ORGANIZATION
VPL Research
The first company to sell commercial virtual reality products — headsets, DataGloves, full-body tracking suits — founded by
Jaron Lanier in 1984 in a Palo Alto garage. VPL gave the technology industry the term 'virtual reality' and gave Lanier the pioneer's credentials that made his subsequent critique impossible to dismiss as outsider complaint.
VPL Research occupies a specific and important place in the history of computing. Founded in 1984 by
Jaron Lanier — a twenty-four-year-old without a college degree and with dreadlocks to his waist — the company built the first commercial systems that could translate human movement into digital space. The EyePhone head-mounted display. The DataGlove that tracked finger position. The DataSuit for full-body motion capture. The RB2 networked virtual reality systems. For a brief luminous period in the early 1990s, VPL's products appeared in films and magazine covers, were sold to NASA and the military, and embodied what computing's most ambitious future might look like. The company went bankrupt in 1990, its patents acquired by Sun Microsystems, its moment of cultural dominance passed. But the credentials it established for Lanier — inventor of commercial VR, coiner of the term, builder of the first systems —