Philip Rosedale is always a great interview: insightful, engaged, and articulate. Here’s a perfect example, a recent 11-minute interview with GameReactor (a European videogame magazine) at the Gamelab 2019 conference in Barcelona, where he talked about his favourite topic, the metaverse, and the new direction for High Fidelity as a platform for remote workteams:
He argues that the change in the medium and the technology with virtual reality is so profound that it’s unlikely that the same big companies will dominate it, thus creating business opportunities for new companies (like HiFi!). He compares the shift from flatscreen computer use to virtual reality as being similar to the change from radio to television in the last century.
Philip Rosedale is a true pioneer and visionary, without whom we literally would not have the metaverse landscape that I love to blog about! Even though I am still somewhat annoyed at how High Fidelity chose to handle the sudden pivot away from their original consumer audience, I can certainly understand and appreciate the company’s need to establish a beachhead in one area (remote business teams) and then use that as a base to expand into other areas. VR needs more time to mature. As he says in this interview, HiFi was early to the game. The pivot was the best possible corporate strategy to keep the company moving ahead and generating revenue while waiting for millions of consumers to adopt VR (and eventually, they will).
I do admire Philip and I wish him and his team at High Fidelity the very best (even if I do deliver the occasional critical editorial on this blog).
I find it intriguing that Philip mentions “drag and drop”. He probably has talked about that feature in the past, but I managed to miss it. If HiFi ever does achieve that particular feature, it’s a new ballgame for everybody.