High Fidelity Has 2nd Round of Major Layoffs, Pulls Current Products, Gives Codebase to User Community

Another sad and sobering announcement from Philip Rosedale of High Fidelity some seven months after his startup laid off 25% of its staff (80 at the time):

Until VR headsets don’t feel like, as The New Yorker’s Patricia Marx puts it, “a gerbil’s casket [has] been plastered onto the upper half of my face,” compelling social virtual worlds won’t gain traction... 

Our new project is different and in early development, which led us to the sobering realization that the incredible and talented team we have built, isn’t the one to take us forward. Consequently, we will reduce our team size in half effective today... As part of the refocus, we’ll also be withdrawing our apps on the Steam Store, Oculus Store and our Virtual You: 3D Avatar Creator app [pictured] from the Apple App Store and Google Play Store. Since there are no High Fidelity supported environments, we’re not offering registration for new accounts which these enable. 

No specifics on what this new product his remaining team of about 30 (assuming no one else has left since the first round of layoffs in May) is working on, but it seems to be somewhat (or significantly) different from the virtual world-meets-Slack product Philip has been touting recently.

Another notable point -- and virtual world veterans should pay close attention here -- High Fidelity's underlying code can still be developed by the community under an open source license (Apache License Version 2.0):

[High Fidelity] can handle large crowds, low-latency 3D audio, live editing, interactive content, open-format file compatibility, and users can host the content however they wish with complete control. The existing community over the past six months has continued to use the platform and contribute code with little involvement from High Fidelity. Given this, and given that our new project will further reduce our ability to manage the existing open-source repository, we believe that the best course of action is to formally turn over control of the codebase to the community.

This seems to open up the possibility of the High Fidelity virtual world becoming the basis for... OpenSim 2. 

More details about the fate of High Fidelity the company on this FAQ.

Comments

[Nick Rhodes]

Open Sim 2, that's interesting

[Jeremy Owen Turner]

What will this mean for all of the virtual coins I have required at HFC's bank? What about any assets created within High Fidelity?

[Jeremy Owen Turner]

@Nick Rhodes... Open Sim 2 will indeed be interesting although I am not sure if that will be in a good way(?) I am now hedging my social VR bets on NEOS VR.
https://neosvr.com/

High Fidelity's official demise is sad news for social VR, unless the community really makes it their own...High Fidelity has/had so much potential...Some of my most memorable VR experiences were from within this world (e.g. the Futurelands Festival with Thomas Dolby as the headliner was one of those moments)..

p.s. I really enjoyed your Duran Duran song about Second Life. Also, Wild Boys really jolted me out of my childhood innocence (in a good way ultimately, I think) ;-)

[Jeremy Owen Turner]

p.s. I found some answers to my questions here...
https://forums.highfidelity.com/t/company-update-a-new-beginning-faq/15817

[sirhc desantis]

Going to give Rosedale kudos for his post before this, as you say, sobering announcement.

https://www.highfidelity.com/blog/requiem-for-the-hmd

[duh]

This venture with VR headsets was always going to end here. Let's get real.
We've paved some roads to a dead end. Well, okay. But maybe this isn't the well we should go running to the next time we're thirsty for progress.

In the meantime, those who could have benefitted from resource and interest in developing usable and realistic virtual experiences are pretty much left with squat.

Who would have ever thought that people would be so reluctant to be blind and detached from their life?

[Iggy 1.0]

Funny thing. For the first time in months, I logged into SL today and then came over here. I do log in once in a while, a Rip Van Winkle checking his little 512 paid for by my premium account. Making sure no rascals are squatting on my plot so I can hurl thunderbolts down upon them from my floating glass house. Because I can. I can even dress like Zeus when I go a-hurlin' thunderbolts.

I think I'll go back, mesh my 2008-era avatar, buy a lower-lag vehicle, and try to drive some now-empty Mainland highways! SL is still there. Hi-Fi goes belly up. Sansar is not booming and I doubt it ever will.

Philip, maybe The Lab needs a code monkey? Sure are a few bugs left to fix. Polish up that Curriculum Vitae, as we call 'em in Academe.

Take heart. The future didn't end up the way either of us planned, and I won't hold it against you that, for a year or so in 2007-8, I told my students "in the future we'll ALL have avatars." Meanwhile, some guy named Jobs holds up a little box at an Apple event.

Had I said "In the future we'll all have tiny glass screens to which we'll be addicted," I'd have been on thicker ice. But, hey, I once thought we'd have a lunar city built by the year 2020. At least SL got me my flying car.

[FlipperPA]

I get excited when my watch automatically unlocks my laptop, and when I hit "Approve" in my two-factor auth app and it logs me in. My teenage self thought we'd be so further along as a species by now, and would be incredibly disappointed in me.

I'll never slag someone for dreaming big in public and not quite making it, because it takes a lot of guts to dream big.