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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."
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".
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."
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