High Fidelity Blog

We used https://highfidelity.com, 3d audio in a 2d space. Amazingly effective for lots of people to have quiet conversations.

Aw. Randy Farmer and Chip Morningstar once demoed that for me. Very cute, and amazing that they could fit the client in a Commodore 64 and run over a 300 baud modem. The classic paper on this is "The Lessons of Lucasfilm's Habitat". It would be fun to have it running again, but it might be easier to run the old code in an C64 emulator. AOL originally ran this as QuantumLink Club Caribe. It didn't catch on, though. If they're going to revive this, it ought to be phone-based. It's about the right level of detail for a phone screen. (The current big effort in virtual worlds is High Fidelity.[2] This is from the guy who ran Second Life. Supports VR, face tracking, etc. It's supposed to be better visually than Second Life, but so far, it isn't.) [1] https://web.stanford.edu/class/history34q/readings/Virtual_Worlds/Luca… [2] https://highfidelity.io/

And Second Life is owned by a single, proprietary interest. And that's great, but that's not the Web. The beauty of the Web is that nobody owns it all and yet it still all works together. Even one of Linden Lab's former founders is trying to help open VR up on the Web: https://highfidelity.io/ I tend to think the problem with VRML was less to do with markup and more to do with 1997. Did anything 3D look great in 1997? Not really, and even then it still impressed us. But we have the power today to make--while not the most cutting edge graphics--certainly anything better than was available in, say, 2010, and we can make it cross-platform, open, and on the Web. Doesn't that sound like something we should at least try to do? Just once?

> Telepresence has been tried. It fails. Oculus won't succeed either. Why not? Because humans value eye contact. Your Oculus won't have that, and hence it will fail for that reason. I don't want to get in the middle of the love affair between you two, but just want to add my 2 cents that telepresence will likely play a huge role in VR over the next 5-10 years. Technology isn't quite there yet, but there are several interesting initiatives in this area. Philip Rosedale (yes, the same Philip from Linden Labs/Second Life) has been actively researching and pushing the boundaries of facial expression with his High Fidelity project [1]. Not sure it'll ever become a consumer product, but the potential is obvious. I saw him demo'ing his alpha version earlier this year, and it was amazing. Even though it was an avatar-based chat, the fact you can see the eyes moving and the face conveying emotions, brings the experience to a whole new level, well beyond the uncanny valley. The addition of facial expressions and other forms of body language are obvious extensions for Oculus. Case in point: they just acquired Nimble VR [2], and will likely incorporate their hand tracking technology into a future CV1 or CV2. Facial expression and eye tracking is likely a bit further down the road, but not that far. [1] https://highfidelity.io/ [2] http://nimblevr.com/

This blog post has a bunch of headset and mic recommendations across a variety of price points: https://www.highfidelity.com/blog/the-best-headphones-headsets-and-mic…

How to create a social networking event remotely for a happy hour or business networking event or party is an interesting unsolved problem. Here are a few other early protypes from teams working on it. Both of these have a UI where you walk around a 2d space and can communicate with groups nearby: https://theonline.town/ https://www.highfidelity.com/

This is promising! Noting for later. Has anyone seen the spatial audio only https://www.highfidelity.com/ too? I'm looking at both of these this week.

Check out https://www.highfidelity.com/ I know it's not really what you are asking for, but it's some very cool spatial audio work, letting you separate out where folks are in a virtual space. [disclaimer, I know some of the folks working on it]

Sansar is nice, but not directly comparable to SL (it reminds me more of would-be SL competitor Blue Mars). There is no single world; instead, it's a platform for the creation of stand-alone "experiences" (which can include teleport gates to other experiences, by all means). The building tools are also limited. Judging by my (so far also limited) experimentation, you end up working alone, mainly in something like Blender or Maya, then you upload and position your meshes in Sansar. In SL, you can collaborate on builds in real time. An interesting open source alternative in the social VR space is Phil Rosedale's High Fidelity: https://highfidelity.com/ But personally, I am currently infatuated with the much more light-weight Rec Room: https://www.againstgrav.com/rec-room/

The company behind Second Life is already working on a VR-centric "Second Life v2", with what seems to me a more interesting vision of the metaverse than Facebook Spaces. http://www.wsj.com/video/creating-virtual-reality-worlds/E180E596-4DBA… There's also High Fidelity, an open source, distributed VR metaverse started by the founder of the same company. https://highfidelity.io/

If you're into working on a Opensource Social Virtual Reality platform, we're always looking for contributors! http://highfidelity.io

The same guys who made Second Life have made a second second life that's pretty sweet. Better in many ways than OP's demo. https://highfidelity.com/

I don't know how you define a Metaverse, but I assume it comes with high expectations of sensory inputs. Check out https://highfidelity.io/ I think this project will grow to meet the high expectations of a metaverse.

High Fidelity is supposed to be that open replacement: https://highfidelity.io/ The problem I've run into is that it runs worse on my brand-new computer than Second Life ever did, and that's even on the mostly-empty demo areas they have.

There is opensim[1], which is used to run thousands of similar 3d worlds (shameless plug[2]), and the upcoming open source highfidelity platform [3]. 1. http://opensimulator.org 2. http://opensimworld.com 3. http://highfidelity.io

Sounds similar to what High Fidelity are building (https://highfidelity.com), which they're also open sourcing.

Yes, Second Life has one persistent world ("one shard") but it's composed of a bunch of "sims" glued together at sim boundaries. (A "sim" is a 256 m x 256 m x notsure m volume of space.) The states of the things in that sim are the responsibility of one server; if an object crosses a sim boundary, the new sim may be handled by a different server. The sim-crossing hand-off can cause object motions to look non-physical. As I understand it, Improbable also simulates one big world, but they map the various simulation calculations to servers in a different way. How exactly? That's their secret sauce. Philip Rosedale's new startup, High Fidelity, also takes a different approach. See https://highfidelity.com/

Sounds like High Fidelity: https://highfidelity.io (No affiliation other than having tried it a couple months ago and written a little bit of code for it.)

Arguably that's probably why Facebook's efforts are doomed to fail before they've even started. By branding and marketing and tying all of their "metaverse" activities to VR they've already lost in a lot of user mindset. The retrending blog post on the Requiem for the HMD [1][2] is more than enough reason to believe that VR (at it exists today, as it existed in 2019 when that blog post was written) is an albatross that Facebook has now tied around its neck as Meta. People are already dismissing this "metaverse" furor as just more VR hype with a stupider name and the company "Meta" is risking killing the entire term "metaverse" and any usefulness it might have had altogether. Ironically, by owning Facebook "Meta" should be in one of the best positions to build/sell a 2D "metaverse plane" as well as just about anyone else possibly could. Tear down some of the garden walls, allow a bit more of the old MySpace and Blog anarchy of clashing styles and user control, be a better web citizen. They aren't likely to do that because they are using "metaverse" as attempt to make more Oculus money and risking the Facebook lock in and walled garden for a vision with actual guts and takes risks doesn't seem to be in their interest. [1] https://www.highfidelity.com/backlog/requiem-for-the-hmd [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29069381

And High Fidelity: https://www.highfidelity.com/

Also https://www.highfidelity.com/

An interesting idea is to use some form of game / sandbox evnirnment for interactions. Interestingly, highfidelity which was until recently a VR-focused startup announced that they are switching to a more business oriented desktop experience, which sounds a lot like "slack in 3d". I think this model has a lot of potential as these 3d social tools lend themselves naturally to interactions, prototyping things together, and also give a sense of "presence" . https://www.highfidelity.com/blog/toward-a-digital-world

To give a perspective. Former Second Life founder and CEO founded Highfidelity.com to create an open source social VR world platform. 5 years later, and with at least 75M dollars in funding the platform is empty[1], even though it is in Steam, and even hardcore VR creators dont seem eager to use it. They had to pay users to join them for their stress tests. The creators' stories in the forum may be telling about the shortcomings of creating amd using VR regularly[2]. Meanwhile, secondlife's open source clone, opensimulator, has thousands of regions and users online[3] despite being a super buggy platform, with less than $0 in funding. 1. https://highfidelity.com/user_stories?include_actions=concurrency 2. https://forums.highfidelity.com/ 3. https://opensimworld.com/ (disclaimer:shameless plug)

High Fidelity -- San Francisco, CA -- Fulltime, ONSITE but work from home friendly. High Fidelity is a San Francisco-based company working on Virtual Reality (VR) technology. The company has developed an open-source application for building and deploying virtual environments (domains) to desktop and server computers. The virtual domains are designed to be social and interactive, meaning they allow for the real-time addition, rearrangement, and gross modification of 3D assets in a hosted environment being used simultaneously by multiple users. Our goal is to deploy an open, flexible platform for a variety of VR applications rather than a specific, narrow VR experience. We are looking for software engineers with solid experience in C++ and Javascript to help us build the Metaverse. Openings can be viewed at http://highfidelity.com/jobs.

High Fidelity [1] [2] [3] is an interesting open source [4] VR platform, developed by Second Life pioneer Philip Rosedale [5]. [1] https://www.highfidelity.io/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Fidelity_Inc [3] http://venturebeat.com/2015/10/28/virtual-world-pioneer-philip-rosedal… [4] https://github.com/highfidelity [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Rosedale

A few more for your list: https://altvr.com/ https://borrel.app/ https://calla.chat https://cozyroom.xyz https://cubechat.io/ https://gather.town/ https://happyhour.ianwdavis.com/ https://here.fm https://hopin.to https://icebreaker.video/ https://makespace.fun http://mcparks.us https://metaversehq.com/v/room https://mixaba.com/ https://party.vipshek.com https://rally.video/ https://rambly.app/ https://recroom.com/ https://remo.co/ https://sine.space/vr/ https://slashtalk.com https://spatial.chat/ https://squadapp.io/ https://tivolicloud.com/ https://town.siempre.io http://vircadia.com/ https://virus.cafe https://wavexr.com/ https://welcome.topia.io/ https://www.airmeet.com/ https://www.banger.digital https://www.brella.io https://www.highfidelity.com/ https://www.huddlehq.io/ https://www.ivent-uk.com/ https://www.joinglimpse.com https://www.kitely.com https://www.muze.nyc/ https://www.sansar.com/ https://www.somniumspace.com/ https://yorb.itp.io https://zonko.chat/