I got to know Jaron Lanier a little bit in the 1990s, when Virtual Reality was becoming a craze. Jaron was one of the very first people to talk about VR—see his April, 2001, Scientific American article, "Virtually There." By the mid 1990s, his company VPL Research was making one of the first "Data Glove" devices, and the Advanced Technology group at Autodesk was using these gloves for their so-called Cyberspace project.

I was working at Autodesk at this time, writing some demos for the C...