Tivoli Cloud, the company started by the former Strategic Evangelist and Director of Content at High Fidelity, Caitlyn Meeks, after HiFi’s abrupt pivot to enterprise users, has moved from San Francisco…to Adeje, on Tenerife, the largest of Spain’s Canary Islands, off West Africa. Tenerife is dominated by Mt. Teide, a dormant volcano that is Spain’s tallest peak.
In a new blogpost titled Hello! We’re building a spatialized metaverse from a volcanic island, Caitlyn writes:
Unlike a super villain’s volcanic island lair from a James Bond film, ours doesn’t include an atomic doomsday laser, but does have shirtless German tourists and open air restaurants. It is from here, the volcanic island of Tenerife, that we started engineering a spatialized metaverse architecture.
By we, I mean Caitlyn Meeks, former chief evangelist at High Fidelity (that’s me), and my partner, our CTO and co-founder, Maki Deprez, an accomplished programmer and VR content creator. Together, we’re building a spatialized metaverse on the architectural foundations first laid by the open-source virtual reality company, High Fidelity. We believe this architecture, and its future progeny, will become the foundation of the spatial networking metaverse we’ve all been waiting for.
She goes on to explain what they hope to do with a fork of HiFi’s code:
Spring 2019 was a tough season for High Fidelity, when business circumstance pivoted the company away from the metaverse and production shifted towards a seemingly more commercially viable remote coworking product. The company’s virtual world servers were abruptly taken offline. The metaverse project largely dropped off the radar. There’s a lot of theories about why the company decided to sunset its metaverse project, and I’ll not go into them here. What’s important is that the company made core parts of the architecture open-source so it could survive exactly this kind of situation.
The Xerox Alto, first created in 1973, introduced the point and click desktop interface used everywhere today. It never went to market. Today, this interaction model is at the heart of every Macintosh and Windows computer. Similarly, we feel that the spatial computing architecture engineered at High Fidelity, and its progeny, will become the backbone of spatial computing for decades to come.
VR Winter is probably coming, but like the title says, we’ve been literally working from a volcano in the Canary Islands. It’s keeping us warm and fired up. To that end, we’re weaving together our own spatialized metaverse using some of the core architecture innovated at High Fidelity, Inc.
It is the small mammals that survived the ice age. We’re not a big company by any means, we’re just a plucky little startup who wants a metaverse. We’re haven’t got money to make sexy videos, our shares are currently worth way less than penny stock, we’re not going to have a flashy “initial land offering” on a blockchain. In fact, we’re going to stay away from using the blockchain for now. What we do have is more than enough server resources, donated to us by Amazon, Google and Digital Ocean via the WXR Accelerator and First Republic Bank. What we do have is a groundbreaking open-source metaverse engine, seven years in the making. Most importantly, what we have is an understanding of what needs to be done to get people to actually use it, and perhaps even love it. And as far-fetched as it may sound, we think we’ve got just enough technical skill and moxie to do it.
If you want to follow their progress on this undertaking, here is their blog. You can also be among the first to follow the company on Twitter.
