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.

The second blog post is How Big is the Metaverse? This post raises some interesting points regarding the potential power of distributed computing. Philip provides a quick answer to the main question :

If all the desktop computers with broadband access in the world today were linked together to create a single Virtual World, that place would be already be the size of earth, able to provide concurrent access to every living internet user, and doubling in size every two years.

He also provides a much longer and fascinating answer. High Fidelity’s model is one that aims to take advantage of the already existing computing power on the planet, so it’s no surprise that there’s a blog post on this subject and the blog post makes for a very interesting read. The potential size of The Metaverse as things stand is put into perspective in the post too :

So, just like earth, this Metaverse would be already be so vast that we could not begin to hope to explore it all. Even with the power of teleportation (as compared to plane flight), you couldn’t even come close to seeing it all in a lifetime: if you lived to be 80 years old, you’d get less than one second to examine each of those city blocks.

With expected growth in computing power and bandwidth as we go forward, it’s not difficult to imagine the potential for a massive metaverse to be available. There are a lot of factors that need to be right for the delivery of such a massive Metaverse but the potential definitely exists.

The third blog post is Oculus Rift and HTC Vive: First Contact. This is a short post and allows a video to do most of its talking. I’ll embed the video near the end of this post. This post features the use of different hardware to allow three people inside High Fidelity to touch hands.

One user is using an Oculus Rift with a Razer Hydra to do the hand tracking. Another user is using a desktop PC with a Razer Hydra to do the hand tracking and the third user is using a HTC Vive.

At first glance this may seem a little underwhelming but it’s actually a very bold step in virtual world interaction. I would imagine people would get a better feel of how well this works if they could actually experience it themselves. However one of the challenges with VR going forward is going to be getting users with different peripherals to be able to interact. There are a lot of peripherals coming to market, it’s very important that different peripherals can not only interact, but also that they can interact in a timely fashion to allow users to feel immersed by the experience and we see in this video that this seems to work well.

High Fidelity is still in Alpha, although it’s now in open alpha, so anybody who wants to can dip their toes into the water. High Fidelity is also Open Source, so you can play around with code if you’re that way inclined. I know many people just want to get inside a virtual world and engage with it, but patience is the key here to a bright VR future, High Fidelity seem to be moving in the right direction.