Derrick Schneider over at Geek Dad has been talking to Linden Lab CEO Ebbe Altberg about Project Sansar. There’s not really a lot new in this article, but every article seems to reveal a little bit of something that may have been missed or overlooked in other articles. These pieces are slowly starting to fit together.
For example Derrick posts :
What happens when your Second Life city gets too many people inside? Lag. And then you’re sort of stuck. In Sansar, says Altberg, a successful multiplayer experience can automatically spawn a new instance of itself when you hit some limit: Linden’s jobs website asks for experience with Amazon Web Services, so it’s easy to see where they’re going: Scale up behind the scenes so the creator doesn’t have to think about it.
I don’t think it’s any surprise that Project Sansar is looking at cloud based delivery, this has probably been mentioned before. I know instancing has been mentioned before and I know I’ve had someone post that instancing has been mentioned before when I’ve posted about instancing! So a lot of the information about Project Sansar is already out there, but it’s scattered.
However an interesting part of the Geek Dad article comes in terms of experiences. Linden Lab have invited people to alpha test Project Sansar and one point that has been mentioned is that Linden Lab are currently looking for people with Autodesk Maya experience. Now you may have thought this was to get 3D models inworld, but it appears there’s more to it than that :
The initial focus is letting people make experiences, and the authoring tools will reflect that need. “How many things in your home did you make,” asks Altberg. “But it still reflects your identity. We didn’t make the chairs in this room or the table,” he continues, gesturing around to encompass the reinforced brick walls, “but we are making an experience.”
There’s a lot more in the article, including talking of a Project Sansar downloadable client and talk of content ratings, with Ebbe suggesting that Linden Lab do not want to impose strict censorship, but it seems they do want content ratings to be there from the outset, which I think most people would agree is a sensible idea.
The Geek Dad article gets a few things wrong, for example they talk of Second Life’s eight year old community. This year Second Life officially celebrated its twelfth birthday, although it’s technically older than that.
One striking part of the article to me is in terms of branding :
When you go to the company’s office near San Francisco’s Ferry Building, Second Life is in large letters on the brick wall facing the street; the company’s name is underneath it in a smaller font.
That says a lot about how powerful the Second Life name is. Linden Lab’s San Francisco building has recently been revamped but Second Life being a bigger star attraction than Linden Lab is still the order of the day. Linden Lab have also redesigned their Seattle office and have a new office in Boston, so they look like they are looking towards being around for quite a few more years.
As I said the Geek Dad article doesn’t cover a lot of new ground, but it does make for a good read and room for speculation about what the future may hold.