Philip Rosedale’s Hi Fidelity project has largely gone dark, well in terms of blog posts anyway, there hasn’t been one since May. There are some funky features on the website though, more on that later.
However today, Hamlet Au over at New World Notes has posted some thoughts from Mr Rosedale: Philip Rosedale on Connecting High Fidelity’s VR Tools With Second Life — and When We’ll Get Those Tools to Play With
I’m not into spoilers, but the answer probably isn’t going to satisfy people, although it does keep the intrigue going. However Hamlet also links to a very interesting post from the Singularity Hub where they talk to Philip Rosedale. Now some interesting ideas emerge from this interview:
“While body tracking may make for more realistic and intuitive avatars, High Fidelity’s other big idea will power the world they live in. In exchange for virtual money, virtual citizens will assign their computer’s unused processing power—when they’re sleeping, for example—to construct High Fidelity’s world in exquisite detail.”
This isn’t new, it has been mentioned regarding Hi Fidelity before but it’s good to see the idea mentioned again, the interview makes the point that Second Life runs on 40,000 servers, imagine a world running on millions of machines and how that processing power can be harnassed to deliver the needed results.
The interview also suggests that the new Virtual World of Hi Fidelity will replace the inspiration of Snow Crash with the inspiration of Ready Player One, to quote Philip:
“I’d love to see us build something quite similar to what [Ready Player One] describes, but probably with less central agency. A global virtual world seems very likely to be (un)governed in a manner similar to the internet itself.”
The concepts and ideas at play here are rather staggering, impatience is likely to be a big factor here, I mean here I am having a small whine that they’re not updating their blog but it looks like they are quite some way from being able to launch anything tangible.
There’s far more in the interview, more concepts, very interesting quotes and a lot to get the imagination running wild at the possibilities.
Then there’s the big question about the Hi Fidelity website itself, who the hell is doing the Barry Whiteesque voice overs on the staff profiles with that funky music in the background? I mean surely, that information shouldn’t be classified, should it?
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