We had our weekly company meeting in HighFidelity today, just like we always do. For a while now, we’ve all been using Oculus VR headsets and trackers for our hands, and we now have avatars that look like like us. We have good multi-user physics and whole-body tracking-animation for our avatars.
Today one of the guys showed off his recurve bow. As long as you hold it, it re-arms with arrows. Pull the string back with your physical hands, aim and let go, and the arrow flies. It’s basic fun with weaponry. People took turns playing with it.
But quickly people started saying, “Oh, shoot me between the eyes!” (including our CEO). It’s pretty cool to see the arrow coming right for you. Can’t do that IRL! (In Real Life.)
But I never said this. Instead, I stood among the circle of avatars in front of the shooter, and kind of stared him down. Without thinking, I conveyed, “Come at me, bro”, but with nothing so obvious as arms wide or a Neo-like “come on” finger-wave. My avatar could do that with just a stretch of my physical arm or squeeze of my hand, but I didn’t gesture or say a word. Our team is pretty competitive, but we’re not the kind of folks who would shoot the person in front of us without being invited. We need to be invited. But multiple shooters did shoot me. Non-verbal communication works!
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About Stearns
Howard Stearns works at High Fidelity, Inc., creating the metaverse.
Mr. Stearns has a quarter century experience in systems engineering, applications consulting, and management of advanced software technologies. He was the technical lead of University of Wisconsin's Croquet project, an ambitious project convened by computing pioneer Alan Kay to transform collaboration through 3D graphics and real-time, persistent shared spaces. The CAD integration products Mr. Stearns created for expert system pioneer ICAD set the market standard through IPO and acquisition by Oracle. The embedded systems he wrote helped transform the industrial diamond market. In the early 2000s, Mr. Stearns was named Technology Strategist for Curl, the only startup founded by WWW pioneer Tim Berners-Lee. An expert on programming languages and operating systems, Mr. Stearns created the Eclipse commercial Common Lisp programming implementation.
Mr. Stearns has two degrees from M.I.T., and has directed family businesses in early childhood education and publishing.
