Virtual reality pioneer Randy Pausch's last lecture

Via Slashdot, I spotted this item about Randy Pausch, a Carnegie Mellon professor and early virtual reality engineer/visionary. He has terminal pancreatic cancer, but gave a wonderful presentation this week about his life and his involvement with VR and related technologies, entitled "Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams." The lecture discusses everything from Captain Kirk to virtual worlds, and many things in between. The first segment about his childhood dreams is here. In the next segment, shown below, he talks about VR in the early 1990s, and corporate and government VR experiments from that era.

There are a lot of interesting moments, not to mention funny recollections -- check out the class project demo from the 1990s shown in the fourth segment.

The full-length video is available from a dedicated Carnegie-Mellon page, but if the CMU server is struggling, click on the Google Video/YouTube links above.