Breaking News: Philip Rosedale Returns to Linden Lab

Good news to fans of Philip Rosedale, the founder of Linden Lab and Second Life. He's back at the Lab. There was an announcement today that High Fidelity, the company Rosedale would found after leaving Linden Lab, had "acquired an interest" in Linden Lab. Some people from High Fidelity will be joining the Lab, including Rosedale, whom is back as a "strategic advisor."

The transaction will help Second Life further scale its operations and strengthen its commitment to growing an innovative, inclusive, and diverse metaverse where its inhabitants’ ingenuity drives real-world value for themselves and others.

"No one has come close to building a virtual world like Second Life," says Second Life founder and High Fidelity co-founder, Philip Rosedale. “Big Tech giving away VR headsets and building a metaverse on their ad-driven, behavior-modification platforms isn’t going to create a magical, single digital utopia for everyone. Second Life has managed to create both a positive, enriching experience for its residents — with room for millions more to join — and built a thriving subscription-based business at the same time. Virtual worlds don’t need to be dystopias.”

“Since Philip started Second Life in 1999, its visionary approach has not only stood the test of time, but positioned it for the future,” says Brad Oberwager, chairman of Linden Lab. “He and the High Fidelity team have unmatched experience and I can’t wait to capitalize on the vast opportunity in front of us.”

The Lab would state both Philip and Overwolf Linden would appear on a special edition of "Lab Gab" in a couple weeks. Residents are invited to submit questions using (this Google doc), but have until Midnight Sunday January 16 to do so.

Click Here to go to the Press Release.

Click Here to go to the announcement in the Linden blog.
 

Philip Rosedale at Lab Gab

About two weeks ago, Philip Rosedale, the founder of Linden Lab, was interviewed by Strawberry Linden on the "Lab Gab" show. Known by the same name inworld, Philip had much to say about Linden Lab and Second Life, as well as his current company High Fidelity. He talked some about what shaped decisions such as what drove him to create Linden Lab, why his particular choice of avatar, his management style at the Lab, the "Rig,' why did he leave Linden Lab and form High Fidelity, and how he thought the Pandemic was driving the public to go virtual like it hadn't before.

Read the details of the interview in People.

High Fidelity Fading Away

When the Newser last wrote about High Fidelity in July, the company was in trouble, having laid of a quarter of it's staff and made other cutbacks. But these moves failed to turn things around and the situation has continued to go downhill. Today, while High Fidelity isn't dead yet, it certainly seems close.

Earlier this month, Philip Rosedale, the co-founder of the company, had an announcement titled "Updates and a New Beginning," which had some bad news for fans of the virtual world platform. Among the things announced, High Fidelity was going to "turn over control of the codebase to the community. As of January 15, 2020, we’re going to make High Fidelity’s Github repository private. We want to give community leaders time to create their own repositories and systems as desired."

There were more layoffs announced, "we will reduce our team size in half effective today."

All High Fidelity applications are being removed from online stores and no further accounts are being created, "we’ll also be withdrawing our apps on the Steam Store, Oculus Store and our Virtual You: 3D Avatar Creator app from the Apple App Store and Google Play Store. Since there are no High Fidelity supported environments, we’re not offering registration for new accounts which these enable."

Taking a look at a "User FAQ" page on the forum, High Fidelity's Marketplace is closing, and there will soon be no more cashout's of the virtual currency, "The Marketplace will close. The public Marketplace pages will be removed, you will not be able to purchase new items, you will not be able to add new items available for sale, and you will not be able to edit existing items’ details. We will also no longer offer cash-out of HFC after January 15, 2020."

Philip Linden felt that the reason for High Fidelity's failure to succeed was that virtual reality had yet to take off due to technical limitations that had yet to be solved, "four fundamental advances in hardware need to happen before HMDs replace mobile and desktop general-computing use. Until VR headsets don’t feel like, as The New Yorker’s Patricia Marx puts it, “a gerbil’s casket [has] been plastered onto the upper half of my face,” compelling social virtual worlds won’t gain traction. So where does that leave High Fidelity?"

Philip's parting words to High Fidelity's users were, "Your passion and dedication to the possibilities of VR and virtual worlds is inspiring. We’re grateful for your support over the years and hope you’ll try out our new product once launched." But the reaction by some users was quite negative. In the forums, one thread was, "Never Forgive, Never Forget," the poster remarking, "I call on the community to never forget the actions of High Fidelity corporate. How they have treated their users and how they have treated their employees. If or when High Fidelity comes out with their next project or a updated version of this project. We should remind High Fidelity of their past and educate their perspectives users of their past. Philip we do not forget. We do not forgive." But not everyone was so critical, DrFran saying, "I don’t know about you, but when people constantly criticize, belittle, and second guess everything you do, you tend to distance yourself from therm. I think HiFi realized the toxicity of the user base, and had to decamp. I don’t blame them for their actions. Their ball; their game."

Ryan Schultz commented of the announcement, "High Fidelity will soon be a dead platform, the first major victim of the social VR wars (but probably not the last). R.I.P." Hamlet Au's assessment was more optimistic, "High Fidelity's underlying code can still be developed by the community under an open source license. ... This seems to open up the possibility of the High Fidelity virtual world becoming the basis for... OpenSim 2." One of High Fidelity's users, Theanie, had his comments, "I ... am not in a state of mourning. The High Fidelity code is thankfully open source, and that means the platform will never really 'die.' There are already multiple forked projects in the works that could prove to be viable successors to the now-defunct platform. However, before we can move on toward that bright virtual future that awaits us, it’s critical to spend time on reflection. As the old saying goes, “Those that don’t learn from the mistakes of the past are doomed to repeat them.” We need to analyze the mistakes that were made, so as to prevent them from happening again."

In any event, the sun is setting for what was the next virtual world made by the man whom led the building of Second Life.

Bixyl Shuftan

High Fidelity in Trouble

With so much going on in Second Life, it's easy to miss what's going on with other virtual worlds. But there have been reports that one particular one that a number of residents have heard of has been having serious troubles: High Fidelity.

For those of you not familiar with the virtual world, after Philip Rosedale, the founder of Linden Lab, left the company, he went on to found High Fidelity in 2013. Despite having raised over seventy million from investors, it hasn't been doing well. In a community meeting in early April, Rosedale had some bad news. All company owned domains in the virtual world would be shut down, except for the orientation room for new users, and instead of focusing on VR headset experiences they would be concentrating on those from desktop computers. The reason for the latter was slow VR equipment sales. Hamlet Au remarked, "I can't emphasize enough how huge a blow this is to social VR and consumer-facing VR in general." In May came another announcement, a quarter of the workers would be laid off. The company would also be changing it's direction more to businesses.

As part of the changes in April, the General Assembly meetings were replayed with monthly Developers Discussion. When blogger Ryan Schultz looked at the video for the June discussion, he noticed a significant drop in attendance compared to the April meeting. "what happened to all the people who were active supporters of High Fidelity and who used to come out to meetings?" he asked. He then noticed on the forums some longtime members had their "trusted member" status downgraded to standard, which did not sit well with some, "Wow, after being here for 5+ years, I guess I never was trusted at all." Schultz's reaction was, "Is it just me, or is there a general overall sense of HiFi turning off the lights, shutting down various systems, and in general just downgrading services to their loyal userbase?"

If those weren't enough signs of trouble, in late May High Fidelity began offering it's office in San Francisco up for rent. All of this point to signs that of a company, and virtual world, in jeopardy. The name of Schults's blog post "Rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic" might have been a pessimistic assessment, but hardly unjustified. Despite Philip Rosedale's success with Linden Lab and Second Life, he's been unable to recreate it with his new company and virtual world, leading one to comment, "Second Life must have been a strange anomaly, that neither its founders nor the current Linden Lab appear able to replicate."

Sources: Wikipedia, New World Notes, Ryan Schultz, Crunchbase

Bixyl Shuftan

More Second Life April Fools

Our "April Fool's" joke on Friday got a number of comments. While one thought it was in bad taste due to the subject matter being of someone she didn't like, most had a chuckle out of it. Daniel Voyager for instance told the Newser it was one of the funniest April Fools he had seen pulled. He later posted a link to it on the SL Universe forums. Many gave it the "peanut gallery" treatment, though one man commented, "That was a far better April Fool than LL's official one."

The "official joke" by Linden Lab was posted on their blog at 10AM on April 1, saying they had an "Exclusive Message" for Second Life residents inworld, hinting it involved their next virtual world, Project Sansar. People were asked to head to the meeting point of the four Town Hall Islands sims, where there was an auditorium. Daniel Voyager was there, writing that about 150 avatars were there at one point.

And the exclusive message: Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up." Or as Daniel put it, "You All Got Rick-Rolled By Linden Lab." On the official forums, someone suspected it was a joke. In SL Universe, there was a variety of comments from "Linden Lab's Poor Effort at Comedy" to "Rickrolling is indeed lame, low effort and old. But it can still make me smile at the right time, and when I heard about LL's april fools this year I smiled because it's a very LL sort of thing to have done. ... But you know, I appreciate that they did something for the holiday, didn't have to." Nalates Urriah noted that all those avatars caused so much lag, she and presumably many other residents couldn't see the video, and had to wait until hours later when there were only a few around, "I appreciate the Lindens taking the time to put it together. I just hope they realize how bad things have gotten when lots of avatars are present. ... It leaves my wondering if if we are going into one of those periods where the Lindens get ridiculously out of touch with the users’ experience."

One other April Fool's joke was posted by a user of the High Fidelity forums, an official-looking statement announcing that Second Life would be closing at the end of the year. It got sent to some SL Universe users on it's email list, causing a bit of confusion. There is no evidence that anyone with High Fidelity was involved. Still, it did make a few people briefly wonder.

* * * * *

On a final note, when we reported on other examples of April Foolery across the Internet, we hadn't seen what "World of Tanks" was offering yet. What they did was to make a "Lunar Lunacy" map in which players controlled "Russian IS-8 Ball" tanks. While the ball tanks were armed, the best way to knock them out was to knock them into one of the six lava pits arranged on the edge like pockets in a pool table. For those who won ten battles on the map, one got a token for use anytime that would increase experienced earned by three times for an hour. To see a youtube of their April Fool stunt: Click Here.

Top image credit: Daniel Voyager

Bixyl Shuftan

What’s Happening In High Fidelity?

Besides Second Life, DrFran has also been checking out the virtual world Philip Rosedale has been working on lately: High Fidelity. While SL 2.0, or Sansar, remains very much an unknown to those outside Linden Lab, High Fidelity has been in open alpha for anyone wanting to go in and try things out. While the avatars aren't always "pretty," Rosedale has been focusing on problems that have been constant banes for Second Life users.

Read more in Other Grids and MMOs.

Philip Rosedale at the SVVR

Earlier this week, the Silicon Valley Virtual Reality (SVVR) Conference and Expo took place. Philip Rosedale had the honor of being the keynote speaker. Second Life Newser was able to get to one of the places in Secone Life where the event was broadcast. But, technical difficulties got in the way.

Fortunately, we were able to find it on youtube later. So here it is.



(Click here if the video fails to load)

 Daniel Voyager had a few words about what he had to say, including, "we're going to be arguing over the price of virtual real estate  on Pandora soon."

High Fidelity Alpha

After Philip Rosedale, the former Philip Linden, left Linden Lab, he continued his work in virtual reality. Eventually, he came up with a new project: High Fidelity. A new kind of virtual world, he build it with his experiences in Second Life. DFran Babcock was approved as a tester for the alpha, and will be writing about her experiences.

Read DrFran's article in Other Grids and MMOs.

Andrew Linden Anounces His Leaving Linden Lab

At the inworld Simulator Users group meeting on Tuesday December 17th, Andrew Linden announced he would be leaving Linden Lab in two days (today). He is quoted as saying, “This is going to be my last User Group meeting as a Linden: I’ve decided to leave LL and pursue other things. I’ve really enjoyed these User Group meetings, which is why I’ve been showing up all these years.”

Andrew's profile lists him as having been employed since April 2002, while Second Life was still in it's beta, for eleven years and six months (longer than Philip Linden, who hired him, served). He described himself as "a C++ developer at Linden Lab. I work mostly on the SL servers and backend architecture." He wasn't normally available for most support issues, but was a regular at the once a week meetin to "answer questions about server bugs, architecture, and the current state of development in LL."

After today, Andrew will be heading off for High Fidelity to once again work with Philip Rosedale (the former Philip Linden), ”I’m going to join Philip and his new project. Not because I don’t love SL or am not excited about what LL is working on, but because I’m ready for a change, and I really like working with Philip.”

Inara Pey described Andrew, whom consistently appeared as a balding man dressed in a purple t-shirt and shorts as well-mannered and polite, "In the time I’ve been attending the Simulator User Group meeting (formerly the Server/Sim/Scripting group), Andrew has always been polite, inquisitive and helpful to all, and demonstrated a willingness to readily delve into issues and see what he can find and / or put right. In response to the direct enquiries I’ve put to him in the past, he’s always been more than helpful in his replies, willing to provide concise explanations and offer additional information and guidance." He's also worked on the recent Project Sunshine server-side programs to improve viewer performance on newer computers. "Also of late, Andrew has worked on a number of anti-griefing measures within the platform," and has been working on projects that should appear in viewer updates early in 2014.

Sources: Daniel Voyager, Modem World, Natales' Things and Stuff