High Fidelity, a low-profile San Francisco startup, raised $2.4 million out of a $3.4 million funding round earlier this week. The SEC filing’s related persons section lists Linden Lab founder Philip Rosedale, and former colleagues Freddy Heiberger and Ryan Karpf.

Linden Lab is the company that created Second Life, an online virtual world that had over 21 million registered accounts as of November 2010. Rosedale, Heiberger and Karpf went on to launch a job marketplace called Coffee and Power in 2011, but the service turned out to be largely unsuccessful (they did however manage to raise  1$ million in funding from Amazon founding CEO Jeff Bezos, Digg co-founder Kevin Rose, Greylock Partners and a couple of other investors).

It now appears that three entrepreneurs have returned to familiar ground with a bold new vision.

High Fidelity’s site doesn’t disclose much, but it does reveal that the web startup currently has 6 engineers who are “designing now for a level of richness and detail that continually extends deeper”. According to the homepage, the team is trying to reduce latency in real-time environments and find new “ways to efficiently organize and deliver massive computing power”.

The startup’s job page offers more details:

“We are prototyping the technology and user experience of a next-generation virtual reality system. It is an expansive vision with a number of moving parts that are each unique and compelling new technology.”

The pieces certainly add up, but it remains to be seen whether Rosedale and his team will manage to fulfill their ambitions. They will have to overcome great technical challenges in order to produce a platform capable of accommodating the “information spaces of the future”.