Second life vr9/24/2023 ![]() ![]() Born in 1968 in San Diego, California, the son of an English teacher and a Navy pilot, his parents moved six times before he was 13. "A big part of our focus is to make it possible for people to build anything"Īs a boy, Rosedale dreamed of virtual worlds. Without true dexterity, how would people build things? High Fidelity has 26 full-timers and $15 million in funding, but it can't do everything, so it is forced to leave many crucial details to third parties. To pick up an object, you shoot a laser-beam at it, then manoeuvre it clumsily into range, where it floats weightlessly on your palm as if it were made of gas.įor Rosedale, this is a problem. High Fidelity may have hands, but it isn't able to simulate the movement or feeling of fingers. Still, the experience is far from perfect. "That is the only reason why Second Life has a million people using it today and not a billion." In VR proper, you do more or less what you'd do in real life.įor Rosedale, the difference is fundamental. VR's ease of use, says Rosedale, is perhaps the most important thing about it: "A big part of our focus is to make it possible for people to build anything." He had the same goal for Second Life - but there, it took users 40 or 50 hours to become familiar with complex keyboard-mouse commands. "One of the things that's cool about our system is that the physics of it allow us to interact naturally," says Rosedale. The movements for the game come easily, if a little clunkily. ![]() We head outside to a garden to have a go at Tetherball. Inside High Fidelity, Rosedale enters, wearing the same "Matthew" avatar as Collins. But for less motivated visitors with limited time, it was hard, confusing and alienating. "The one thing they all had was a huge amount of time to invest in it." Second Life was a retreat for escapists, an outlet for pent-up creativity - a place, as Rosedale once put it, for "smart people in rural areas, the disabled, people looking for companionship". "There was something about them," he says. When Second Life stopped growing, Rosedale could see from the user analytics what the people who stayed had in common. It isn't lifelike exactly - but it's not so far away. But the thing about presence is that you know it when you see it. For now, these approximations have to do the trick. One day, headsets will be packed with sensors able to detect facial expressions directly. The way a face moves is recreated by a machine learning algorithm trained on thousands of videos of actors speaking to camera. Skin, for example, is simulated by a "subsurface scattering effect". Presence is made up of a thousand tiny details - the way a basketball bounces, the way leaves rustle in the wind, the way skin glows as light passes through it - and each one comes with a specific technical fix. In VR, this feeling of being "there" is called presence. ![]()
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