High Fidelity – Page 11

August 25, 2014

High Fidelity’s Worklist For Developers

High Fidelity seem to be ramping up their communications this month and they have posted a video on YouTube to inform people of their Worklist. I’ll embed the video at the end of the post, it’s not a long video.

High Fidelity is currently in the Alpha stage and is an open platform covered by an Apache 2.0 licence. This means the code can be downloaded from GitHub, forked etc. Now you could just look at the code and play around with it or you can go via the Worklist route and look at which issues have been posted. Now if you’re a developer and fancy doing some of this work, you can bid on the work and get paid when it’s complete.

Now you may be wondering what they mean by getting paid, are they talking about virtual money? Well from a cursory glance at the jobs done page it looks as if they’re paying people in US dollars, not virtual money.

The High Fidelity team will work with people who bid on work, so you’re not going to be left out on a limb.

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August 23, 2014

Tony Parisi Joins High Fidelity As An Advisor

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!

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August 18, 2014

High Fidelity – We Want To Make A Supersonic World Out Of You

The High Fidelity team seem to be having such a good time, having a ball and whereas they may not be quite travelling at the speed of light, the team are working at reducing the curse of latency, as they explain in their blog post : Measuring The Speed Of Sound.

We are obsessed with reducing latency, because we have observed aspects of 1:1 interaction which are broken by too much latency.

The issue that seems to be causing most concern is that of audio, rather than video. I’d really like to know what the mobile phone has ever done to Philip Rosedale. Did he have a hot tip on the horses that he received too late to place a bet on because of latency? There’s more to this than meets the eye, or in this case, ear.

However back to the technology. The High Fidelity team conducted a test, as they explain in their blog post :

We connect two high quality microphones directly to the two input channels of a digital oscilloscope, and we then use either a metronome or simply snapping our fingers or clapping to create a sharp audio signal that can be detected by both microphones. By positioning one microphone at the input of an audio system and the other at the output, we can then easily and reliably use the scope to capture the delay over multiple samples down to millisecond resolution.

The results of the test were interesting, Skype winning the day over mobile phones. However with regards to mobile phones themselves, it seems Verizon are quite a bit more efficient than AT&T or T-Mobile if you’re making your call in the San Francisco area. Verizon’s measured 280msecs for 1-way latency, compared to 400-450msecs for AT&T and T-Mobile.

Skype blew them all away however, in terms of end to end latency, as the blog post explains :

Skype, by comparison, generally outperforms the cell phones in terms of end-to-end latency: we measured audio delays of from 100-200msecs for various combinations of audio and video calls, where the two endpoints were on the same WiFi network. So this means that with a packet delay of about 40 msecs (which is what we typically see when pinging Boston from San Francisco), a cross-country audio or even video call on Skype is going to come in with about 250msecs of delay and be a bit better than using a cell phone.

Pretty impressive results, but far from good enough for the ambitions of the High Fidelity team.

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August 17, 2014

High Fidelity’s AKA Get Easy Like Sunday Morning

The High Fidelity team have ramped up their blog discussion during August and there’s a lot of interesting and fun stuff to look at. There’s a post about the importance of the speed of sound, there’s a post about Javascript from Paloma .. Paloma being a 17 year old intern and not a place and then there’s a post about frogs who aren’t frogs sitting on lilypads and singing.

Now as this is Sunday and I need to shave and hit the pub to watch a bit of footie, I’ll focus on the frogs who aren’t frogs sitting on lilypads and singing. We’re promised a follow up post from executive producer Ryan Karpf to explain the concepts behind this post at a later date. However for now we’re left to see some members of the High Fidelity team at play.

Ryan, Chris Collins, Emily Donald and Ozan Serim all feature in this video as well as a guy with very large shoulders whom looks uncannily like the avatar form of former Linden Lab employee Andrew Meadows (AKA Employee Number 2 when he worked at The Lab). However as this avatar isn’t introduced I’m not 100% sure who it is.

The post introduces a name for the High Fidelity band, they are known as AKA, they are also known as AKA too.

The video in the post exemplifies High Fidelity in action as well as Chris Collins reminding me of a character from Monkey Island for some reason. However what we see here is facial expressions and once again the mouth movements are pretty damn impressive.

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August 14, 2014

Virtual Worlds Should Pay Heed To The Rise Of The Orcs

Earlier this year Mitch Wagner had an article published in Information Week about High Fidelity : Second Life Founder Pursues Second Chance. The article talked of how Second Life had not reached mainstream appeal and pondered whether High Fidelity can. Mitch wasn’t convinced because of the time investment, but he did acknowledge that Second Life got a lot right. However for the real reason Second Life hasn’t reached mass appeal we need to go to the comments on the article and consider the issue of Orcs :

Second Life would have fared better if it had appealed to MMORPG fans, the primary proven market for such activities. Philip Rosedale, you need orcs.

This comment misses the point of Second Life somewhat and yet in doing so, highlights one of the issues for Second Life and any other virtual world. People see Second Life as a singular place, it’s not, but the architecture of the platform can make it appear so, which brings us to another comment on Orcs :

I think the Orcs comment is spot on. It’s one thing to fix the technological elements, but Second Life never appealed to me because it was so open and amorphous. Part of the fun of an immersive experience is having an objective and a set of limitations to work within (or against). An open world where you can do anything sounds great, but then you run up against the limits of your own imagination.

This comment hits the nail firmly on the head. Second Life needs to deliver experiences as well as offering open creativity, people want something to do. This also goes back to the points Mitch made about time investment, people want to pop into a virtual world, experience something and logout. They don’t want to build, they want to be guided. The problem here isn’t Second Life itself, it’s the way people view Second Life as .. well, Second Life. I’ve said something along these lines before, but for Second Life to reach mainstream appeal it requires people to stop talking about Second Life. This may sound somewhat odd but my point is that Second Life should be viewed as the technology. The experiences the places people visit, the places people learn at, the places people role-play, they should be at the forefront of the major discussion, Second Life should be consigned to the geeky conversation about technology.

Now of course virtual worlds offer a sandbox experience and the concept is absolutely brilliant. Virtual worlds such as Second Life, Kitely, Inworldz, OpenSim etc. offer authors, creators, designers the opportunity to build their very own stage and bring their own visions to life. This really is a fantastic opportunity for people who want to get creative, to do so. However there are many many people who want to be guided through an experience, they want to teleport right in to the end product. Virtual worlds do indeed offer great potential but to some, a blank canvas is very difficult to grapple with.

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