Jaron Lanier is a computer scientist, composer, visual artist, and author.  

Lanier's name is also often associated with Virtual Reality research.  He is credited with either coining or popularizing the term 'Virtual Reality' and in the early 1980s founded VPL Research, the first company to sell VR products. In the late 1980s he led the team that developed the first implementations of multi-person virtual worlds using head mounted displays, for both local and wide area networks, as well as the first "avatars", or representations of users within such systems.