High Fidelity, the book by Nick Hornsby, then turned into a movie starring John Cusack and now a new virtual world by Philip Rosedale. In the new virtual world Philip, ably abetted by Jeska Dzwigalski, goes back to his former places of employment to figure out what went wrong and learns how to build a new stronger virtual world, with molecular cubes and a soundtrack featuring songs such as “I can’t Stand The Rain“, “Walking On Sunshine“, “We Are The Champions” and “Baby I Love Your Way“.
Philip and Jeska work at a store called Championship Voxels where they help other people who come through the doors of the store to reach their goals and dreams. Jeska educates people regarding the key differences between Whisky and Whiskey and in which cases it’s worth worrying about it or not and In the end we all applaud and live happily ever after! Hurrah!
Ok ok the virtual world isn’t anything to do with the Nick Hornsby book, but if they will pick a name like that! No it’s nothing to do with the book, but it is an interesting looking venture and it does feature Voxels….. I don’t know what they are and I’m not googling it either.
So what is Philip Rosedale’s High Fidelity? Well it is intended to be a virtual world and the blurb does look interesting, although at this stage we’re in vague city. The blurb tells us:
“We’re building a new virtual world enabling rich avatar interactions driven by sensor-equipped hardware, simulated and served by devices (phones, tablets and laptops/desktops) contributed by end-users.”
There’s a blog post today announcing the formation of the new company, which you can read here.
At this stage it’s all very much in the foundation stages and they’re hiring, rather than exemplifying the future but that’s all good, we can see how it develops over the coming months and years. This does look like a very ambitious project and obviously it’s starting from a different level to Second Life. They are taking into account the move to mobile computing with this project but fortunately they aren’t discarding the desktop, which personally I think is a very wise move.
They are looking to build a shared experience which utilises the power in those devices to build what they describe as a collective cloud to simulate this new virtual world and at the same time address the issues of latency. This is taking the idea behind a project like Seti and applying it to a virtual world platform. There will be more to it than that but that’s the basic concept ….. I think! However instead of exploring life, the universe and everything, this will be used to explore life, the virtual world and everything…. and maybe the universe too!
This looks, as I said earlier, very ambitious and it’s at a very early stage but it does seem to be well worth keeping an eye on.
Indeed. *nods thoughtfully*