https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4RJetzDyOY&t=28m18s
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VPL_Research
https://www.pioneersofdigital.com/about-book/about-pioneers/...
>Here’s an excerpt from the Jaron Lanier chapter in the book [Pioneers of Digital]:
>“In the early 1990s, Lanier got a call from movie director Brett Leonard saying he’d got the film rights to Stephen King’s short story, ‘The Lawnmower Man’. Lanier remembers that Leonard told his reluctant celluloid subject that he’d leverage the King story option to get the project funded but then do a ‘weird science fiction biography of you and your company.’ All the director needed was some explanation of how virtual reality kit worked and some old prototype gear from the era that ended up actually being used in the film.
>Lanier’s entrepreneur character was played by then unknown actor Pierce Brosnan, and real life appears to have mirrored the outlandish plotline as Lanier claims ‘it turned out VPL was part of a justice department investigation later, on the French Intelligence Service using the investment arms of French companies to do industrial espionage on American start-ups in Silicon Valley’.
He got popular with press because he can give a great quote, hold an interesting conversation / PoV / interview and was accessible and very visible with the first generation of VR hype. VPL Research ended in bankruptcy circa 1991/92 with its patents eventually going to Sun Microsystems. After VPL - he worked on Tele-immersion at Internet 2 - doing remote telepresence over high bandwidth networks and also did some telepresence stuff with SGI. Since then he is probably better known by his books, industry commentary, press quotes (or music depending on your interests). However a bunch of the tools we use today (Occulus/Vive, visual programming in the likes of Unreal, telepresence robots etc) can be considered descendants of some of the stuff he helped pioneer or at least the ideas he helped plant for later generations of developers to run with.
Please see Don Hopkins note below for more history and correct product names :-)