Philip Rosedale was interviewed by Signe Brewster at Gigaom Roadmap 2014 yesterday and Gigaom have posted the interview in an article entitled : The gap between virtual reality and sci-fi is shortening. Philip talks about virtual worlds, including Second Life and not surprisingly, High Fidelity.
The video is interesting because Philip talks about the past and future of virtual worlds as well as discussing how science fiction is a good influence for him. The interview runs for about half an hour and that includes a Q&A session.
There’s a really interesting part of this interview where Philip talks about body language. New devices allow virtual worlds to capture the body language of the person behind an avatar and reproduce that body language inside a virtual world. High Fidelity staff conducted an experiment where they were each interviewed in High Fidelity using the same avatar and then those videos were later played back to all of the staff without sound. The staff members quickly realised that they could recognise who was who based on the face gestures and body movements of each avatar.
When asked about what he has learnt from Second Life Philip talks about economies, virtual communities and how people will self organise. This may explain why High Fidelity is more of an open source venture than Second Life was. Philip has witnessed that people will self organise and presumably he also feels they are capable of self governance. Philip does point out that technology has changed since Second Life was created, for example there was no cloud computing back then and he does state that they tried to make Second Life as open as they could. This is a comment that has a lot of merit. Whereas Second Life isn’t open in the way High Fidelity will be, it remains very open in the concept of user generated content.
Philip talks of how reading science fiction is almost an instruction manual for building virtual worlds and his big influence in this area is, not surprisingly, Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash.
Minecraft and No Man’s Sky get a mention. I must admit I’d never heard of the latter but it is described as a science fiction game set in an infinite procedurally generated universe. This sounds interesting.
Then the discussion swings back to avatars and how people will often make a recreation of themselves, even though they have the capacity to be something else. The way people self identify in many cases is interesting, they give visual clues about who they really are and in many cases it’s simply intuitive to do this.
The interview ends with the Uncanny Valley. This is where the closer avatars get to a more human form, our brain senses that something just isn’t right and that makes us naturally feel uncomfortable about this avatar we can see. The way around this? Philip has found a trick and it comes in the shape and form of facial hair! I suppose that the logic here is that because we can’t see some of the flaws in the human looking avatar, because they are camouflaged to a degree, our brains aren’t quite so uncomfortable with what is presented before us.
Alternatively we could all go into virtual worlds as Dwarves. Traditionally Dwarves are known to have beards, even the women in many stories, so as well as Orcs being needed for virtual worlds, we also need Dwarves!
The video is well worth a watch if you have the time, as I said it’s around half an hour long but it packs quite a lot in.
“Philip has witnessed that people will self organise and presumably he also feels they are capable of self governance. ”
No, then he learned nothing from SL because it was allowed to be a wild west, thug’s life for the longest time. Phil was probably one of the ones who got yucks out of it.
What dear old Phil is really feeling is that he hopes fools will do all the work for free and give him money. Just like in SL.