Second Life CEO Ebbe Altberg speaks about their VR project, Sansar

Some interesting points:

Creating:

Things might be a bit technical at first given some of the complexities of 3d modeling in Autodesks May a (3D computer graphics software).However, everything afterward can be publishedwith simply a push of a button which -in doing so- includes a link that can be shared and explored by others.

My understanding is that they will branch out to other modeling software like Blender & that there will be building inworld as well.

Economy:

Compared to its cousin, land in Sansar will be cheaper and more abundant. However, instead of charging users upfront, Sansar will be making up the difference by capitalizing on the transactions made and taking asales tax of the platforms totalGDP. This strategy will allow for meaningful infrastructure expansion and lower the financial barrier to entry.

I'm hoping this is a good thing (since I like having a lot of land) but have no idea what this means to the retail side of my business or affordability in general.

For more Sansar information see:

Sansar: news and updates from the media and from the Lab

It is acknowledged that content creation tools can be a barrier to adoption / use; it is therefore a goal with Sansar to make it easier to make things in Sansar than it is in Second Life

Your thoughts?

--
Proprietress of Tatiana's Tea Room ~ Owner of the Provence Coeur Estate ~ Webmistress of this site

updated by @tatiana-dokuchic: 06 Oct 2016 06:36:06AM

Thank you for sharing Tatiana, I also greatly anticipated Sl2 (didn't knew it has a name yet) seeing in the notes that the world can run at 75 FPS is great news for script but I wonder if the client side viewers will get faster then SL... From the link discussion it is not clear how "land" will work and how rental will be made but yes seams to be willing to lower tier cost by increasing transaction fee... That could be of course when you sell something but sadly when you upload something inworld. As their intention to make it easier to upload mesh I wish they will remove the land impact from Sansar as it is only a way to make money and block creativity. And yes I too wonder what the inworld building tool will look like, they talk about Voxell which I don't know about.

You're very welcome, Louis-Francis

I've read that there will be a 5% tax on sales of goods - both inworld & from an online store. As a creator that's fine with me as long as land prices are cheaper. Right now I'm paying much more that 5% of sales in land fees.

I haven't seen anything yet about upload fees. I have seen where they want to make uploads much easier which would be great.

Don't know if they're going to have the concept of Land Impact. It's a good question.

I like the idea of having one Master Account from which you can control many avatars.

I'm also hoping that by LL keeping control of the viewer, content theft will be a lot harder. We can dream

--
Proprietress of Tatiana's Tea Room ~ Owner of the Provence Coeur Estate ~ Webmistress of this site

I have been following project Sansar for a while now. I do find myself excited about the prospect of a newer faster better world. And cheaper is always better. With that said, he fails to mention cost of SL or how Sansar will effect it. Will they keep the prices the same in SL with cheaper prices in Sansar? Higher sales and service taxes in exchange for lower land prices, I would surely like. With lower land prices, I can guarantee, I would be spending more on the marketplace. After tiers, who has money left for shopping. Prices to me are very important. At current prices, I may be downsizing in the next couple months, just because it is hard to justify the cost of SL.....when you can get the same size estate in an open sim for the fraction of the price.

His is comments on building, seem troublesome to me. I understand that creations in maya and blender, those sorts of programs, can be much nicer and efficient. What bothers me is, that not all people are technical, so to speak. When I joined SL, I had no idea about 3d modeling or building in a virtual world. It took me all of a month in SL, to figure out the building part of it. The reason I stuck to it, was it was simple. The concept of rezzing a prim and applying a texture was easy. I am afraid with the new world, if it is not a simple process, people like me would not have developed. Later yes, I found out about maya and other external building programs, but even now, I am still struggling with blender. The concept of basic shapes and easy add textures..allowed even the most hard headed, like me, to learn and fall in love with building.

Lets hope, Sansar opens up new opportunities for us. I still wonder if I even have the energy to move our whole estate to Sansar. I have just finished a 3.5 year project and am ready to retire. Some of our buildings, like the Capitol, are not meshed, and we would not be allowed to carry them to Sansar. The Capitol has been in the same place since it was built in Jan 08. It is the oldest original building in Antiquity. That would be hard to replace.

Like louis, I have never heard of Voxell, but lets hope that those of use with the IQ of a fence post can understand how to use it.

Thanks for keeping us up to date Tatiana..:)

--
His Royal Highness Jacon Cortes de Bexar Prince of Antiquity, Duke of Cumberland, Duque de Bexar, Duc de la Valliere, Marchese di MSB

Could the Oculus Rift help give Second Life a second life?

This sounds promising:

Another change is in making things easier to build. As with Second Life, Sansars success will hang on what people create in it, and when the first players begin exploring this week, the place will be a ghost town. So Linden Lab is making the tools to create virtual objects in Sansar easier to find. It will also support objects created with external 3D modeling and editing tools, much as a word processor supports documents created in other word processors.

--
Proprietress of Tatiana's Tea Room ~ Owner of the Provence Coeur Estate ~ Webmistress of this site

That will be great..the notecard system and word processing do need lots of work and would be great if we could incoorperate in some with with google documents or something.

On Oculus, in my humble opinion, it will be a revolution for Virtual Worlds. When Facebook bought Oculus, and Zuckerberg gave his vision for virtual reality, live events, visiting doctors, virtual travel, shopping, it made me stop and think for a moment. With the reach of facebook, who better then them to market it to the masses. There is talk that they are developing apps and maybe even some sort of virtual world platform. Yes, this is all good and fine for Facebook, but I also see it having an effect on us here. With more people, joining the ranks of Virtual Reality, due to all the new products coming out, we could see a whole new influx of people. It would take years for these new worlds to get up to the amount of development and content that SL has so it puts SL in a good position for new people to come in and see stuff that is already built.

Sansar will also be marketed for Oculus users i'm sure. So yes...they may visit Sansar, but also take interest in exploring the thousands of worlds here. With Open Sim, anyone can afford to create a world. The equivalent of a webpage when the internet first started, and could very well develop the same way. Worlds linked together via hypergrid....would allow inexpensive worlds to be developed by people, education and business just like webpages did.

These are some of my thoughts on this. I really am bullish on Virtual Reality and Oculus and the potential it has to change how the internet is seen.

--
His Royal Highness Jacon Cortes de Bexar Prince of Antiquity, Duke of Cumberland, Duque de Bexar, Duc de la Valliere, Marchese di MSB

I agree with you Jacon but at the same time, having Facebook making is own virtual world could have the opposite effect in SL as their will be no publicity made for SL only for Facebook virtual world or Sansar when it should come out. Also Open Sim is already here for long time and it is not exploit as it should be as there is not enough publicity around it and mostly there are almost no marketplace but for Kitely (as far as I know) so not many creators. People go where many people are like they said about Sansar, they will be pushing hard at launch to bring creator there as it is the only way this project can work out. Creators could already move to another grid and bring their existing work over there the way it is built in SL (prim, sculpt, mesh) but they don't as they don't see the interest (potential profit). To me having something as cash making and addictive simple games like Facebook making its on virtual world is more alarming then promising in SL perspective...

I've been following news on Project Sansar, and I'm always eager for more information. I think it would be nice if they introduced a built-int 3D modeling too, more simplified and intuitive - even if, then, more limited than other 3D softwares - so users who are new to it won't be completely left out. The inclusion of a animation system sounds very promising too.

The master account thing will be great for roleplayers, specially since apparently you'll be able to share your inventory among your different "personas". Hopefully the different pricing of land will create room for new and varied high quality sims, RP oriented or not. Since it is mentioned lindens will remain as the platform's currency, I wonder if we will be able to transfer L$ bought in SL to Sansar?

On a more visual note, I'd love to have some kind of clothing physics, something like this http://goo.gl/MJQHZ4 . Hoping for great improvements in the lighting and all too!

Autodesk Maya, Looks Great, but is expensicve, dose not support all platforms equily ( Autodesk is famouse for not having all featuers in there Macintosh Version of Software) and dose have a steep learning curve.

Blender is FREE, runs on Windose, Macintosh, Linux and there lots of online toutorials.

At work, We use SketchupPRO, as do most of the Archetechs I know these days as well as most of the other Solar Companys I know. The software NOT Free, but easy to learn, powerful, and not unreasonably ecxpenssive for a hobbist to be able to justify the cost of.

I would hope, so as to get many creative minds and hands working, thatt Blender and/or Sketchup-PRO would be standards for support, with brach out support for programs like Calavari and Maya.

A Consumption tax, i.e. Sales Tax helps creators greatly, as it move part of the support of land to the users, instead of being all on the Creators.

If I remember correctly, Sansar is using voxels for landscaping and there is speculation that this may also be extended to building in general.

I don't know much about voxels, except they allow terraformers to create caves instead of faking it as we do now. Here's some more information:

Are voxels the future?

Voxels can easily do things that would otherwise be difficult for polygonal models. Voxels are more malleable for example, its surprisingly difficult to model holes with a triangular mesh, but very easy with voxels. Likewise, voxels enable models to take on very fine details such as bumps and imperfections without resorting to graphical hacks such as bump mapping, which merely simulate bumps by playing with how light interacts with the surfaces of objects. Voxels turn out to be a much more natural way to digitally represent the real world.

--
Proprietress of Tatiana's Tea Room ~ Owner of the Provence Coeur Estate ~ Webmistress of this site

I would be more impressed by the cheaper and more abundant land if they started making it cheaper in SL, too. If it's a matter of a "tax," they can certainly impose it in SL if they choose.I wonder why they don't start experimenting with alternative fiscal models in SL, if that's what it takes? Or if they really want us to move, why they don't create a method that allows us to shift at least the mesh portions of our existing investments in inventory, or compensates us for the creations that we would have to abandon? (Yes, I am feeling a little sour. And my learning curve as a creator has been much more modest than Jacon's, and my appetite for purchasing software needed to create outside of SL or any other platform is small; if I can't justify it for real world purposes, I can't rationalize the purchase in the context of the RL family budget.)

--
Antiquity Hedgewitch

Given that SL is LL's major source of income it's not surprisingthey are reluctant to change the current revenue model.

After all, the "land barons" are happy, LL is happy, SL is bringing in money and it's only the "little guys" (like me!!) that find the land fees too high. In a sense I'm happy as well because it doesn't look like SL is going to go bankrupt anytime soon.

As Ebbe says ( Ask the CEO ):

In general we will lower the cost of land (For Project Sansar). We continue to look at optins for SL but I can't promise any changes there.

At least they are going another route with Sansar land costs and if it's reasonable it will be a big incentive to switching over.

Though I also hate the thought ofleaving allmy inventory behind I'm pretty much resigned to it. I figure I'll build it up in Sansar over time as I continue to spend time in both worlds.

With regard to inventory transfer, it's not only the technical difficulties but the intellectual property ones. It's my understanding that the majority of items I've purchased are licensed for SL only. I'd hate to muddy the waters of Sansar with a lot of content that wasn't sanctioned by the intellectual property owners.

I believe that they will eventually have inworld building tools and you will be able to use free software like Blender & Gimp etc. just as you can now with SL.

Only time will tell how it will all shake out. In the meantime, I'm consuming large amounts of chocolate to keep me positive

--
Proprietress of Tatiana's Tea Room ~ Owner of the Provence Coeur Estate ~ Webmistress of this site

Long,flowingskirts - we can only dream!!

--
Proprietress of Tatiana's Tea Room ~ Owner of the Provence Coeur Estate ~ Webmistress of this site

I'm hoping that we will all find renewed energy, Jacon!

Perhaps we will, especially if Sansar addresses some of the challenges that grind us down on a daily basis (cost being high on my list). There are a lot of projects that I've just never tackled because I'm out of space.

I think that it's kind of exciting to be able to start fresh and build a brand new estate based on all the knowledge & experience I've gained in SL over the years.

--
Proprietress of Tatiana's Tea Room ~ Owner of the Provence Coeur Estate ~ Webmistress of this site

For me it's potato chips!

The intellectual property issue should be something that can be handled, given that Sansar and Second Life are effectively owned by the same people - a matter of agreeing on shared identity and creating a contract that frames the identicality in legally appropriate language, and then notifying us of a change in the precise terms of service. The real barrier is probably the perception that more money can be made if we can be motivated to start everything afresh in Sansar.

--
Antiquity Hedgewitch

Also the issue with clothing is that most effeminately, Project Sansar's avatar will be brand new, with new and completely different models,rigging and bones.

The clothing made and rigged for our current Second Life avatars wouldn't work on them.

That starts to make sense for wardrobe, at least, if not for other things.

--
Antiquity Hedgewitch

*most definitely, I think chrome corrected that wrong!

Hot off the press:

Linden Lab Invites First Virtual Experience Creators to Project Sansar Testing

SAN FRANCISCO - August 18, 2015 - Linden Lab, the creators of Second Life, today announced that a small number of creators have been exclusively invited to be the first to help test its new platform for virtual experiences, codenamed Project Sansar.

Have you been invited? Know anyone that has?

--
Proprietress of Tatiana's Tea Room ~ Owner of the Provence Coeur Estate ~ Webmistress of this site

Exciting! I wonder if the 3D content they mention include sims? Would be great to arrive in Sansar with already some interesting choices of sims to visit. Can't for more info to come out.

Would be great to have someone interested in historical creations among these initial creators, who knows!

An interesting article concerning Sansar & fragmentation of users:

Second Life: Sansar Fargmentation Anxiety

The meaning being it will be a platform that people can use to build experiences just like we build blogs and web sites. Blogs and web sites are separated things. They fragment users.

I'm really excited about the whole "building experiences" direction because that's exactly what many of our historical communities are doing right now. We've never been part of the SL mainstream (whatever that is) but have essentially used SL to travel back in time to live, learn & explore.

If Sansar provides us with tools that make it easier to develop our historical environments it would be wonderful. Many of the ideas that I would have loved to implement never got off the ground because they required extensive scripting including "workarounds" for the standard environment.

As for having to use portals to connect to other "experiences" we're essentially doing that already as very few of the historical regions are actually connected together. If portals provide us with a better experience than the current teleporting does I'm all for it.

Looks like Sansar has the potential to actually bring us closer together rather than farther apart.

--
Proprietress of Tatiana's Tea Room ~ Owner of the Provence Coeur Estate ~ Webmistress of this site

Can somebody just leak some pictures already!!???!!?? Avatars and environment graphics! The suspense is killing me! Lol