High Fidelity – Page 2

July 21, 2017July 21, 2017

Cum On Feel The (High Fidelity) Noize

High Fidelity are really ramping up the noise in the publicity market with a series of extremely impressive looking developments.

One particularly striking development comes via High Fidelity’s link up with 3D body scanning company DOOB-3D.

High Fidelity’s Janet J. Lee blogged about DOOB-3D back in May and gave a brief overview of what DOOB-3D can do :

Doob 3D is a full service 3D tech company founded in Dusseldorf, Germany, with regional HQs in NYC and Tokyo, as well as stores in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York. The company defines a “ doob™” as “a photo-realistic 3D printed replica of you.”

The blog post also delves into the steps required to get that avatar into High Fidelity, there are quite a few steps but the results are impressive.

A short version of the process is exemplified extremely well in a YouTube Video from High Fidelity : Ashlen Rose’s Cosplay + Doob 3D = High Fidelity VR Avatar.

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March 31, 2017

High Fidelity Partner With Limitless To Bring Interactive NPCs To VR

High Fidelity have announced that they have partnered with Limitless to bring Interactive NPCs to the High Fidelity Virtual Reality platform.

First things first, you may be wondering who or what Limitless are. Limitless have been making headlines for being a content creation platform for creating animated characters in VR.

Now they are making headlines for creating a toolset that allows people to create their own interactive VR creators, as Charles Singletary reports over at UploadVR in a chat with Limitless CEO and Founder Tom Sanocki.

I particularly like the view that Tom Sanocki takes regarding putting the perspective of the creator at the heart of creating an interactive experience :

“This means we always have something that is usable, simple, and shippable,” he says.”Our path to improving it always focuses on the needs of the storyteller, not the engineer,” he says.

I’m a huge fan of storytelling and Limitless aim to bring creation of artificial intelligence in VR to storytellers and creators, rather than those storytellers and creators also having to be experts in AI.

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November 11, 2016

High Fidelity Now Available On Steam Early Access

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High Fidelity, the virtual world and virtual reality platform, arrived on Steam early access this week for Windows users. The welcome message states :

We’re incredibly excited to launch High Fidelity on Steam Early Access!

High Fidelity is an open-source virtual reality platform that gives everyone the power to create, explore, and share virtual spaces. It works with both Oculus Rift and Vive, and you can also run it on your PC in desktop mode if you don’t have a headset.

We’re looking forward to your feedback! We expect to learn important lessons about the needs of social VR from the active, engaged, and connected users here on Steam.

There’s a notice that you need a virtual reality headset to use the software, but as the above message informs us, you can run the software without a headset. However the minimum specs should be noted :

MINIMUM:

OS: Windows 7 SP1 64 bit
Processor: i7-4700 quad core equivalent or greater
Memory: 8 GB RAM
Graphics: NVIDIA GTX 970 / AMD R9 290
Storage: 2 GB available space

Now when you find the software on Steam there’s a good chance you will see this message : “Content in this product may not be appropriate for all ages, or may not be appropriate for viewing at work“.

This isn’t because High Fidelity is a den of iniquity, it’s because user generated content is involved, as the High Fidelity Twitter account explained to me : “The warning is a precautionary measure because it’s an environment with a lot of user generated content“.

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June 11, 2016

Live Music In High Fidelity

Last night I visited High Fidelity to watch Kevin M Thomas perform live. Kevin is not new to performing live music in virtual worlds, he has been performing in Second Life since 2007, see my previous blog post for more details.

Arriving at the location I was informed by way of a pop up that my LOD settings had been reduced due to the complexity of the scene, which is a nice touch. LOD means Level Of Detail, which will dictate what I can see and from how far away I can see objects.

I had not had to mess with my LOD settings for a while in High Fidelity so it took me a while to find them and this is exemplified in the image above, Kevin’s Guitar does not appear in this shot. I would advise people to stick with the reduced LOD settings in general in a situation like this, but I wanted to take some snapshots so I wanted to tweak those settings.

What we can see in the above picture is Kevin’s avatar and on the screen, the actual band, who were all in a room together to perform. This provided an excellent perspective to what exactly was going on here and highlighted the fact that real people were very much involved in the performance.

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June 10, 2016

Kevin M Thomas Talks To High Fidelity About Live Music In Virtual Reality

Kevin M Thomas is a name that should be familiar to fans of live music in Second Life. Kevin has been performing in Second Life since 2007 and has an inworld group with over 7,000 fans.

Being a musician of course is a portable skill and Kevin is taking advantage of that portable skill by taking his performances to other platforms. Today Kevin will be performing at a music jam event at 15:30 PDT in High Fidelity at hifi://open. That’s 23:30 British Summer Time … I think!

Kevin recently spoke to Caitlyn Meeks, Director of Content for High Fidelity and Caitlyn has posted some of that conversation in a blog post : Live Performance in High Fidelity.

There are some great points in this blog post and one of them is an issue I’ve raised before, the potential for Worldwide reach in virtual worlds, Kevin says :

Performing in VR requires incredible energy as a performer as you do not normally get the fan feedback as you would in real life, however the payoff is greater as you can build a much larger fan base in VR as no one is limited by where they live to attend a show.

Worldwide reach doesn’t just cover musicians, back in March I blogged : Comedian Sami Shah Exemplifies The Advantages Of Virtual World Reach. Storytellers, artists and film makers can all build reach via Virtual Worlds and as we move forward, more immersive Virtual Reality environments.

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