High Fidelity – Page 9

September 19, 2014September 19, 2014

Drax Files Radio Hour Episode 37 – Virtual Therapy

Episode 37 Of The Drax Files Radio Hour has a main feature this week regarding virtual therapy with an interview with Dr Tammy Fletcher. There’s also discussion of some hot topics such as Innsmouth,

However the episode opens with an excellent interview with Jeska Dzwigalski (AKA Jeska Linden), regarding the late Joe Miller with whom Jeska was a work colleague. Jeska talks of the introduction of voice in Second Life as well as talking about how passionate Joe was about Second Life. This is an excellent perspective of the contribution Joe made to Second Life and is well worth listening to. Jeska left Linden Lab quite a while ago now but she’s still a well known and liked name. She also runs a pretty cool site : Geeks With Drinks. Jeska earns extra kudos for knowing the difference between Whisky and Whiskey.

The episode also touch upon a subject close to my heart, Facebook’s absurd real names policy. This time they are mainly talking about drag Queens petitioning Facebook to change their real name policy and allow people to use stage names. Facebook’s real name policy is simply absurd, a name people known as is a far better policy. I’m tired of trying to encourage Linden Lab to embrace Google + now that they allow people to use any name they want to. Facebook has reach, Google + currently has far better ethics in this area.

They talk about many more issues including the High Fidelity Alpha users and a revelation that Draxtor Despres may well be entering High Fidelity for a special broadcast, with a special Draxtor Despres avatar. I hope they realise the perils Of Draxtor’s long hair! This may be more challenging than Rock, Paper, Scissors which they have been having fun with over at High Fidelity.

However the main feature is a fascinating interview with Dr Tammy Fletcher. Dr Fletcher talks about therapy within Second Life. This is a fascinating interview because a lot of people will think that any sort of therapy within Second Life will be artificial, ran by charlatans and not worthwhile.

Yet Dr Fletcher explains not only how therapy in Second Life can be useful and valid, she also explains why Second Life can highlight issues that are specific to spending too much time in Second Life, or using alts, or associated drama and how these are real and not virtual issues.

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September 16, 2014

High Fidelity Alpha Users Talk Of Their Projects

The word on the street is that some of the High Fidelity team will be heading to Hollywood in a few days for the Oculus Connect event. I would imagine that some of the Linden Lab team may be heading there too. However before that happens, the High Fidelity blog has been been having A Look at Alpha Projects in Hifi. The picture in the blog post is particularly impressive, especially when enlarged.

Dan Hope, who I believe is a new member of the High Fidelity team, highlights the work of three Alpha testers, Judas, AI Austin and Ctrlaltdavid. This is virtual space, so people have virtual space names.

Judas has been working on models created in Blender. High Fidelity currently supports the FBX format, rather than the Dae format that Second Life supports. However as both have their roots in Blender, the basic workflows are going to be somewhat similar. High Fidelity is in the Alpha stage and this is highlighted in the blog post as Judas explains how a recent update has allowed him to import avatars from High Fidelity into Blender without destroying the rig to animate them. However Judas also hits the mark about the nature of virtual worlds in terms of being social platforms. I’ve said many times that Second Life is where it’s at in terms of virtual worlds because Second Life has the people. Any new virtual world has to have that social aspect and Judas acknowledges this in a quote on the blog post :

High Fidelity is about people. A grin, a smile, a hand gesture, a wave — not some pre-recorded gesture — breathe personality into lifeless avatars. [We’re creating] an environment that normal people want to gather in, not because of polycount, latency, or server technology, but because their friends are there. Every game has amazing graphics; HiFi should have amazing people.

Meanwhile in another part of the vast virtual space that High Fidelity engulfs, AI Austin is building I-Rooms: A Virtual Space For Intellectual Collaboration. Again we have a social usage exemplified here as well as the all important collaboration angle that virtual worlds offer so very well. I-Rooms are defined as :

We have developed the I-Room virtual environment—the “I” stands variously for intelligent, information, in- teractive, integrated, and instrumented—a shared persistent space, founded on process methodologies and offering intelligent sys- tems support for interaction and collabo- ration between users, systems, and agents.

AI Austin is also testing the boundaries of what is possible with mesh models in High Fidelity. This includes a Supercar with 575,000 vertices and 200,000. I can see people in parts of the virtual world sphere frowning furiously at this right now. AI Austin also has an International space station mesh that was provided by NASA. As it stands, space is a concept that High Fidelity captures very well. There are a lot of stars in High Fidelity.

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August 29, 2014

High Fidelity Take Us Behind The Easy Scene

Back on August 14th High Fidelity’s band, AKA, that’s their name, published a video of the band performing a cover of the Commodores song “Easy”. The original video was accompanied by a promise that executive producer Ryan Karpf would provide a behind the scenes follow up post.

That behind the scenes post appeared this week : “Easy” Behind the Scenes. Inara Pey has eloquently covered this and Ryan’s hypnotic eyebrows already. However I’m going to cover it too, although I may pass on mentioning Ryan’s hypnotic eyebrows. That doesn’t count as mentioning them!

First of all, the production of this video involves a lot of peripherals. The actors used PrimeSense or Asus 3D cameras. PrimeSense were acquired by Apple just over twelve months ago. Faceshift software was used for the expression tracking.

Emily (0n vocals) and Ozan (on guitar) used PrioVR upper body suits.

Camera man Grayson was using, to quote Ryan, something like the Elgato capture unit. Audio editing was done in Logic and video editing done in Premiere. I’m assuming these are products from Apple and Adobe as those are the companies I know produce products with those names.

Ok so first of all, the average user is not going to have access to all of those peripherals and pieces of software. However we should bear in mind that this video and the follow up one are aimed at demonstrating the capabilities of High Fidelity. At this point you may be thinking that the future’s so bright I’ve gotta wear shades.

However that’s not all that was involved, far from it. Next came a Javascript script to utilise nine different camera positions. The beauty of the script was that it mapped to different keys on the keyboard, therefore camera 1 may well have been mapped to key 1, camera 2 to key 2 etc.

However they were far from good to go, whilst building the set they ran into a bug that High Fidelity’s Alpha users had reported. Basically having too many models in close proximity caused the server to crash. A technical explanation of the issue is provided by rad Hefta-Gaub. At this point I should warn you to beware of geeks bearing gifs. This is all in the video, well not the part about geeks bearing gifs.

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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 21, 2014

High Fidelity – Una Paloma Blanca

The High Fidelity website is currently a strange beast. The site looks visually more appealing on my Mac using Safari than it does on my PC using Chrome. The whole layout is different, I’m not sure whether this is a caching issue or not. However I’m generally more of a content over pretty type of guy, with some exceptions, Microsoft Office 2013 being a glaring exception to that rule but I’ll move swiftly on from that. Another issue is that the top two links to the blog posts don’t work on Safari, the two links below do. However I don’t have that issue on Chrome because the layout looks different on Chrome.

However I’m not here to talk about website layouts, I’m going to talk about Paloma Palmer. Who is Paloma Palmer I hear some of you ask … someone? Surely? Anyway, Paloma Palmer has spent the summer as an intern at High Fidelity and whereas Paloma is far too young to be a cider drinker, she is certainly not too young to be involved in Javascript projects, as exemplified by the blog post : Paloma’s Javascript Project.

Palom has been coding for three years after taking classes in BASIC language and Java. This started in her Freshman year, I have absolutely no idea what a Freshman year is. I’m also surprised BASIC is still being taught, is this the same BASIC I’m thinking of?

10. CLS

20. Print “Ciaran Was Here”

30. Goto 20

That BASIC? That brings back memories! Anyway, Paloma explains why she finds coding interesting, it’s literally learning a new language and Paloma compares this to learning French. This is a point oft missed by people who are adept at spoken languages such as French but think code is scary. There are some major differences with application but some of the principles are very similar. The same goes for coders who shy away from learning foreign languages. Paloma also explains that coding is good for solving puzzles and applying maths to a situation.

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