@S1mon - I think that is unfair, though he is a first class media hacker and quote giver. He has had a high-ish industry profile from his time as a developer at Atari Research in the early 1980s. He, Thomas Zimmerman and Mitch Altman et al formed one of the first commercial VR companies - VPL Research in 1984 and developed early generations of the data glove, eyephone (VR Headset) and datasuit (body tracking) and a visual programming language (VPL -BodyElectric) for building early VR apps. And its this which propelled him into the press visibility.

He got popular with press because he can give a great quote, hold an interesting conversation / PoV / interview and was accessible and very visible with the first generation of VR hype. VPL Research ended in bankruptcy circa 1991/92 with its patents eventually going to Sun Microsystems. After VPL - he worked on Tele-immersion at Internet 2 - doing remote telepresence over high bandwidth networks and also did some telepresence stuff with SGI. Since then he is probably better known by his books, industry commentary, press quotes (or music depending on your interests). However a bunch of the tools we use today (Occulus/Vive, visual programming in the likes of Unreal, telepresence robots etc) can be considered descendants of some of the stuff he helped pioneer or at least the ideas he helped plant for later generations of developers to run with.

Please see Don Hopkins note below for more history and correct product names :-)