New World Notes

Listen: Here's How a Live Concert in High Fidelity With Multiple Musicians Playing in Sync Would Work

You heard the High Fidelity demo of multiple jazz musicians across California seperately jamming in the same virtual space, now get your headphones and hear this demo (above), showing how three separate jazz musicians could play live in High Fidelity in sync. What's seriously cool (especially in the COVID age) is how the sound changes as the avatar moves through the space, just as it would if this were a concert in real life -- but here, unlike in real life, you're able to "walk up" close to the individual musicians, to focus on a drum solo and so on. (If you did that in real jazz club, the bouncer would quickly eject your ass.)

How does it work? In this simulation created by Lucio Pascarelli, the three musicians stream their audio into a mixer, which is then streamed out into three separate devices: 

Jazz Musicians Quarantined Across California Experiment With High Fidelity's Spatial Audio for Live Performance

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Put your headphones on and click play to hear a group of quarantined jazz musicians improving together in High Fidelity, the 3D spatial audio virtual world. Uploaded by music theorist Rob Ewing, you can hear different groups of improv happening at the same time; there were seven performers in this session, he tells me, located throughout Northern and Southern California. 

Despite being relatively close together in the real world (making their latency relatively low), Rob doesn't think it would have been possible for them all to play the same song in sync together. However, he believes collaborative live music performances are still possible in High Fidelity:  

Philip Rosedale Offers to API License High Fidelity's 3D Spatial Audio to Zoom & Other Online Conferencing Services

Sick of Zoom meetings? Of course you are! So put on your headphones and play the video above. It's not actually a Zoom call but a simulation of what a Zoom call would sound like, using High Fidelity's very impressive 3D spatial audio. As you can hear, it sounds as if the callers displayed on the left or right are literally sitting in front of you on the left or right. It's actually a mock-up created to demonstrate how spatial audio can make Zoom calls less artificial and exhausting.

As High Fidelity founder Philip Rosedale explains:

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:

Watch, Discuss: Strawberry Linden Interviews Philip Rosedale! UPDATE: Added Questions Covered In Her Chat

Update, August 7: Bumped up for viewing and discussion. Post title changed accordingly!

Update 2 , August 7: Courtesy Strawberry, here's the main questions she asked Philip:

• Do you still log in to Second Life? If so, what communities and experiences do you enjoy exploring?
• Are you surprised that Second Life is still around 20 years after founding Linden Lab?
• Your avatar look has become very well known and perhaps even iconic - can you tell us a bit about what inspired you to create your unique look in Second Life?
• Let’s go back to the beginning of Linden Lab and Second Life: Can you share some stories about the origins of Second Life?
• Tell us what inspired you to create Linden Lab and eventually Second Life? There are rumors that you originally were focusing on virtual reality with a prototype hardware device called “The Rig” - is that true? If so, what happened to “The Rig”?
• What were the early days like at Linden Lab? Some in the community may not be familiar with this, but you led some corporate innovations that helped to shape and inform the culture at Linden Lab - such as the Love Machine. You also published the Tao of Linden. Can you speak a bit about both of those.
• If you could do one thing differently when creating Second Life, what would it be and why?
• As you know, Linden Lab recently announced that an agreement was signed for it to be acquired by an investment group led by Randy Waterfield and Brad Oberwager. While I know that you aren’t in a position to say anything specific about the terms of the deal, I wonder if you can share any thoughts about what you think it means for the future of Second Life as I know that you have known Brad personally and professionally for many years.
• Your career spans much more than just Second Life, of course. Prior to Linden Lab, you were a key executive at RealNetworks - a pioneer in audio and video streaming. Can you tell us a bit about your work there and how that might have helped to influence your decision to form Linden Lab?
• About a decade or so ago, you left Linden Lab to explore other entrepreneurial efforts - can you tell us why you chose to move on at that time?
• You are now involved with High Fidelity - can you share a bit about what High Fidelity is and how we can check it out?
• What’s next for High Fidelity?
• Do you have any other entrepreneurial endeavors that you want to share?
• The concept of a social virtual world was so ahead of its time -- and it feels like the pandemic has caused new respect and recognition for the value and utility of shared virtual world and VR platforms. That must be so affirming! Has the pandemic caused you to have any shift in your vision for the future of virtual social networks?

Listen: High Fidelity Adds New Demo With Ambient Effects to Its 3D Audio-Based Virtual World -- And a Wedding Venue for Virtual Marriages!

Click "JOIN LIVE DEMO" here to try a new demo of High Fidelity, the 3D audio-based virtual world from Philip Rosedale and crew. (Headphones and mic strongly recommended!) As you'll hear, the demo immersively dives you into a pool party where you seem to be surrounded by music and dozens of people, talking (or sometimes ranting!) all around you. At least 65 of them are audio-based bots -- a new feature added to the platform.

"I think there are 65 bots there... and two DJ sources in that map," Philip tells me. These ambient effects join a new set of updates announced recently on the HiFI blog:

Major Event With Top International Pop Stars Honoring Kofi Annon & Nelson Mandela Hosted in High Fidelity

Since High Fidelity launched its 3D audio-powered virtual world in May,  it has seen a steady increase of groups using it to host various events and conferences, especially those that can no longer be held in the real world due to the ongoing pandemic.

The most prominent so far is probably this one: The Mandela Mile, an annual event honoring the birthday of both former United Nations head of Kofi Annon and the legendary activist/politician Nelson Mandela, whose birthday is July 18.  Featuring appearances by a number of top international pop stars like Yemi Alade and Teniola Apata, the event's Step Up! Afterparty 24 runs from 3pm-5pm Pacific on July 17 -- click here for more info and RSVP for a free ticket.

Mandela Mile's event producer for the Step Up After Party in High Fidelity is a firm called Analytic Events, which happened to discover Philip Rosedale's new world in a uniquely cool way:

Listen With Headphones: Demos of High Fidelity's 3D Spacial Audio-Based Virtual World

You've been recently reading about Philip Rosedale's new 3D space audio plus 2D graphics version of High Fidelity, how musicians like Thievery Corporation's Rob Garza are enthused, even how it might even be used for real world social activism and protests. But none of that's quite convincing until you actually hear what I've been writing about.

So put on some headphones, and click Play on the videos in this post. There's a bit of spacial audio quality loss because these videos are on YouTube, but you should be able to hear various speakers walking around, and even use echolocation to have a rough guess where they are on the 2D map, in relation to you.

Notably, the official High Fidelity demo emphasizes its usefulness as an audio replacement for Zoom: Instead of doing Zoom video calls with many multiple (or dozens of) office workers, you can instead create a 2D floor plan of your real office in High Fidelity, and log into that. Then when you are supposed to have a conference meeting, you just drag your icon there on the floor plan, or drag it over to your desk for a one-on-one chat, and so on.

Here's a non-official demo from London City Voices Choir, using High Fidelity as a social hangout 

High Fidelity Adds Maps to D.C., Minneapolis & Oakland -- Turning Its Spatial Audio Group Chat App Into Potentially Powerful Tool for Activists UPDATE: Lead Creator Philip Rosedale Responds to Security Concerns

Update, 6/11: Some readers raised serious security concerns about using this app for activism. Lead developer Philip Rosedale replies to those in Comments and below.

Here's a fascinating new update to High Fidelity's new spacial 3D audio chat app for PC/Mac web browsers and for iPhones: Now, you can overlay maps to downtown Washington D.C., Minneapolis, and Oakland on your server. That way, you can communicate with up to 100 people logged into the same server, while also knowing where they are in relation to you in the real world.

As you probably noticed already, downtown D.C., Minneapolis, and Oakland are currently major flash points for recent (and ongoing) Black Lives Matter protests that have rocked the entire world. This is not accidental, High Fidelity founder Philip Rosedale tells me, when I ask him if these city maps could become a powerful tool for real life activism:

"That's just the idea," as he puts it. "Plus, we will add the ability to actually re-position you automatically on those maps.... so you could just walk around with your phone in your pocket.  Coming soon." (In the current version, you still have to update your location via simple click and drag.)

I'm very curious if activists will find use for this. As we saw with the peaceful D.C. protest that was unexpectedly and violently broken up by the Trump Administration, I imagine protesters could find great value in a communication app that enables them to keep track of their specific locations in real time amid the chaos.

Update, 6/11: Responding to reader concerns over security while using High Fidelity for activism, Philip posted this comment:

I agree with these concerns, and we feel that one way we can be a force for good is to be serious about not collecting any data, and not building a business that is an any way dependent on such data. Here is what we are doing so far:

1. You do not create an account to use High Fidelity, you simply click on a server URL link (sent to you by the server host). What this means is that, as a visitor to a server, we do not have your email address or any other information about you.

2. The server machines that actually process the audio do not save any information - neither the audio not historical access data. Server machines are actively recycled - when there is no one on a server, the 'instance' (to use Amazon EC2 terminology) is removed from service to a standby list. This means that the server host (in addition to High Fidelity) also has no access to any sort of logging information.

Going forward, we will look into adding end-to-end encryption of the audio data to add additional security. We like this idea, but is is much more complex to design with the 3D spatialization we need to do as well... in short, the server needs to 'hear' the audio very briefly to mix it together for the receivers.

In summary, the lack of accounts and the fact that we don't log/store any information that passes through the individual servers makes High Fidelity a much more secure choice than something like Zoom or Google Meet. But, we agree with the focus on privacy and with continue to improve it in the future.

Instructions for installing these maps (along with a template for fundraising) below, via High Fidelity:

Philip Rosedale Launches His New 3D Audio-Driven Virtual World -- Come Join Him At His Pool Party Now!

Go here to create an account and then click here to join Philip Rosedale in High Fidelity's public pool party. You can also DM Philip on Twitter to invite him over to your own High Fidelity server. This is the "audio plus 2D world" (as Philip describes it) that uses High Fidelity's highly spacial audio and has already been tested (and embraced) by top musicians like Thievery Corporation's Rob Garza. (Currently runs on Chrome web browsers and Safari on iOS devices.)

I just tried it out (see above), and the spacial audio is quite impressive -- Philip clicked-and-dragged his avatar around me and listening through my headphones, it sure as hell sounded like Philip himself was walking around me. I would love to see (hear?) ambient audio in these experiences, to make it truly feel like a virtual world -- in this case, splashing in the pool, sound of a beatbox blasting, tinkling of ice cubes in drinks, etc. -- but perhaps those will be added in future updates.

Anyway, jump in now while Philip is by the pool and share your reactions (and HiFi servers) in Comments!