Watch: Robert Scoble & Philip Rosedale Discuss State of VR in VR

Recorded live in High Fidelity. Scoble's avatar is eerily lifelike -- here's how they created it. Discuss below!

Comments

[sirhc deSantis]

So - HiFi is for past prime red shirts. Thanks for the warning.

(unless the scobe is up the duff of course)

[Erik Mondrian]

"Eerily lifelike" is right. Uncanny valley much? I know it's still early days, as Philip himself mentioned—and to be fair, there is a lot about this that's pretty amazing—but if they're not careful in how they promote their platform to a wider audience, High Fidelity could wind up with a reputation as unflattering—and as long-lasting—as the one that's dogged Second Life for years.

Think, for example, of how great Second Life can look these days (on a good computer) compared to what it was way back when. And yet... so few people seem willing to give it another chance, despite all the improvements (visual and otherwise), and the mainstream media attention that it still occasionally manages to get usually does little to correct those dated assumptions, too often using old screenshots that don't accurately represent the present-day SL experience. First impressions are remarkably hard to shake, even for those whose job it is to know better.

In my opinion, this might actually turn out to be one of the biggest challenges for the VR movement as a whole. It's dangerously easy for the people who are already "in it" to nerd out and get carried away by how cool they think it all is, the "look at how far we've come" and "imagine the potential," while ignoring (as in this video) how off-putting it might be to someone else; for the uninitiated—the people on the outside, without a headset, looking in—they may just see it for what it is right now and judge accordingly.

TLDR? I can't help feeling that the harder VR developers try to be "realistic" without *quite* getting there, the more they'll creep out and turn off potential users, possibly for a long time to come.