Nu Vibez and Roleplay Guide Magazine - February 2014 | Page 58

High
Fidelity
by Scorpinosis Nigh ire

Philip Rosedale's Next
Genera on Virtual World
When Philip Rosedale became less
involved with his own crea on Second
Life, many saw it as confirma on that the
experiment of avatar driven pla orms
had failed. However what was not known
un l recently is that while Rosedale
seemed to be pulling away from his
brainchild S L , he was far from
abandoning the concept that created it.
Enter High Fidelity.
High Fidelity is Rosedale's latest project
and claims it will be a a lot of things SL
currently isn't. Now some may find
building a whole new pla orm, versus
just upgrading the exis ng one, strange.
Yet, reminiscent of Simon Cowell leaving
his crea on American Idol to start The X
Factor, we see that upgrades apparently
would not be enough to accomplish
what Rosedale can do when he starts
over fresh.
58 - Nu Vibez Magazine - February 2014

According to DEViCe reporter Robin
Burks:
High Fidelity is star ng with more
intui ve interfaces, using body
tracking technology that

can
take our real world movements
and body language and put them
into a virtual
environment. His
first experiment involved taking
the gyro from an Oculus Ri
headset and
connec ng it to a
simple pair of glasses to simulate
head movement. High Fidelity is
also
looking at other devices,
though, created by companies like
Leap Mo on.
Robin goes on to say the following:
Rosedale believes that virtual
worlds also need be er virtual
economies. He has an idea

that could prove groundbreaking:
he wants to set up a system where
u s e r s e x c h a n g e t h e i r

computers' unused processing
power for virtual money (for
example, when a user is asleep).
That could lend itself to the crea on of
many fine details in the world that High
Fidelity wants to create. Presently,
Second Life uses 40,000 servers. But with
this new idea, a virtual world could have
millions of servers dedicated to it,
allowing for image rendering like we've
never seen before. Rosedale believes
that the technology is almost there to
create these complex worlds.