Philip Rosedale’s High Fidelity cuts deal with Second Life maker Linden Lab
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Maybe there is something behind the idea of the second coming of Second Life.
High Fidelity has cut a deal with Linden Lab, the maker of the virtual world Second Life, that will bring Linden Lab founder Philip Rosedale back as a strategic adviser. It’s another metaverse play.
High Fidelity is selling some of its assets — including a number of employees and patents — to Linden Lab, and it is also making a cash investment into Linden Lab. Rosedale will advise Linden Lab, but he will remain on the board of High Fidelity as it attempts to focus its other business. Rosedale will work with Linden Lab executive chairman Brad Oberwager.
The deal includes distributed computing patents. Members of High Fidelity’s metaverse team are joining Linden Lab as it tries to fashion Second Life into a more popular metaverse application.
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“After lots and lots of pondering — Brad and I are friends — so it made easy to figure out,” said Rosedale. “We decided to come back home, and bring a bunch of us back to work on Second Life.”
Rosedale is the founder of both companies. He started Linden Lab in 1999 and helped inaugurate the first metaverse craze around virtual worlds with the launch of Second Life in 2003. He ran Second Life for a while and stepped down as CEO in 2008. He founded High Fidelity in 2013 with a focus on virtual reality. But the company pivoted into spatial audio as VR hit the doldrums.
Above: Linden Lab founder
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