This screenshot from the latest product update of High Fidelity, Philip Rosedale's new VR world, is pretty damn impressive, and I'll tell you why. Well, let HF's Chris Collins first set the scene:
High Fidelity will achieve high scalability both by maximizing the number of people who can be together on a single server, and also by connecting servers together to create larger single spaces. In pursuit of this first goal, we’ve begun optimizations to maximize avatar concurrency for the single-server case. So far, as is show in this image, we’ve been able to support a couple hundred avatars connected to a single server, with the nearest 40 or so rendering at 75Hz in the Oculus using fairly detailed avatars and including joint and facial animation.
Thing is, all these 200 avatars look pretty fully rendered, so it's even more impressive if they can consistently get 40 of the nearest to render in, well, high fidelity. With Philip's first VR world, Second Life, it is difficult to get even forty avatars total on the same server, and that's with hellacious sputtering and partially rendered avatars. (You can get about 200 semi-visible avatars in proximity to each other, but only when they were on four different sims right next to each other, which almost always looks like a lagtastic wreck.) So if this level of quality concurrency works as well as promised, that's quite a leap, and an important one.
More updates from the video, many others that are also intriguing:
You should have mentioned that for the purpose of the experiment these are bots and not users. But it's still very impressive.
Posted by: Real Burger | Friday, January 29, 2016 at 03:53 PM
I believe this is going to be the most important feature going and yes hf does hold a lot of users as well this is good progress in every point
Posted by: High Fidelity User | Saturday, January 30, 2016 at 03:11 AM
It's impressive, yes. But personally, I'm not thrilled with how their avatars look, all cartoony and stuff. I'd have to see some prettier avatars to want to check it out, myself. The models I've seen in their pics so far are seriously underwhelming.
Posted by: Tamar Luminos | Saturday, January 30, 2016 at 09:18 AM
impressive but a bit ahead of itself, I cant even load the HiFi interface program without crashing on load up.
Posted by: Metacam Oh | Saturday, January 30, 2016 at 08:17 PM
I did rezz over 200 npc's in 2011 at osgrid in one of our regions, all at same time (Full avatars=hair, clothes, attachments and so on, rezzed and controlled by scripts) and any passing by our region at the time would be able to see them all.
What a big new, lol.
Posted by: zz bottom | Monday, February 01, 2016 at 01:00 AM
With a good server, you can have about 50 avatars milling about in opensim. They had approximately 100 or so at their conference thingy.
200 fully rezzed in one place has great implications ...regardless of the quality of their avatars. That's a not-bad audience for a bar band, for instance.
It's still in Alpha, isn't it? An open source metaverse platform with capacity for RL audience numbers? This has a lot of potential ..a lot.
Posted by: Han Held | Tuesday, February 02, 2016 at 12:22 AM