Philip Rosedale has been working with virtual worlds for a long time, having founded Second Life back nearly 13 years ago in 2003. He co-founded High Fidelity in 2013, and he previously told me that he wanted to fix a lot of the things that were holding Second Life back. One big limitation was having all of the virtual worlds hosted by Linden Lab’s servers, and so Philip wanted to flip that model on it’s head by going with an open source model. Users will be able to host their own virtual spaces in a more scalable fashion like the Internet, but High Fidelity also has plans to leverage the idle GPU power of millions of machines to help render a high-resolution metaverse.

I’ve spoken to Philip at SVVR 2014 & 2015, and I had a chance to catch up with him again at SVVR 2016, where High Fidelity announced beta access to their Sandbox client. We talk about physics in VR, body tracking, 3D audio & social presence, experiments with SMI eye tracking, scaling the metaverse, avatar continuity for group collaboration, and the future of using VR as a neutral meeting ground to interface with AI robots.