Philip Rosedale Building Better Virtual World from Beautiful Real World Home

Financial Times has a quirky profile of Philip Rosedale, juxtaposing his attempt to create the next generation of virtual worlds in High Fidelity while renovating his real world home in San Francisco's super suave Pacific Heights neighborhood. Back when Linden Lab was still a tiny startup, Philip used to host regular (and increasingly drunken) Friday night poker parties at his place for the whole team, so it's personally interesting to get an inside look at his place. This might not have been the reporter's intent, but it also evokes the tension of trying to create a virtual world better than the real one, while living in one of the real world's most desirable cities:

Rosedale doesn’t just believe he can make a convincing virtual world. Unfettered by the constraints of traditional reality — the laws of physics, for example — he believes he can make a better one. “If you could work, play, meet, go to school, if you could do all these things in a virtual world then why would you not think that these spaces could become more important than this [real] one?”

I kinda doubt any virtual world location will ever be more important than San Francisco, and no virtual house will ever beat the view from Philip's home.

Comments

[Iggy 1.0]

Not everyone gets to live in Pacific Heights, hobnob with other Bay Area IT mandarins, and pontificate about the desert of the real.

As I've said before, the garden of the real remains more compelling to me than what I've seen online so far. Time will tell if Philip and other utopians are onto something.

I rather hope not.

[Carlos Loff]

If Philip is so good in bringing it's vision to reality and having such an great start as SL, than there can be only one reason why he did not stayed at LL and changed SL instead of going back to ground zero - LL stakeholders had too much power and did not allowed Him to keep improving things to it's great final vision - That said and assumed, I hope this time He manages to maintain full control on everyting at HF, good luck, after all nobodyvwould be here now if it weren't for Philip

[Sammy Bourne]

I always said " if LL did not charge money for a quarter of a sim and every person could have one for free. facebook did not exist.
Maybe this can be saved , if sL could be played from a integrated mini viewer in facebook.