Second Life and Virtual Worlds
Ciaran has the article Project Sansar To Offer Instancing And Perhaps A Different Approach To Branding Experiences posted. Ciaran has put together a set of clues and come to a conclusion. His reasoning seems plausible. So, what is instancing?
Ciaran gives a quick answer. I’ll go a bit deeper. First let’s look at how Second Life™ works. We have a region running in a server. Technically we may have more than one region running in a server, but for our purposes here I’ll ignore that aspect.
During SL12B a number of meetings with various Lindens were held. One was with Ebbe Linden, the CEO of Linden Lab. Jo Yardely and Saffia Widdershins are the other voices in the video.
This is my summary. As usual it is paraphrased.
01:05 Jo: Is there any change in Second Life that you are especially proud of?
Zarrakan Productions put out a video of a meeting with Danger Linden, Drax, Safia W., and Troy Linden. Much of the discussion is about Sansar and what Linden Lab is doing. Below is the video and my summary of it.
As usual, I paraphrase. Listen/watch the video for better context and exact wording.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yeeM4wOSOKo
Content starts at Tme Mark (TM) 03:42. Introductions and how Danger and Troy came to Second Life and some of their work history.
Danger was Senior Product Manager for Sansar but is now 100% with SL. Troy is a Senior Producer, a product owner. I am still not clear on how much of his time is with Sansar or SL.
8:10 – Sansar started from almost scratch.
Indigo Mertel caught an article titled: Second Life Creator Linden Lab Prepares To Test Parallel VR Universe. There are some new bits of information about Project Sansar, aka Second Life 2.0. A quick summary of the new information follows:
Linden Lab plans to have testers in Sansar starting the end of July, 2015.
Sansar runs at 75 frames per second (FPS) and will run at 90 FPS to meet the expected Oculus Rift requirements.
First one into the new world will by handpicked, skilled creators.
Additional beta testers will be invited into Sansar the first half of 2016.
A Sansar version 1.0 will be ready by the end of 2016.
You probably know that Project SANSAR aka SL 2.0, is going to use a proprietary viewer. If we were really lucky, there would be no viewer. The new world would be web ready. But, I get the impression that is out. More and more I think it will be via app only.
In any event an open source viewer for SANSAR is not currently in the cards, at least for the initial release and probably for sometime after the main release.