Project Sansar is making the news again and we learn a little bit more each time an article is published. A couple of articles I’ve read today add some more context, it’s not earth shattering news but it adds a little bit more.
The first article is by Edward C. Baig over at USA Today and comes with an accompanying video : Second Life’s creators try for a third — in virtual reality. The part I find interesting in this article is in terms of discovery. That means how people will be able to find Project Sansar experiences and although this has been mentioned before, the way it is described in this article really hits home :
Linden Lab’s design aims to give Sansar creators more power to attract an audience to their experiences than they do in Second Life, where visitors may stumble upon the places by chance. Some people never find such places and don’t stick around.
If you search Google for “I want to learn French” you might find in the search results a virtual reality experience in Sansar where you can actually “go to virtual places in France, meet French people and have French dialogue at the boulangerie,” Altberg says.
The key difference there being that unlike Second Life, you should be able to discover Project Sansar experiences via the web. I know you can search Second Life from the web now, but the Project Sansar approach sounds more organic in terms of discovery.
This could be very powerful for book launches, live music, storytelling and shared community experiences.
Here’s the video that accompanies that article but the article itself is well worth a read and covers more than I have.
The other article I’ve been reading regarding Project Sansar is by Stephanie Condon over at ZDNet : Second Life Lessons: What Linden Lab is doing differently with its new VR platform. This article is good because it joins together some of the dots regarding the aims of Project Sansar being easy to publish content for and hosting of content.
For example, on ease of publishing, Ebbe Altberg explains why this is so important :
“Imagine the internet without easy-to-use web publishing or blog tools, or being able to upload your videos to stream to the world,” Altberg said. “It would be a fairly empty space, or just a bunch of big companies with deep pockets. Luckily, pretty much anyone can express themselves on the internet today, and with VR, that’s not really true.”
This is undoubtedly true. I can easily publish content via this blog, I can easily upload content to Flickr or YouTube, once the content is ready, it’s a matter of clicking buttons.
There are various ways of publishing blogs, some people pay for their own hosting, others use a shared publishing platform such as WordPress.com. There are advantages and disadvantages to both approaches. Project Sansar is going down the WordPress.com route by the sounds of it and that does make life easier in many respects :
“Creators won’t need to worry about figuring out how to host and distribute their creations [or] host their own servers,” Alterg said. “Instead, they’ll be able to simply publish their creations to our cloud, where they can be easily discovered and accessed by their audiences.”
This also links in with ease of publishing. Another point that gets raised in both articles is that Project Sansar is not Second Life 2.0, that it will be very different and that’s something that probably doesn’t get mentioned enough. In the USA Today article Ebbe comments :
“We’ve never referred to it as Second Life 2.0,“ says Linden Lab CEO Ebbe Altberg of Project Sansar in an interview here. “We think we’re building what will be the easiest ways for users to create virtual reality experiences that are social. And to make it easy for people to create, share and monetize these experiences.”
In the ZDNet article Ebbe again emphasises that Project Sansar is not Second Life 2.0 :
Project Sansar is going to be a very different product than Second Life, Altberg said — “We’d never refer to it as 2.0, or anything like that” — but he nevertheless detailed the ways Second Life informed the development of the new immersive platform.
However, despite Project Sansar not being Second Life 2.0, Linden Lab’s experience of managing a virtual world enterprise and their brand recognition with current and past Second Life users is likely to play a pivotal role in the launch of Project Sansar, as the USA Today article suggests :
Altberg hopes to draw users from Second Life to Project Sansar, while acknowledging the likelihood of some cannibalization. “We obviously have the largest ready to roll audience…. But rather me than someone else,” he says.
This has been raised before and it’s controversial point, but it’s also a reality that as VR moves forward, new experiences will be on offer, whether from Linden Lab or someone else and they will tempt Second Life users to engage with them.
Both articles are well worth a read, there’s a hell of a lot I haven’t covered here, so if you get the time, read the articles.
I’m sorry, but Project Sansar never has and doesn’t now interest me in the slightest. Many other SL residents are voicing the same or similar opinions, but I’m not entirely sure that anyone at LL is listening.
And no one (except LL management) it seems, is thrilled about the demand that in order to create an avi for Sansar, one will be forced to attach their real names to it (via FB).
Never mind that people are trying to protect themselves from invasions of privacy and that even more are shutting down their FB accounts for exactly the same reason.
This is not the best move LL has even made and it will further keep people away from Sansar.
But what I’m mainly failing to understand is this: why flush $20m down the drain on a ‘new’ VR instead of fixing and/or ‘upgrading’ SecondLife?
SL is tried and true; sure, there’s a few things that could be a little better, but it’s what we all know and love – Sansar is not. SL works. Sansar will not.
From the precious few pictures of Sansar the public has been permitted to see, it looks, quite frankly, like a dull, dirty, hot and dusty desert with little else. Dull and unappealing.