High Fidelity – Page 3

June 7, 2016

Educators Should Look To The Past Before Moving Forward With Education In Virtual Reality

Back in February 2010, Jeffrey R. Young published an article on The Chronicle Of Higher Education : After Frustrations in Second Life, Colleges Look to New Virtual Worlds. The article, as the title suggests, delved into areas of frustration for educators such as performance, navigation, ease of use and :

Plus, a lot of decidedly nonacademic activity goes on in Second Life, and it’s difficult to limit access so that only students can enter a classroom there. Online vandalism is so common that there’s a name for it (“griefing”), and it’s easy to stumble into areas designed for virtual sex that is, ahem, graphic.

Jeffrey makes a far point about griefing but I’m sure that part of the reason his article rubbed many Second Life users up the wrong way was due to the complaint about nonacademic activity. Second Life was not created as an education product.

A very interesting and very telling point from Jeffrey’s article though was the willingness of educators to look at alternatives, continue with Second Life and persevere with the goal of virtual education :

What surprised me the most was that, despite these challenges, educators appear more interested than ever in the idea of teaching in video-game-like realms. A group of college folks interested in virtual environments organized by Educause, the higher-education-technology organization, has a growing membership. Tellingly, though, it recently changed its name from the Second Life group to the Virtual Worlds group, in part reflecting an eagerness to find alternatives.

I was actually subscribed to the mailing list at the time when the change of name was made from Second Life to Virtual Worlds. This wasn’t solely due to educators wanting to explore other virtual worlds, there was also the issue of Linden Lab’s branding policy regarding the use of the Second Life name at the time, but many welcomed the move to discuss and explore alternative virtual worlds.

This week Jeffrey has published another article on The Chronicle of Higher Education regarding Second Life, Virtual Worlds and education : Remember Second Life? Its Fans Hope to Bring VR Back to the Classroom. The headline and opening text is likely to rub Second Life users up the wrong way. Jeffrey has experience of this as he discussed his 2010 article in the more recent article :

In 2010 I wrote an article for The Chronicle pointing out that some colleges were moving away from Second Life, arguing that the virtual world hadn’t lived up to the hype. I got more hate mail for that article than for anything else I’d ever done. And in one of the strangest moments of my journalism career, I was invited to discuss that article in a forum within Second Life called Virtual Worlds Education Roundtable.

As we can see from the link to the discussion, Jeffrey got a hostile reaction. I will say at this point that disagreeing with Jeffrey is fine, but sending him hate mail is not. Second Life users have hopefully grown thicker skins by now.

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April 13, 2016

Caitlyn Meeks Is Doing A Great Job Of Highlighting High Fidelity Content

Due to ongoing personal commitments I’m not finding as much time to explore virtual worlds as I would like. This is a great shame, but can’t be helped. This is particularly a shame when it comes to High Fidelity because they are making some great strides and they are being highlighted in an excellent fashion by Caitlyn Meeks, who made the move from the Unity Asset store to High Fidelity in February.

Caitlyn brought us the news that Content Team members Eric Levin & Jazmin Cano won best VR scene at the San Francisco VR Hackathon at Microsoft’s Reactor Space in March.

Caitlyn has also been talking us through the concepts of creating Mini-Golf in High Fidelity :

This is aimed more at content creators than consumers, but you can see Mini Golf in action here.

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October 31, 2015

High Fidelity – October Updates Include Developments With Mouth Tracking, Avatar IK & More

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 :

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September 29, 2015

Philip Rosedale Talks To Nautilus About Earth-Sized Virtual World And More

Dr. Kiki Sandofrd has posted a very interesting interview with High Fidelity CEO Philip Rosedale; The Man Who Created Second Life Thinks We Can Make an Earth-Sized Virtual World.

I found this a fascinating read and it exemplifies so very well how Philip has not lost his enthusiasm for virtual worlds, indeed he sounds more excited than ever about the concept. We’ll forgive Kiki for calling a company Linden Labs, this is such a common mistake that the URL Lindenlabs.com resolves to the correct website. The articles talks about how Second Life was once bigger than it is now and yet, as I’ve mentioned before, when people look to the future of virtual worlds, they can’t help but look back at Second Life and even grudgingly seem to admit, it’s not the giant flop that some paint it as.

When asked how virtual reality will change society, Philip answers :

If you look at Second Life today, as a sort of a terrarium for looking at that question, it already has. It demonstrates that we go after and exploit and enjoy the benefits of any increase in tools that enable our creativity and our commerce—and that our willingness to engage in business and in transactions with each other seems to be virtually boundless.

He says a lot more, he talks about how virtual worlds can cross boundaries and get people to talk with each other when those people would otherwise be enemies. I haven’t seen enough studies on this to have a firm opinion on it to be honest, but there is the common denominator factor. The issue is surely going to be that if virtual worlds grow as some predict, some of those common denominators will be removed.

However what’s this business about earth-sized virtual worlds, well Philip gets to that in the interview :

In a recent analysis that I did in thinking about this, I figured out that if we used all our computers—connected via broadband to the Internet—to make a virtual world, it would be as big as the landmass of Earth. You and I could go fly around in it, wander into some cave in Siberia that no one had ever been probably, write our names on the wall in there, and come back ten years later and the names would still be there.

Obviously, as soon as someone says something like that, the next question is likely to be whether virtual worlds could ever be the size of a galaxy. Indeed, that is pretty much the next question in the interview, but you will have to read the article on Nautilus to find out more.

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September 21, 2015

Linden Lab Continue To Generate Publicity As VR Hype Cycle Gathers Pace

Whilst reading Nalates Urriah’s blog last week I noticed an article related to Second Life In The News. Inside Nalates’ post was a link to an article on the Financial Times, which at the time I couldn’t read because the FT have this paywall thing going on. However today I discovered that I could read the FT article as long as I answered a one question anonymous survey.

The FT Article is by Tim Bradshaw and Emma Jacobs and is entitled “Second Life eyes second act as virtual reality matures.” Whereas the article does look to the future, it also looks to the past and this is where Linden Lab and Second Life, benefit from the current hype. The article starts off by talking about how magazine covers from over ten years ago that praise Second Life still adorn the walls of Linden Lab’s HQ.

The article doesn’t really reveal anything new, although there is an interesting aspect regarding adult content within the article, with quotes from Ebbe Altberg, Linden Lab CEO and Hamlet Au of New World Notes. Ebbe mentions that metadata will be used from start with Project Sansar to filter and sort certain types of content whereas Hamlet points out that adult content is a popular area in Second Life and therefore a source of revenue. Hamlet also talks about companies making the same mistakes in the future of VR as they have done in the past.

Another article on a similar theme by Heather Kelly was published on CNN Money; Company behind Second Life building virtual reality universe. This article also looks back on Second Life, but ultimately points out that Second Life isn’t the future, but this article also makes an odd claim that I haven’t seen anywhere else :

Creating worlds will be more difficult in Project Sansar than Second Life, but Altberg said they’ve made a tool non-engineers can use.

“It’s still extremely difficult to create content for virtual reality. Pretty much anything you want to create, you have to have a sophisticated engineering organization in place,” said Altberg. “We’re trying to solve those problems.”

Most of the quotes I’ve seen about Project Sansar have been about making it easier for people to create worlds, so I’m not sure whether the author has got the wrong end of the stick or LL are admitting that building with third party 3D tools isn’t as easy as building with prims in Second Life. Time will tell on this one, I have seen quotes suggesting that there will be inworld building tools in Project Sansar.

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