Ebbe on VR

Bloomberg Business talked about Virtual Reality (VR) a few days ago. In the show was a few minutes with Ebbe Altberg, Linden Lab CEO. The discussion of VR starts about 10:30m in.

My take away is that gaming adoption of VR is going to be slow. Mostly because of cost. Other uses of VR are likely to lead the adoption race. Medical and military use seem to be the leading fields for VR adoption.

In other news, the Oculus Rift is already behind the tech curve. Seems Sony is adding features to their Playstation implementation of the headset that Oculus don’t yet support. Wouldn’t that be an upset?

Also, Unreal has added in world modeling. You can build your game/world inside the world. Very Second-Life-ish. So, does that put them ahead of Linden Lab? I doubt it. I still give the edge to the Lab based on their experience with virtual worlds and economies.

Ebbe’s Speech Shaking Things

Linden Lab’s CEO Ebbe Altberg spoke at VWBPE 2016, Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education. There are some interesting points made in the speech. Some are changes and others are just making it more clear what the Lab is planning with Project Sansar®.

For about 12 minutes Ebbe was talking about Second Life™ and Project Sansar. Then the question and Answer part starts. The moderators were doing an excellent job of focusing questions. That got lots of ground covered.

I’ve done my summary style index. Paraphrasing. And I’ve added links into the video for those things I think have impact.

The most impactful thing I took away from this Q&A is how often Ebbe implies and says Project Sansar and the final resulting product will not be a replacement for Second Life. He provides way more information on why not. If you’re an educator, you may well be keeping your projects in SL with… I’ll say… links to very focused experiences in Sansar. Continue reading

In the News: Project Sansar

Daniel Voyager has an article up pointing to an interview by Ryan Matthew Pierson with Ebbe Altberg, Linden CEO, and Peter Gray, Linden marketing. See: Linden Lab’s Project Sansar and the Future of Virtual Reality. The article is about what is required for Virtual Reality (VR) to go mainstream.

ℜØSE Siabonne #paparazzoted

ℜØSE Siabonne #paparazzoted

The TL:DR is that Second Life did not catch on because the rewards of Second Life didn’t cover the cost of the learning curve, in people’s perception. The article puts that much more convincing worlds.

Ryan covers how Sansar will be different and that it targets the ‘developer/game maker’ rather than the user. But, he never answers the question implied by the first half of the article.

So, interesting, but no great insights.

Danial writes far more about the article from the perspective of a resident of Second Life™ that lives through the times being discussed. (Click Daniel’s name at the top of this article.)

Project Sansar: Democratizing?

Over on SLUniverse Han Held quotes Prokofy ripping on the idea of Project Sansar® being a democratizing force in Virtual Reality (VR). I would send Prokofy glasses, but I doubt she’ll ever see the world anywhere near the way I do. But, she does raise the question of whether Project Sansar can democratize VR. That is worth addressing.

The Village & BarDeco

The Village & BarDeco

So, first what is democratization? Merriam-Webster defines the word as; to make (a country or organization) more democratic, an alternate defintion:  to make (something) available to all people or said another way: to make it possible for all people to understand (something). Continue reading

Second Life & Sansar: What did we learn?

A Lab Chat meeting with Ebbe Altberg, Linden Lab CEO, was yesterdays (1/21) big event. We learned new things about Second Life™ and Project Sansar. We are starting to see reaction from a few to the new information.

Lab Chat - 2016-01-21

Lab Chat – 2016-01-21

I am paraphrasing what I heard on the audio and I’ve shortened it. For some questions the answers were repeating what was said earlier. So, I’ve included time marks to you can easily find the actual statements in the audio stream. I have also expanded on what Ebbe says from what I believe is implied. Take that with however much salt you feel is appropriate.  Continue reading

Second Life in the News Week 3

Annie Gaus, a reporter for the San Francisco Business Times has written In virtual reality, Second Life prepares for its second act. Annie interviews Ebbe Altberg. Starting with Second Life as a virtual world and moving into talk about Project Sansar.

Nothing new here to those following Sansar in the SL Blogosphere. But, it is a nice article.

Xiaoyu

Xiaoyu

Second Life: The Ghost Town

The Ghost Town is a free-to-play MadPea game. Canary Beck is writing about it. See: Merchants: A chance to get out in front of new Second Life residents, which is a comment on marketing.

MadPea needs merchants to provide prizes… gifts… for a hunt that is part of the game. For details see Canary’s article.

…and this video has nothing to do with anything, I just thought it was neat.

Bodies

Canary also has an article on body shape, men’s and women’s. How men and women draw up the “perfect body” in Second Life. Interesting.  Continue reading

Ebbe and Lab Chat

Canary has a nice summary of the First Lab Chat meeting. See: The Linden Lab Chat summarized in 7 minutes. It is a 5 to 7 minute read. This one is like 2,700 words. At 200 to 250 words per minute that is 11 to 15 minutes read time. Way less than listening to the 90 minutes audio of the meeting.

I put my thoughts at the end, page 4.

Mohana

Mohana

The meet makes it clear, at least to me, that the Lab is working to promote Second Life™. They are spending ad money and actively working to figure out what works best with new users via A/B testing in SL. They say they are making small advances at several levels.

When asked about gateways, Ebbe tells us that the current ‘beta’ (?) gateways are not producing any better results than the Linden Welcome and Learning Islands. We don’t know much about the current gateways. We do know Firestorm has theirs in place. But, some concerns about the current gateway API they can use has stopped them from pulling their promotional trigger. To me that calls into question the importance of a statement that no gateway has outperformed the Linden entry points.  Continue reading