Philip Rosedale’s new startup, High Fidelity, hopes to make virtual worlds mainstream by clearing technical hurdles that Second Life stumbled over.
Second Life founder Philip Rosedale says he knows why the virtual world did not achieve mainstream acceptance. He’s got a plan to do it again, and do it right this time.
You remember Second Life. It is a so-called “virtual world,” a 3-dimensional digital environment where people drive cartoon-like “avatars” to chat, role play, dance, play music, make art, create virtual landscapes, buildings, and vehicles, do business, make fortunes, or even have cybersex. Evangelists predicted in 2006 to 2007 that it’d be as big because the web itself, and shortly we’d all be living our lives in virtual worlds.
Second Life proved bewitching for plenty people. i used to be one in every of them. But the general public sneered. It’s still around, and it got lots right, but it’s mostly forgotten.
But not by Philip Rosedale. The boyish, 45-year-old Second Life founder stepped back from his active role as CEO in 2008, and after launching a few startups and a short lived return as interim CEO in 2010, Rosedale settled at a brand new company, High Fidelity, where he’s engaged on a brand new virtual world, in keeping with 2014 technology, that learns from the teachings of Second Life.
“The explanation virtual worlds were in niche is the double assault of the interface being difficult, and the emotional bandwidth not being there. You cannot see my face, you can not see my eyes when I’m chatting with you in Second Life,” Rosedale said.
“Putting people in an avatar world, finding the way to channel emotional bandwidth into that world — which i feel is feasible — goes to win. For you to give us an alternate technique to be present with one another.”
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Basically, Rosedale is ranging from bare ground and rebuilding Second Life from the floor up.
Located in a cool element of San Francisco, next to a tattoo parlor and near a mix laundromat/coffee shop, High Fidelity’s office is at the second floor of a commercial building. It’s an open, blond-wood decorated space sufficiently big for the company’s 10 employees. After I visited in November, the lobby was gutted as if for renovations. I also talked with Rosedale by phone in August and again in January.
Why’d it take me five months to get this text done? I’ll get to that later. For now, let’s let Rosedale speak his piece.
Rosedale believes the principle reason Second Life didn’t achieve mainstream acceptance is that it’s hard to take advantage of. And he’s got some extent. It takes most individuals a half hour to be told to do anything in Second Life, and weeks to become competent. Getting around involves a bewildering array of onscreen buttons and keyboard shortcuts.
High Fidelity’s plan is to switch all that with motion-capture cameras and software, along side optional motion controllers. He gave me a demo of the software, that’s in prototype, running on a MacBook. An off-the-shelf webcam captures the user’s facial expressions and copies them to the avatar’s own face, reproducing movements of the eyes, eyebrows, and mouth. For movement, point where it’s essential go. Otherwise you can point at what it’s essential to examine within the virtual world.
High Fidelity is operating with several hardware motion controllers to enrich the experience, including the Leap Motion, Razer Hydra, and Sixense. High Fidelity also supports the Oculus Rift, a prototype virtual reality headset. Rosedale anticipates these won’t require a large investment for users — the Leap is under $100 on Amazon, the Razer Hydra is $499. The Sixense and Oculus Rift are still in development. And they are optional. High Fidelity works fine without them.
The software now runs on Mac and Windows. However, High Fidelity relies extensively on WebGL, so it will become relatively easy to port to mobile devices, with tablets a concern, Rosedale said.
Another big problem for Second Life was scalability. The conventional Second Life server, or “sim,” supports about 40 avatars — large enough for an intimate nightclub, but not for a significant live event.
The cause of the scalability problem is equal to the explanation why Second Life is so hard to apply: It’s in accordance with technology from 2003, when the service launched, Rosedale said. In 2003, the smartphone and tablet market was insignificant, and users got Internet connectivity through a desktop computer connected by a difficult Internet connection. (WiFi and cellular data was used only by a number of early adopters.)
The cloud was also embryonic and so Linden Lab, which operates Second Life, needed to run its own servers in expensive datacenters.
High Fidelity uses a peer-to-peer architecture, distributing across the world an identical computers users use to access it. The more people connect, the more computing power is offered for an event; Rosedale envisions events populated by enormous quantities of folk. And High Fidelity will run on both desktop computers and mobile devices — another advantage over Second Life, which hasn’t ever had an officially supported mobile client.
Latency is another problem High Fidelity is calling to resolve. When there is a lag between an action taken on one side of an interaction and the action being seen or heard at the other side, the system feels unnatural and awkward to participants. Conversation proceeds in fits and starts, with people interrupting one another and pausing to simultaneously defer to one another — “Go ahead,” “No, you go ahead.” This can be a huge problem in virtual worlds. It’s one who the High Fidelity team is operating hard to eliminate.
Mitch Wagner is California bureau chief for Light Reading. View Full Bio
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