Watch: Philip Rosedale Explains High Fidelity's Vision for Blockchain-Based Social VR -- With Annotations from Past NWN Interviews

Here's High Fidelity's new, highly-polished presentation explaining founder Philip Rosedale's vision for a social VR platform that can scale to a billion users -- and if you understand all the jargon and references he's dropping throughout, congrats my friend, you're a Valley-level technorati type. Philip's alluded to this vision in numerous interviews with New World Notes, so here's some references/footnotes to provide more background reading:

Philip Rosedale: 1 Billion VR HMD Owners Possible By 2021: "The adoption period for a widely-desired inexpensive technology (like smartphones) to reach saturation (1 billion+) seems to now be at about 7 years. So the ramp will be between now and about 2021."

I remain deeply skeptical that VR will ever be as widely desired as smartphones, but leave that to one side for a moment. More references below:

Philip Rosedale Proposes Blockchain Technology To Create Online User Identities That Are Anonymous But Still Trustable: "Here is how that would work: First, you go to a website of a trusted third party that validates information for storage in the blockchain. Let’s say for this discussion that this is Google, but it could as easily be Verisign, or of course High Fidelity. You can pick whatever company you want, provided that they are well enough trusted that the people you will ultimately want to prove your identity to are likely to believe them. Google puts up a web page where you can give them the email you want to prove that you own. They then send a code to that email, which you reply to, in the same way that might happen when you create a new online account today. But instead of putting that transaction in a database somewhere (which would potentially compromise you later on), Google writes an entry into the blockchain which says “Google, Inc. certifies that the owner of the following public key is also the owner of this email address” Google doesn’t need to know anything else, and they don’t associate your email address with any other account information."

Philip Rosedale Tells Me About His Plan To Introduce Blockchain-Based Virtual Currency & IP Protection To His New VR World High Fidelity: “In the client you will just have a simple 'balance' and an 'inventory' of things you own," he explains. "If you are asked to pay for something, you may have to enter a password. You won't have to do any fancy cryptocurrency things.  The differences with using a blockchain are behind the scenes, and not visible to a casual user.”

Philip Rosedale On His Plan To Protect IP Rights Of High Fidelity Users Through Blockchain Registration: "When someone registers an asset, they will also have the ability to specify a fee (HFC$ or %) for including it in derivative works.  When someone else registers a new asset, they can include a previously registered asset in their filing.  And this will carry over to the marketplace, so that if someone sells an asset containing other works, those fees will automatically be paid whenever the new work is sold. "

However this vision plays out in its actual implementation, I continue to be impressed by Philip's desire to dream on a global level.

Comments

[Masami Kuramoto]

Federated consensus explained in a graphic novel:

https://www.stellar.org/stories/adventures-in-galactic-consensus-chapter-1/

[Estelle Pienaar]

If only he would understand a tenth as good what consumers want as he knows what investors want to hear...

[Clara Seller]

I really like Estelle Pienaar's comment.

I'm afraid that we, as consumers and people, have a really difficult road ahead. Philip Rosedale is pretty small potatoes compared to some of the more powerful sociopathic narcissists with "visions" we're going to have to contend with in our future. I think that we, the little people, are going to have to reclaim our hearts and minds before we are completely smothered in this insanity. Philip should focus on getting his contraption to fly and stop worrying about loading the human race on his latest Hindenburg.

[Iggy 1.0]

"They" know what "we" want before we even want it? I'm not so sure.

Philip Rosedale is a good salesman, but he is no Steve Jobs. Jobs may have simply gotten lucky with the iPhone or iPod before it. He could extrapolate well by looking at how folks were fighting their current devices, playing their music, taking photos, and communicating. The appeal of both devices and tablets has been the haptic interface; everything that came after moved to that standard.

But what's the extrapolation for widescale VR? Just because we are "someplace else" with our addictive phones does not mean that consumers want full immersion in a VW on a regular basis.

And given the looming end of Net Neutrality, and really, even with it, the US market at least would need a new and disruptive technology to bring us adequate bandwidth. Otherwise, under our telecomm monopolies the changes Rosedale talks about will never happen.

To me, his pitch is more Valley Kool-Aid aimed at luring investors. Speaking of Kool-Aid, we educators believed the same pitch a decade ago, and momentarily we embraced the hype about SL. Not going there again.

We can deliver distance education, which is where the money and consumers will be for mere credentialing, without VR or VWs. Those students and parents from the upper 10% of the US elite classes, plus a smattering of wealthy foreigners and "scholarship kids" from home, who want a residential experience will look to a small number of legacy, comprehensive schools, many of them offering boutique services and gateways to internships, the best jobs, and best postgraduate education.

Funny how we are getting a Cyberpunk future without VR and where the new bosses are the same as the old bosses, isn't it?