Word: lanier
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...calmly guided Houston through the oil bust and cleaned up the police force and reformed city government. But last week voters unceremoniously ejected Mayor Kathy Whitmire from office after 10 years. Land developer Bob Lanier and state representative Sylvester Turner placed first and second, respectively; they will meet in a runoff next month...
...Kathy Whitmire trailed wealthy developer Bob Lanier and state Rep. Sylvester Turner in her bid for a fifth term in Houston in a race in which the poor local economy was an issue. The two top vote getters would be forced into a runoff...
...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...
...does not sit well with the people who make a living creating the ultra-realistic computer graphics widely seen in TV ads, network news shows, science-fiction movies and theme-park rides. A computer-generated backdrop for a Hollywood film may take more than two years to create; Lanier claims he can make whole virtual-reality "worlds" in less than two hours. "Jaron Lanier has created a wave of revulsion in the industry," says the president of one computer-graphics firm. "He's promising something that will never be delivered...