You probably know that High Fidelity is Phillip Rosedale’s latest venture. Rumor… well… fact is he is building his second virtual world. I guess a second life for Second Life Avatars…
We have already heard that he plans to use a voxel based world. I mention that in: Second Life News 2013-15. Scroll about halfway down. Voxels replace polygons and produce much more detailed worlds. The people developing a voxel engine say we can have nearly unlimited detail.
In an article in Tech Crunch: True Ventures Confirms Investment In High Fidelity, more information comes out about this possible new world. Tony Conrad of True Ventures says:
Philip is truly a Founder of a movement—his passion for authenticity in our virtual interactions is unparalleled. So it stands to reason that his most recent company, High Fidelity, is building a next-generation virtual world enabling even richer avatar interactions, driven by sensor-equipped hardware, simulated and served by devices (phones, tablets and laptops/desktops) contributed by end-users. Together with Co-Founders Fred Heiberger and Ryan Karpf, the High Fidelity team is creating a version of the SETI system, but with computers powering a tiny piece of the virtual world rather than folding proteins or looking for aliens.
I would hope you know about the SETI computers. SETI is Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence. Beyond looking for little space aliens SETI is known for the computer system used to crunch the massive data delivered by the radio telescopes. The system is known as SETI@home. It is a distributed computing network. People that leave their computers on sign up to be part of the program and the SETI computers send data to home computers for processing via a screensaver. Combined the system provides 600+ teraflops of computing power.
It seems Phillip is planning to use a distributed network to gain computer power and reduce lag. I’m not so sure about the lag part. But, it is in the plan.
Read more on the High Fidelity site.
Sounds like Hype to me :-p
Good hearing.
Hype and fundamentally wrong. SETI is one of many projects using the BOINC network. IF they are using anything they are using BOINC to help create their world. It is almost inconceivable that they would be able to have the world actually reside on a distributed computing network.
Hype, yes. Fundamentally wrong, probably not. Think about OpenSim and specifically OSGrid. OSGrid provides the asset management. Simulators can be anywhere. I run one on my home system. Also, think about Torrent. Combine the two.
I don’t see how avatar to avatar updates can be any quicker. Put a thousand avatars from all over the world in a region. I expect some loss of sync and lag. But, like Euclideon’s ideas for voxels are new Hi-Fid may have come up with a new idea. But, I’ll salt it until I see it.
I just think the Seti / BOINC comparison is invalid. BOINC distributed computing downloads a set of tasks. Your computer completes those tasks *at your convenience* (as determined by settings). Any virtual world application would need pretty much continuous / live access. You can even go off line and BOINC will continue to process the work it has stored.
I think you are taking the comparison too far, but in that sense you are right. I think using the Torrent concept explains what may be planned.