must deal with people for real.
When you’re planted, you must also deal with yourself. "
[On Joseph Campbell] "Well, yeah. Anyway, Campbell—really great guy—has a theory I don’t really like much, that all human stories are variations on the same shared story."
Concur
[On his unique and groundbreaking game Moondust] "The music was algorithmic and pretty, with an echo and wetness, which was a trick in those days. The music was driven by the action, a first in gaming."
I had to look it up, Pretty cool.
[Jumping off point] Scott Rosenberg wrote a book that in part recounted my experience of dreaming in code, called, naturally, Dreaming in Code"
My notes of this type are usually "Find". In this case, I found it and read it in parallel with this one.
[memories] "If I’m not great at remembering events, faces, or sequences, how do I know my life? I remember experiences in terms of ideas; how a story I lived through illuminated a deeper question. My experiences become allegories."
Hmmm. I tend to discard names faster than other things, with experience details after, to make room for more, I suppose. This prompted me to stop and consider the perspective.
[more on memory] "My cognition is oddly ill-suited to the task of reconstructing meticulously accurate history. One reason is that I have a more than moderate case of prosopagnosia, or face blindness. I generally do not recognize people on sight.
[...]
I’d rather convey the authentic incompleteness of my memory. The events happened, but the cast is uncredited."
I can definitely relate
[on programming] "Programming was an Eden. Today it’s a crowded bureaucracy; code is all about reconciling what you want to do with endless layers of preexisting structures in the Cloud. "
It used to be an individual thing. Even if you worked on someone else’s code, it became yours when you were done. And it stood alone.
[Jumping off point] "Fred Brooks had long ago observed, in his classic book The Mythical Man-Month "
Find
[On musical instruments, expression, and computers] "Not only are instruments the best haptic interfaces yet invented, they are the best interfaces of any kind, if what we care about is the potential for mastery and expressiveness. Instruments show what’s possible; how far computer science must go before we can call it even a beginning."
[On VR] "Most people lose touch with the thrill of VR after the initial novelty if they can’t interact and have an impact on the virtual world."
Seems quite true.
[Jumping off point] "When I was a kid we had 78s of Uday Shankar and other amazing non-Western musicians. In the LP era I was obsessed with releases on the Nonesuch label: gamelan, Tibetan ritual, drumming from Ghana and Senegal, gagaku court music, and on and on."
Okay, I have some genres and music to find.
[Me] He uses words like this a lot: spirit, ghost
[On Timothy Leary...yes, that Timothy Leary] "Tim was always ringed by circles of adoring hippie kids, but he also adored being embedded in the world of Hollywood glamor. He became a great friend with whom I disagreed. It was good practice for me, as I would grow to have more of those over time"
Great friend with whom I disagreed. Everybody needs one of those. I need one. (I have a great friend, but we agree much much more than not.
[on a VR demo developed for a drug company to promote Prozac to psychiatrists] "What I had not foreseen is that I’d spend exhausting, bizarre days at the annual psychiatrists’ convention putting the world’s top shrinks through demos in which they shrank. The situation was more surreal than even VR ought to be; in those days half of them looked like Freud impostors."
Oops, my fingers slipped and keyed in this note to myself: "Freud was an imposter "
[on the failure to anticipate the internet properly] "Much later on, companies like Google and Facebook would make hundreds of billions of dollars for the service of partially mapping what should have been mapped from the start."
[on email] In the early days of the popularization of the Internet, there was a debate about whether to make online digital experiences seem casual and weightless or whether to make them feel serious, with costs and consequences. For instance, early luminaries including Esther Dyson and Marvin Minsky advocated micropostage for email. If people had to pay for email, even if only a tiny fraction of a penny, big-time spammers would be discouraged. Meanwhile email would be appreciated for what it is, a big human project that costs a lot.
Something too late to think about.
[more on the internet] "Reasonable people started to change through online experience, and for the worse.
[...]
A new medium was bringing out the worst in a tiny minority of people, but that minority was in your face."
How true.
[more on that "worst"] "For years, Gamergate was only a plague within digital culture, but by 2016 its legacy was influencing elections, particularly the one in the United States. Gamergate turned out to be a prototype, rehearsal, and launching pad for the alt-right."
[futurism] "Don’t make the mistake of treating this book as a conservative or traditionalist reaction against trendy futurism. I’ll usually out-futurize other futurists in futurism cutting contests."
I recently read a book on futurism. He's right.
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curate those requests. If I win, cool. If not, I try to get to the book later after it is published because something about it interested me. In this case, it was virtual reality. I did some work at UConn back in 1982 that was cutting edge VR, but I didn't realize it at the time, nor until many years later. I wrote the code that translated a camera trace of an outline of a person standing in front of a silver screen (blue, and then green was not invented yet, I guess) into a stick figure display. Raise your arm, the stick figure did, too. Yeah. The professor and his grad assistant, who was a friend that recruited me, loved what I did and wanted me to do more. But I was too cool for that. "Cool" being a kind term for "young and stupid". Anyway, a lifetime later, I finally read Lanier's memoir-ish semi-history, five years after never receiving my review copy. Not what I expected (and I had to remember why I requested it in the first place, to recall what my expectations actually were). Semi-meandering, Lanier weaves in his life with that of the early world of VR. Really, he offers definitions of VR as he goes along and relates the starts, stops, and evolution (up to 1992) of VR as he saw, led and experienced it. I think it a bit sad that while technology has vastly improved since the 1980s, VR is still seen primarily as visual. Better and better graphics and software, but still no real haptics. Anyway, an interesting read. BTW, he ends with 51 definitions.
Some highlighted highlights:
[on death, in this case, of his mother] "Therapists, daytime TV hosts, and social networks all counsel that we should talk. It’s a luxury when you can afford to do it. "
Interesting perspective. I find it is exceedingly rare that “talk” helps more than it hurts. But I find myself in a minority on that.
[On chance encounters] "Who are these strange creatures who walk among us? Today I would Google or Bing, but in those days one moved from mystery to mystery."
I like his writing.
"Becoming an adult does not mean a total loss of creative power. It just means you have to put up with an enormous amount of inconvenience."
Preach, brother!
"Exotic road stories are fun to tell and fun to hear, but they depend on not having had a deep stake. When you alight in a place, you must deal with people for real.
When you’re planted, you must also deal with yourself. "
[On Joseph Campbell] "Well, yeah. Anyway, Campbell—really great guy—has a theory I don’t really like much, that all human stories are variations on the same shared story."
Concur
[On his unique and groundbreaking game Moondust] "The music was algorithmic and pretty, with an echo and wetness, which was a trick in those days. The music was driven by the action, a first in gaming."
I had to look it up, Pretty cool.
[Jumping off point] Scott Rosenberg wrote a book that in part recounted my experience of dreaming in code, called, naturally, Dreaming in Code"
My notes of this type are usually "Find". In this case, I found it and read it in parallel with this one.
[memories] "If I’m not great at remembering events, faces, or sequences, how do I know my life? I remember experiences in terms of ideas; how a story I lived through illuminated a deeper question. My experiences become allegories."
Hmmm. I tend to discard names faster than other things, with experience details after, to make room for more, I suppose. This prompted me to stop and consider the perspective.
[more on memory] "My cognition is oddly ill-suited to the task of reconstructing meticulously accurate history. One reason is that I have a more than moderate case of prosopagnosia, or face blindness. I generally do not recognize people on sight.
[...]
I’d rather convey the authentic incompleteness of my memory. The events happened, but the cast is uncredited."
I can definitely relate
[on programming] "Programming was an Eden. Today it’s a crowded bureaucracy; code is all about reconciling what you want to do with endless layers of preexisting structures in the Cloud. "
It used to be an individual thing. Even if you worked on someone else’s code, it became yours when you were done. And it stood alone.
[Jumping off point] "Fred Brooks had long ago observed, in his classic book The Mythical Man-Month "
Find
[On musical instruments, expression, and computers] "Not only are instruments the best haptic interfaces yet invented, they are the best interfaces of any kind, if what we care about is the potential for mastery and expressiveness. Instruments show what’s possible; how far computer science must go before we can call it even a beginning."
[On VR] "Most people lose touch with the thrill of VR after the initial novelty if they can’t interact and have an impact on the virtual world."
Seems quite true.
[Jumping off point] "When I was a kid we had 78s of Uday Shankar and other amazing non-Western musicians. In the LP era I was obsessed with releases on the Nonesuch label: gamelan, Tibetan ritual, drumming from Ghana and Senegal, gagaku court music, and on and on."
Okay, I have some genres and music to find.
[Me] He uses words like this a lot: spirit, ghost
[On Timothy Leary...yes, that Timothy Leary] "Tim was always ringed by circles of adoring hippie kids, but he also adored being embedded in the world of Hollywood glamor. He became a great friend with whom I disagreed. It was good practice for me, as I would grow to have more of those over time"
Great friend with whom I disagreed. Everybody needs one of those. I need one. (I have a great friend, but we agree much much more than not.
[on a VR demo developed for a drug company to promote Prozac to psychiatrists] "What I had not foreseen is that I’d spend exhausting, bizarre days at the annual psychiatrists’ convention putting the world’s top shrinks through demos in which they shrank. The situation was more surreal than even VR ought to be; in those days half of them looked like Freud impostors."
Oops, my fingers slipped and keyed in this note to myself: "Freud was an imposter "
[on the failure to anticipate the internet properly] "Much later on, companies like Google and Facebook would make hundreds of billions of dollars for the service of partially mapping what should have been mapped from the start."
[on email] In the early days of the popularization of the Internet, there was a debate about whether to make online digital experiences seem casual and weightless or whether to make them feel serious, with costs and consequences. For instance, early luminaries including Esther Dyson and Marvin Minsky advocated micropostage for email. If people had to pay for email, even if only a tiny fraction of a penny, big-time spammers would be discouraged. Meanwhile email would be appreciated for what it is, a big human project that costs a lot.
Something too late to think about.
[more on the internet] "Reasonable people started to change through online experience, and for the worse.
[...]
A new medium was bringing out the worst in a tiny minority of people, but that minority was in your face."
How true.
[more on that "worst"] "For years, Gamergate was only a plague within digital culture, but by 2016 its legacy was influencing elections, particularly the one in the United States. Gamergate turned out to be a prototype, rehearsal, and launching pad for the alt-right."
[futurism] "Don’t make the mistake of treating this book as a conservative or traditionalist reaction against trendy futurism. I’ll usually out-futurize other futurists in futurism cutting contests."
I recently read a book on futurism. He's right.
Show Less
LibraryThing member asbooks
Good writing. Instantly engaged. I wasn't sure I'd be that interested in the subject but the feel and rhythm of the author moves you along.
Language
Original language
English
ISBN
9781784701536
Physical description
368 p.; 7.8 inches
Pages
368