Samantha Murphy of New Scientist Magazine has had an early look at High Fidelity and appears to be very enthusiastic about it, without actually going into a lot of details, the article Second Life 2.0: Virtual world recreates the real you is a little out of date in some regards, for example Samantha writes :

It’s easy to forget that Second Life, a free-roaming virtual world, was a big deal when it launched in 2003. Users could go anywhere, do anything. Reuters even had a dedicated Second Life reporter for a while. It still boasts a million active monthly users according to Rod Humble, the CEO of Linden Labs, which owns the game. But despite this it has never really lived up to its promise.

It’s tempting to pick this apart, Rod Humble these days appears to be a chap in a hat somewhere as we await more news on his latest venture, rather than being CEO of Linden Lab. Oh and yes, it’s Linden Lab, not Linden Labs of course. However these sort of things can be overlooked, the article is more about High Fidelity, rather than Second Life. However it’s fair to say that Samantha Murphy appears to be a virtual world enthusiast and she does mention issues with her Second Life experiences of the past :

I had a few issues with Second Life. I often conducted interviews there, but my painstakingly created avatar would often appear half-naked, with an arm stuck awkwardly above its head or facing a wall. So when Rosedale invited me to be the first to interview him in High Fidelity, I jumped at the chance.

Now what is surprising after reading that Samantha had problems with appearing half naked in Second Life is that she reveals that when she goes to High Fidelity to interview Philip Rosedale she isn’t half naked, no, it’s worse than that, she informs us that she has no clothes on! However, there is a perfectly plausible explanation for this, Samantha is in robot form in High Fidelity and therefore doesn’t need to be clothed.

Samantha soon discovers that her facial expressions are being mimicked by her avatar via use of a webcam. Then Philip arrives, unlike Samantha, Philip is clothed and in human form. Philip’s facial expressions are portrayed on his avatar too, the eyebrows rise, the mouth moves and it goes further, his hands move and point too. This isn’t all done via webcam of course, other pieces of hardware are required such as a 3D camera that uses the same chip as Microsoft’s Kinect and the hand movements are captured by use of a Razer Hydra games controller. High Fidelity’s use of these extra peripherals are signs of a more advanced experience but it’s not going to appeal to everyone.

However Samantha is impressed by this and so is Jeremy Bailenson, director of Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab.

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