Project Sansar – Page 3

September 11, 2015

Linden Lab Talk To Tom’s Hardware About Project Sansar

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.

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August 18, 2015

Linden Lab Announce They Are Inviting Selected People To Test Project Sansar

Linden Lab have published a press release regarding Project Sansar; Linden Lab Invites First Virtual Experience Creators to Project Sansar Testing. I’m not going to publish the press release in full, but I will quote parts of it, starting with :

SAN FRANCISCO – August 18, 2015 – Linden Lab®, the creators of Second Life®, today announced that a small number of creators have been exclusively invited to be the first to help test its new platform for virtual experiences, codenamed Project Sansar.

Slated for general availability in 2016, Project Sansar will democratize virtual reality as a creative medium. It will empower people to easily create, share, and monetize their own multi-user, interactive virtual experiences, without requiring engineering resources. The platform will enable professional-level quality and performance with exceptional visual fidelity, 3D audio, and physics simulation. Experiences created with Project Sansar will be optimized for VR headsets like the Oculus Rift, but also accessible via PCs and (at consumer launch) mobile devices. Users can explore and socialize within Project Sansar experiences through advanced expressive avatars, using text and voice chat.

This isn’t surprising news. Linden Lab have stated for some time that a small number of hand picked creators would be invited to test Project Sansar. The early users are expected to be people who can create architecture and have access to Autodesk Maya, as that’s the software Linden Lab seem to have been using inhouse.

The use of Maya as a tool in Project Sansar was discussed by Ebbe Altberg recently in a video interview with UploadVR :

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.

People should not get too concerned about this. Project Sansar is in the very early Alpha stage, things can and probably will, change quite dramatically before it’s in beta, or even open Alpha if they have one. At the moment Linden Lab are going with what they know works, which at this stage is Maya.

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August 5, 2015

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.

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July 23, 2015

Project Sansar To Offer Instancing And Perhaps A Different Approach To Branding Experiences

Scientists have announced that they have found “The closest twin to earth outside the solar system“. The name of the planet is Kepler 452b and it’s considered Earth’s older and bigger cousin. However that’s not really what this blog post is about. No, this blog post is about me finding “The closest article to the article I found yesterday about Project Sansar, outside this blog“.

I have discovered the article at none other than Variety. The article in question is Second Life Maker Linden Lab Wants to Build the WordPress of Virtual Reality by Janko Roettgers, Senior Silicon Valley Correspondent for Variety.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, yesterday I blogged Ebbe Altberg And Peter Gray Talk To MMORPG About The Future Of Online Experiences, which was based on an article on MMORPG by Neilie Johnson entitled “Linden Lab Looks to the Future of Online Experiences“.

The article in Variety covers a lot of the same ground but it also has some additional and rather interesting information, for example, when it comes to how many people may be able to visit a build in Project Sansar, the Variety article states :

Why spend a lot of money to build a presence in Second Life if it could only be visited by only 70 people at a time? Project Sansar wants to solve this issue by allowing for unlimited copies of an experience. In other words, instead of just opening one restaurant, McDonalds could open hundreds or even thousands of eateries in the new virtual world, and open and close them based on customer demand.

This does indeed mean instancing! Now if you’re not familiar with instancing, imagine a Second Life region that is full. Instancing would address this by creating pretty much a copy of that region on demand, to allow more people to enter the experience. The obvious issue there is that you may not be in the same instance of the region as your friends, but we can worry about things like that later because instancing is a bloody brilliant concept.

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July 22, 2015July 22, 2015

Ebbe Altberg And Peter Gray Talk To MMORPG About The Future Of Online Experiences

First things first, some readers may find the website of MMORPG a little garish, it’s a bright site and very busy. I mention this because this post is about an article by Neilie Johnson on MMORPG; Linden Lab Looks to the Future of Online Experiences. The article is based on an interview 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).

Whereas there are no ground breaking secrets revealed in the interview, it is worth looking at some things again. Firstly the proposed land model for Project Sansar, or what is known about it so far. The article reiterates that the plan for Project Sansar is to have much lower land costs than the USD$295.00 a month region cost in Second Life, with sales tax on the increase compared to the 5% Marketplace commission. There are no figures provided but I think it’s fair to say that this has been mentioned enough times now for it to be a reality.

The article also touches upon the fact that Linden Lab have learnt a lot from Second Life. Although the minimum age requirement will be 13, Linden Lab feel that they will be able to segregate content so that minors aren’t running into unsuitable content.

One of the things I’ve seen said about Project Sansar when comparing it to Second Life is that the Project Sansar development team will look at the way some things are done in Second Life and decide they would not want to start from there to achieve that in Project Sansar. Content and land restrictions are areas where Project Sansar can take a new approach and one that could very well deal with some of the problems we’ve seen in Second Life. The experience of the issues that have been raised in Second Life are an advantage here.

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