The summer season of The Drax Files Radio Hour has had a few repeats and this week is no exception, it’s a repeat of the excellent interview with Tony Parisi. This is well worth a listen because Tony talks of the challenges of client downloads and how they turn people off as well as lots more excellent commentary from a person who has experience in virtual worlds and beyond. Tony also thinks the 3D internet is right around the corner, but confesses he’s been saying that for many years.
However this interview becomes even more relevant with the news that Tony Parisi has joined High Fidelity as an advisor. If you don’t know who Tony Parisi is then I suggest you read his bio. He was also involved with the virtual world Vivaty, but you can hear about that in The Drax Files Radio Hour. However a snippet from his bio :
Tony is the co-creator of the VRML and X3D ISO standards for networked 3D graphics, and continues to innovate in 3D technology. Tony is the co-chair of the San Francisco WebGL Meetup (www.meetup.com/WebGL-Developers-Meetup), a founder of the Rest3D working group (http://www.rest3d.org/) and a member of the Khronos COLLADA working group creating glTF, the new file format standard for 3D web and mobile applications.
High Fidelity are assembling an impressive looking team, it’s a shame Jeska left, but hopefully that was the right move for Jeska. As for Tony, not only is he an advisor for High Fidelity, he’s also involved in some top secret stuff!
Unfortunately as the stuff is top secret the High Fidelity blog post does not tell us anything about it!
However, in the High Fidelity blog post we do get a picture of the vision Tony Parisi has helped create. One Philip Rosedale was very impressed with that vision :
Coming from San Diego, I had been used to feeling like I was the only person crazy enough to be thinking about this stuff. Then one night I wandered into a virtual reality user group meeting at the Exploratorium, and these two guys were presenting this new language they had co-created for doing exactly this: describing and sharing 3D scenes and objects across the internet. Those guys were Tony Parisi and Mark Pesce, the language was VRML, and I ate up everything I could find on the early internet about it.
High Fidelity is not going to be like Second Life, it’s not one single world. One of the concepts behind High Fidelity is to allow people to use High Fidelity to build their own virtual worlds. it’s an open project, rather than a walled garden and therefore that means agreed standards. Tony Parisi is a big fan of such matters and extremely recently created a presentation on who shall control the metaverse.
Ideally the controllers of The Metaverse will be us. However time will tell whether that’s plausible.
Yes. You might as well say you are building a new car and just brought on the guy who invented the catalytic converter.
It isn’t a walled garden. Its very concept is about sloughing off overhead onto the users themselves.
I’ll be damned if I act as their server for them and other high powered users without any kind of meaningful compensation other than game funny money. I’ll be sitting out Hi-Fi.
I’ll wait to see how that actually works in providing value, if there is value to be had. The concept is interesting.
Mel is right.
Who in their right mind is falling for the tech-corporate philosophy of how much work and money they can drain out of stupid paid users?
If the world was filled with Jo Yardleys then yes Hi-fi and LL can make oodles of money buy putting out crap products and getting others to do free work for them.
What a world.
Loads of people are providing their services to the tech world. Let’s take Facebook, they’ve convinced people it’s a free service but people are providing the content.
In terms of High Fidelity, time will tell if it has appeal or not.