Philip Rosedale on Low Latency in High Fidelity -- Can Online VR Interactions Become Faster Than Skype Video?

Philip Rosedale says he wants his new High Fidelity virtual reality platform to operate at latency of 100 milliseconds or less, as I blogged last week, but after re-reading that post, I wanted to know a bit more precisely what he meant by that figure. So I asked him, and here's the thing: He is aiming to create a virtual reality platform where interactions happen much faster than they do when you are talking with someone on Skype video:

"[W]here I use the expression latency," Philip tells me, "I mean 'end-to-end latency', or as the ITU calls it 'mouth-to-ear' latency. I mean the elapsed time between my lips moving and you hearing it on your end. For a cell phone, this value is about 400msecs. On Skype video the delay between my eyebrow moving and you seeing it move is about 250msecs, although both our cameras are typically at 30 frames per second. Our goal with HiFi is to get that end-to-end latency to about 100msecs."

Speaking of FPS, he told me the kind of rates they're getting there, too:

"The local updates rates of Hifi are between 30FPS and 60FPS, depending on what thing we are sampling. 3D camera = 30FPS, rendering rate = 60FPS (ideally)." 60FPS is really good, on par with what you typically get from high-end first person shooters or high definition TV.

In any case, when he talked about latency in his interview with Mitch Wagner in Information Week, Philip tells me, "I am talking about the wall clock time between an event and when the person at the other end sees it, which affects the feeling of presence."

If High Fidelity can more than double the interaction speeds we get when talking with someone on Skype video, I'd say we'd achieve a genuine sense of presence -- to the point where lots of people might prefer communicating with each other in VR, as opposed to using something like Skype.

But all that depends on execution. Philip offered to give me a High Fidelity latency demo the next time I'm in San Francisco, which is something I hope to do soon.

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Comments

[Metacam Oh]

Hard to believe he is going to accomplish this with all the detail and data required for a virtual environment. Hope I'm wrong.

[Jess 2.0]

Great Article!

Looking forward to a new life in HF.

[Kirby Crow]

The more I hear about HF, the better I'm liking it! It sounds amazing. Wish it were real right now.

[2014]

big dreams, do you think people are just going to ditch skype? not happening.

[Hitomi Tiponi]

Hamlet, when he gives you that demo get him to show you it working between there and somewhere overseas, e.g. in the UK. It should be possible to get speeds down below that provided by Skype, but low latency VOIP service Mumble is not that widely used, despite its low latency and voice quality.

[Orca Flotta]

Speed- and ping tests to Dallas are showing around 270 m/s. And that's ping alone, not latency, which should be much longer. That's what is physically possible from South Africa and parts of Europe as well. So how does Philip wannna give us 100 m/s?

[Masami]

When you interview a person like Philip Rosedale, it is extremely important to separate the facts from the snake oil.

Metacam wrote:

Hard to believe he is going to accomplish this with all the detail and data required for a virtual environment.

He won't. The 100ms latency claim applies to avatar interaction. It doesn't mean that the world will load in 100ms.

Avatar interaction doesn't require much data, in fact it requires much less than a video stream. We are talking about small packets containing parameters for body pose, mouth and eyebrow position etc.

Ten years ago I liked to play online first-person shooter games (which implement a similar kind of realtime avatar interaction), and even back then, it was easy to get latency below 20ms (!) if the server wasn't too far away (e.g. between Germany and UK). Overseas latency will be higher, and there is nothing Philip can do about that.

Also, when Philip compares HiFi to Skype, it's important to know which Skype he is talking about, because there are two:

Before Microsoft acquired it, Skype was a peer-to-peer system that needed a central server only for logging in. All communication between Skype clients was serverless and encrypted.

After Microsoft bought Skype, they changed its topology to a traditional client-server model, similar to the one Second Life is using. Now every Skype call and chat passes through a server in the U.S., even if both participants are abroad. This increases Skype's latency significantly, and it was because of this change that the NSA could for the first time successfully wiretap Skype calls.

If Philip intends to implement peer-to-peer communication between HiFi users, it will be easy for him to beat Skype's latency. However, I don't think he'll be able to do that for long in a country like the U.S. because someone will say he's aiding terrorists.

[Wolf Baginski]

Promise me you're not going to fall for the old stunt of running a demo that never crosses a network outside the building.

There's nothing wrong with the target of beating Skype, but nobody is going to beat lightspeed.

[dizzybanjo]

Gotta say this is how excited I am about Hi Fidelity :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bbFu_wkflpI&feature=kp

[Adeon Writer]

To look past all this hype and buzz terms, Skype has very big latency and even Second Life has lower latency than it on a good day.

[pingsting]

Just as long as he makes this one free. VR should be the web reinvented, not choked by an internal economy that will always stagnate rather than promote growth and more importantly, peoples dreams.

Philip Rosedale could be the next Tim Berners-Lee if he gets this right...
But it MUST be freely available, royalty free & without an internal economy.
We are limited in real life by the amount of money we own, Virtual Reality should be the anithesis of this.

[Imagin Illyar]

Has Phillip mentioned yet whether or not High Fidelity is going to be a real time creative world that you can build in? I'm hoping it is NOT like the Blue Mars model where you build outside the world and it only gets updated inworld once a week or so.

[Jess 2.0]

@ Imagin

That has been the same question in my mind because I seen the damage it done in SL

We lost Tens of Thousands of creators that's why the mainland is abandoned because people one day woke up finding they were competing against Sims 3D Modelers & the 20+ alts of linden employees of who dominate sales in the marketplace.

1} These people woke up to find no new inworld tools offered to help them be able to compete

2} No early real full perm market it took close to 3 years to get good selection but a little to late the market is clogged with full perm mesh but most older builders left

3} Many woke up with linden lab not offering much advice other then go learn blender so people took the stores down because of no sells then abandoned land.

Linden Lab failed in keeping these people who were the founding foundation of the grid.

[Jess 2.0]

@ Imagin

Content Protection in HF how will they deal with copybotters?
will it be a half hearted effort like LL has done

LL-Development Team created the code for copybot then waited over 2 years after it went wildfire before banning it as we all know,
LL for a few years it thought it was a good idea and the viewer was even sold on xstreet

One year not only was all my work being stolen but LL let a bug thru that turned everything in my venders full perm it was almost as if they wanted creators to leave

Copybot is stronger then ever even with its own popular forum that LL has failed to shut down

Notice how HF is mostly ex lindens so will they have learned? will they have a new approach and offer solutions that the old grid cannot.

My mesh stolen in HF how will the HF Team handle it vs past LL Failures?

Will we look at content as a whole the same in HF as we do elsewhere.

[Oink]

SL Forum 03-27-2006 Question: What would make a good competitor for Second Life? Answer: I say Garry's Mod... GMod already gives you the ability to run your own sim, with the server option. It lets visitors come by your sim. It lets you build inside your sim; you can both save what you build and save the state of your sim; and best of all it's very possible to both import and export objects to-and-from GMod - That was 2006, now we have Garry's Mod 13 + Standalone Version 14.01.22 in 2014! http://forums-archive.secondlife.com/108/6a/96447/1.html

[Oink]

More Benchmarking

02-04-2010 "Recently, I started a Garry's Mod dedicated server. I had some problems but I was able to search around and fix them. My server is now showing on the steam list and I've had a few people join. Today, I just noticed that my latency is staying between 15 and 50, usually around the 20's. The server is in my favorites, and it seems that when it gets below 20, it disappears from the main server list but not my favorites. I'm pretty sure that higher is better... If so, is there any way I could increase it? In March, we may be upgrading our internet package. This is what I just got from a speed test..."

http://ht.ly/tgaEd

[Oink]

Philip must be kidding again...

Philip Rosedale complains 00:04 about needing ONE HOUR himself as SL creator to get his audio in Second Life running, next to crashing http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rv91AwOkJQ

[Oink]

Historical Analogy?

Wright brothers 3D axis control 1903
The brothers' fundamental breakthrough was their invention of three-axis control, which enabled the pilot to steer the aircraft effectively and to maintain its equilibrium.

http://ht.ly/tEyaX

[Oink]

Philip missed the train again...

Microsoft is working on 3D holographic avatars for Skype http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/move-over-hologram-tupac-microsoft-reportedly-working-on-3d-holographic-avatars-for-skype/

[Imagin Illyar]

@ Jess - I have no problem with mesh and using tools outside SL to create it. I'm learning Blender myself as well as a couple other modelling programs. And I don't care who my competitors are. I just want to be able to upload instantly like we do in SL, not have to wait for a weekly upload like Blue Mars did. I don't see anything unfair about how mesh was added to SL. In any market you have to keep up with improvements. That's just progress!

I do agree on the copybot thing, I do hope that HF will be built with a way to prevent it or at least a way to prove it so that it can be dealt with quickly.

[zzpearlbottom]

My soul mate and I only build in world, she uses sculpted generator and the mesh generator tools to create all!
The only work outside Sl is on textures!