Philip Rosedale

Founder of Second Life

Philip Rosedale

I make things, usually with software.

Experiments

Interactive Neurons

A spiking neural network simulator where you can drag neurons around, adjust weights, attach input and output keyboard letters, and play around with how this type of neural network learns.

Alignment

Vectors try to align with neighbors, creating complex islands of agreement.

GPU Particles

Particles with flocking and other behaviors, learning GPU coding.

Hierarchical Game of Life

An experimental implementation of Conway's Game of Life with hierarchical structures.

Run Tracker

Run Tracker with no digital exhaust. PWA (add it to your home screen), stores nothing to nowhere, vibe-coded. I've always wanted this and didn't have time to code it. I want to go running, but I don't want to store where I'm running in the f**king cloud.

Jitter

Test for minimal noticeable display jitter for a moving object, with various perceptual metrics.

SolarBed Mutant Vehicle

In 2019 I built a solar-powered art car for Burning Man, and have upgraded it it various ways each year since.

Bio

Born in San Diego, the son of a Navy carrier pilot whose deployments took my family all over the United States before returning to San Diego for high school and college. BS Physics, UCSD '92.


Fell in love with coding in middle school, and started a software company in high school which helped me pay for college. Moved to San Francisco in '94, discovered the Internet, and created FreeVue, a videoconferencing app that worked over dialup with the earliest web cameras. Acquired by RealNetworks in late '95, where I led the creation of RealVideo and became CTO.


In '99, I left RealNetworks and founded Linden Lab to create Second Life and fulfill my dream of building a virtual world. After 10 years running Second Life as CEO, I started several experimental new companies with two co-founders, including LoveMachine, Worklist.net, and Coffee & Power. In 2013, after experimenting with the mems gyro chips that would enable the Oculus Rift, we started High Fidelity to build a new open-source virtual world platform for VR Headsets. In 2019, with VR failing to gain wide consumer acceptance, refocused High Fidelity on spatial audio.


In 2022-2024 created a lab in San Francisco working on several new projects, including FairShare, which aims to provide a basic income and reduce wealth inequality using a group-based digital currency. Also helped create CIMC.AI, which is exploring consciousness in machines.


Rejoined Second Life in October 2024 as CTO to help with several new initiatives!

Board & Advisory Roles

Writings

Substack Medium

Giant Robots

Wrote this in 2017, still makes sense. There is an industry to come around tele-operated robots, and it could be a uniquely American industry with jobs for everyone.

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Metaverse Identity

Civil online places will not be possible until there is a safe system for establishing singular, non-PII based identity.

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Sales tax can fund a basic income

To correct the escalating wealth inequality inevitable in free markets, make a currency that uses a sales tax to fund a basic income. Can be done with a cryptocurrency.

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Hack: measure latency with smartphone

In smartphone slo-mo, every frame is 4 milliseconds. Capture and count.

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Physics

Physics is what everyone agrees will happen next.

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Consciousness as a Hall of Mirrors

I predict myself, therefore I am? Exploring the recursive nature of consciousness and how predictive models might give rise to self-awareness.

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Videos & Podcasts

Kevin Rose Foundation Interview thumbnail

Kevin Rose Foundation Interview

A 2011 interview at the under-construction Coffee & Power office at Market & Guerrero.

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Second Life - 2008 TED thumbnail

Second Life - 2006 TED

TED video about Second Life

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Welcome to Lindenworld! thumbnail

Welcome to Lindenworld!

Original video by James Cook giving a tour of the alpha version features of Second Life.

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The Universe, the Brain, and Second Life thumbnail

The Universe, the Brain, and Second Life

An Oxford panel along with Elon Musk and Baroness Susan Greenfield, a neuroscientist.

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Singularity University: Creation of Second Life thumbnail

Singularity University: Creation of Second Life

Peter Diamandis interviewing me onstage as a tele-operated robot.

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Patents

Input and Feedback System

2000

Rather than wear gloves and HMDs, immobilize a person and measure the forces they apply to an exoskeleton to move their body in a virtual world. Allows for zero latency as well as inertial mass, haptics, and full body locomotion.

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Immersive Audio Environments

2014

The first thing we did at High Fidelity was to try to figure out how you could make a huge space where everyone could hear each other, using servers connected together in some way.

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System and Method for Distributed Simulation

2002

Distributing simulation of a virtual world across tiled servers so you could make a really big space. Still hasn't been replicated broadly in gaming.

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System and Method for Determining Network Conditions

1997

Back in the days of modems, at RealNetworks, we were trying different ideas to better measure how bad your connection was. This was the idea that if you send two packets at exactly the same time (from a server), you could learn about the speed of the network by looking at the time delay between when they were received.

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