High Fidelity – Page 5

May 26, 2015

Ebbe Altberg And Philip Rosedale Set To Speak At AWE2015

Between June 8th – 10th the 6th Augmented World Expo will take place. The event will feature exhibits, networking, classes and more and is described as :

AWE 2015 features over 200 companies leading the charge in augmented and virtual reality, wearable tech and the internet of things. Join over 3,000 tech professionals to engage in over 20+ workshops, 200+ interactive demos, a VR experience powered by UploadVR and 100+ AWE-inspiring talks from industry leaders and pioneers. AWE is focused on turning ordinary experiences into the extraordinary and empowering people to be better at anything they do in work and life.

Whereas many of the names are familiar, two names probably stand out more for those of us with experience in a virtual world background. Linden Lab CEO Ebbe Altberg and High Fidelity CEO Philip Rosedale will both be speaking during the course of the expo.

Both are due to speak on June 10th. Ebbe will be speaking in a session entitled The Social and Philosophical Impact of Immersive Technology, which is described as :

How is virtual reality going to impact our social and cultural world? How will this technology affect human interaction, social dynamics, relationships, and life in general.

Ebbe will be joined by Altspace VR CEO Eric Romo. Philip Rosedale’s session is a little more vague.

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April 4, 2015April 4, 2015

Austin Tate’s Progress Of High Fidelity Posts Are Now Public

High Fidelity recently moved to the Open Alpha stage and with that they also removed their request for people to not blog about some of the inner workings of High Fidelity. The reason for the request was completely understandable as High Fidelity was in the closed Alpha phase when the request was made and public blog posts could make some misleading representations about the platform.

I would still advise people proceed with caution when blogging about High Fidelity because it is still in Alpha and things can change quite dramatically during this phase.

However you can get an insight into the progress and development that has been made so far with High Fidelity thanks to Austin Tate, who has been quietly blogging about High Fidelity during the closed Alpha phase, but kept his blog posts private.

The posts start in May 2014 : High Fidelity Alpha Tests – First Screens, in which Austin took a look at building tools, mesh, chat, using scripts and much more.

There’s also an interesting post about NPC Bots as Assignments, which as you’d expect, covers how one would implement NPC’s within High Fidelity. I’ve had a play around with that myself and it worked quite well as an initial test.

Another interesting post covers Experiments with Oculus Rift DK2, in which Austin talks about how Oculus Rift worked with High Fidelity at the time.

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April 1, 2015

High Fidelity Moves To Open Alpha Phase

High Fidelity, an open source virtual world solution, has until now been in a closed alpha phase with people only gaining access after being invited to participate. However yesterday they unofficially announced that Open Alpha was coming and now that has been officially announced by Philip Rosedale : High Fidelity Open Alpha.

It’s important to read the blog post before diving into High Fidelity because it includes some extremely important points regarding expectations, for example :

This is a very early release, and High Fidelity is still very much a work in progress. The look and visual quality is far from complete, and big things like avatar movement animation and physics are still not in place. There are lots of bugs to fix, and content formats will continue to change. But enough systems are now functional to make us feel that High Fidelity is useful for some types of work, experimentation, and exploration. Having run a small and controlled early alpha to iron out the really show-stopping bugs, we’re now eager to engage a larger group and recruit open source contributions from other developers working on building the metaverse.

Please bear this in mind because it is an early Alpha product and if you’re expecting something like Second Life in its current form then you will be sorely disappointed. However if you are prepared to put up with an early Alpha product, one in which things could change rather rapidly, then take a look at High Fidelity.

Another important thing to bear in mind, especially if you’re a casual traveller, is that at this stage, there isn’t that much to explore. However as High Fidelity moves to this Open Alpha stage, expect that to change.

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March 7, 2015

Could Improbable Technology Make Massive Virtual Worlds Possible?

I have just read an article on Endgadget : Better than ‘Destiny’: Studios now make massive games in just months. The article centres around technology from a company called Improbable and this sounds very interesting indeed. The CEO of Improbable, Herman Narula, is quoted in that article as saying :

It’s about having no game server. What you’ve always seen has been game worlds where there’s one server for one region and another server for another region, these very neat lines. And the servers are actually just the same game engine that’s running on your computer. … But what if you didn’t do that? What if, instead of that, actually you had thousands of tiny, very limited processors — call them mini servers, like a swarm of insects? And what if, instead of having boundaries, actually they all moved around many, many times a second, migrating to deal with simulation in a particular area? And they’re all able to work together to model a world much bigger than any one of them could understand.

Whereas the focus in the articles I’ve read on the Improbable technology have been about games, I’m pretty sure these concepts could also apply to virtual worlds. Indeed one of Improbable’s employees, Dave Hillier, once worked on Second Life, so the company have someone with knowledge of virtual worlds on the team.

The Endgadget article explains a little bit more about what Improbable is and isn’t :

Improbable isn’t just a series of servers. It’s cloud-based, but it’s not cloud rendering; it’s almost an operating system. It follows in the fresh footsteps of other studios crafting large worlds with just a few people.

What they seem to be talking about is a potentially huge world that reacts in a permanent fashion to player actions, talking about the game Worlds Adift, the article states :

the game world reacts in permanent, persistent ways to players’ movements. Build an airship and drop a boulder overboard, knocking down trees and crushing players below. Come back to that same bit of land months later, and those trees will still be knocked over, perhaps with other plants growing around them, or with other players harvesting them for resources. Real persistence, real in-game consequences to physical actions. This impacts not only mechanical moments, but also the story that Worlds Adrift tells.

Those are the sort of concepts that make me ponder whether this sort of technology would be suitable for a virtual world environment, because in virtual worlds, especially user content generated worlds, changes are largely persistent.

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February 26, 2015

High Fidelity Raises $11m In Funding, They Are Hiring And Open Alpha Will Be Their Next Big Milestone

In a blog post entitled This One Goes To Eleven, High Fidelity reveal that they have raised a further $11m in funding from Paul Allen’s Vulcan Capital :

We are happy to announce today that we have raised an additional $11M in funding, in a new round led by Vulcan Capital and with participation from other new and existing investors. This is certainly great news for us, but also great news for the overall VR ecosystem as we continue to see more and more validation from the investing community that VR presents enormous opportunities.

The point about validation is very important. At the moment I see a lot of hype and technologies emerging with regards to virtual reality but the proof of the pudding really lies in investment. Whilst investment is still rolling in, it suggests that many people really do believe that something concrete will emerge.

High Fidelity itself is still progressing at a nice pace. I’ve been impressed by the fact that they haven’t tried to rush into producing a product that isn’t ready for prime time. An article over at TechCrunch regarding the new funding exemplifies the point about High Fidelity’s progress :

The main idea driving High Fidelity forward is the ability to quickly generate a virtual space to meet in and interact with. While the interface is far from final, it’s already at the point where you can pick a template, choose a name, and instantly have a space accessible by others. Each space is essentially a small video game world, filled in with the same 3D models you’d build for a game built with Unity.

Creating your own world in High Fidelity is a lot easier than it once was, you can be up and running fairly quickly these days with some starter content already included. However High Fidelity is still very much Alpha and that should be taken into account if you see or visit a High Fidelity world. The TechCrunch article is well worth a read if you’re interested in High Fidelity. However back to the High Fidelity blog post :

Our next big milestone will be an open alpha version of our system which will allow everyone to start deploying interconnected shared VR spaces.

Although the blog post doesn’t inform us just how far away open Alpha is, it is encouraging to see the High Fidelity team mention this.

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