Philip Rosedale Announces Major Changes to the High Fidelity Platform: “This model is not working right now”

Daniel Voyager

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Last Friday, at the weekly General Assembly meeting, Philip Rosedale made two major announcements:
  1. High Fidelity was immediately (i.e. within the next 24 hours) closing down all its public domains, with the exception of a small Welcome domain for new users; and
  2. In response to complaints from users that the company was not sufficiently supporting open source development of the High Fidelity platform, the weekly General Assembly meetings were to be discontinued, and replaced with a biweekly developers’ meetup.
See the full blog post here

See the live stream of the High Fidelity General Assembly here...


I'm wondering if the High Fidelity community will now move over to Sansar or will go elsewhere.
 

Khamon

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We're going to close down all of our public spaces because we're not a social game. We're not a chat room. We can't manage the ban lists. We can't manage a new user experience. We can't successfully demonstrate a effective use of this platform. We don't like our users so we're gonna refine our exposure to them by qualifying developer status. They have BINGO! We listen; we hear you, we feel you. Oh dear Phillip it's like 2005 all over again.

We just want to know that what we develop will be supported by the platform into the future, with a committment from you, according to your roadmap.

Let us politely say fuck you and now we shall repeat the mantra of the day, again, moving along.

And here comes the "don't get too attached to your virtual shack on the beach because we're dismissing you all to court business and education accounts with no real intention of supporting their needs and desires either" speech.

Retroing for desktops is smart. I wonder how the room took that? That's an excellent idea.

Wow operating a VR server is prohibitively expensive. That's too bad. Is he gonna tell them his "garage door in my bedroom" story again?

No, he didn't, but now he's reiterating that there will be no committment to support existing content. The SL team broke Starax's wand but usually chose to limit development of features in order to preserve existing content. Not sure which is best.
 

RyanSchultz

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Yeah, it's clearly a difficult period of High Fidelity. I have no idea what's going to happen next. But if HiFi is pinning its hopes on B2B, well, we'll see what happens with that.
 

Kaimi Kyomoon

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At one point, long ago, I knew how to make clothes and build stuff with prims. I earned enough money to take Bruce out to dinner once a month. I have no idea how anything works in SL, especially now, when I've almost forgotten how to walk around in world. Can someone give me the explanation for dummies on what this means to me? Thanks.
 
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Dakota Tebaldi

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Wasn't HiFi one of those things that Phillip said right off the bat, rather emphatically, was NOT supposed to end up being another SL? And I guess this response comes because 1) a lot of its users were trying to make it another SL anyway and 2) running HF in that way is bleeding the company dry.

You can't give the people what they want if what they want isn't financially sustainable. Themed and RP estates in Second Life fold all the time for this reason, this is just larger-scale.
 

Kaimi Kyomoon

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What is HiFi? What is Sansar?
 

Cristiano

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What is HiFi? What is Sansar?
HiFi is High Fidelity, a virtual world platform created by Phillip Rosedale that is described as this:

High Fidelity is an open-source virtual reality software platform to help 3D artists, developers, and creators build virtual reality spaces

Sansar is Linden Lab's similar project, though they are different in some ways.
 

Beebo Brink

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High Fidelity is an open-source virtual reality software platform to help 3D artists, developers, and creators build virtual reality spaces
You can always count on Rosedale to court as much free labor as he can get. He should come with a warning label: Read Tom Sawyer before working for this man.
 

Soen Eber

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The good news is the amount of good, useful free code that will make it's way into the open source community after the inevitable bust. Once it's untiered from the constraints of the profit motive something fun could develop that would THEN get licensed for commercial development.
 
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Casey Pelous

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This. THIS.

I am seriously wondering what the hell High Fidelity is thinking.
That's easy. He sold that line of crap to the venture capital community before and he'll try it again. He may have even gotten feedback about the need to go in that direction from some VC.

There's absolutely nothing about SL or "next SL" that would light up a VC. Something that's going to magically tap the spigots of the corporate world by [insert latest VC gibberish for "sell a metric butt-load and make big profits"] is always in style.
 
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Well; SOMEONE has to make a VR SL.

It’s not High Fidelity.
It’s not VRChat.
It’s noooooot Sansar.

Maybe someone will get it right eventually.
 

Bartholomew Gallacher

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Well VR is going to be a thing if VR becomes really cheap; the Oculus Quest is definitely an interesting step into that kind of direction, but since it uses a smartphone the VR app really must be dumbed down compared to a PC.
 
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And just after I write this, VRChat announces Quest support. Alright then.
 

Soen Eber

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Can any of these headsets be used with a PC just for normal work, say so I can work on a script with the PC closed or on one side with just the goggles, a mouse, and a separate keyboard?

Not having a clunky laptop or PC in the way would be great and would keep it safe from accidents. Bonus points if the goggles have multiple screens - a simple turn of the head to check out documentation, a web site or youtube vid, or even a built-in video adapter.

Maybe someday we can have a Minority Report interface...
 

Bartholomew Gallacher

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The Oculus Quest uses a smartphone as computer - so no. You literally are putting the whole computational device there into the head gear.