High Fidelity Aiming For Eye To Avatar Eye Contact

Eye to eye contact, we made, eye to eye contact, you and me, contact! You were looking at me, I was looking at you, you were looking at me.

Mitch Wagner knows a thing or two about Second Life and used to run a podcast called Copper Robot, where he would sometimes interview people inworld. At one stage this was a fortnightly event and I think Crap Mariner was involved, but unfortunately I didn’t get to hear too many of the podcasts myself.

I’m mentioning Mitch’s virtual world experience because he has published an article in Information Week : Second Life Founder Pursues Second Chance. This isn’t the first time Mitch has published an article in Information Week by the way! Anyway, the article itself has quotes from Philip Rosedale regarding his hopes for High Fidelity. The article touches upon some issues that frustrate users of Second Life, namely usability, scalability, latency and the lack of eye to eye contact!

There are some bizarre quotes in this article, for example Philip seems to think people don’t talk on the telephone anymore. I can’t be the only person on the planet who talks happily on the telephone! However Philip’s point is to do with latency.

However there are some very interesting points to this article, one of which is the lack of eye contact in virtual worlds, which makes conversations difficult in real time. In the article Philip tells Mitch that avatars in High Fidelity will make eye contact with the human being on the other side of the conversation. I would imagine this may feel quite odd at first.

There’s a lot more to the article, some of it does raise issues with Second Life. The issues are realistic ones, latency and only being able to have 40 – 100 people in a region at a time, meaning events have to be quite small. However you need to read the article in full to get the full context of this, Second Life made its breakthrough at a time when mobile and cloud computing were not exactly common place, so the platform developed in a certain way. Unfortunately that certain way means it’s difficult for Second Life to address issues such as scalability and latency today, although it’s fair to say Linden Lab do attempt to make improvements.

High Fidelity comes from a different starting position and can therefore take a different approach. As the mobile market is now very much a viable market, High Fidelity has plans to embrace mobile and desktop technologies. Second Life will find this far more difficult, although I know they have embarked upon a beta mobile client phase. I have no idea how that’s coming along.

The article is worth reading because you get an overview of some of the other concepts High Fidelity is hoping to embrace such as distributed computing and how facial responses and movement control the avatar in High Fidelity.

Mitch sounds far from convinced that High Fidelity will take off, he doesn’t say it won’t be a success, but he also doesn’t embrace the concept overly and admits that the article has taken him five months to put together.

Whether High Fidelity works or not, only time will tell and this is a difficult market to compete in. Getting the technology right is only part of the issue, getting the people to embrace it, is an extremely difficult challenge but I must admit, High Fidelity does sound very promising.

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