Linden Lab’s Project Sansar remains under a shield of secrecy, even on Linden Lab’s newly revamped website. We have picked up bits and pieces from interviews, such as when Tom’s Hardware spoke to Linden Lab’s Senior Director, Global Communications, Gray Of The Lab From San Francisco (AKA Peter Gray) :
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. However the WordPress analogy may have fell just a bit short of exemplifying the message Linden Lab were trying to convey, so they’ve added a new analogy, YouTube.
John Gaudiosi of Fortune has been speaking to Linden Lab CEO Ebbe Altberg and posted an article entitled; How ‘Second Life’ Developer Hopes To Deliver The ‘YouTube For VR’. The YouTube analogy is a good one because it encompasses more than just the creation aspect, as Ebbe Altberg explains in the article :
“Much like YouTube, Sansar will empower people to create, share, and profit from their own social virtual experiences,” Altberg says. “Doing that today requires an engineering team—it’s hard and expensive, and that limits the use-cases for VR. That’s similar to the old days of the web, so we sometimes also use WordPress as an apt analogy.”
Unless you work for Linden Lab or are in the top secret Alpha you won’t know which analogy works best, time will tell on that front. However YouTube is widely known as a platform where people create content and make money. Whereas that link between creation and income isn’t so clear when it comes to WordPress, although that route is available via use of WordPress too.
Whereas the article doesn’t tell us a lot new, it does raise some issues that are worth raising again :
Project Sansar is completely separate from Second Life and will run in parallel with it, but the new platform will not be backward-compatible. Altberg says the same mesh files and other assets imported to Second Life can also be imported to Project Sansar. And users will be able to translate their social networks and financial accounts to the new platform.
I know some people want to be able to import their content directly from Second Life to Project Sansar but that’s something I don’t support. Some Second Life items were created with terms and conditions specific to Second Life. Project Sansar is a new platform and even though it’s owned by Linden Lab, I think it would be opening a huge can of worms were Linden Lab to allow direct import. That’s before we get to the issue of Second Life content not being optimal in many cases for Project Sansar.
Project Sansar has been built from the ground up, with mobile devices and HMD in mind. Whereas you can use an Oculus Rift with Second Life, the frame rates Second Life delivers mean it doesn’t take full advantage of the capabilities of Oculus Rift.
The article ends with :
Project Sansar will be live in alpha form in time for Facebook’s Oculus Rift launch in Q1 2016.
An important point to note here is that the above is not a quote. I don’t know if it means Linden Lab want an open Alpha by then or whether they are going to continue to invite more Alpha users, but Project Sansar is already in Alpha.
Project Sansar continues to be popular with tech journalists, and that also means Second Life making plenty of news too.
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