Considered a founder of the field of virtual reality,[2] Lanier and Thomas G. Zimmerman left Atari in 1985 to found VPL Research, Inc., the first company to sell VR goggles[broken anchor] and wired gloves.

He lived in tents for an extended period with his father before embarking on a seven-year project to build a geodesic dome home that he helped design.

At NMSU, he took graduate-level courses; he received a grant from the National Science Foundation to study mathematical notation, which led him to learn computer programming.

The free time enabled him to concentrate on his own projects, including VPL, a "post-symbolic" visual programming language.

Along with Zimmerman, Lanier founded VPL Research, focusing on commercializing virtual reality technologies; the company prospered for a while, but filed for bankruptcy in 1990.

[21] In "One-Half a Manifesto", Lanier criticizes the claims made by writers such as Ray Kurzweil, and opposes the prospect of so-called "cybernetic totalism", which is "a cataclysm brought on when computers become ultra-intelligent masters of matter and life.

In his April 2006 Discover magazine column, he writes about cephalopods (i.e., the various species of octopus, squid, and related molluscs), many of which are able to morph their bodies, including changing the pigmentation and texture of their skin, as well as forming complex shape imitations with their limbs.

In his online essay "Digital Maoism: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism", in Edge magazine in May 2006, Lanier criticized the sometimes-claimed omniscience of collective wisdom (including examples such as the Wikipedia article about him, which he said recurrently exaggerates his film directing work), describing it as "digital Maoism".

Lanier also argues that there are limitations to certain aspects of the open source and content movement in that they lack the ability to create anything truly new and innovative.

In another example, Lanier further accuses Web 2.0 of making search engines lazy, destroying the potential of innovative websites such as Thinkquest, and hampering the communication of ideas such as mathematics to a wider audience.

Lanier further argues that the open source approach has destroyed opportunities for the middle class to finance content creation, and results in the concentration of wealth in a few individuals—"the lords of the clouds"—people who, more by virtue of luck rather than true innovation, manage to insert themselves as content concentrators at strategic times and locations in the cloud.

By convincing users to give away valuable information about themselves in exchange for free services, firms can accrue large amounts of data at virtually no cost.

The people behind the source translations receive no payment for their work, while Google profits from increased ad visibility as a powerful Siren Server.

[30] As a solution to these problems, Lanier puts forth an alternative structure to the web based on Ted Nelson's Project Xanadu.

He proposes a two-way linking system that would point to the source of any piece of information, creating an economy of micropayments that compensates people for original material they post to the web.

Lanier cites modern VR's rich résumé beyond gaming and entertainment: it has been used to treat war veterans overcoming PTSD; by doctors to perform intricate surgeries; by paraplegics wanting to feel the sense of flight; and as a mechanism to prototype almost every vehicle fabricated in the last two decades.

We see the mundanity, the avarice, the ugliness, the perversity, the loneliness, the love, the inspiration, the serendipity, and the tenderness that manifest in humanity.

Lanier has performed with artists as diverse as Philip Glass, Ornette Coleman, George Clinton, Vernon Reid, Terry Riley, Duncan Sheik, Pauline Oliveros, and Stanley Jordan.

Continental Harmony was a PBS special that documented the development and premiere of "The Navigator Tree"[36] won a CINE Golden Eagle Award.

[38] The album has been described by Stephen Hill, on "The Crane Flies West 2" (episode 357) of Hearts of Space, as a Western exploration of Asian musical traditions.

[39] Lanier is currently working on a book, Technology and the Future of the Human Soul, and a music album, Proof of Consciousness, in collaboration with Mark Deutsch.

Lanier has also pioneered the use of Virtual Reality in musical stage performance with his band Chromatophoria, which has toured around the world as a headline act in venues such as the Montreux Jazz Festival.

In October 2010, Lanier collaborated with Rollins College and John V. Sinclair's Bach Festival Choir and Orchestra [41] for his Worldwide Premiere of "Symphony for Amelia".

Lanier contributed the afterword to Sound Unbound: Sampling Digital Music and Culture (MIT Press, 2008) edited by Paul D. Miller, a.k.a.

[46] In 1997, he was a founding member of the 'National Tele-Immersion Initiative',[47] an effort devoted to using computer technology to give people who are separated by great distances the illusion that they are physically together.

[55] He appeared on ABC's The View during the final seven minutes of the show on 19 June 2018, promoting his book Ten Arguments For Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now.

[57] Lanier appeared on the Lex Fridman podcast on September 6, 2021 to talk about his views on AI, social media, VR and the future of humanity.