Second Life pioneer Philip Rosedale shows off virtual toy room in High Fidelity

SEATTLE — Philip Rosedale wants to build the Metaverse, the virtual reality experience depicted in the Neal Stephenson’s 1992 novel Snow Crash so many years ago. His first-generation attempt to do so was Second Life, the virtual world created by his former company Linden Lab.

Now, as head of VR startup High Fidelity, Rosedale showed off his second-generation attempt to build a metaverse in a virtual reality environment. Today, at the SEA-VR tech conference in Seattle, Rosedale showed an alpha version of a “virtual toy room,” where two people collaborated, long distance, from inside a 3D, cartoon-animated world where they could pick things up and talk to each other. Rosedale’s experiment is part of an effort to create a whole virtual reality industry, which tech adviser Digi-Capital believes will be a $30 billion market by 2020.