High Fidelity Hires VR/Avatar Pioneers Jeremy Bailenson & Ken Perlin (But Needs UI/UX & Game Pioneers Too)

"Welcome Ken Perlin and Jeremy Bailenson" is the title of a pretty low key announcement Philip Rosedale posted on High Fidelity's blog last Friday, but it's actually among the most important news items for his new VR project -- Bailenson and Perlin are easily among the very most influential and pioneering people working in VR and avatar expression (respectively) in the entire world. Their resumes are massive, but to give you just two examples: Perlin's avatar animation software was Valve's reference for the character animations in Half-Life 2. And while at Stanford, Bailenson (who's helping High Fidelity "advance the state of the art in 1:1 presence"), led discovery of the Proteus Effect, which suggests that VR avatars influence a person's real world behavior. 

Just these two additions alone make High Fidelity a project worth following. At the same time, I'm still not convinced High Fidelity will drive the future of virtual reality. Because unless I missed an older announcement, it's in deep need of two others kinds of pioneers:

A world class expert in user interface/user experience, and a pioneer in game design. Last time I tried High Fidelity a few months ago, the user experience was far more cumbersome and user-unfriendly than Second Life has ever been, even in Alpha, and a colleague just told me last weekend that HF remains a vexing, confusing mess for anyone who's not a hardcore early adopter. And as with Second Life, there remains no "point" or meta-game to High Fidelity which helps ease new users into the experience, and make them feel invested in it. And my fear is Philip still assumes that that the immersive power of non-game virtual worlds in and of themselves are enough to attract a mass market -- something that remains unproven.

Or to say the same thing from another angle: Minecraft has blocky, unrealistic avatars but even in early Alpha, was relatively easy to play, and came with a meta-game (i.e. survive the Creepers). Minecraft has over 100 million users, while Second Life trails far behind with well under 1 million.  So which should be the model for the next generation of VR worlds?

(Speaking of which: Psst, Philip, Notch seems to be enjoying his post-Minecraft retirement way too much -- maybe he's looking for a fun part-time gig?)

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Comments

[Metacam Oh]

One of the things I learned a little about in java is Perlin Noise which is what Minecraft uses to generate its terrain. I wonder if he is hired to do some procedural land generation which if I have to be honest is sorely needed for HiFi

[Kitty Revolver]

HF so needs a UX/UI designer. I can't walk right. I know it is in alpha and in someway I'm fine with the issues, but it still needs a lot of work before I would have opened it up to testers. Hm whatever.

[Ciaran Laval]

High Fidelity are certainly hiring the right people but they need people to do a lot with their software to show people why they too should be interested and that's a lot easier said than done.