High Fidelity – Page 12

January 23, 2014

2 Broke Girls Episode Includes Second Life Jokes

I’ll be honest, I don’t really watch 2 Broke Girls on the television, I’ve watched the odd episode and it seems to be on the telly a lot during the evenings in the UK, along with the Big Bang Theory. I’ve watched far more episodes of the Big Bang Theory.

However news reaches me via a post over at SLUniverse by Brenda Connolly (AKA Connolly) that a very recent episode of the show included references to Second Life. I mean really recent, like this week! This is backed up by an update on the wikipedia page : Second Life in popular culture which also references the episode. Actually that page is missing references from The Big Bang Theory.

Anyway, there were apparently a few references in the show. One exchange related to a character called Han (not solo) who missed an arranged visit to one of the characters because his Second Life wife was having a baby. The character complained that he had had fake sex nine months ago and not told anybody …. I guess you had to be there!

According to the SLU thread there was a further reference regarding the traditional don’t you need a first life before you have a second, ho ho ho. Anyway, this does exemplify that Second Life is still a popular and relevant enough name to be made fun of. There’s no such thing as bad publicity …. usually.

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December 30, 2013December 31, 2013

2013 Reviewed

The challenge with a review of the year is to try and make it worth reading. There’s a balance between including information and including too much information. This year’s review is largely based on Second Life and my own posts, so there’s plenty of information that I will be missing. For those who want a more in depth review, Inara Pey has been reviewing 2013 too.

For me personally it was a difficult year, Reed, Dee, Izzy and TJ Linden all gave me wonderful support, even when I myself was more than a tad grouchy with them but I do appreciate the efforts they made to accommodate me.

This post is not as long as it looks, if you skip the pictures, links and embedded videos it won’t take as long to read as you may think at first glance. I did consider breaking this down in to different posts, as I did last year. However at the end of the day it is what it is, so it looks like it’s epic in length but it’s really not. However to aid people I’ve decided to go back to HTML school and create a table of contents! Hurrah.

Contents

January – March
April – June
July – August
September – December
Summary

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December 21, 2013

So You Want To Login To High Fidelity?

High Fidelity is Philip Rosedale’s new virtual world project. This is currently in the very early stages of Alpha but you can signup to that Alpha from the main webpage. However you won’t be able to login to High Fidelity or see any of its features.

However it does seem as if it is possible to login to High Fidelity. There are clues on how to do this, starting from the jobs page. There a challenge is laid down to people who may want to do paid work for High Fidelity:

“We are seeing lots of great applicants! If you’d like to get our attention and also have more fun than sitting in an interview, do the following:

Checkout our code on GitHub, build the Interface client, and see if you can login to Hifi. Then, take a look at Worklist and see if there’s a job you can do to show us your work skills.”

Obviously this isn’t going to be for the faint hearted, or at this moment in time, Windows users. The GitHub link provides further information on the ingredients for building an interface for you to login to High Fidelity. The ingredients include CMake, building in XCode, QT5.1 and OSX or Ubuntu. High Fidelity has so far been successfully built to run on OSX 10.8, Ubuntu and some other modern Linux distributions

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December 20, 2013

Are Philip And Andrew Going Back To Their Roots?

The reasons for Andrew Linden’s move from Linden Lab to High Fidelity (which is now accepting Alpha signups) are unknown. Some speculate that Andrew had had enough of standing in the rain, drenched and soaked with pain, tired of short time benefits and being exposed to the elements.

Others have suggested that Andrew’s departure was due to feeling his spirit’s getting old, It’s time to recharge his soul, whereas others suggest it’s simply a matter of Andrew being homeward bound, Got his head turned around.

Whatever the reason, the move reunites Andrew with Philip Rosedale, with whom it all began back in 1999 when they were both at Linden Lab. The Second Life wiki tells us that Linden Lab originally started life as a hardware company involved in the research and development of haptics. Haptics are related to touch and are still very much in development, one of the latest examples being The Steam Controller. The controller is currently in beta but PC Gamer have been taking an early look at it, it’s not yet the finished article.

However Linden Lab abandoned the idea of being a hardware company after the software they created to bring their hardware to life turned out to be more fun. That software morphed into Second Life. The Hardware? Well that was something known as The Rig, and rumour has it that it sits in a box at Linden Lab HQ and makes the odd appearance, a bit like Magellan Linden but with less drunken debauchery and grumpiness. Whether Andrew has taken The Rig with him to High Fidelity is unknown.

Where am I going with all this? I mean High Fidelity isn’t a hardware company. This is true but on November 27th on The High Fidelity Blog, Grayson Stebbins blogged:

“How to create virtual touch? Without haptic feedback rigs or direct stimulation to the brain, how can we get closer to that special, sometimes intimate, sometimes intricate, sometimes magical feeling that is touch?”

The example they produced involved Ryan The Stylist and Emily The Client and the results look rather impressive.

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April 16, 2013

High Fidelity Hi

High Fidelity, the book by Nick Hornsby, then turned into a movie starring John Cusack and now a new virtual world by Philip Rosedale. In the new virtual world Philip, ably abetted by Jeska Dzwigalski, goes back to his former places of employment to figure out what went wrong and learns how to build a new stronger virtual world, with molecular cubes and a soundtrack featuring songs such as “I can’t Stand The Rain“, “Walking On Sunshine“, “We Are The Champions” and “Baby I Love Your Way“.

Philip and Jeska work at a store called Championship Voxels where they help other people who come through the doors of the store to reach their goals and dreams. Jeska educates people regarding the key differences between Whisky and Whiskey and in which cases it’s worth worrying about it or not and In the end we all applaud and live happily ever after! Hurrah!

Ok ok the virtual world isn’t anything to do with the Nick Hornsby book, but if they will pick a name like that! No it’s nothing to do with the book, but it is an interesting looking venture and it does feature Voxels….. I don’t know what they are and I’m not googling it either.

So what is Philip Rosedale’s High Fidelity? Well it is intended to be a virtual world and the blurb does look interesting, although at this stage we’re in vague city. The blurb tells us:

“We’re building a new virtual world enabling rich avatar interactions driven by sensor-equipped hardware, simulated and served by devices (phones, tablets and laptops/desktops) contributed by end-users.”

There’s a blog post today announcing the formation of the new company, which you can read here.

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