Redwood City, Calif.-based AltspaceVR has raised $15.7 million to date. AltspaceVR avatars, in an eye-tracking demo As its name suggests, it wants to convincingly recreate real-world interactions in VR such as talking, shaking hands and sword fighting (really!). High Fidelity also plans to use personalized avatars to let people “travel” around a diverse but interconnected virtual world. The 20-employee startup has raised $17.5 million to date, with investors including Vulcan Capital, True Ventures and Linden. Meanwhile, Second Life’s original inventor Philip Rosedale is spearheading High Fidelity, also based in San Francisco.
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Like Second Life, Project Sansar aims to be a lot of things to a lot of people, letting them download a free client for their PCs and visit a diverse array of spaces and experiences - some of which may cost a fee - with their customizable avatars.
The company declined to share how much it has invested in the project. Ready Players One, Two, Threeįor the past year, San Francisco-based Linden Lab has been heads-down and aggressively hiring on a long-awaited follow-up to Second Life, currently codenamed Project Sansar. Let’s meet the companies and see what they’re up to now.
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If one or more of them can crack it, they would unlock a great deal of virtual reality’s long-term potential.Įmphasis on long-term. That’s the Big Idea - that VR would be as transformative to the Internet as the World Wide Web - and it’s why so many companies are testing the waters. Like a Web browser, or an operating system, it would offer users a means to do many things, and likely pay for them in many ways. They have to reach for something.Ī perfect metaverse, then, is more than just a video game or an application. It’s clearly science fiction (Neal Stephenson coined the term metaverse in his 1992 novel “Snow Crash”), but it has also become a critical touchstone for developers and engineers working in VR today. The promise of virtual reality, or VR, is often summed up by its proponents in the fictional “metaverse,” a digital space that replicates - and in some cases surpasses - the physical world.
There are still a number of challenges facing virtual reality on the eve of its consumer debut, so belief in the potential of these virtual worlds is rooted in two things: A willingness to place far-off bets, and a little bit of science fiction-infused faith. And this time, they’ll do it in virtual reality. They’re betting, again, that they can really go mainstream, that people really do want to dive into a virtual world. That they’ve been able to hang on means Linden - and several of its competitors - can double down. Linden has 215 employees, up from 140 in 2007 when it notched a million active users. Second Life and other “virtual worlds” never lived up to their real-world-changing hype, but the hardcore fans stuck around, and not only is Second Life still kicking, it’s profitable (though they decline to say by exactly how much). Linden Lab CEO Ebbe Altberg’s avatar in Second Life Some said Second Life would come to supplant significant aspects of daily life, but it quickly faded from the scene, peaking at a little more than a million users in a month in the late 2000s. People could talk, shop, party and even go to music concerts put on by bands like Duran Duran. Whether you go into a pub, a bar, a classroom, a bowling alley, an office, a library … We create spaces and we have people come together in those spaces, and then we communicate and socialize within those spaces.”Īltberg is the CEO of Linden Lab, the company that made Second Life, the eccentric social network that offered users a free avatar in a virtual world, and was once heralded as the next big thing after the Internet. San Francisco is a space that was created by its users. “What humans do is create spaces,” the gregarious 51-year-old executive says, leaning back at a table in a small room on the second floor of Linden Lab’s headquarters in San Francisco. Ebbe Altberg needs about a paragraph to define human life:
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