High Fidelity flies a kite

Arguably a little late in the day when products like Zoom have already taken the lions share of live meetings during the Covid crisis, but High Fidelity has relaunched as an hybrid meeting VR/RL meeting place.

CEO Philip Rosedale explains,

"High Fidelity started out in 2013 hoping that VR hardware would be as ubiquitous as the mobile phone by 2020. 

 Turns out, we’re far from that reality. Our mission from the beginning has been to serve humanity by building technology that helps people be together, in the most natural way possible, from anywhere in the world. 

 So we have spent the last several months optimizing our patented 3D audio technology to work on nearly any device. It’s designed for crowds -- you can hear 3D surround sound of everyone near you and hear others who are in the distance."

This new version of High Fidelity is cloud-based and works using a browser. Everyone in your family, all of your friends and colleagues, have a device that should be able to use it. People can use it to connect with each other for a wide variety of reasons — from listening to live music, to family gatherings, hosting parties, networking at conferences, big festivals, political rallies, classrooms, happy hours, or anything else you can dream up."

It is an interesting concept where you can appear as a moving icon against any background you choose, together with your friends and family.  If this has been launched at the start of the global lockdown it may have gained some traction.  Whether it still will now that everyone is venturing out into the big wide world again, remains to be seen.   It's appeal to me is limited, since it makes no mention of screen sharing for the all important "countdown" round in our family quiz on Zoom.




For more information head here https://www.highfidelity.com/