IEEE Spectrum: You've been talking about the metaverse for a long time. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity. IEEE Spectrum spoke with him to find out the challenges involved in building an immersive virtual world. But despite some promising progress Rosedale says VR headsets are still too immature for mass adoption and the company has now put the idea on the back burner and switched focus to its spatial audio technology.Īs the creator of an early metaverse-like experience and someone well-versed in the limits of VR technology, Rosedale has plenty of insights for the latest pretenders to the metaverse crown.
#SECOND LIFE SOFTWARE#
Its chief architect Philip Rosedale left Linden Lab in 2009 and now runs a new start-up called High Fidelity, which started out building software that let people design and deploy their own virtual reality worlds. But Second Life still has a dedicated band of regular users and is probably the longest running experiment in the possibilities of a metaverse-like experience. Second Life had its heyday in the late 2000s, and its keyboard and mouse controls and blocky graphics are a long way from the polished vision of immersive worlds beamed through virtual reality headsets that companies like Facebook and Microsoft are touting.
Instead, users create a digital avatar to represent them and are then free to explore the world, meet other users, create their own digital content and even trade goods and services in the in-world currency, the Linden Dollar. In Second Life, there are no goals or objectives. Its creators, Linden Lab, go to great pains to emphasize that Second Life is not a game, unlike other proto-metaverse experiences such as Fortnite or Roblox. Since 2003, people have been gathering to do all of the above in the online world of Second Life. The idea isn’t as new as it might seem though.
The tech world is abuzz with talk of the metaverse, a virtual world where millions of people could soon gather to work, play, and socialize.
0 kommentar(er)
