Meet the father of virtual reality Jaron Lanier circa 1993
He coined the phrase 'virtual reality,' developed the DataGlove, the EyePhones on your head-mounted displays, and DataSuits, which makes sensual immersion possible. He also plays over 300 instruments.
By Anthony Perkins
From May 1993 issue of Red Herring (the first issue!)
Timothy Leary calls virtual reality "Electronic LSD." Others look to it to provide the ultimate experience in safe-sex"virtual sex." Some fear it will fall into the hands of the military-industrial complex and go awry, as in the Stephen King movie Lawnmower Man. Yet others dismiss it as nothing more than science fiction, a cyberpunk fantasy about a world that will never happen, no more feasible than the holodeck in Star Trek. Who is right? None of the above, at least not yet.
The fact is, virtual reality (VR) is already with us, but not in any grandiose form. VR can not yet bring your favorite fantasy to life, but it is being used to solve real problems. Pilots can now take their first test flights in realistic flight simulators, and architects can test their designs by walking through a simulated building. VR even has applications in surgery—doctors use it to perform minimally invasive operations. In many applications, VR saves a considerable amount of time and money—in some cases by letting designers fine-tune their plans before any real materials are committed, in others by letting professionals hone their skills before they take the wheel of a multi-million dollar machine.
One of VR's pioneers and chief spokesmen is Jaron Lanier. Variously described as "amiable, round, and dreadlocked....a Rastafarian hobbit," "the wizard of odd," "Bigfoot," "a new age Jabba the Hut," and more recently by Business Week, as "an enigma" and "a Guru without a portfolio," Lanier epitomizes the kind of alternative personality required to pursue a field as unconventional as VR.
Lanier comes by his pursuits naturally. He grew up in a remote corner of New Mexico in a geodesic-domed house. His mother was a concert pianist; his father a science writer. Bored with school, Lanier dropped out to pursue music; but later, at age 14, he took advanced math courses at New Mexico State. His interest in math led him to computers, which in turn led him to Silicon Valley. In 1984, Lanier founded his first VR company, VPL (Visual Programming Language) Research, Inc. VPL developed many of the key components of VR, including the DataGlove, the EyePhones that go into the latest head-mounted displays (HMD's), and DataSuits, which make possible a more complete sensual immersion into VR. VPL was in fact the first off-the-shelf vendor of VR components. By 1991, it had annual sales of $6 million.
At the same time, however, VPL was becoming increasingly indebted to a French company, Thomson CSF, originally only a minority investor in the project. By July 1992, VPL owed Thomson $1.6 million -- the French company closed in, seized VPL's patents, and ousted Lanier. But this turn of events has not phased Lanier. He's now Chief Technical Officer of a new VR concern, Domain Simulations, a software company based in Sausalito, CA.
We interviewed Lanier in his unmarked bungalow in Sausalito, close to the offices of Domain Simulations. His house sits atop a quiet hill overlooking the San Francisco Bay. In this scenic and remote setting, Lanier works away on several new virtual reality projects. Even at night, his answering machine is constantly working—it's not unusual for Lanier to get 40 to 50 calls in a single evening.
Lanier's one-room cottage is filled with the implements of his work and play. In one corner are some 300 musical instruments from around the world, all of them played by Lanier. The walls are filled with his artwork, dreamscapes painted in bright colors, shades of surrealism showing the influence of his favorite artist, Hieronymous Bosch. A tall bookcase in the corner is crammed with books on art, music, business, interpersonal communication, and social commentary by favorite authors such as Timothy Leary and Marshall McLuhan.
We also found Lanier's house littered with computer equipment -- CPUs, monitors, scanners and switch boxes. The collection includes an audio station with a piano keyboard and 8-track mixer. Wires of all sorts criss-cross the floor. Yet there are no software packages, manuals or technical guides lying around. In fact, aside from an outline and a few sketches sitting on his drafting table, there are no papers in sight. The only TV in the room is used to play videotapes of virtual reality products -- there is no cable or antenna hookup. The furniture is minimal -- we sat on piano benches during the interview. In our several hours of discussion with Lanier, he impressed us with his thoughtful analysis of his business experiences and the industry he created.
Perkins: You coined the term "virtual reality." What does it mean to you?
Lanier: Oh that question. Well, the term "virtual reality" is applied to just about everything. There are clothing stores called Virtual Reality and rock bands and for all I know rubber kitchen items. If I was raising money from you, it means one thing. If you're an academic, it means something else. Ultimately it's the marketing term; general purpose simulation technology. It also forms a rubric over a community of researchers and entrepreneurs very much as other terms like biotechnology or the famous horror story of artificial intelligence. What happens is that you have to create a certain shared set of philosophies and goals in a community in order for them to work together, and virtual reality vaguely defines such a community.
Perkins: What has been your contribution to VR?
Lanier: In terms of the technology, probably the most important thing I did was network head mounted displays together to create a shared virtual place. Nobody had done that before. Prior to my work, VR was considered a user interface and after my work it was considered a communication tool.
Perkins: Tell us about your first company, VPL. How did you go about raising money for it?
Lanier: In the beginning I really didn't intend to start a company. After Scientific American published an article I wrote about some research I was working on, people just started calling me to see if they could invest, so VPL was born. The first serious attempt to make money was in 1988 which was based on the realization that VPL was truly becoming a manufacturing company and was going to need working capital.
Perkins: What was the opportunity for potential investors?
Lanier: The opportunity was to do a good enough job at making virtual reality hardware that we would cause the market to grow faster than it otherwise would have. We would have a very large share of that market; so that rather than entering a competitive market later we could define a market of which we were the top. It could have happened but it didn't.
Perkins: And why didn't it?
Lanier: I think ultimately there were a few reasons for that. One is that the company failed to bring in the type of management that it needed early enough. That was the first problem. Now it's not that we didn't talk about management, we simply failed to hire somebody who was really qualified until too late in the game.
Perkins: What type of person did you need?
Lanier: It's not just a single person that we should have hired. Manufacturing was a big issue and quality control was a big issue; internal management of a growing number of somewhat eccentric creative technical people was an issue, customer communication was an issue -- but more important than any of those was just having organizational coherence and I didn't provide that. I'm not good at that and the other candidates from the organization weren't either.
There were also very serious problems on the investor side. We had an investment group, Thomson CSF, which is a frequent minority investor in the valley but rarely involved as a lead investor the way it was in VPL. The problem is that they're ultimately run by a big French bureaucracy on the other side of the planet. If you know the French and you know bureaucracy, you can imagine what a French bureaucracy is. They weren't able to make coherent decisions. In one board meeting they would take one position very strongly on, say, which product plan should be emphasized, and then at the next meeting they would reverse the decision without explanation. It was very clear there was some process going on back in Paris that was filtering down at this end, but we never could really understand the process itself.
Perkins: At some point you weren't meeting your projections and you needed more cash. What happened then?
Lanier: I wanted to raise money; we had to raise money and initially Thomson was simply opposed to it for reasons that I never understood. Either through incompetence or intent, Thompson blocked attempts to raise money. There were a lot of sincere investors and VPL people who put up initial money or put money in escrow, and we just kept on failing to close deals. The reason the deals fell through, I think, was really because of the board and particularly Thomson being unconstructive in managing the process.
Perkins: Is there any particular reason for this?
Lanier: I don't know; I've certainly speculated a lot. What you have in Thomson is an example of why government shouldn't run big companies, and it's really a terrible mismatch to have that kind of organization, which is the ultimate anti-entrepreneurial formation, as a lead investor in a very challenging young entrepreneurial company. That was a major mismatch, a very serious one.
Perkins: How did the mismatch play itself out?
Lanier: The key events were that, first of all, the initial investment that was made by Thomson had preferences attached to it that put them in the position to block further investment -- intended for anti-dilution purposes. I think that their use of the preferences was very unusual. They seemed to simply never be able to come to terms with new investors and in some cases they would insist that their own attorney handle the negotiations, and their attorney would put in terms favoring the other side that weren't requested; and that would submarine the whole negotiation. This went on and on; there were a series of incidents like that. There was sort of a rationing effect where each time an investment deal would not come through they would sort of say, "Tisk tisk, why can't you guys raise money?"
Another thing that happened was the creation of an institution called the financial committee, which took all power away from the board as part of the conditions of one of the bridge loans. The financial committee had the power to hire, fire, approve contracts, budgets, and on and on. All expenditures were under the auspices of the financial committee, which Thomson controlled completely. Thomson essentially took over the board, even though they were only a minority shareholder. They began to micro manage the company, and had people in the company on a daily basis -- one managing finance and the other working on patents and technology. That situation was very difficult. During the same time, VPL's product quality started to decline, at first a little and then I think very seriously.
Perkins: What contributed to the decline?
Lanier: Initially the company was run by entrepreneurs who might have been a little out of control, and I was always hoping to get better management into the company. But then there was this transition to being run by a huge bureaucracy. There was one guy in charge of manufacturing, a Thomson favorite, and there were a couple of remarkable things about him. One is that he refused to even try the products and never did. He never actually experienced a virtual reality demo. And this in my opinion made it impossible for him to assess the product. He was Mr. Specification. You have to work as much as you can with statistics and math and objective information, but then you also have to bring in the touchy feely side, and you have to love the product and care about it and get everybody involved with it.
Perkins: So what happened in the end?
Lanier: What happened was one morning a Thomson representative stated that a new CEO be hired and that the old one had to go that day without any explanation or notice. The way they told me was loud enough to penetrate the glass wall of the conference room; so that the rest of the company became informed of it. I got threats of resignation from the entire technical and marketing staff. That became a sort of standoff which was one of the events that led to the conclusion of VPL as we knew it. At any rate, in late November 1992 the entire marketing and technical staff, the creative staff and the management left, because there was absolutely no hope. It was like a game of chicken -- there was nothing to be won. Thomson wasn't backing down and yet there was no way out, so it was a check mate.
Perkins: So how do you feel about being out of VPL?
Lanier: You know, I started an industry and I've gotten an education that perhaps took twice as long as an MBA but is also probably twice as good. So I feel good about it. Although, I think there's a kind of schizophrenia about exactly what capitalism is in Silicon Valley. On the one hand there's a sort of belief in extreme winners and losers so that either you make a billion dollars or else you're crud. And of course any market that functions only between those extremes is very unhealthy. What I hope people understand the market to be is a friendly, reasonable place where people treat each other well whether you succeed or fail at any given stage.
Perkins: What did you learn?
Lanier: The single most important and the single hardest thing to do is pair up with the right people. That's true especially with partners and top executives, but it's also true for every single employee. Another lesson is that there's irrational motivations at the basis of every great achievement and you can't pretend that those aren't there. So when you're selling the product or you're selling yourself or when you're designing the business or motivating a team, you have to accept that there's a type of madness that takes hold that's part of the process of achieving things. What I really notice in start-up companies is that the well planned ones, the really rational ones, often don't go very far. It's the ones that are a little bit mad, that have this intense belief in what they're doing, this intense caring that isn't limited to financial motivation -- those are the ones that succeed. Everybody in Silicon Valley has seen it again and again.
Perkins: At one point Thomson assigned your patents as collateral. What are those patents worth today?
Lanier: There's a pretty good patent that covers gloves for use in virtual reality and clearly a lot of virtual reality systems don't use gloves. That patent is already licensed around in so many markets and so many companies that I think Thomson might make some money from it. But the way the patent system works is kind of strange; it's not based entirely on the merit of the patent but it's often based on how aggressively the patent is managed by its owners. Based on what I've seen from Thomson, the value of the patents is certainly lowering.
Perkins: Give us your analysis of VR as an industry.
Lanier: Right now there is a lot of attention paid to the extreme high end and the extreme low end. At the low end, for instance, there's a Sega product coming out this year, in which I was a major participant before I left VPL, called Virtua. And then you see a lot of attention to the high end for military simulators or something like that. In the middle there's a hole. This is a problem on the hardware side. Then on the software side you have to engage in a very ambitious program. You have to build something that's sort of a real-time authoring operating system that can function in a bunch of different areas at once and includes graphics and physical dynamics. If you look at the scope of that software, it's pretty large; and what you see among the small virtual reality companies that are swimming in VPL's wake, is that they are all kind of groping and making many of the same mistakes that VPL did.
Perkins: So where do you see things going from here?
Lanier: One company can't do it all. One scenario is that somehow, magically, all the little companies function together and support each other and there's some kind of symbiosis among them and you start seeing the products that really could exist. There's no reason from a technological point of view that you couldn't have, say, a $10,000 product attached to a $10,000 SGI in a year or two from now that provided a spectacular experiential virtual world that was easy to program and would be immensely useful for data visualization. That's a do-able project. However, if you look at the money you can make selling those and the size of the market, that market by itself -- that niche -- isn't enough. So with the exception of medicine perhaps, none of the application niches are large enough to drive the market. There's your dilemma. A second scenario is more likely. And that is that the whole thing is going to be chaotic and crazed for maybe five or seven years until finally the market demand is so great that the products burst through the chaos. So which will it be? One of the reasons I started VPL and tried to build a generalized company was to try to promote the first scenario and I still would like to; I'd like to find a way to do that but it's pretty tough.
Perkins:VPL was reported last to have $6 million in sales, is that the largest virtual reality company?
Lanier: Yeah.
Perkins: Is there an opportunity today to grow a VR company larger than $6 million in sales?
Lanier: There isn't yet. I would suspect that the world of virtual reality is growing fast enough so that in a fairly short time some of the various companies might have larger sales than VPL did. But they still are going to be very niche oriented; whereas VPL was able to be very general. That particular role will be very difficult for any company to achieve again. That's one of the reasons it was so bad for the whole industry that VPL wasn't more successful. Not so much that VPL would have dominated, but it would have created more coherence than there is now. They need to have somebody who can blaze a trail through a market, whether or not they are going to dominate it later. It just avoids confusion. VPL had the potential to play that role, but it didn't work out that way.
Perkins: So where does that leave the industry?
Lanier: Well you can think of it as two axes. One axis has all the different scattered technologies you need to make a VR system -- all the sensors, the displays, the software, the special purpose computers, the special communications capabilities and on and on and on. Another axis has all of the niches where there are real markets. Now if you look at virtual reality today, what you see is that none of the markets is large enough to support development of the full array of the technologies that need to be developed. If you look at the graph you might say, "Wow! Look at all these users -- it's a great business!" But then you start to strategize on how you are going to make this business happen. Well, you need to fill in all the pieces on the technology axis. But in order to do that, you need to pay for it by selling things to the markets on the other axis. But the markets are a bunch of little villages without a big city of users. So the question is: "How do you build the full array of technologies in this very competitive environment where you have companies that specialize in these little market niches and never have enough resources to develop all the necessary technologies. That's why there's a chaotic situation right now.
Perkins: So will there be a standards fight like there is in the software industry?
Lanier: The standards fight hasn't started yet and that's probably the greatest strength that VR has right now. Obviously VR has the potential to go the route of the so-called multimedia market which would be devastating and would cause it to be delayed by perhaps a decade, just as multimedia has been. I'm very much hoping that virtual reality avoids that. What I would like to see is a more rational behavior on the part of the virtual reality community than has existed in multimedia and a recognition that without unity on the software standards issue the entire field will be stilted. I've been bringing up these issues with a variety of groups, including the National Academy of Science. There are areas of potential agreement that could be worked out, and I'm trying to network and accomplish that. I think I might have enough clout individually to be able to influence it. Especially since right now I don't have a portfolio so I can be unbiased.
Perkins: Given this chaotic situation, when do you think virtual reality will reach the mainstream?
Lanier: There's a lot of factors that can influence this and the overall economy is probably the single biggest one. If Sega gets its act together this year, we're going to have the first toy head-mounted display in homes, just as we had a lot of gloves in homes a few years ago. And in terms of a real VR system, meaning something that has the flexibility to really manage a lot of applications, I think around the turn of the century something like that will start to hit the home. As far as acceptance in areas of work, I expect training, medicine and construction to be the three that happen first. By training, I mean training industrial and maintenance workers.
Perkins: What about entertainment?
Lanier: I think it's an interesting market. I know the entertainment industry quite well because I've been involved in a virtual reality theater project for some years. There's a number of different ventures that are all approaching the same market in a somewhat similar way and they include Battle Tech and its offshoots; there's also the IWERKS company and there's Tim Disney's new venture.
Perkins: What do you think about Battle Tech centers? They've already been called the Chuck E. Cheeses of the nineties.
Lanier: I'm much more polite than that about other people's work but I still think that that's a very valid comparison. They might find some success; I think they have a pretty good chance. I think they're making a little bit of a demographic mistake in that there's an obsession in the entertainment industry with the young adult on the theory that this is the person that has the disposable income and the time and the desire to blow money. I think there's some truth to that. Younger people tend to understand technology better than the previous generation. On the other hand, they're creating a facility that is so specialized for that market that it's actually going to be vulnerable, as all things in that market are, to suddenly becoming uncool the year after it was cool. That's a perfectly acceptable risk if you're marketing a movie because you only expect it to have a short life span, but if you're building buildings then I think that's a problem. The approach that we've tried to take in our theater project is to create the next generation of theaters that I think are going to replace the movie theater or at least replace a lot of movie theaters. The idea is to have a facility that in itself has no content. It's just a place that runs absolutely stunning shared simulation experiences (voomies) that change all the time. That's where it's like movies -- movies they come through town and some of them bomb and some of them sing but they'll all be different and they'll all be oriented towards different markets.
Lanier: Who are you working with in the voomie business?
Perkins: There's a company based in Los Angeles called Quanta Communications which is now managing the development of the voomie business. There's some complexity to that because it started out under the auspices of a joint venture between VPL and MCA and now it's transferred into an independent company. They have some of the original people who've always been involved with it and there's also some new people; and it's plowing ahead. It's a very ambitious project. We are truly creating the theater of the next century and it's a very long term approach and as I say we're trying to keep risks to a minimum by taking a very general approach towards the audience and towards the material.
Perkins: So are you part owner?
Lanier: I'm not going to comment on that.
Perkins: So what other business enterprises are you involved in?
Lanier: In addition to Quanta, I'm involved in Medical Media Systems, which is surgery. I'm also involved in Domain, which is specifically software. I'm doing some research that's basic science; it's not commercial. I'm trying to do some public service; I'm doing some teaching. And I'm trying to be an advocate for the industry in Washington.
Perkins: Earlier you described the two axes -- the enabling technologies and market niches. Which enabling technologies do you think need to come first?
Lanier: There's a lot of them and what's remarkable is here we are in 1993, and we've been selling VR systems since '89. There're hundreds of labs around the world and thousands of users, millions of conferences, millions of spin-offs and bullshit artists and you have all this stuff and you still can't buy a head-mounted display that just shows you a sharp, color picture. So we're dealing with something that is still nascent in a sense. You still can't buy a software development tool that will let you build a whole virtual environment that includes interactive elements. The basic rundown would include special purpose computer resources for computation of real time physical simulations: graphics resources such as Sil by Silicon Graphics but bundled in a more focused way; optical systems that are better; tracking systems that are better; displays that are better; sensors that are better; force feedback systems that are mass produceable and generalizable enough to be used in a variety of applications and it goes on and on. I'm just scratching the surface.
Perkins: Finally, we'd like to touch on the social implications of VR. In one interview, you criticized TV as a manipulative tool. Couldn't VR be used the same way?
Lanier: Of course -- that's part of the story of communication. Surely every venture capitalist knows that they are being emotionally manipulated every time they make an investment. And they love it, they love the attention. Communication involves many unpleasant things. You can find examples of the most heinous works of communication, for example, Mein Kampf. What you have to do is look at it with a broad brush and recognize that the potential outweighs the danger. There's a very interesting thing about communication. There's a sort of faith in it -- it's a kind of sweetness. When you invent a new media technology you're displaying a faith that people are ultimately good.
—Anthony Perkins is Founder, CEO, Editor-in-Chief and The Red Herring.
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