Tag: Philip Rosedale

Strawberry and Drax Take a Tour of High Fidelity with Philip Rosedale

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Today, Philip Rosedale, the visionary founder of Linden Lab and creator of Second Life, conducted a tour of his new VR-capable virtual world, High Fidelity, for Strawberry Singh and Draxtor Despres.

This is another of Strawberry’s continuing series of visits to virtual worlds other than Second Life. She had visited High Fidelity for the first time a month ago. Back in February, she had also paid a visit to Sinespace, on a tour led by Sine Wave Entertainment’s Adam Frisby.

Philip said that currently, the High Fidelity company consists of 55 people, and about 20,000 people have created user accounts so far in High Fidelity. He said, in response to a comment from Drax that most High Fidelity users are probably American, that British/European users actually make up the largest block of HiFi users.

Philip talked about a piece of code you can add to your HiFi client, called Mirror Mode, which allows you to see a copy of your avatar in-world, to see what you are wearing, etc.

The group started at the Zaru domain, and from there they went on to visit the following domains:

Each HiFi domain runs on its own server; High Fidelity is a distributed open-source virtual world. Philip said that they built the architecture so that anybody who wants to can put up their own server, which means that it can scale upwards much more easily than a centralized system. He also hinted that you might be able to access High Fidelity on your phone someday soon!

Here’s Strawberry’s livestream of the tour (she was experiencing some technical issues with lag, and she did crash at one point):

Drax also did a livestream of Philip’s tour (one of the cool HiFi features he demonstrated was the ability to befriend another avatar simply by shaking their hand in-world):

High Fidelity and JanusVR Announce the Virtual Reality Blockchain Alliance

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Remember that blogpost I wrote, way back when, about the idea of the Universal Avatar? Well, we seem to be one step closer to that today.

Philip Rosedale, the visionary founder of Second Life and CEO of High Fidelity, has just announced that JanusVR and High Fidelity have founded the Virtual Reality Blockchain Alliance (VRBA), “a group dedicated to establishing a universal digital identity built on the blockchain and outside the control of any specific corporate entity.” He goes on to say:

As a member of VRBA, Janus will host a node of the High Fidelity blockchain and have the ability not just to read from the ledger but to register assets and record transactions on it as well.

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As a member of VRBA, Janus will recognize avatar identities created in High Fidelity, and equally personas created within Janus will transfer to High Fidelity. Users of both services will be able to control what information they share or keep private for each experience and tailor how they present themselves. Together we’ll add more features to our identity platform to help build trust as people traverse VR.

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Soon High Fidelity users can bring their virtual goods to Janus, along with ownership rights — the precursor to avatars and property moving effortlessly from world to world.

Janus is also developing a Blockchain Explorer that will allow people to view and render their assets, regardless of which service they used to buy them. You’ll no longer have some of your stuff on one platform, some of it on another. It’s just your stuff, everywhere you go.

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High Fidelity Coin (HFC) is our cryptocurrency for peer-to-peer transactions and purchases on the High Fidelity Marketplace. Janus will soon support HFC in its digital wallet, meaning anyone will be able to purchase Janus content using HFC. We’re creating a kind of ‘HFC free-trade zone’ between all the virtual worlds on both platforms.

JanusVR, a decentralized service which re-imagines webpages as collaborative three-dimensional webspaces interconnected by portals, also had a statement on their website of this new alliance. It states:

Fundamentally, Janus builds a universe of virtual worlds from the decentralized platform of the web itself. The use of blockchain technology is the next logical step, as it provides a meaningful solution to an important problem: portability of identity between virtual worlds. Such portability enables many new capabilities, for example: avatars that provide a consistent appearance between worlds, or enabling transactions with cryptocurrencies or any other kind of digital asset, with transactions occurring in-world or even between-world. All of this data will exist within a decentralized, public, secure network that will itself allow open exploration and visualization (something we are very enthusiastic about working on).

Of course, there’s still a bit of skepticism in some quarters about how well blockchain technology will stand up in actual virtual world use. It’s a fascinating debate, well worth following. Philip Rosedale is obviously a big believer in the blockchain. Maybe his bet will pay off.

And maybe—just maybe—the day of the Universal Avatar isn’t as far away as it once appeared to be…

Philip Rosedale Schools a Decentraland Promoter

The level of hype over blockchain-based virtual worlds in general, and Decentraland in particular, never fails to amaze and amuse me. Sansar user Theanine alerted me to this gem of a tweet by Barry Silbert, who appears to be a cryptocurrency cheerleader, and the absolutely perfect response from High Fidelity’s Philip Rosedale:

Decentraland Hype vs Reality 23 Feb 2018

Damn! Barry got told. And Philip is right; High Fidelity is well ahead of Decentraland.

It would appear that Barry is quoting directly from this rather strange article from WT VOX, titled Fashion For Digital Self – VR Environments For Self Identity Congruence. Here’s the quote in full:

Decentraland comes closest to the ‘Ready Player One’ virtual reality. Its advanced VR platform is powered by Ethereum’s blockchain and lets users create raw materials, construct buildings, objects, enjoy experiences, exchange goods and communicate. Even more, in Decentraland’s virtual reality world users can monetize content, such as goods, experiences, services and more complex applications.

What? WHAT?!?? Right now investors in Decentraland can’t do ANY of those things! You can’t even set foot in Decentraland right now!