Many argue that mobile smartphones and social media have made us less connected to our fellow human beings. VR has the potential to course-correct the isolating nature of much of today’s technology and the opportunity to make us more connected and even more human.
Here’s a livestream of the hour-long talk, which I thoroughly enjoyed (and I even got an opportunity to ask a question at the end!). If you missed the event, I would encourage you to watch this wide-ranging and fascinating discussion about virtual reality and the various social VR platforms, held within High Fidelity.
I have to say this: I am really quite impressed with the level of innovation recently coming out of Philip Rosedale’s metaverse company High Fidelity. (It might be the result of all that new venture capital money they are spending!) Yesterday they had their third in a series of monthly stress tests of the virtual world platform, and they officially beat their old record by quite a margin: 356 avatars in a single HiFi domain!
They started off with a half-hour trivia game, where you had to stand on one of four coloured squares (A, B< C, or D) corresponding to what you thought was the correct answer to a posted trivia question. Each wrong answer teleported the losers automatically off the playing field (to watch from a raised platform on the sidelines) until there was only one winner left standing! There were a few glitches to the system, but overall it worked fairly well, and it was a fun way to start off the event!
The following picture of me standing in front of the main stage at The Spot with the official avatar counter in the background was taken by Andrew, who is the very hard-working producer and video editor of my upcoming pre-taped show, Metaverse Newscast. (High Fidelity hired him to be the official photographer at yesterday’s event!)
We already have two taped segments of the first episode of Metaverse Newscast, and we hope to add a third segment and release the program to viewers sometime this fall. We’ll be interviewing the personalities behind social VR, virtual worlds, and the metaverse on various platforms, including High Fidelity in the future!
High Fidelity, a social VR startup founded by one of Second Life’s original creators has bagged a $35 million Series D led by Blockchain investment firm Galaxy Digital Ventures. Also participating in the round were Breyer Capital, IDG Capital Partners, Vulcan Capital and Blockchain Capital.
It’s only natural to want to compare two of the newer, VR-capable social virtual worlds: High Fidelity (founded in 2013 by Philip Rosedale), and Sansar by Linden Lab (the company founded in 1999, also by Philip Rosedale, before he left to start HiFi; the current CEO is Ebbe Altberg). With similar roots, the two virtual worlds have a lot in common, but there are still some significant differences between them. Earlier this year, I recently posted an infographic comparing the two platforms (which I probably need to update).
Now, my preferred virtual world happens to be Sansar, but there are some areas where High Fidelity still has an edge over Sansar, at least right now:
Making friends: You can “shake hands” with another avatar and they are automatically added to your friends list in HiFi. Very natural and very cool.
Paying an avatar: You can pay or “tip” an avatar directly from the tablet UI in High Fidelity, something you can’t do in Sansar.
Spectator Cam: This is a very useful and fun tool. The Spectator Camera is a camera you can use, along with recording software such as Open Broadcaster Software (OBS), to record or livestream what you and your friends do in High Fidelity. They even had a film festival in HiFi consisting entirely of videos recorded using this device! I went to the premiere, it was great fun!
Blockchain: High Fidelity stores currency, object information, and identity on the blockchain. It’s a new, relatively untested technology which some feel is problematic, but Philip Rosedale has embraced it boldly. Sansar has decided to go in a different direction with a commerce system very similar to its flagship product, Second Life.
In-World Building Tools: High Fidelity does offer you the option of building items in-world, in a way very similar to the “prim building” in Second Life. It’s still a crude tool, but it works. There’s no such ability in Sansar, nor is one planned as far as I know. Most content creators in HiFi and Sansar do decide to use external tools such as Blender or Maya (or even Windows Paint 3D!) to create content, then import it.
Have I missed any other advantages to High Fidelity over Sansar? Please let me know in the comments, thanks!
You also have a lot more control over custom avatars;
On the fly Scripting and scripts that can run only on your client
CUSTOM avatars, not just customizable ones with attachments
In-world freedom to do things
Let me give some examples:
You can manipulate object behavior on the fly, instead of relying on things to occur: Like in this silly video where i just experimented with Attaching a camera to the end of a stick, then making it physical. I also bound my track pad to change my emotion state on the fly while in the HMD.
Avatars can also be, honestly a lot more expressive, in HiFi compared to Sansar, due to the ability to have completely custom shapes instead of attachments, which also are completely doable (my coat is an attachment I can change on the fly)
There also is quite alot of flexibility of creation of addons: like the clap script, allowing you to clap while in HMD. Scripting it self extends the possibilities to be quite large:
Or even cast a spell using gestures and vocal control, if you have the scripting know-how. This also demonstrates me switching out my attachments via a script.
