39:40 – Terrain editor – They have two guys working on terrain editing. This will be more powerful than in SL. They are working on ways to blend voxel and height map type terrain. They are making caves and tunnels possible. The plan is to have procedural organics.

41:00 – Will we have more control of terrain textures? Yes. But, Ebbe is not sure how far they will get by opening day. But, the in-world terrain tool will be way more powerful.

Water is another thing. It probably won’t available opening day because it isn’t even on the road map today (1m/20d/2016). But, pouring a glass of water should be possible. That would mean pools, ponds, and lakes should be possible.

43:00 – Sansar should be available by end of year 2016, probably January 2017. Sansar is at the point we can creat environments now, but scripting is not yet implemented.

45:00 – What workflow should we learn for Sansar?

Learn to work with mesh and C#.

46:00 – World Map – Will there be a world map?

Ebbe says they are not thinking of having a world map. He doesn’t think of SL as a single community but a collection of communities. Many of them don’t interact with each other. So, SL not being a single community but users thinking of it that way may be why it is so hard to find things in SL.

In Sansar large experiences may have their own maps and communities.

SL is like a walled garden where all users come in through the front door. Then good luck finding what you like. Sansar will be in-side-out in that regard. Each experience will be a doorway in. Users will start with what interest them.

Rather than the Lab buying users (meaning: doing the advertising to draw in new users) experience users will be able to do their own marketing for their experience.

A major idea is to avoid having users coming to your experience get lost in a general registration process. This requires the Lab to provide creators the ability to do their own marketing and registrations. Remember. The Lab is thinking each experience will be provided a web entrance page. Registration will be handled by the Lab but in such a way as it looks more like an individual registration for a game. Think of the gateways, like Firestorm’s, we have now in SL.

There is a plan to make SLURL’s work better in SL. The idea is you could give a SLURL to anyone and have a good chance of them actually arriving at the SLURL target destination without getting lost in registration.

There is this idea of an experience associated web page for Sansar experiences, like SL gateways and their web pages. We have seen a primitive example with the Firestorm gateway pages. The Lab is improving and building on that process. Sansar is going to have it from day one.

The real paradigm shift is to allow people to discover places/experiences on the Internet and come into them. As SL is now you come into SL then try to discover places/experiences. But, they are working to change SL to a similar model.

Ebbe is saying the idea of pages is along the line of Project Sansar/Creator name/Experience name for web pages. Of course this is structure for the pages the Lab provides to experience creators.

There will be search tools for use once one is inside Sansar. So, there will be a way to find Sansar related experiences.

51:40 – There once was a major emphasis on educational use. Is there an opportunity for that in Sansar? Ebbe says they are looking at supporting a broad range of users; educators, architects, medical, and more.

56:00 – Will we have something like Windlight? Will we be able to sell 3D scenes? Will there be a LEA in Sansar?

Ebbe says there will be environmental controls. He doesn’t know if the will be marketable.

In some viewers we have filters that make for huge changes in how a scene is rendered. They aren’t thinking of filters now, they are too far out.

Endowment for Arts – Will the Lab be providing support? May be. Hopefully cheap land should reduce the need for art support. But, if needed the Lab will look at it.

1:00:00 – Will Sansar cater to aviation?

Ebbe says aviation should be better. There will be a better physics engine. Regions will be larger. Think multiple kilometers. They are not planning for region crossings like we have in SL. Travel between experiences (or regions if you must) will be more portal oriented.

Ebbe says the multiple kilometer limit is more about what they can do with coordinate systems and how the math fits. Jo kept poking for a size and finally got 4 square kilometers as an answer. But, that was sort of putting words in Ebbe’s mouth. I doubt there will be a 4km limit.

Think about the size limits we have in SL. Those are based on computer math. 256 meters allows for use of an 8-bit number. We also see elevation position start to break at 1,000 meters (more like 1024) and fall apart at 4,000 meters (more like 4096). Those are represented by 12 and 16 bit numbers. This isn’t how these numbers are actually represented in SL. They are for illustration.

In Sansar I expect the size of a region to also be controlled by binary math and the bytes of data they decide to devote to coordinates systems. The large the data word size the more processing power it takes to do math and increases the ram needed to keep track of where things are. Since performance is a major issue for VR headsets the data word size is no trivial facet of the plan.

More pages, links below…