High Fidelity – Page 4

June 11, 2016

Live Music In High Fidelity

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.

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June 10, 2016

Kevin M Thomas Talks To High Fidelity About Live Music In Virtual Reality

Kevin M Thomas is a name that should be familiar to fans of live music in Second Life. Kevin has been performing in Second Life since 2007 and has an inworld group with over 7,000 fans.

Being a musician of course is a portable skill and Kevin is taking advantage of that portable skill by taking his performances to other platforms. Today Kevin will be performing at a music jam event at 15:30 PDT in High Fidelity at hifi://open. That’s 23:30 British Summer Time … I think!

Kevin recently spoke to Caitlyn Meeks, Director of Content for High Fidelity and Caitlyn has posted some of that conversation in a blog post : Live Performance in High Fidelity.

There are some great points in this blog post and one of them is an issue I’ve raised before, the potential for Worldwide reach in virtual worlds, Kevin says :

Performing in VR requires incredible energy as a performer as you do not normally get the fan feedback as you would in real life, however the payoff is greater as you can build a much larger fan base in VR as no one is limited by where they live to attend a show.

Worldwide reach doesn’t just cover musicians, back in March I blogged : Comedian Sami Shah Exemplifies The Advantages Of Virtual World Reach. Storytellers, artists and film makers can all build reach via Virtual Worlds and as we move forward, more immersive Virtual Reality environments.

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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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December 16, 2015

Tribeca Film Festival To Feature Virtual Reality & Philip Rosedale

The Tribeca Film Festival® is set to run April 13th April 24th 2016 and news about the festival is starting to appear. The first round of speakers have been announced. Tina Fey and Tom Hanks are grabbing the headlines for their part in; Tribeca Talks: Storytellers platform, and I do love storytelling but this year’s festival is also taking a look at technology and innovation :

On April 19, it’ll be home to Imagination Day, powered by the Hatchery. The industry’s top minds will convene for an all-day summit focused on, “What happens when our wildest dreams become reality, and what will that reality be in our not-so-distant future?” The first round of confirmed speakers is no joke: entrepreneur Sir Richard Branson, founder and chairman of the Virgin Group, and business leader and product innovator Regina Dugan, of Google ATAP. The Hub will also host the following esteemed VR creatives and tech entrepreneurs: Second Life and High Fidelity founder Philip Rosedale, VR directors Félix Lajeunesse and Paul Raphaël of Felix & Paul Studios, and STRIVR founder and CEO Derek Belch.

Imagination day sounds like quite an interesting day, although there aren’t many firm details just yet.

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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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