Atlas Hopping at Colossus Rising (Picture by Mijeka Munro)
Unfortunately, I had to miss yesterday’s Atlas Hopping with Draxtor Despres and Strawberry Singh. (I am now watching Drax’s livestream, and I am enjoying it immensely! Silas Merlin made Drax a wonderful blue dragon avatar.)
The avid atlas hoppers visited the following Sansar experiences, all except the last created by Sansar Studios, the in-house design team at Linden Lab:
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):
(My sinuses are acting up and my eyes are watering so much I can’t use my VR headset today, so I logged out of Sansar and I am just watching Strawberry’s livestream today.)
The Mainstreet, by Alfy (picked at random from the Sansar Atlas)
SunbeamS, by Sunbeam Magic (also picked at random from the Atlas)
I noticed a few new touches to the Aech’s Garage experience: audio commentary by Aech on each of the 1980s items in the garage, and the automated mechanical arms on a conveyor track, passing a barrel back and forth at the ceiling near the windows!
And Alfy’s experience is huge, with a city and a separate beach where dolphins are frolicking! Very nicely done!
