![]() ![]() “I think it’s going to grow from the baseline to something that vaguely resembles Second Life, he resolves. “The headset is so broken that it’s actually going to take, I think, five years to get to something that’s good,” he says, “and we as a start-up wouldn’t survive, nor would it make sense for us to sit around.” five years.” He sees building Second Life as a better platform that will be VR-optional until that magically perfect hardware arrives. Rosedale sees the change as a solution to the problems while virtual reality hardware is still being thought of.ĭespite the apparent success of Oculus Quest 2, he still doesn’t think it’s enough. The reason for the change is that Second Life still makes money and still has a considerably larger community than most VR platforms: it has created more than 73 million accounts since launch, and active user estimates hover around 900,000. ![]() “Two of those patents are moderation patents in a decentralized environment, which is really cool.” We’re investing in Second Life, to keep working on Second Life,” Rosedale told me. “We’re announcing that we’ve changed a group of seven people, some patents, some money. Rosedale is going to be a “strategic advisor” to Second Life, while his company High Fidelity looks to infuse Second Life with some fresh ideas, simultaneously working on other ideas for future technology, including, at some point, virtual reality again. In many ways, that’s already the cross-platform tone underlying Microsoft’s and Meta’s recent metaverse moves. He’s not the only person who feels this way: even VR/AR software companies like Spatial have recently moved away from VR headsets as a way to reach more people. In the meantime, it’s shifting focus to a metaverse platform that doesn’t require a headset: namely, Second Life. Rosedale thinks that VR headsets could make it around the time of the iPhone, but maybe not for a few years. Talking to him about Google Meet in 2022, he still feels that way, calling VR headsets a real-world blindfold that only some people are comfortable enough to wear. ![]() In 2019, Rosedale posted a farewell to VR of sorts, stating that VR hadn’t reached a form that was good enough for most people to want to use it. But High Fidelity started moving from VR to other technologies in recent years, focusing more recently on spatial audio. His hopes are that the development of community-focused worlds like Second Life will solve some metaverse problems that aren’t necessarily being solved in VR headsets… yet.Īfter Second Life, Rosedale focused on VR technology in 2013, co-founding a company called High Fidelity that promised high-quality, low-latency VR. Philip Rosedale, the founder of Second Life, has decided to commission a core team to work on the evolution of Second Life now that the metaverse has become a buzzword once again. The virtual place that a lot of people went to back then was Second Life. Neal Stephenson not only coined the idea in 1992, but some of us were literally living in virtual spaces with virtual currency and virtual storefronts almost 20 years ago. ![]()
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