Project Sansar Buzz Appears To Be Launching The Second Life Of Second Life

There’s an image for Project Sansar that is appearing on many articles regarding the project. I have no idea where people are getting this image from, have Linden Lab got a top secret media kit somewhere? I’ll use images from 1920’s Berlin and Everwinter for this post, 1920’s Berlin in particular gets a lot of mentions in the media.

There’s something very interesting going on with the recent media attention Linden Lab are receiving over Project Sansar, Second Life is making the news on the back of this too and in some cases, it sounds as if the way Second Life works has only just been discovered.

There have been a number of good articles about Linden Lab recently, my favourite recent written article I covered in my last blog post, it’s the article by Eric Johnson over at Re/code. However today I’ve discovered two more articles, one on Gamasutra and one on MoviePilot. Then there is a video interview from UploadVR, which is very impressive.

Christian Nutt over at Gamasutra has posted; True virtual reality: The race to build a ‘metaverse’. The article is very brief and refers to Eric Johnson’s article. Another article comes to us from Moviepilot and this one is all about Second Life;  Second Life: How to Navigate an Online Virtual World (and Maybe Even Make Some Money) :

In 2003, Linden Lab, a San Fran-based gaming and VR company, launched Second Life. 12 years later, more than a million users around the globe play the online game – although Linden Lab insists that Second Life is not a game at all.

This is the sort of article that makes you check that it wasn’t originally published in 2008 and has now for some odd reason came back to the top of the news, but it’s not, the article was published on 5th August 2015. The article discusses creating items for sale, becoming a stripper, sex being a big part of the Second Life virtual world and also time travel.

The article really does sound like Second Life is relatively new, rather than over twelve years old and the article also makes Second Life sound quite exciting :

In fact, the possibilities of this game are almost endless. You can visit “Hell’s Asylum” (a landscape of fire and brimstone), “Everwinter” (a post apocalyptic wasteland based on the Chernobyl fallout zone) or – if you prefer something more serene – there’s “Irreplaceable”, a beautiful island paradise complete with a castle, forests and an underwater cave.

The article makes for a good read and is refreshingly honest in its approach of highlighting several different aspects of Second Life.

Then comes the video interview on youTube between UploadVR and Ebbe Altberg. They are for some strange reason sat in front of a fire, in the middle of the summer. Ebbe appears to be enjoying a glass of wine or something similar and what appears to be a guitar seems to be nearby, but don’t worry, they don’t break out in to song!

This is something you’ll probably want to listen to, it lasts for just under thirty minutes. There are other options of course, you could try reading the youTube transcript instead, but these are often not that accurate. Another alternative is to read this post over at SLUniverse, where you’ll find that Adeon Writer provides a link to a transcript, for which I’m very grateful as I’m awful at listening to videos and typing at the same time!

This is a really good interview from which we learn that Ebbe was once a college room mate of one of the Linden Lab board members. There are parts of the interview that people may well be familiar with, how Project Sansar is looking for a lower land tax and higher sales tax than Second Life, how Project Sansar will work better with Oculus Rift than Second Life will ever be able to because Sansar can deliver better frame rates and how Project Sansar will initially have hand picked users for the alpha stage. However early on we hear a bit more detail about Project Sansar and some of this sounds very interesting :

UploadVR: What does that workflow look like for Sansar?

Ebbe Altberg: For starters, it will be quite technical, you will register, you will log-in, you’ll install this application which includes some add-ons for Maya, and you’ll use Maya to create the content. You’ll create a full scene, very large scenes, and you just publish that and we host that on our servers, and then that experience you can send links out to, and people follow the links and walk into that experience.

UploadVR: Just like that, straight from Maya?

Ebbe Altberg: Straight from Maya, push a button, and then you have a virtual environment that you can share.

So it sounds as if Project Sansar will allow people to create massive scenes and publish them from the application they work with, initially obviously this will be for Maya and Maya is out of the reach of a lot of Second Life residents in terms of price, but eventually the plan is to extend this to other 3D applications.

Another interesting part of the interview comes when they start talking about the Second Life economy and you can detect quite clearly that the UploadVR interviewer is surprised at the numbers he hears :

Ebbe Altberg: Although VR will take years to reach critical mass and the number of users that have the hardware required to do that, but you can do it on your screen on the PC and choose when to do VR and when to do PC, and ultimately mobile as well, but there’s so many use-cases and we enable and empower users to earn a living in ways that they otherwise couldn’t. Because a lot of people make their living creating and entertaining, and running all kinds of business. We just had a musician that earned enough money doing concerts in Second Life that he could actually have a real-world record made. He’s sitting on a mountain top somewhere in Colorado. We have a woman who makes really fancy dresses, couture-type dresses, and she’s sold, I think she said about 300,000 dresses.

UploadVR: She sold 300,000 dresses?

Ebbe Altberg: Her average price is about 4 USD.

UploadVR: Four dollars.

Ebbe Altberg: Yeah four dollars. So about 1000 Lindens.

UploadVR: Over one million bucks.

Ebbe Altberg: Over many years. But yeah still.

UploadVR: That’s insane. Are they all unique or is she just selling the same dress? Like I go to Azura and it’s the same vests or jacket that I have?

Ebbe Altberg: Well it’s brands. There’s a lot of popular in-world brands, fashion brands. I met a guy just not long ago who has a premier Jeans brand. So he’s made his living, his only income for six years now, making jeans. he’s a big jeans brand.

This is where the Project Sansar media interest is helping Second Life’s publicity. People know about Second Life, they know Linden Lab are going to build a new virtual world, so interviewers ask about Second Life and they are then surprised not just about the monetary figures, but also about how many people are still engaged.

The interview also points out some of the differences between the approach to Second Life as one big virtual world and Project Sansar as a platform :

Ebbe Altberg: Yeah it’s going to be, you can sort of call it a parallel universe, it’s going to be independent of Second Life, and it’s going to be less world-focused. Second Life is very much *a* world, where you enter the world and then you discover things within it. With Sansar we’ve taken more of a platform approach, where you don’t necessarily think of entering the world and then discovering things, you might discover things from outside: a search on Google, see a cool video on YouTube, whatever, which will lead you into any one particular experience. So every experience can attract it’s own audience. So that’s why we’ve referred to it’s similarities to WordPress. You don’t go to WordPress.com necessarily, you go to the blog, and that in the future instead of just being a blog it will be a virtual experience that you can enter.

That’s going to be a different experience for those of us who are familiar with Second Life too. I’m not going to copy and paste all of the transcript, but I do want to add one more quote from Ebbe because it points out that he does get the problem with land tier costs in Second Life :

Ebbe Altberg: I mean in Second Life you have these unfortunate situations where people build these beautiful things, but they’re not highly monetize, so at some point they have to take them down because they can’t have them just sit there for people’s entertainment with no return for $295 a month, so we don’t want content to not be created or to have to be removed because of cost so we want to reduce that as much as possible so we have as much content created as possible. So, lower the barrier to entry for creating content and having it hosted, and we’ll get more of a piece of the GDP.

Many of us cheered at this news, although it doesn’t help with the land tier cost in Second Life, it does at least provide hope that Linden Lab understand the issue of creative barriers.

Second Life is getting some damn good publicity on the back of the current wave of Project Sansar hype, indeed it appears that Project’s Sansar’s existence is giving Second Life a second life of its own and with Linden Lab continuing to add improvements and technical fixes to Second Life, the short term future looks bright.

I’ll end this post with the UploadVR interview with Ebbe Altberg, it’s good, really good.