Philip Rosedale Returns

On Monday 13th, January, Linden Research Inc, announced that High Fidelity owned by Second Life founder and original Lab CEO Philip Rosedale, has acquired and interest in Linden Lab.

High Fidelity originally began life as a VR platform in much the same vein as the Lab's own Sansar project.   In December 2019, Philip announced a new direction, concentrating on 3D sound, an immersive spatial audio, which offers depth and distance stereo. It has to be said, it is very impressive when sat side by side with Vivox for comparison.

Philip and other members of High Fidelity will re-join Linden Lab team, but it has yet to be announced whether or not Spatial Audio will become a replacement for the existing voice and sound systems.

I asked the long time friend of London City in 2019, if he would consider coming back to Linden Lab, to which he replied,  "Do you think they would have me?".    Apparently they will.

Philip Rosedale, now Philip Linden again, last visited London City just a week ago.  I wish we had managed to land the scoop!

It is very exciting that this extraordinary visionary has re-joined the team.  Philip, welcome home!

Here is a replay of Philip Linden visiting London City in 2018, exploring out loud, where Second Life might want to go next. It predates the migration to the AWS cloud system in 2020.

Linden Lab have blogged about Philip's new Role here

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/

Philip Rosedale visits London City - The video

Flashback to Philip (Linden) Rosedale's visit to London City....

Philip Rosedale (formerly Philip Linden), the founder of Linden Lab and Second Life and CEO of High Fidelity, visited London City to hang out for a couple of hours with the community and find out a bit more about our visitors.

For the last half hour of his visit, Philip took to voice to talk more about the history of Second Life, the complexities of the platform, possible improvements and his ambitions for High Fidelity.