For those that just want to get chat installed and go, scroll the end of this article. For those that want to know why there is no chat in High Fidelity and how people are handling that, read on.

High Fidelity Open Alpha by Daniel Voyager, on Flickr

As one starts to look at the documentation for High Fidelity (HF) they will come across the interesting bit of news from March 3: Announcement: High Fidelity is not going to host a text chat system. Well, that could explain why there is no apparent way to text chat in the current Interface (viewer). There once was, but it has been removed. Continue reading →

Philip Rosedale’s High Fidelity Virtual World now has a Marketplace 1.0. A blog post made yesterday gives us more details on how to use it and its current purpose. See: Marketplace 1.0.

Second Life founder Philip Rosedale talks about his new company High Fidelity during OpenCo by Steve Rhodes, on Flickr

About payment systems Philip says, “we will probably initially tie asset payments to credits earned sharing computing resources with others (which is not yet enabled but also coming soon).   Then real-world currencies.  And yes, we are thinking about crypto-currencies and blockchains.”

This suggests that if you are running a Stack Manager and sharing your computer’s computing power, you will earn in-world credits/currency. Eventually the funds will likely be exportable as real dollars.

Philip Rosedale has posted on the HF blog: High Fidelity Open Alpha. He is announcing the opening of the Alpha testing phase to the general public.

While this may sound exciting, and it is, it isn’t what you may be expecting. But, you can download the server and client now and get a region running. You are going to need to be a little geeky to get an install running. But, installing and running the Interface is as easy as installing and running a Second Life Viewer.  Continue reading →

Our virtual worlds require computers and electricity. Both of those cost money. So, if we are to run a virtual world we have to have some way to pay the bills. The crew at High Fidelity is figuring out how to make money.

Hamlet gets into the details: High Fidelity Virtual World to Monetize with Names, Content Sales & Ads (Including Virtual Billboards)

Image by: David Evers – Flickr

A novel, sort of, idea is selling avatar names. I suppose this would be like getting domain names for a web site. But, what happens when your name expires? What is the grace period? And what happens to your market place entries if someone else buys your name?

Hamlet also points to the idea coming from Hi-Fi that they will use billboards. That has possibilities…. Good and ridiculous…

I suppose we will get answers as things move forward.

Three new blog posts for High Fidelity popped up this morning.

Paloma’s javascript project is one. It is about a 17 year old intern at HyFy. Using JavaScript she was able to program what basically is sound bars that react to her singing with no perceptible lag.

High Fidelity’s AKA covers “Easy” is a blog post with a video, they say they will tell us more later. I suppose it is kinda neat… blah…

Measuring the speed of sound is a post about HyFy’s obsession with eliminating latency, lag. Right now they are dealing with sound and measuring the speed of sound in various media they list as Skype and cell phones.

Of course that really isn’t measuring ‘sound’. It is measuring how fast these mediums can translate sound to digital form, transmit it, and convert back to analog sound for your ears. The trick for HyFy is to figure out how sound is behaving in the real world and at least duplicate that in their virtual world.

The point is cell phones don’t really need to convey a sense of presence. A half second delay in such a conversation just means people tend to start talking over each other. But, we do that in real life too. So, we don’t consider it a deal or even take much notice of it.

They show Skype is a bit better and there is the video feed to sync up. But, we still don’t take much notice of it here.

With HyFy they want to maximize the sense of presence. So, all the electronic delays have to be minimized to the point they give us the experience we have when we are face to face talking. All the testing is telling them what the system has to do performance-wise to achieve that. It sounds like they can pretty much do it.

You’ve probably seen the blogosphere discussing the work going on at HyFy (High Fidelity – Philip Rosedale’s new VW). The video everyone is on about is below.

The talk is about making the avatars look better. One of the HyFy staff, Ozan, is talking about what is being done. (Reference) The avatar shown in the video is NOT a good looking avatar, my opinion. BUT… the lip sync’ing is awesome and that is the point of this exercise.

Expect the avatars to get better with time. For now HyFy is doing the cutting edge stuff no one has done before, at least at this level. There are lots of people making pretty avatars. Expect that once the hard stuff is done they will clean up the skin and shape.