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'Second Life' Creators Develop A VR Social World Named 'Sansar' (technologyreview.com)
An anonymous reader writes:
After four years of development, Sansar, the new virtual reality world from Second Life's creators will arrive later this year on Oculus Rift and HTC Vive headsets. "It is trying to solve some of the big problems that plagued Second Life for years," reports MIT Technology Review, "such as that most users come in through what is essentially a front door and have a hard time finding things to do once they get in... In the demos I tried, I navigated via an atlas that shows a simple clickable thumbnail image of each destination along with its name."
But it still has to prove itself to users like John Artz, an associate professor at George Washington University who once taught a class about using Second Life for business applications. Artz "thinks Sansar will still suffer from the same fundamental issue that dogs Second Life: while the technology behind it is good, he says, it just got boring after a while."
Second Life still has 800,000 monthly users -- and in Sansar, virtual land will be cheaper, with Linden Lab concentrating "more on making money from selling virtual objects like clothing for avatars and furniture."
But it still has to prove itself to users like John Artz, an associate professor at George Washington University who once taught a class about using Second Life for business applications. Artz "thinks Sansar will still suffer from the same fundamental issue that dogs Second Life: while the technology behind it is good, he says, it just got boring after a while."
Second Life still has 800,000 monthly users -- and in Sansar, virtual land will be cheaper, with Linden Lab concentrating "more on making money from selling virtual objects like clothing for avatars and furniture."
SansSense?
My basement has Linux.
It is trying to solve some of the big problems that plagued Second Life for years, such as that most users come in through what is essentially a front door and have a hard time finding things to do once they get in... In the demos I tried, I navigated via an atlas that shows a simple clickable thumbnail image of each destination along with its name.
Wrong. Creeps and trolls killed second life and they will kill "Sansar".
In Mongolian, sansar means outer space.
The problem with second life sems to be that if you let people build whatever they want, they invariably build cocks.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Will the virtual pussy have force feedback when you reach out and grab it?
Considering Second Life's strength is the social element, I presume this VR version has some sort of built in proximity voice chat. Because you sure as hell aren't going to be typing text chat with an Oculus or Vive on you head. And it's sure not going to be very social without a robust communication.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
That's great
Second Life was an exciting combination of people trying to do different things.
Many people came to Get Rich Quick, by reselling server (virtual "land") parcels,
or making clothing and accessories and other objects, or by providing entertainment
services (live music, virtual sex trade).
Some companies came in order to promote themselves, either as
corporate impressions, or even marketing real-world products through
interactions in the virtual world.
Some groups came to try Education on the platform.
Some came to try it out as a virtual Business Meeting space (especially when Voice became supported).
A lot of people came (or quickly discovered) for fun creating with the
3D modelling, making toys, vehicles, games of many kinds, housing,
static/kinetic artwork, scenery, clothing, etc.
And the bulk of the population came to play with all of the above,
not to mention the general activities of Shopping, dressing up your
avatar, and just plain socializing.
All of the above suffered from: technology limitations (the attempt to use it
or business was particularly laughable, given the platform's reliability)
and from Linden Lab's...ummm...dynamic (chaotic and consternating) policies,
and from IP issues.
The "real estate" trade, which allowed a tiny handful of people to actually
get rich, was deliberately killed off by the company as a strategic move.
A notable big business sector in SL was illegal gambling devices,
which came to an end due to legal problems with the U.S. Government.
Most of the content creators who were making significant money went
out of business when two things happened, one after the other.
First, there was no way to prevent copying of most content, and it got
to the point where everything was promptly stolen by illegitimate
competitors. (If your client software can render the content, it can generally
capture the content for theft and re-creation.) Shortly after this became
untenable, new features were introduced to significantly enhance the
quality of new content (aka "mesh"). Creating that content required
external tools, beyond the capabilities of most creators, and it also
resulted in fragmentation of the user base with lots of confusion
about the content. This was after all the "VR" hype and get-rich-quick
had died down, and after people had figured out that SL was not ready
for prime time in the business and education sectors.
Although the primary communication method was text messaging, SL had
about the worst messaging system you could imagine. Very primitive,
and for most of the platform's history, Group instant messaging was
unreliable and crashed all the time. (And though it sounds unforgivably
incompetent, it was related to scaling issues on both the rather
complex server architecture and the structure of the client program.)
Some people will mention griefers, and that was an issue to some degree.
It was only after the place was dead that they finally implemented
rudimentary features for virtually muting people (that is, making them
invisible to you), and even that is not enough. Privacy and Security
seem to be hard to figure out.
Linden Lab cites the newbie user experience as a problem.
Just figuring out how to operate was problematic and confusing.
Some huge (90% ?) of people never even completed the introductory
experience necessary to actually enter the main world.
When they did make it, they were dumped randomly into "help areas"
which were totally infested with griefers just waiting for the fresh
meat. Although some improvements and variations were made on this,
they were not really good enough. And always, those who got past that
were still left wondering, "What is this place for? Is it a game?
How do I win? I heard i could make money here somehow."
And the user interface was indeed a rather technical challenge for
most people (hence the Sansara statement about Sl being ju
Second Life had some success back then because it was among the first 3D sandbox virtual world thing... people would at least try to see how it worked because it was something different. Not sure what would be the point these days with so many of those in the market already, even more if they are putting micro-transactions in it.
Well, I guess it's among the first of it's type on VR. Then again, the market is still tiny right now.
n/t
in Sansar, virtual land will be cheaper, with Linden Lab concentrating "more on making money from selling virtual objects like clothing for avatars and furniture."
Back when Second Life was the great new thing, several companies announced that they were bringing out competing software (I recall Sony was one of the competitor wannabes). The competitors were all going to have one difference: Professional looking pre-made objects like clothing and furniture, rather than the community made stuff in Second Life. And all of them failed to gain the community following that Second Life had because of this.
3-dimensional cocks flying into/out of a speaker's mouth! Oh, the internet is full of potential!
I see more and more Indian terminology and terms being used as product names, especially in tech arena. Sansar is a Hindi word that has cognates in almost all Indian languages, originates from Sanskrit. Though it technically means "the World/Earth/Universe" it is often used in the sense of "mundane, not devine".
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
The gambling rackets and the real estate biz was tied in so closely together that when LL banned gambling, it took down the other almost immediately. This had a chain reaction in a massive run on the SL virtual banks, forcing one of the four to immediately go under, nearly bringing SL as a whole to it's knees. The valuation on the Linden took nearly 75% off vs the Dollar. You were pretty much looking at a mirror event compared to the Panic of 1819, only the SL Panic was based on prohibition on gambling.
LL got their heads out of their collective asses and restored gambling to a certain point, so they would not crash out altogether.
They have yet to recover back to that level of prosperity, and that was over 10 years ago.
First rule of holes; When in one, stop digging.
I am a professional 3D illustrator, and enjoy playing all kinds of video games. But, EVERY TIME I tried to jump into SecondLife to create some stuff or wander around, I was blown away by how backwards and complicated the UI felt to use and how difficult it was to create 3D content in SL compared to my normal 3D software - even with the mesh system.
The look of even the most visually advanced worlds felt like it was designed for systems 15 years ago.
I'm optimistic that Sansar will be different and will give it a go for sure.
I hate in game purchases with the heat of a thousand suns. I would rather pay a good sum for a quality game. Whatever... I am probably in the minority and I am feeling like an old curmudgeon anyway so this is nothing more than a rant. There...feel better now.
I joined SL more than a decade ago. At the time corporations and news media had a presence. CNN, IBM, Sun, etc... I attended conferences at Sun's amphitheater and listened to avatars give speeches and present videos. NASA had a hugh display of VR rockets. There was a life size model of the Startrek Enterprise, and of the TItanic, IIRC. Over the course of a couple years those sites became defunct because SL did NOT turn out to be a medium conducive to business. The population map showed that the spots with the greatest number of avatars were those showing porn movies or populated with avatar couples having virtual sex using animated genitalia. Who knows how many marriages were destroyed when avatar owners made real contact with the owners of their avatar lovers. I suspect that password protected "communities" probably had pedophilia or worse going on. That's when I stopped using SL. The VR SL will not bring any new visitors to SL. It will just make a lot of basements a lot stinkier, and turn loose onto society even more hyped up sexual perverts not satisfied with self-gratification.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
I just remembered a big problem attending Sun's lectures, or PBS Science or music events: when the number of avatars approached around 100 the lag killed performance, for both video, sound and avatar movement. Is that fixed? Can 500 or a 1,000 avatars attend an event without causing a crash?
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
I'd like to see SL improve their compatibility with 3D mice, like 3DConnexion's products. Yeah, they are pricey as sin, but they can work in other applications, and in SL actually improves the experience, but not after some seriously high level tweaks done to windows.
First rule of holes; When in one, stop digging.
But what would it take to help convince the Japanese and what is left of the international community to migrate to osgrid, or similiar, along with as much of their zones as can be exported, so the community can continue even when LL shelves SL in the next few years?
Just one point to clarify on the parent post. I contributed to a few of the third party viewer client projects to a fairly deep level and could see some rough-and-ready usage numbers just from loads of the various splash page content and update checks. From what I could see and then derive, LL's published usage numbers are accurate.