Word: lanier
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...real center of attention is Jaron Lanier, 30, the programmer who coined the term virtual reality and co-founded VPL in 1985. A legendary eccentric in a field famous for its oddballs, he grew up in a New Mexico desert, dropped out of high school to take up music composition and eventually drifted into video games, earning a reputation as a prodigious hacker. Amiable and rotund, he sports shoulder-length dreadlocks that make him look more like a Rastafarian reggae singer than a computer scientist...
...Lanier is a bit surprised by the hoopla his brainchild has generated. He concedes that expectations have flown far ahead of today's primitive technology, but he is convinced that virtual reality will someday live up to its name. He dreams of users creating their own artificial environment as fast as they can describe it. Even if these worlds are sketched roughly on the screen, he claims, the mind will fill in the missing details. "The internal experience of reality is much more a product of your central nervous system than of the actual external world," he says. "That...