Second Life and Virtual Worlds
Canary’s list of anxieties Second Life™ residents has as items 3 and 4 a fear of losing their SL inventory and that they won’t be smart enough to use Sansar… See: Are Second Life™ residents anxious about Project Sansar?
I covered the loss of inventory in Second Life: Sansar Separation Anxiety. I think this fear is mostly imaginary. But, the issue is hard to define as there are types of loss to consider. It also requires a presupposition or two to think you’ll lose your inventory.
I suppose in a digital world whether or not the sky can fall is a programming choice. Whether you believe the sky is falling in a metaphorical sense is another matter and a personal choice. Canary Beck has published a list of 10 things that are causing some SL’ers anxiety. See: Are Second Life residents anxious about Project Sansar?
I disagree with lots of things Canary thinks. That doesn’t make her wrong and I’m not necessary correct. But, our different viewpoints should prompt readers to think.
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.
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.
In Has it occurred to you what Project Sansar really is? I wrote about the latest Project Sansar® news. Now I see the site Road to VR has a story up about Project Sansar: First Glimpse of Linden Lab’s Next-gen Virtual World, Project Sansar. They suggest it may not be so photorealistic as a stylistic Halo type world.
The peeps at Road are speculating from the latest image releases that Sansar will be a more ‘stylized’ than ‘photorealistic’ world. They make a mistake in saying that ‘stylish’ and ‘beautiful’ are words not used in describing Second Life™. They obviously haven’t looked at the images in: MOST EXCELLENT SecondLife (some NSFW±) or Stunning Second Life Images (safer). It can be argued that many of the images in these Flickr groups have been Photoshop’d. But, are we sure the Lab didn’t Photoshop these images for dramatic affect? I can edit video to improve appearance… Ben Lang, the author of the article, says,
Daniel Voyager has an article about Project Sansar. Daniel has changed the look and feel of his blog. I thought my Feedly sent me to the wrong place… He points us to a couple of new bits out about Project Sansar®.
Ebbe Altberg talked about Project Sansar at the 2015 Web Summit. An audience member, Janne Juntunen, got a video of a video shown at the event. There is a 30 second clip on Twitter.
…or Project Sansar in the news. Geek Dad has posted an interview with Linden Lab CEO, Ebbe Altberg: Project Sansar: Giving Virtual Reality a Second Life. Now… isn’t that a catchy title?
While there isn’t much new information, the author Derrick Schneider sees things differently than most. So, whether he asked different questions or just heard Ebbe’s talking points in new ways, I can’t be sure. But, I took some new thinking away from the article.
Quoting Ebbe:
“We do say that it’s [Sansar] in the spirit of [Second Life], but that’s where we stop. We don’t think of this as a 2.0. Sansar is its own thing. Some things will be similar, some will be completely different.”
…
“With Sansar, we explicitly said, the creator is king, and the creator is the customer.”
While we have repeatedly heard the creator is the primary target market for Project Sansar, how ‘creator’ is defined is likely different than we may be thinking. Ebbe gives us clear statements that ‘creators’ are not just those making 3D models with Maya or Blender. For Ebbe a person that furnishes a home is creating. While they didn’t necessarily build any of the things they bring into the home, they still built their living environment. So, to Ebbe such people are ‘creators’ too. It is this broader group of creative people that Ebbe is considering his target demographic. It is tools for them that he is building first.