His hopes are that developing community-focused worlds like Second Life will solve some metaverse problems that aren’t necessarily being solved in VR headsets... yet.

After Second Life, Rosedale became focused on VR technology in 2013, co-founding a company called High Fidelity that promised high-end, low-latency VR. But High Fidelity started to pivot from VR to other technologies over the last few years, focusing on spatial audio most recently.

In 2019, Rosedale published a goodbye to VR, stating that VR hadn’t reached a good form for most people to want to use. He still feels that way, calling VR headsets a blindfold to the real world that only some people feel comfortable enough to use.

In the meantime he’s shifting focus to building a new metaverse platform that doesn’t require headsets and he is calling it er Second Life.