On Thursday August 21st, Philip Rosedale announced that Tony Parisi has joined High Fidelity.

Precisely what Mr. Parisi’s position at HiFi is, isn’t stated, but Mr. Rosedale does say:

Tony has just joined us as an advisor, and is also working with us on some secret High Fidelity stuff that is coming soon. He’s a perfect person to add to the High Fidelity team.

Tony Parisi is the co-creator of the VRML and X3D ISO standards for networked 3D graphics, and a 3D technology innovator. He’s a career CTO / software architect and entrepreneur, has and is serving on a number working groups, and may also be familiar to some as one of the SVVR Creating the VR Metaverse panel in April 2014. More recently, he was featured in a Drax Files Radio Hour feature-length interview, which I also reviewed (and am embedding again at the end of this piece, as it really is worth listening to if you missed it the first time around).

Tony’s full bio can be found here, and while the work he’ll be doing at HiFi is currently “secret”, Philip Rosedale does expand on why his involvement is a good fit for the company:

What we are building at High Fidelity is a bigger project than any one designer or company. To bring virtual reality to everyone will mean a broad set of standards and open systems, and Tony has been designing and championing big pieces of those standards for his whole career, most recently with WebGL.

There can be no doubting Tony’s background and understanding of the potential for consumer-focused VR – again, just listen to the interview below for proof of that.

So interesting times at High Fidelity just got more interesting!

(Nice touch on the updated website as well, with the video header.)