In the early 1980s, Jaron Lanier founded VPL Research, the first company to sell virtual-reality products. He and his VPL colleagues developed the first implementations of virtual reality applications in surgical simulation, vehicle interior prototyping, virtual sets for television production, and assorted other areas.
"Jaron's World," Lanier's monthly column in Discover Magazine, is devoted to his wide-ranging ideas and research on numerous topics, including high-technology business, the social impact of technological practices, the philosophy of consciousness and information, internet politics, and the future of humanism.
 Lanier has been active in the world of new "classical" music since the late 1970s. He is a pianist and a specialist in unusual musical instruments, especially the wind and string instruments of Asia. His work with these instruments can be heard on the soundtrack to Three Seasons (1999), the first film ever to win both the Audience and Grand Jury awards at the Sundance Film Festival. 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.
He also writes chamber and orchestral music. Recent works include a ballet which premiered at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco in April 2006; a concert-length sequence of works for orchestra and virtual worlds celebrating the 1000th birthday of the city of Wroclaw, Poland (2000); a triple concerto commissioned by the National Endowment for the Arts and the American Composers Forum (2000); and a symphony for the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra (1998).
Lanier's paintings and drawings have been exhibited in museums and galleries in the U.S. and Europe. In 2002, he co-created (with Philippe Parreno) an exhibit for the Museum of Modern Art of the City of Paris illustrating how aliens might perceive humans. His first one-man show took place in 1997 at the Danish Museum for Modern Art in Roskilde.
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