Content Team Update!

February has been a very productive and revealing month here at High Fidelity. We’re witnessing the payoff of years of research and engineering as our nascent platform spins up, revealing its potential for meaningful, effervescent virtual world interactions.

In other words, it’s to the point where you can start making really cool stuff.

Most of you are familiar with the apothegm of beginning things with a bang. Aptly, our own digital firebug Eric Levine cybercrafted a fireworks system in just under a day, underscoring how quickly you can iterate with High Fidelity. Pictured above is a moment from yesterday’s in-world staff meeting, where more than twenty employee avatars participated in lag-free discussion while Eric’s pyrotechnics light up the sky. We’re practitioners of the Eat the Dog Food methodology, using our own product regularly to conduct internal communications and meetings in VR to better understand the experience in a practical, prolonged scenario. In addition to being a great way to stress-test our technology, we having fun doing it!

Eric’s fireworks system combines a cartoon-like industrial button mechanism with an elegant little script to detect interaction. Using Javascript, the system instantiates and launches an entity skyward using physics, creates and parents a particle system to the entity for a smoke trail, and pops out a another, final particle system for the crescendo. When combined with sound effects, audio injectors and High Fidelity’s excellent HRTF implementation, the fireworks system is an audiovisual delight, best shared with friends making obligatory oooh & aaah sounds. Is your finger itching to press the button? Find it in-world.

If you’ve ever been to Las Vegas and were sober enough to wander into its outskirts, hopefully you’ve had the opportunity to visit its famous Neon Boneyard. It’s the final resting place of some of the most iconic signage to ever grace Las Vegas’ main strip. There’s something compelling and transient about these imperfect beauties as they take on even more charm, rusting away under a hot Nevada sun. We’ve found them a pleasing means to delimit space without resorting to boxes, polygonal walls and crates.

Trigger warning for sufferers of coulrophobia. The Langton Circus Casino sign will be a familiar sight to anyone who’s survived Las Vegas’ famed Circus-Circus casino. Just as an aside, High Fidelity’s office was located on Langton Street in San Francisco, hence the name. There’s another sign in the Playa which is a nod to our current HQ location. Can you find it?

Don’t forget, High Fidelity is a completely open platform where you can freely host a domain using your own computer. Have you made a beautiful world you’d like to share? Or perhaps have an idea for a fun and compelling experience on the playa? Is there something you’d like to see us demonstrate in High Fidelity? Do you like turtles? We’d like to know! Feel free to bring it up below.