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  • Published: 17 September 2018
  • ISBN: 9781784701536
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 368
  • RRP: $29.99

Dawn of the New Everything

A Journey Through Virtual Reality




‘The father of Virtual Reality … a high-tech genius’ (Sunday Times) explains why virtual reality presents the ultimate test for humanity

Named a Best Book of the Year by the Economist, Wall Street Journal & Vox
‘The father of virtual reality’ (Sunday Times) explains why virtual reality presents the ultimate test for humanity.

‘Essential reading, not just for VR-watchers but for anyone interested in how society came to be how it is, and what it might yet become’ Economist
Welcome to a mind-expanding, life-enhancing, world-changing adventure.

Virtual reality has long been one of the dominant clichés of science fiction. Now virtual reality is a reality: from the startling beauty of lifelike video games to the place where war veterans overcome PTSD, surgeries are trialled, and aircraft and cities are designed. VR is, in fact now, the most effective device ever invented for researching what a human being actually is – and how we think and feel.

More than thirty years ago, legendary computer scientist, visionary and artist Jaron Lanier pioneered its invention. Here he blends scientific investigation, philosophical thought experiment and his memoir of a life lived at the centre of digital innovation to explain what VR really is: the science of comprehensive illusion; the extension of the intimate magic of earliest childhood into adulthood; a hint of what life would be like without any limits.

We are standing on the threshold of an entirely new realm of human creativity, expression, communication and experience, and as we use VR to test our relationship with reality, it may test us in return.

Vivid and absolutely extraordinary’ Evening Standard

  • Published: 17 September 2018
  • ISBN: 9781784701536
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 368
  • RRP: $29.99

About the author

Jaron Lanier

Jaron Lanier is one of the most celebrated pioneers of digital innovation in the world, and also one of the earliest and most prescient critics of its current trajectory. His previous books include the international bestsellers Who Owns the Future? and You Are Not a Gadget, both chosen as best books of the year by the New York Times, and most recently Dawn of the New Everything: A Journey Through Virtual Reality, chosen as a best book of the year by the Wall Street Journal, The Economist and Vox. He was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time, one of the 100 top public intellectuals by Foreign Policy, and one of the top 50 World Thinkers by Prospect.

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Praise for Dawn of the New Everything

A terrific book by a supremely intelligent guy ... vivid and absolutely extraordinary

Evening Standard

A deeply human, highly personal and beautifully told story

Dave Eggers

It's entirely unexpected and disarming to read about these fascinating ideas about technology and the future from such a personal, unabashedly subjective point of view. Lanier has thoroughly convinced me that Virtual Reality is the beginning of an enormous paradigm shift in the way humans relate and communicate

Joseph Gordon-Levitt

Essential reading, not just for VR-watchers but for anyone interested in how society came to be how it is, and what it might yet become

Economist

Lanier beautifully describes his fascination with VR as the technology that 'highlights the existence of your subjective experience. It proves you are real'

Nature

Fascinating as life itself … a modern history of the industry that changed the world

Hugo Rifkind, The Times

Lanier is a visionary who sees a world suffused with the possibility of good ... As with William Blake, you might first be repelled by the strangeness of it all, the sense of teetering on the edge of madness, but, on looking closer, you realise you are in the presence of a gifted truth-teller

Brian Appleyard, Sunday Times

A studied and nuanced interrogation of VR’s potential, as well as a gentle critique of what he sees as a failure of imagination when it comes to the medium’s current proponents ... interspersing the general ideas, principles and promise of VR with intimate autobiography ... aided by the fact that Lanier's childhood was preposterously unusual … combin[ing] tragedy, whimsy and peril in ways that might seem far-fetched for even a David Lynch film

Observer

A tech futurist, researcher and writer, he is well placed to act as guide to the world described in Dawn of the New Everything… A lot of the charm of this highly personal account turns on his description of a childhood that reads like something out of a magical realist novel

Financial Times

Fascinating

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