Philip Rosedale on How COVID Has Transformed Virtual Worlds -- And Helped Crystallize His Life's Work

Recent New Yorker story on Zoom fatigue (no jokes, please) features a number of its virtual world/VR alternatives, and focuses quite a bit on High Fidelity, capturing and expanding upon the sense of audio-powered immersiveness that so impressed me when it launched last May:

Re-creating offline interactions is difficult. Without video, High Fidelity has done away with visual cues. All the subtle movements we use to communicate beyond speech—the mirroring and the blinking, the smirking and the side-eye—are gone. But as we spoke I came to appreciate the lifelike quality of the audio, which was immediate and transportive. It felt like entering a room in a way that Zoom doesn’t. 

Philip Rosedale gives author Anna Russell a hands-on (ears-on?) tour of High Fidelity, capturing and expanding upon this strange era we're now in, where virtual worlds suddenly went from odd niche/kids' game to social necessity and with little warning you're suddenly helping fix David Lynch's avatar hair. 

Or as Philip puts it:

“COVID is such a bizarre experiment,” Rosedale said. In my headphones, his voice sounded warm and intimate, as if we were sitting a little too close on a sofa. I moved my dot backward, slightly. “It has been so weird and fascinating to see science fiction unfold right in front of me and to have people forced to use virtual worlds,” he said. The pandemic has approximated the conditions of his most dire fantasies. In November, he ran a thought experiment with his team. “I said, ‘Imagine there’s a nuclear war that Trump causes, you know, through his incompetence,’ ” he told me. “Everyone would be online and have no way to communicate face to face because everyone’s kind of hiding out.” (He called this exercise After the Fall.) “What we’ve really lost with COVID is the public commons,” he went on. “We’ve lost the ability to be among a crowd—among a lot of people, maybe some of them friends but some of them strangers.”

That last point reminds me of something Philip recently mused about on Twitter:

Looking back from the clearer vantage point of COVID, I realize that all my work, and especially Second Life, has been about trying to connect with strangers.

Read the rest here.

Comments

[Athulupua]

Stoner phil and e.musk are just the latest batch of people who care little about the natural environment, people's privacy or the planet in general. All they care about is money and being "right". How primitive.

[seph]

I love Phil, but it's difficult to believe a word of what he pitches nowadays. Has he forgotten why the company is called High Fidelity instead of Low Fidelity? He spent the last half a decade convincing us hand trackers like Leap, face/eye trackers like FOVE and more were the future of communicating and better than video and now he's denouncing such fidelity of visual cues.

The only thing consistent is his attacking video communication which is weird...it's an unwinnable fight. I get the importance of 'picking a fight' when launching a new product, but video conferencing, Zoom or not isn't going anywhere. It works, its easy, and any problems with it aren't solved by audio-only dots.

Phil comes off as selling what he has and can afford to continue to develop, not what he really believes in. I feel for him since he's taken a lot of VC money and has a lot of people he pays and is responsible for, but it's difficult to believe he actually believes in this given he created Second Life, Coffee + Power and origin High Fidelity. Only one of those succeeded as a profitable business but all three attempted to change and improve leisure and work communication in ways it felt like he believed in. 2D dots with decades old spatial audio techniques isn't Phil.

[Joey1058]

I have to agree with seph. Spacial audio is an old tech. Rosedale might be able to fine tune it, but I'm not going to use a tech only for it's audio features. I can wear a pair of $10 earbuds and get the convo done and move on with my day.