When I was a lad, ok when I was younger, older than a mere lad, tom’s Hardware would be a site I would go to for information about graphics cards and such like. The site had a reputation for being trustworthy when it came to reviews of hardware, plus the community had a reputation for being helpful and knowledgeable.
These days tom’s Hardware is known for more than just, well, hardware and that is exemplified by an article published today by Kevin Carbotte; Project Sansar: The Forthcoming Successor To Second Life Will Focus On VR.
The article is based on discussions between Kevin Carbotte of tom’s Hardware had with Linden Lab’s CEO, Ebbe Altberg and Linden Lab’s Senior Director of Global Communications, Gray of The Lab From San Francisco (AKA Peter Gray).
There’s nothing earth shattering or new in the article, but it does build on other articles in helping to cement some ideas about what the future may hold for Project Sansar. Again we read that land costs will be lower, sales taxes will be higher and that Project Sansar will be comparable to WordPress in terms of ideology. The idea with Project Sansar is to make things bigger, better and easier and here we do come to something that has not been discussed that often, the engine :
Peter Gray likened Project Sansar for VR to what WordPress has done for the Web; the idea is to make it possible for anyone to create a virtual experience, without the need for a software engineering background.
Linden Lab is creating its own proprietary rendering engine to make this happen. I asked why the company took this direction rather than use existing options, and was told that the problems the company has run into over the years with Second Life made it clear that the company needed an engine designed from the ground up for this platform.
The company needed the ability to make the creator tools simple to use, a task for which the current available engines are not suitable. Project Sansar offers a whole package, including the underlying multi-user functionality, hosting, assets and tools. Additionally, Linden Lab is designing Project Sansar to be accessible through several different media.
There has been some speculation as to what engine Linden Lab were using with Project Sansar, the answer is incomplete but it looks like it will be their own engine.
We also get to read more about what Project Sansar may or may not be and the more I read about it, the more I feel that Project Sansar itself will not be one huge virtual world. The WordPress analogy is a good one and I’ve touched upon this before. On WordPress I can read other WordPress blogs, I can interact with them if I login with my WordPress account and have certain features, but other WordPress blogs are not all on the same site, you can host your own WordPress blog.
Project Sansar is starting to sound more like that :
Project Sansar will make experiences much more discoverable and easier to share. Creators will be able to offer an entry point from anywhere, allowing for completely private simulations that can be linked directly from a website, rather than a typical game login. This will also unlock the ability to make these experiences discoverable through search engines, rather than being limited to the pool of Project Sansar members.
This does not mean to say that Linden Lab will not produce a massively muliplayer online world with Project Sansar technology, but it sounds more and more like people will be able to run their own version of Project Sansar away from a central virtual world if they choose. That definitely has potential but we will need to see it in action before we can draw firm conclusions on the direction this is headed in.
The big question of course is when are we likely to see Project Sansar in action, the tom’s Hardware article has some information on this, but please note that this is not set in stone :
Although no concrete dates have been set, there are plans for multiple stages within the development of Project Sansar. Altberg said a semi-open beta should take place in the first half of next year, and a full access beta is tentatively planned for the third quarter. An open public beta should take place before the end of 2016.
Currently around half a dozen creators are said to be playing around with Project Sansar and it should be noted that it’s in its Alpha stage. Those who are involved are people Linden Lab know to be proficient with Maya. Don’t despair though, other 3D modelling engines will be supported when Project Sansar really comes to town.
Project Sansar continues to generate good publicity, without people really seeing anything of it. This goes to show that despite all the sneering, all the negative comments and all the noses being turned up at it, Second Life was revolutionary and it is secretly admired by techie folk, even if they won’t admit it. This gives Linden Lab a bit of a head start in the virtual world stakes, they are a company the tech world believes can create the canvas that provides the foundations of a virtual world.
Virtual worlds will grow in the future, whether they grow in the direction people think they will is another matter, but more and more virtual worlds will arrive. Project Sansar may very well be at the centre of many of those new virtual worlds.
Yes like a mentioned before:
web browser engine (sometimes called layout engine or rendering engine) is a software component that takes marked up content (such as HTML, XML, image files, etc.) and formatting information (such as CSS, XSL, etc.) and displays the formatted content on the screen.
HTML5 pages of which they can host 10000 worlds for free on a single server and they expect people to pay monthly tier on that.
plenty of bla bla, we cannot say more until we see it ourselves.
The summary is that Linden Lab is building their own version of cloud party and High Fidelity
What else could be found by search engines? Search engines still read html code from what I understand.