I was planning to write up a detailed post-mortem blogpost about High Fidelity, when my friend Theanine wrote an excellent article on the same topic, and posted it to his Medium account today. Theanine wrote a well-argued, thoughtful essay, which is far, far better than anything I could have written myself, informed by his many years of working on the platform as a content creator, with his background as a game developer and a game artist.
Theanine very kindly gave me his permission to repost his work here as a guest editorial, along with his pictures.
Please note that Theanine has asked me to remove his guest editorial from here, and refer people to his original write-up on Medium. Thanks!
Decentralized servers: you host your own world the same way you do a website
Desktop and VR support: you do not need a VR headset to participate
In-world building and scripting using Javascript
3D spatial audio
According to Kalila, the Project Lead:
We are a group of exclusively volunteers looking to continue the goal of the metaverse. There are about 5 actively working, 5 around and about and advising, and then 10 more that are around for help or advice where needed. In the team and group, yes, there are ex-HiFi employees and contractors who are passionate and want to continue working on this shared dream.
There were a record 20 avatars at DrFran’s weekly salon in High Fidelity, which is effectively shutting down as of January 15th, 2020, trying to figure out what they are going to do in response to all the bad news. New users will not be able to create accounts on High Fidelity after that date, which means that in-world meetings of this kind will be increasingly unlikely, as the existing userbase drifts away to other platforms.
As far as we are all aware, there are at least three forks of High Fidelity’s open-source software code in various stages of development:
None of them is currently up and running, which means that there will possibly be an “in-between” period where HiFi users will not have a home. DrFran said that she is not sure she will be continuing her weekly salon in the new year, which leaves the Federated HiFi users Discord (and of course, my own cross-worlds Discord) as places where High Fidelity’s diaspora can meet and discuss issues.
There is hope amidst the general despair in social VR… (Photo by Lina Trochez on Unsplash)
This is the first chance I have had to find a little peace and quiet, decompress, and meditate on the events of the past couple of days, and indeed the events of the past twelve months. It’s been a rocky year.
A year ago, things seemed much more hopeful for social VR and virtual worlds. High Fidelity was hosting numerous splashy events, with hundreds of avatars in attendance. New and better features were continually being added to Sansar, which was also experiencing record attendance at big events like the Monstercat launch. Prospects seemed so bright as we entered 2019.
And then, things started to go wrong, or perhaps more accurately, stubbornly refused to go right. High Fidelity abruptly switched direction away from consumer use in an ultimately futile attempt to pursue the business market, and now the company has announced it is essentially shutting down its flagship platform in the new year. Linden Lab, despite assurances earlier in the year that it would be “business as usual” while they were still trying to build an audience for Sansar, suddenly laid off many of its talented staff working on the project (and at the worst possible time: halfway through a complete redesign of their human avatars). Even worse, LL has had to back out of a recent disastrous decision to replace the popular Atlas of worlds with the Nexus and the Codex, only after many users threatened to pull their worlds in protest.
After the bruising year that has befallen Linden Lab’s Sansar project and Philip Rosedale’s High Fidelity, an observer might be forgiven for wondering why any company would choose to embark on building a metaverse at all. In a recent blogpost, Philip blames problems with the current state of VR hardware for HiFi’s failure to thrive, but that does not absolve him of his tactical decision to go all-in on virtual reality, at a time when the majority of users were still in desktop mode (and likely will be for quite some time). Ebbe Altberg similarly gambled that VR would take off much sooner than it has, a gamble that he (and frankly all of us) bet the house on. A bet we appear to be losing.
In one of my darker moments of gallows humour this week, while writing the blogpost about the demise of High Fidelity, the thought occurred to me: that I might be the one blogger who documents both the rise and the fall of social VR. Was all this just a fad? Will virtual reality continue to be a niche, unprofitable market? Will High Fidelity and Linden Lab be the first of many metaverse-building companies to downsize, backtrack, and even fold in 2020?
In 2020 all eyes will be on Facebook as it launches its latest and greatest attempt at social VR, Facebook Horizon. Will Facebook be able to leverage its existing reach (and its deep pockets) to make social VR a viable proposition? If mighty Facebook fails, despite using all the powerful tools and tectics at its disposal, then perhaps that will be clearest signal yet that social VR (at least, as it is currently being conceived and marketed) is not what consumers want or need.
We could land up back at the drawing board, a discomforting thought. Or, perhaps, one or more companies and/or communities of users will bring some outside-the-box thinking that is sorely needed to kickstart this market and bring it out of its comatose state.
Look at Mozilla Hubs. It runs on just about every single piece of hardware you can throw at it, from high-end VR headsets to the cheapest cellphones. It’s so dead simple that you don’t even need an account to use it! Yet despite its limited features, I have had some truly wonderful meetings and experiences in Hubs this year.
Look at Cryptovoxels, a one-man labour of love that started off with slow, organic growth, and is now growing and thriving, with an invested community and a thriving art scene.
Look at NeosVR, which is probably unique among all social VR platforms in that a majority of its users are actually in VR headsets (a claim that even VRChat cannot yet make), and which is doing some truly amazing and innovative work that is attracting notice.
Look at ENGAGE, which is already profitably using social VR to create educational experiences for universities, with innovative features such as three-dimensional video recording of lessons.
This is not the time for a perimortem or a postmortem; it is time for a call to arms. A time to put our brains together and come up with new ideas and approaches, new niches and markets for this amazing technology. Yes, there will be failures and missteps, but there will likely be more successes like Mozilla Hubs, Cryptovoxels, NeosVR, and ENGAGE.
This is not a time to give up hope. It is a time to keep going, keep pushing, and keep trying new things. To keep moving forward, despite setbacks.
Call to arms. They wouldn’t have a problem if they actually understood the underlying mechanics and causality for making a social VR platform. What we’re seeing isn’t the failure of social VR but instead the unmasking of all the pretenders who bullshitted competency.
