Second Life and Virtual Worlds
Inara Pey noticed something in the recent Linden Lab press release that I passed right over. The Lab refers to Project Sansar as SANSAR™. Subtle.
Inara contacted the Lab and got a sort of left handed confirmation.
See: Lab confirms Sansar’s title and issues first Creator Preview invites.
They now have a Sansar Flickr Channel.
This morning an announcement appeared on the Linden Lab Press Releases page: LINDEN LAB BEGINS INVITING CREATORS TO SANSAR, THE PLATFORM FOR CREATING SOCIAL VR EXPERIENCES. (8/31/2016)
The Lindens say ‘more than 6,500 people have applied’ to participate in what I’ll call the beta phase of Project Sansar.
This will be a rolling invitation. Some will be invited now. More later and even more with time.
If you haven’t applied and you are a creator, there is a link on the PR page.
The opening day will be sometime in early 2017. I expect that will be when I get in for the first time.
While none of this is really new to those of us in SL, it is a milestone that it is happening now.
An interesting question is how tightly NDA’s will these invitees be bound?
Massively has an article about a game named No Man’s Sky. In the article is a video by TheHappieCat explaining how the game’s makers created quintillions of worlds using fractals. The thing I find surprising is the worlds are never stored in a database. Yet when you come back to a world it is re-generated, but the same exact world is generated. TheHappieCat explains how she thinks it works.
The Massively Overpowered article Eve Evolved: No Man’s Sky vs Eve Online, by Brendan Drain explores what the differences between Eve and No Man’s may mean how Eve could be impacted.
Jo Yardley covers a recent Ebbe Altberg interview: Ebbe Altberg interview about SL & Sansar which is going public next January. The original is here: Episode 7, Ebbe Altberg, Virtual Reality Snowball Champion.
I found two interesting points. In the early testing they ran into problems with users getting dizzy. Recent testing shows they have eliminated that problem. I suspect as people are so different there will still be people that get dizzy or suffer simulator sickness. But, in general people will have a good experience. The author got to visit Sansar and thought very well of the experience.
The other is that there will be a group entering Sansar in August 2016, by invitation, from those that have signed up. Then Sansar will go public in January of 2017.
I suspect I’ll only make it into Sansar in January. But, that is only 5 months or so away.
Listening to the audio I found the interviewer thinks somewhat as I do that for sometime VR is going to be a bit primitive and rough around the edges. Its going to take some time for it all to come to gather.
Stephanie Condon wrote Second Life™ Lessons: What Linden Lab is doing differently with its new VR platform for ZDNet’s Between the Lines, a sort of technology meets society section of the site.
Stephanie points out that Second Life (SL) was thought to be the tech revolution to take over the web, way back in 2006-2007 when an Internet in 3D was imagined. But… it didn’t happen. SL has remained profitable. It just didn’t catch on as people expected.
We aren’t hearing much about Sansar these days. Inara did come across this video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCkcbRckqY4