I find myself being dragged away from the wonders of Fantasy Faire by some sort of magic beans. Something seems to be in the air. When The Elder Scrolls Online was in beta, one complaint from their beta testers was that they were gagged by the NDA and therefore couldn’t counter misinformed posts.
This brings me very briefly on to High Fidelity. The thing with High Fidelity is that it’s in a very limited Alpha right now, but has been generating some recent publicity. Indeed Inara Pey recently posted some excellent insights about the platform, largely based on a video that apparently should not have been consumed by the wider public.
Now here’s the thing, High Fidelity is probably at least a year away from properly seeing the light of day, so discussions about the platform, client, avatars, technology are largely a little premature. High Fidelity needs some breathing and development space.
I’ve seen quite a few discussions about High Fidelity and some people seem to be making their minds up already, this is a tad unfair to say the least. High Fidelity looks like it’s going to be a very open ended platform with more of a look towards a hypergrid style design in terms of who runs the world, than a closed grid such as Second Life and that in itself means that it has potential to develop in a lot of different directions.
However the point is, what people see and read today is not likely to be how High Fidelity appears in a year, or in several years and with all the best will in the world, the way computing habits change and technology gets disrupted, High Fidelity will probably go down paths that aren’t currently being envisaged.
As an example let’s go back to 2008 when Philip Rosedale was talking about Second Life :
When we started the company in 1999, it was obvious that broadband would become widespread and at the same time Nvidia released its GeForce2 (graphics chip), what we didn’t anticipate was Wi-Fi and the rise of laptops, which couldn’t do 3D.
That’s the sort of thing that happens with technology and will continue to happen, but the other ingredient that causes chaos is that open ended platforms get used in ways that weren’t envisaged too. Whether High Fidelity will be a roaring success I don’t know, I like a lot of what I’ve read about it but it’s a long way from being in a position to be given a fair critique.
High Fidelity needs room to grow up and develop, what people see now is likely to be very different to how it matures.
I think all the speculation might be good input/feedback for the HiFi team. Everybody is very excited. Though maybe they should keep the doors closed a little longer or Facebook will steal their best ideas for the upcomming Faceworld with its 1 billion users or Apple will file patents on every piece they read about and sue the hell out of HiFi.