Last night I visited High Fidelity to watch Kevin M Thomas perform live. Kevin is not new to performing live music in virtual worlds, he has been performing in Second Life since 2007, see my previous blog post for more details.
Arriving at the location I was informed by way of a pop up that my LOD settings had been reduced due to the complexity of the scene, which is a nice touch. LOD means Level Of Detail, which will dictate what I can see and from how far away I can see objects.
I had not had to mess with my LOD settings for a while in High Fidelity so it took me a while to find them and this is exemplified in the image above, Kevin’s Guitar does not appear in this shot. I would advise people to stick with the reduced LOD settings in general in a situation like this, but I wanted to take some snapshots so I wanted to tweak those settings.
What we can see in the above picture is Kevin’s avatar and on the screen, the actual band, who were all in a room together to perform. This provided an excellent perspective to what exactly was going on here and highlighted the fact that real people were very much involved in the performance.
Kevin played for an hour, with a set of songs that I was very familiar with, which means they generally were not recent songs! The more important matter though was that the songs were entertaining and the hour whizzed by.
I wasn’t the only person, above we can see the avatar known as Judas, whom as far as I’m aware did not give Kevin a kiss before the gig. Judas built most of the set for the performance.
There were also other people attending the gig and they generally seemed to be enjoying themselves, shouting encouragement and being rather friendly. Communication in High Fidelity appears to be voice based, which I know some people will not like, but High Fidelity is also Open Source so if people want to incorporate text chat, I’m sure someone will build the tools to make it feasible at some point.
Dale Innis asked on Twitter if the experience was better than Second Life. This is a tough question to answer because High Fidelity differs from Second Life in many ways and High Fidelity differs for High Fidelity users depending upon how they are engaging with High Fidelity.
For example I don’t have an Oculus Rift or a HTC vive, so I was experiencing High Fidelity in a similar way to how I would experience a live music gig in Second Life. I would imagine it is a very different experience for people who are in a position to get more immersive with an Oculus Rift.
In terms of performance, I did not really experience any problems and I did not notice any problems with the live stream either. I’m not sure how many people were there to see the gig but it was an enjoyable experience.
I hope one day to be able to experience an event like this in a manner that really takes advantage of the technology, with a device like the Oculus Rift and discover for myself just how immersive it feels.