Philip Rosedale Demos High Fidelity's VR Tech Progress

Here's Philip Rosedale presenting the latest update to the virtual reality/world technology he's building at his new startup High Fidelity - watch, discuss:

Some of my previous HF coverage is here and also here.

@philiprosedale Philip shares High Fidelity's progress at an @SVVRCon meetup last week: http://t.co/7hJM6VSdgN

— High Fidelity (@highfidelityinc) April 9, 2014

Comments

[Paola Tauber]

Ugh, the avatars look silly. Nothing compared to the absolute potential beauty of Black Desert.

[Iggy]

When SL was in alpha, LL had The Primitar. I suggest that's where Hi-Fi is now. Give it time. I'm impressed by this technology (my already stated social concerns aside).

[Iggy]

Correction, via http://secondlife.wikia.com/wiki/Primitar

By Alpha SL had the mesh-based avatars we all know. I'm guessing the avatars Philip and Emily show off will only improve by the time we get to an open Beta test.

For now, it's great to follow Sullivan's Law and keep function before form. LL should have done that and made an interface that non-geeks could master fast. It *seems* that High Fidelity takes that approach.

[Giulio Prisco]

This is awesome. Is it a VR renaissance and the beginning of real VR?

[TracyRedAngel]

The avatars do look very cartoonish, but I don't think they're concerned with that. I'm not bothered by it, because I'm going to guess people will customize their own avatars anyway. I listened to it a couple days ago, but didn't Philip mention that you'll be able to upload custom avatar skeletons?I could have heard it wrong.

[Wyrd]

Yeah, the avatars look cartoonish.

I got the gist that they can already do much more realistic looking avatars, but they want to avoid the Uncanny Valley problem.

It's better to go with a somewhat cartoonish avatar (although admittedly maybe not *that* cartoonish) than to make one that looks totally lifelike right up until the moment where it starts to move around and then starts creeping you out because it's so close and yet still so far from real.

Facial expressions and blinking will always be a great deal more important than whether it looks *exactly* like a real person or not.

--
Furry cows moo and decompress.