High Fidelity keep people who have registered informed on their progress, whether or not they having been logging in recently. They do so via way of a monthly email update and this works very well.
The news letter usually appears on the High Fidelity blog, the September Newsletter was posted on September 30th. The October one hasn’t yet appeared but it will soon I would imagine. I should add at this point that finding the blog from the main High Fidelity website isn’t as easy as it should be using Windows 10 with a Chrome browser. The link to the blog is at the bottom of the main page in light on light text, or from a dropdown at the top of the page via company.
So what have High Fidelity been doing in October? The newsletter informs us that they have been working with a company called BinaryVR who develop facial tracking software that is intended to be used in virtual reality :
We have been fortunate to work with so many great entrepreneurs doing amazing stuff with VR hardware, BinaryVR is one of these companies. BinaryVR develops facial expression tracking technology for virtual reality, enabling users to create a personalized 3D face from 2D facial photos to track and retarget their facial animations in real-time in any transformed CG character or avatar mode. BinaryVR have integrated their technology into High Fidelity, allowing your mouth to be tracked while in the HMD.
I will include a couple of animated gif’s in this post, but for a better perspective of what’s going on in them please view the short video I’ll embed at the end of the post. Here’s a gif of mouth tracking in action :
High Fidelity have also been further developing their work with Inverse kinematics (IK for short). IK is used in 3D engines to position avatars and deals with their joints, positions etc. This is a technically challenging process but High Fidelity are making strides here too :
In our September update we showed how we are moving the upper torso and head using the HMD and hand controller. This month we continued that work and expanded it to include the knees. You can see in image below how we are making the knees accurately bend based on the position of the hand controllers and HMD. We will be continuing to work and expect more next month.
Here’s another animated gif, again this is better explained in the video I’ll post at the end of this post.
High Fidelity have also been doing work with hand controllers and Head Mounted Displays and in the video you will see Chris Collins and Ryan Kampf of High Fidelity manipulating objects inworld with those hand controllers. Here’s another gif, but again, the video tells a better story!
On top of that the newsletter points out that Philip Rosedale presented a session at SEA VR 2015. The session Philip presented was What is the Metaverse? Beyond gaming and cinema, what will it take to make VR worlds as big as the internet? The blurb for the session stated :
Many more things than great HMD’s have to happen and ship to get us to a world-scale virtual reality experience. Philip Rosedale, CEO of High Fidelity and the creator of Second Life, will talk about his lifelong passion for virtual worlds, look at the rise of PC worlds like Second Life, and talk about what needs to happen next.
The presentation was covered very well by Dean Takahashi over at VentureBeat; Second Life pioneer Philip Rosedale shows off virtual toy room in High Fidelity. Some of the concepts covered in the October updates were exemplified at the session.
The VentureBeat post also exemplifies the fact that Philip Rosedale hasn’t lost his belief in the Metaverse :
Rosedale believes the Metaverse will happen because the technology to do it is getting cheaper and more accessible.
“You can manipulate virtual environments in a natural way and communicate,” Rosedale said. “These virtual experiences are not science fiction. We are in alpha. It is starting to work. All of the components are there.”
However the article also points out that we’re still a fair way off from being at the stage where The Metaverse will be widely embraced, due to issues such as latency, instantaneous interactions and how many people can technically fit in a room. There’s a lot more in the article and it makes for a good read.
Now, for that video on those October updates from High Fidelity.