Inside High Fidelity: Quick Peek at Philip Rosedale's New Virtual Reality Startup

High Fidelity is the latest chapter in Philip Rosedale's decades-long quest to make reality not strictly relevant, and it's developing as you read this in a South of Market loft in San Francisco, right next door to a tattoo parlor. While the VR company has released a lot of videos showing off their technology and is now accepting Alpha user invites, I recently stopped by the office and got a demo from Philip. And while I'm sworn to secrecy about what I saw, I will say this: They're doing some amazingly innovative things with virtual world and virtual reality tech that will probably surprise you.

Let's take a brief look inside:

While I can't get into any specifics yet, I think High Fidelity's most impressive innovation is the solution Philip and his team have created to minimize lag and latency. It's so freaking brilliant I think it'll probably be imitated by a lot of other companies, both for MMOs and beyond.

And that's about as much as I can say right now. If you want to see more, you'll have to sign up for an Alpha invite, or check out High Fidelity's blog, where you'll see videos like this one, featuring Philip's fellow founding Linden, Ryan.

Full post here.

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Comments

[GoSpeed Racer]

The video reminds me of muppets. The arms moved in a jerky fashion like they were on sticks. The faces did show a bit of animation to them. It will be interesting to see where they'll take this technology and how well they'll refine it.

[Tracy RedAngel]

This is very intriguing...can't wait to see how this all develops.

[melponeme_k]

I wish them all luck and I hope to see new videos about their progress.

But any VR going up agains SL is akin to any old MMORPG going up against WOW. It doesn't matter that WOW or SL is old, they have the head start and the traction.

[Ciaran Laval]

@Melponeme_K exactly, WoW and SL have the numbers and it's hard for something else to break through, although eventually something else will, it may not be in ways we expect.

As for High Fidelity, aren't they going for a Seti style concept for performance in terms of sharing resources from distributed systems?

[Hitomi Tiponi]

"While I can't get into any specifics yet, I think High Fidelity's most impressive innovation is the solution Philip and his team have created to minimize lag and latency. It's so freaking brilliant I think it'll probably be imitated by a lot of other companies, both for MMOs and beyond."

I hope you are not talking about distributed hosting or voxels because neither are particularly new or impressive.

[Hamlet Au]

"I hope you are not talking about distributed hosting or voxels"

I am not, at least not in the way you probably think I am.

[csven]

The methods High Fidelity uses to solve some traditional VW problems (lag, user experience, etc) will be interesting to learn, but I'm equally curious as to how open their architecture will be or is intended to eventually be.

[Julia Benmergui]

Can't say I think much of the AV's.

[Gwyneth Llewelyn]

Well, hmm, maybe HF is really a virtual world after all. In any case, I'm a bit baffled about the "secrecy". I mean, High Fidelity is on GitHub. There is a direct link for it on their website. Just point to it, clone the repository, compile it on your computer, and you're ready to go. No secrets, all the source code is there for anyone to see. Yay for open source projects — go Philip!