High Fidelity – Page 5

September 29, 2015

Philip Rosedale Talks To Nautilus About Earth-Sized Virtual World And More

Dr. Kiki Sandofrd has posted a very interesting interview with High Fidelity CEO Philip Rosedale; The Man Who Created Second Life Thinks We Can Make an Earth-Sized Virtual World.

I found this a fascinating read and it exemplifies so very well how Philip has not lost his enthusiasm for virtual worlds, indeed he sounds more excited than ever about the concept. We’ll forgive Kiki for calling a company Linden Labs, this is such a common mistake that the URL Lindenlabs.com resolves to the correct website. The articles talks about how Second Life was once bigger than it is now and yet, as I’ve mentioned before, when people look to the future of virtual worlds, they can’t help but look back at Second Life and even grudgingly seem to admit, it’s not the giant flop that some paint it as.

When asked how virtual reality will change society, Philip answers :

If you look at Second Life today, as a sort of a terrarium for looking at that question, it already has. It demonstrates that we go after and exploit and enjoy the benefits of any increase in tools that enable our creativity and our commerce—and that our willingness to engage in business and in transactions with each other seems to be virtually boundless.

He says a lot more, he talks about how virtual worlds can cross boundaries and get people to talk with each other when those people would otherwise be enemies. I haven’t seen enough studies on this to have a firm opinion on it to be honest, but there is the common denominator factor. The issue is surely going to be that if virtual worlds grow as some predict, some of those common denominators will be removed.

However what’s this business about earth-sized virtual worlds, well Philip gets to that in the interview :

In a recent analysis that I did in thinking about this, I figured out that if we used all our computers—connected via broadband to the Internet—to make a virtual world, it would be as big as the landmass of Earth. You and I could go fly around in it, wander into some cave in Siberia that no one had ever been probably, write our names on the wall in there, and come back ten years later and the names would still be there.

Obviously, as soon as someone says something like that, the next question is likely to be whether virtual worlds could ever be the size of a galaxy. Indeed, that is pretty much the next question in the interview, but you will have to read the article on Nautilus to find out more.

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August 15, 2015

High Fidelity Announce Stem VR Challenge Recipients

Back in July High Fidelity lanuched its Stem VR Challenge. The challenge was :

High Fidelity will be awarding up to three $5,000 grants to teams or individuals who, using the High Fidelity platform, can create a unit that is:

HMD (e.g. Oculus™) featured

High school age appropriate

STEM focused

Social (can be experienced by >3 people together)

In addition to the dollar amount awarded, grantees will have access to technical support directly from High Fidelity and the option to have their content hosted.

Yesterday High Fidelity announced who the recipients would be, they have chosen two projects to receive the grants. They are T.C.a.R.S: Teaching Coding – a Racing Simulation and FTL Labs PlanetDrop-VR. Both projects look very interesting.

TCars is a combination of code and fun and is described as :

An awesome racing game where you get to interact with JavaScript to customize your car’s handling, create unique power ups and optimize performance through editing the programme code with the use of the Blockly API.

The idea behind TCaRS is explained as one that wants people to learn coding by having fun :

The idea for TCaRS is based on the thought that learning coding can be boring but playing games is fun: “I want to learn to code… but….the road from typing, ‘print my name’ to making ‘Grand Theft Auto’ seems huge and demotivating”

Schools around the world have been using tools like the Raspberry Pi to teach kids coding and it’s an essential part of most High School curriculums these days, but the output from tools like this is often pretty basic-looking.

With High Fidelity, we have the chance to change this by creating the first gaming platform where users get to see and interact directly with elements of the code in order to gain
advantage – so the more you learn, the better you do. And with the benefit of VR to create a genuinely immersive experience.

The people behind TCaRS are High Fidelity Alpha users Thijs Wenker (Thoys in High Fidelity) Programmer / Web Developer (JavaScript, PHP, C#, C++) and Dan Grundy (Judas in High Fidelity) Lecturer in 3D modelling using Blender. There’s a lot more detail in the link.

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August 6, 2015

Virtual World Interoperability Is Still One Giant Step Away For VR

Hamlet Au over at New World Notes recently posted : Cross-Platform Virtual Reality is Here: Watch High Fidelity Unite Vive, Oculus, and PC Users in the Same Metaverse. The post was regarding the High Fidelity post regarding users with different interfaces interacting in High Fidelity. I covered this in my last post. The development is an impressive one.

Hamlet’s headline was a tad misleading and some folk thought the post was going to be about people from different virtual worlds being able to interact in a single virtual world. This has been done before, but the potential was never fulfilled. I have talked about this before.

Just over seven years ago Hamilton Linden blogged IBM and Linden Lab Interoperability Announcement :

This is a historic day for Second Life, and for virtual worlds in general. IBM and Linden Lab have announced that research teams from the two companies successfully teleported avatars from the Second Life Preview Grid into a virtual world running on an OpenSim server, marking the first time an avatar has moved from one virtual world to another. It’s an important first step toward enabling avatars to pass freely between virtual worlds, something we’ve been working toward publicly since the formation of the Architecture Working Group in September 2007.

This was quite big news, Linden Lab issued a press release. The news was covered by Antone Gonsalves at Information Week and Erick Sconfeld at TechCrunch. I will embed a video of the epic moment at the end of the post.

Alas things didn’t work out and the project seems to be dead and yet, as demonstrated in the comments on Hamlet’s post, there’s still a lot of interest in interoperability between different virtual worlds.

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August 6, 2015

High Fidelity On The Rig, The Metaverse And Hand To Hand Contact

About a month ago High Fidelity CEO Philip Rosedale posted a hat trick of fascinating blog posts. They cover immersion, the size of the metaverse and connecting to High Fidelity using different interfaces. They are all very interesting.

The first blog post is VR immersion through immobilization: ‘The Rig’. The Rig is a very important component in the history of virtual worlds and what makes that all the more impressive is that it never saw the light of day as a public product. The Rig was the first work Linden Lab conducted, as Philip explains in the blog post :

Andrew Meadows and myself spent the first 6 months or so building a room-sized device that immobilized a person’s head, legs, and arms while using a folded projection screen to deliver a high resolution VR experience. We called it ‘The Rig’, and our more fearless early investors and friends actually got to try it out.

The hardware required some software to go along with it, so Linden Lab started working on that too and that software eventually became known as Second Life and the rest, as they say, is history. Ok at one time the software was called LindenWorld but after that it became known as Second Life. The Rig is rumoured to be sitting in boxes at Linden Lab, although we don’t know if Philip Rosedale and Andrew Meadows took it to High Fidelity with them. This thought crossed my mind when I read :

The findings were fascinating and may be useful now as the race to create fully immersive VR interfaces continues.

The Rig wasn’t like today’s HMD’s which track your movement, indeed the idea is that you don’t move, it works on force detection, as Philip explains :

As a simple thought experiment, imagine that you are looking at a computer screen, while holding onto the handle of a tennis racket which is bolted to a table…. you can’t move the racket handle a bit. But what you see onscreen is a racket in your hand that is moving perfectly smoothly in response to the forces you are putting on the handle. A ball drops from the air, and you move the racket to bounce it upwards. As the virtual ball connects with your racket, you can imagine that you need to apply a stronger force upward to the handle to keep the racket moving up. This change in applied force ‘feels’ to your brain very much like the sensation of the ball hitting the racket!

This sounds odd when you consider the way today’s devices work and yet, there does seem to be potential for this sort of alternative immersion device to prosper.

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August 4, 2015

Second Life’s Shadow Gives Linden Lab An Edge In Virtual Reality Future

For a virtual world that many people comment with surprise about it still being around, Second Life seems to still cast a mighty shadow over the virtual world scene. Over at Re/code, Eric Johnson has published an excellent article about how the land lies : Welcome To The Metaverse. I heartily recommend that people read this article in full.

The article opens with commentary from Linden Lab CEO Ebbe Altberg regarding humans creating spaces :

Some spaces are mobile, like a bus. San Francisco is a space that was created by its users. Whether you go into a pub, a bar, a classroom, a bowling alley, an office, a library … We create spaces and we have people come together in those spaces, and then we communicate and socialize within those spaces.

These spaces are of course what people have been creating in Second Life too, in many and varied forms and guises.

Early on in the article Eric seems to be talking of Second Life in the past tense. This needs to be taken in context, Eric is really talking about how Second Life did not become the 3D internet that some hoped it would and how in the future, VR ventures will be hoping to go mainstream, become the next big thing and really get embraced by society :

A perfect metaverse, then, is more than just a video game or an application. Like a Web browser, or an operating system, it would offer users a means to do many things, and likely pay for them in many ways. That’s the Big Idea — that VR would be as transformative to the Internet as the World Wide Web — and it’s why so many companies are testing the waters. If one or more of them can crack it, they would unlock a great deal of virtual reality’s long-term potential.

Those of us who have already embraced virtual worlds know that the potential is there, but we also know that a large number of hurdles exist too.

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