High Fidelity are really ramping up the noise in the publicity market with a series of extremely impressive looking developments.
One particularly striking development comes via High Fidelity’s link up with 3D body scanning company DOOB-3D.
High Fidelity’s Janet J. Lee blogged about DOOB-3D back in May and gave a brief overview of what DOOB-3D can do :
Doob 3D is a full service 3D tech company founded in Dusseldorf, Germany, with regional HQs in NYC and Tokyo, as well as stores in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York. The company defines a “ doob™” as “a photo-realistic 3D printed replica of you.”
The blog post also delves into the steps required to get that avatar into High Fidelity, there are quite a few steps but the results are impressive.
A short version of the process is exemplified extremely well in a YouTube Video from High Fidelity : Ashlen Rose’s Cosplay + Doob 3D = High Fidelity VR Avatar.
On top of this High Fidelity have revamped their welcome experience, as explained by Janet J. Lee – All Aboard the Welcome Wagon! :
New users show up in the Welcome Wagon’s current location to acclimatize to VR, explore, and meet new people. When the Welcome Wagon is about to move along to a new domain, people are invited to get aboard. Anyone inside the Welcome Wagon when it relocates comes along for the ride to the next destination. There they can disembark and check out their new surroundings.
High Fidelity are also taking steps in areas that aren’t quite as exciting in technical terms but are very important in social terms, this is explained by High Fidelity’s Howard Stearns in a blog post – Safe Interactions with People :
Social virtual reality gives users significant control over the expression of their identity, letting them try on new personalities and ways of interacting. With that freedom comes risks, however. It can be easier to stalk and attack people online than in real life. The challenge for platforms like High Fidelity and others is to provide protections that preserve the positive aspects of virtual interactions while limiting user-to-user abuse.
The post goes on to explain how you can add people to your friends list, create contacts by shaking hands but also how you can ignore people who then become not only muted, but also invisible, although there are ways of taking people off the ignore list. There’s also an interesting looking feature regarding creating a personal safe space bubble, the post is well worth a read.
Social interactions, especially in more immersive virtual reality environments, are going to be very important in terms of the growth of VR, so it’s important to take steps in terms of making friends and being able to protect yourself from those who aren’t quite as polite as others.
Hopefully though, our experiences will be more along these lines :
High Fidelity demonstrates a lot of impressive and exciting aspects of VR, although it should be pointed out that you require pretty meaty hardware to enjoy the full immersive experience, don’t let that put you off. Hardware costs will come down and even if you can’t fully join in now, it’s always a good idea to keep your eye on developments because many of those developments will also be important factors in other virtual world and VR environments.
The future for VR looks so bright that I might have wear shades.