Hi Fidelity – Ciaran Laval

Daniel Voyager, Inara Pey and Nalates Urriah have all broken the news that Andrew Linden is leaving Linden Lab. They all provide good coverage, if you want my coverage read on! My coverage owes a lot to Hamlet Au Of New World Notes. In particular I’ve taken material from the following post by Hamlet (which is certainly worth a read) :

Meet Andrew Linden, Last of the Very First Lindens (UPDATED: Richard Linden Still Thrives Too)

Andrew, AKA Employee number 2, has announced he is leaving Linden Lab, tomorrow, December 19th and will be joining his former college pal Philip Rosedale at Hi Fidelity. The word on the street is that Andrew will not be revealing the true identity of Governor Linden or the current location of Magellan Linden as he makes the short journey from Linden Lab to Hi Fidelity. However it is widely assumed that Andrew will become the artist formerly known as Andrew Linden and be transformed into Andrew Meadows in his new role.

Andrew Linden is important, very important. Andrew’s Second Life profile states that he was born 11 years six months ago, however he was at Linden Lab longer than that, he was there in 1999 when Linden Lab hadn’t even decided to develop a virtual world. Andrew was there when, according to the Second Life Wiki, Linden Lab were a hardware company involved with research and development in the field of haptics. However Linden Lab decided they needed a virtual world to test their hardware and haptics became consigned to the dustbin of Linden Lab’s history.

Andrew was the person responsible for giving avatars the ability to fly, which was apparently because Linden Lab wanted to save time creating walking animations.

Andrew was largely a C++ developer for Second Life, but took time out to look at holes in the world, literally. In the snapshot above he’s looking for missing prims. Andrew regularly talked to users at office hour/user group meetings, providing the link between developers and users that many appreciate and which is unfortunately largely lost in the new Linden Lab.

Continue reading “Andrew Linden (AKA Employee Number 2) Leaving Linden Lab To Join Hi Fidelity”

Philip Rosedale’s Hi Fidelity project has largely gone dark, well in terms of blog posts anyway, there hasn’t been one since May. There are some funky features on the website though, more on that later.

However today, Hamlet Au over at New World Notes has posted some thoughts from Mr Rosedale: Philip Rosedale on Connecting High Fidelity’s VR Tools With Second Life — and When We’ll Get Those Tools to Play With

I’m not into spoilers, but the answer probably isn’t going to satisfy people, although it does keep the intrigue going. However Hamlet also links to a very interesting post from the Singularity Hub where they talk to Philip Rosedale. Now some interesting ideas emerge from this interview:

“While body tracking may make for more realistic and intuitive avatars, High Fidelity’s other big idea will power the world they live in. In exchange for virtual money, virtual citizens will assign their computer’s unused processing power—when they’re sleeping, for example—to construct High Fidelity’s world in exquisite detail.”

This isn’t new, it has been mentioned regarding Hi Fidelity before but it’s good to see the idea mentioned again, the interview makes the point that Second Life runs on 40,000 servers, imagine a world running on millions of machines and how that processing power can be harnassed to deliver the needed results.

The interview also suggests that the new Virtual World of Hi Fidelity will replace the inspiration of Snow Crash with the inspiration of Ready Player One, to quote Philip:

“I’d love to see us build something quite similar to what [Ready Player One] describes, but probably with less central agency. A global virtual world seems very likely to be (un)governed in a manner similar to the internet itself.”

Continue reading “Hi Fidelity – More Ready Player One Than Snow Crash?”