Photo-Illustration by Sinelab; original photo: Gabriela Hasbun
Philip Rosedale, the Willy Wonka of virtual reality, is giving me a tour of his bustling office in San Francisco in August when his blue eyes sparkle with a better idea. “Let’s just go in-world instead,” he suggests. I follow him to a windowless back room. Waiting there for us are a large HDTV screen, a computer, a few cardboard boxes, and two small, black infrared light-emitting beacons that point down from the high corners.
We slip on our beveled, black HTC Vive headsets, and my eyes adjust to the virtual world. Instantly, I’m teleported to a large living room filled with playthings. A dart board hangs on the wall, a jukebox sits in the corner, a craps table stands beside me. Bows and arrows litter the floor. “My God, it’s a mess in here,” he says through my headset.
In the physical world, Rosedale is a graying 48-year-old in Converse sneakers. Here, Rosedale’s avatar is an almond-eyed woman with short dark hair and blue jeans. I follow Rosedale outside by pushing a button on a controller in my hand and feel a woozy disparity between the motion in-world and my actual stasis. “We’re going to fix that,” Rosedale reassures me.
Rosedale relishes the surreal possibilities of life inside VR. He hands me a garden gnome and suggests we play tetherball. He uses a sword to smack the ball in my direction and urges me to whack it back with the gnome. Tossing the sword on the ground, Rosedale shows me how I can “rez”—or create—my own objects to play with by selecting them from a menu. I use my controller to click something called the Floating Space Cantina, and a huge purple gazebo crashes from the sky onto the lawn before me. “Wow, that’s cool,” Rosedale says, marveling at the structure. “I guess someone just made that.”
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Photo: Gabriela Hasbun
VR Pro: Serial entrepreneur Philip Rosedale fell in love with virtual reality as a teen. Now, he’s obsessed with building his new social-VR company, High Fidelity.
This is a beta demonstration of High Fidelity, open source software created by Rosedale’s company of the same name that lets you build and deploy your own virtual world. Rosedale calls this “social VR.” Most VR experiences—such as games and films—are designed for a single person. Social VR is all about sharing moments with others. The concept is an evolution of his pioneering virtual world, Second Life, which he created in 2003.
Having seen, and monetized, the first Internet boom, Rosedale wants High Fidelity to do for VR what the World Wide Web did for the Internet: provide a new means through which people can stake out ground online. Instead of surfing to people’s Web pages, you’ll be teleporting to virtual worlds they’re running on their own computer servers. To get from one place to the next, rather than clicking on a hyperlink, people will simply click on a 3D object or “portal.” Coded using that favorite of Web programmers, JavaScript, it will connect them to another’s server, allowing them to open the door of someone’s castle or step into the hut of someone’s tropical island. “What we believe is going to happen is the Internet all over again,” he declares.
This master plan is similar to the one that inspired Second Life, which supported 1.1 million active users per month at its peak. But despite the hype, Second Life never reached mass adoption. Achieving full Internet-scale VR, Rosedale has realized, comes down to the servers.
Second Life had at least 10,000 servers around the country all run by his former company, Linden Lab. As Second Life’s popularity grew, his employees became bogged down with maintenance and capacity issues. The question for High Fidelity became how to break that model and put the servers out in the wild. By distributing High Fidelity online for free, Rosedale wants to foster a do-it-yourself, interconnected community that transforms our virtual lives. “We are closer than probably people think to having an Internet-scale set of servers that present interconnected personal spaces,” he says.
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Images: High Fidelity
House Party: With High Fidelity, users build their own homes and invite friends to join them in-world or through streaming video.
Rosedale has a knack for painting utopian visions of the future. But to reach the masses, High Fidelity will need to develop far beyond quirky gnome-and-gazebo demos. His team must create sophisticated synchronization software that is also easy to use, writing code that lets people transform their laptops into VR servers while also handling the job of instantly coordinating people’s actions across worlds. Ultimately, these systems must be able to scale to handle the millions whom he hopes will join him in his funky alternative universe.
Weaned on science fiction and “Star Trek,” Rosedale had an early fascination with the potential of virtual worlds and tried to build his own head-mounted display in his teens. Studying physics at the University of California, San Diego, he devoted himself to solving the software challenges of VR instead. The video compression technology he coded caught the attention of RealNetworks, an early streaming company in Seattle, which bought his wares and made him its chief technology officer. But it was seeing the simulated future presented in the seminal sci-fi film The Matrix, in 1999, and reading the 1992 science fiction novel Snow Crash (which popularized the use of the term “avatar” to mean an online stand-in), that inspired Rosedale to leave Real, move to San Francisco, and make his own virtual world. “I was obsessed,” he says.
In 2003, his company, Linden Lab, launched Second Life as the Net’s first free-form virtual reality community. People could create their own avatars and online homes. Fueled by media buzz, Second Life attracted individuals, corporations, and governments (even the IEEE invested in a Second Life island). Users spent over US $500 million annually worth of virtual cash (in lindens), and developed their own political systems, newspapers, and in-world design firms. It was like virtual reality’s pioneer town—predating the kind of activity we’d later see with large community games like Minecraft or World of Warcraft.
By 2009, however, Rosedale realized the pressure of running a $100 million company with about 200 employees was distracting him from his lifelong goal of making a truly immersive VR experience, so he resigned as CEO (though he remains a shareholder). He had seen Second Life run up against its natural limits in employee and server capacity and was eager to obliterate those limits. “How do we do the kind of thing that Second Life did so well for a million people with mice and keyboards but scale that up to a billion?” Rosedale recalls asking himself.
Part of the answer, it turns out, was to wait for virtual reality to go mainstream. Serious research into virtual reality dates back to the late 1960s, but for decades the goggles were unwieldy, the graphics too unconvincing, and the latency—the lag between making a movement and getting visual feedback on that movement—was too stomach-churning to reach the masses. But improvements in device design and new software for producing 3D objects and environments have made it a far more compelling technology. As gaming, Hollywood, the military, theme parks, and others race to cash in, Goldman Sachs predicts virtual and augmented reality (the latter differs in that it displays a layer of computer-generated graphics over a view of the real world) will become an $80 billion industry by 2025.
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Source: SuperData Research
Technology-research firm SuperData expects the majority of revenue from consumer VR software to shift from gaming to media, social programs, and other applications by 2020.
The release of the Oculus Rift headset, owned by Facebook, last March and HTC’s Vive in April, allowed Rosedale’s team to give up on building their own headset and focus on developing the best possible version of High Fidelity. Finally, the right hardware is slowly catching on: According to SuperData Research, in New York City, Oculus will sell 355,088 Rifts this year, and HTC will sell 420,108 Vives.
The Rift was created by prodigy programmer Palmer Luckey, who’d been working on it since 2009, the year Rosedale left Second Life [See “Oculus Rift Takes Virtual Reality Mainstream,” IEEE Spectrum, December 2013]. A few days before the Rift’s release, I visited Luckey at Oculus’s office on the Facebook campus, in Menlo Park, Calif., to hear his thoughts on social VR. There, the 23-year-old showed me a two-player VR demo called Toybox.
For now, Oculus is focused on hardware and drivers to support gaming and other forms of entertainment. But there’s a reason why Facebook acquired the company in 2014 for $2 billion. Mark Zuckerberg saw Oculus as the means through which his company could create, as he put it, “a new communication platform” based in virtual reality. With Facebook’s support, Luckey thinks VR can become at least as popular as any social platform today. “I’m trying to convince people that virtual reality is going to be the thing that, in the long run, hundreds of millions and billions of people use,” he says.
At Facebook’s headquarters, Luckey and I wore large black Rift headsets tightly strapped to our faces. In each hand, we held a small Touch motion controller that was hooked up to the Rift. In contrast to the humanlike avatars of High Fidelity, each of us was represented by a featureless, blue, disembodied head and hands.
As I turned my head, I looked around a cavernous playroom. Assorted toys—blocks, robots, tanks, Ping-Pong paddles, and balls—were spread out on a table before us. As I clutched the controllers and moved my hands, two motion sensors across the room traced the controllers’ path through the air, which let the system transpose my movements in the virtual world. The click of a button allowed me to select an object, which I could then manipulate with a twist of the hand.
“Grab those lighters over there,” he told me, as he dropped dozens of cherry-red bottle rockets on the large gray table. I reached for two silver Zippos, and flicked open the caps to strike a flame. “Okay,” Luckey went on, holding up an M-80 firecracker and tossing it into a pile, “when I tell you, start lighting.”
As Luckey flung the last M-80 into the pile, he began his countdown. “Three, two, one,” he said, “Okay, light it up!” I brought my flame to the fuses, and when everything exploded I flinched. Despite my better judgment, my brain was duped. I didn’t feel like I was there. I was there.
Forty miles away, in San Francisco, Rosedale is betting his software is best positioned to make social VR a reality. And he’s persuaded others of this too. In 2015, High Fidelity secured an $11 million investment from Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen. In December, Rosedale said the company has raised an additional $22 million from investors, and a total of $37 million to date.
Jaron Lanier, the pioneer who popularized the term virtual reality, has tried High Fidelity and hopes it can deliver the kind of shared experiences he’d always imagined. “I like the idea of networked virtual worlds a lot,” he says. “I’d love to see one take off in a huge way.”
Back in the High Fidelity office, which has the kind of geeky funhouse vibe indigenous to a San Francisco startup, a team of 25 engineers, including several recruits from Linden Lab, have been working like elves to bring Rosedale’s dream to life. Scruffy coders rattle at their computers as multicolored balloons from a birthday party nudge the ceiling. A telepresence robot—a wheelie machine with an iPad affixed on top—rolls around so that the chief technology officer in Seattle can tune in.
Since 2013, when the company was founded, this team has focused largely on creating the software that provides the technology’s essential structure: its distributed client-server system. This means that people can readily deploy it on their own computer servers, without having to rely on a hosting service.
High Fidelity Network Architecture
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Illustration: Erik Vrielink
Such a client-server system allows people to essentially put up anything they want—just as if they were running a Web server. High Fidelity allows people to transform their own computers into servers that can support up to 20 people at a time. To run the program, a computer needs access to a broadband connection with a speed of 10 megabits per second or higher. That’s well within reach of many people in the United States, where broadband networks currently provide an average connection speed of 15.2 Mb/s (some other countries, such as Norway and South Korea, do considerably better). Over time, Rosedale thinks Internet service providers everywhere will readily offer enough bandwidth to support a massive virtual world because customer demand will be so great.
All of the content exchanged on these servers can be user generated, built on JavaScript. Users can design basic objects through graphical interfaces, or create more advanced objects and environments by writing code. Programmers wanting to tinker with the underlying High Fidelity client/server platform can do so: The platform is open source, written in the popular programming language C++, and licensed under the Apache 2.0 open source software license.
For ease of use, the High Fidelity platform supports two popular file formats called FBX and OBJ, which let people open 3D-vector graphics that were originally created in different formats. The platform will also be compatible with emerging standards like the GL Transmission Format (also known as “the JPEG of 3D”) so people can quickly load 3D scenes and move models around in their virtual worlds.
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Source: IEEE