Linden Lab begins inviting creators to Project Sansar this week!

Tags

creator preview, project sansar, sansar

Linden Lab today announced that they are going to start sending out invites to people who have applied to be part of the Creator Preview this week.

So if you’re one of the people who have filled in the application form on the Sansar website, keep an eye on your mailbox!

I don’t know about you but my bags are packed.
Regardless of how enthusiastic you may or may not be about Project Sansar, I doubt there isn’t anyone in SL today who isn’t at least a little curious to what the lindens have been creating in their laboratory.

Over 6500 people have applied for the Creator Preview and a select group of creators who’s skills best fit the current capabilities of Sansar but who, I guess, are also the kind of people who will be able to build a few impressive experiences.
After all, Project Sansar will be mostly empty or filled with Linden created objects and it would be nice to have some user created experiences ready to show when this new virtual world goes public next January.

Addendum;

Inara Pey discovered that Linden Lab has decided to stick with the original name of Sansar, which for a while was just the working title as Project Sansar.
I assumed LL would think of a new name and only picked Project Sansar as a placeholder but started to think they might stick with Sansar last April as I mentioned in this blog (click).
Because I felt Peter’s answer to Inara’s question was a bit too vague (and because I’m just stubborn), I decided to ask as well, just to be sure;

Well that is pretty clear.
I am not sure I like the name, it is short, easy to remember and on google generally helps you find this new virtual world, it is not very descriptive, unlike Second Life you don’t immediately get an idea of what Sansar is.
Of course if you google the meaning you will find that it fits rather well.

The full press release;

SAN FRANCISCO – August 31, 2016 – Linden Lab® today announced that the first invitations to the Sansar™ Creator Preview are being sent this week. Select applicants will be invited to create their own social VR experiences with the new platform, slated for public release in early 2017.

Sansar will democratize VR as a creative medium. It will empower people to easily create, share, and ultimately monetize their own interactive social experiences that can be enjoyed in VR with head-mounted displays like the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive, as well as via PCs and, later, other platforms. Sansar enables professional-level quality and performance, while also solving the complex engineering challenges that have previously made creating and publishing social VR experiences an extremely complex and costly endeavor.

“Since opening applications for our Creator Preview, more than 6,500 people have applied to use Sansar to create their own social VR experiences,” said Bjorn Laurin, VP of Product at Linden Lab. “To start, we’re inviting a select group of creators whose skills and projects are the best fit for Sansar’s capabilities today. As the platform matures, we’ll continue inviting more and more creators up until public release early next year. Feedback from this early community will help us improve the platform, and they’ll create a range of incredible social VR experiences that everyone can enjoy at Sansar’s public release.”

To apply to the Sansar Creator Preview program, visit www.Sansar.com.

I myself hope to be invited and get started on a little idea I’ve had for a while; an embassy for Virtual Time Travellers, in short a place for people who use VR to enjoy the past.

On top of the news, LL also uploaded 4 brand new Sansar Screenshots to Flickr;

Image courtesy of Linden Lab

Image courtesy of Linden Lab

Image courtesy of Linden Lab

Image courtesy of Linden Lab

Ebbe Altberg speaks at Augmented World Expo

Tags

ebbe altberg, ebbe linden, project sansar

A few weeks ago Ebbe Altberg, (aka Ebbe Linden) CEO of Linden Lab, spoke at the Augmented World Expo.

Ebbe talks about what Second Life is all about, mentions Sansar and shows screenshots and video from this new virtual wthat will be open to the public in January.

Emphasis was on creating experiences by assembling objects you buy or build with 3D software.

Ebbe repeats that those who have signed up for Sansar would be let in around ‘early August’.
Clearly that date has been moved or they have been letting people in but they made them sign a non disclosure agreement.

There isn’t much news or anything revealed that we didn’t know yet.
But just in case you want to see it anyway, you can see a video of his talk here;

Ebbe Altberg interview about SL & Sansar which is going public next January.

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"second life", ebbe altberg, ebbe linden, media, podcast, project sansar, sansar

Donnie SC Lygonis, Swedish business coach, currently working in Silicon Valley, recently interviewed Ebbe Altberg (AKA Ebbe Linden, CEO of Linden Lab) for his podcast on spreaker.com.

Ebbe talks about his career, how he ended up with LL, he brags a little about how awesome Second Life is, talks about the new Project Sansar, how users can create experiences there and the future of VR (Virtual Reality), AR (Augmented Reality) and MR (Mixed reality).

Nothing really new or earth shattering is said, but Ebbe did mention that only a few months ago people who tested Sansar gave it a fairly high ‘discomfort rating’, probably based on how dizzy they felt using a headset in this Virtual World, but that today this rating is very low after fine-tuning the speed of walking, tweaking the teleporting, etc.

Ebbe repeated that this August, more users (by invitation only) will be invited to come test Sansar, it already is August, so lets hope those invitations are about to be send!
Close to 5000 people have signed up to be allowed to become part of the August test wave, I am one of them and my virtual suitcase is packed.

My plan for Sansar is to first build an embassy for Virtual Time Travellers, nothing fancy, nothing big, just a place where people interested in using VR for historical purposes (education, entertainment, etc) can hang out, chat, make plans and wonder how long it will take before I can build 1920s Berlin there.

Ebbe also mentions that Sansar will open “to the world” in January 2017.
We’ve been told that Sansar would go public in 2017, even early 2017, but as far as I know, this is the first time an actual month is mentioned and January is quite soon.

Most important of all though is the mentioning of The 1920s Berlin Project at 43:10 🙂

I love that Mr. Lygonis mentions how annoying it is that with all the experience we have in SL, it must be a bit annoying to have all these people re-inventing the wheel when they pitch something as original, unique and new… while we’ve been doing it in SL for over a decade.
Ebbe answers politely but I prefer to imagine him running around Silicon Valley screaming; “SL has been doing that for over a decade, and that, and that!”

After the interview Mr. Lygonis got to try Sansar and calls it “to date; the most interesting virtual reality environment”.

You can listen to the complete podcast by clicking here;
https://www.spreaker.com/user/constantinnovation/episode-7-ebbe-altberg-virtual-reality-s_1

Ebbe talks Sansar at ZDNet & USA today

Tags

ebbe altberg, ebbe linden, project sansar

Today ZDNet (a business technology news website published by CBS Interactive) published an interview with Ebbe Altberg, CEO of Linden Lab.

You can read the full article by clicking here, I quote a few bits I found extra interesting below;

“We’re very fortunate to have over a decade of experience regarding what people want to do when they immerse themselves in a digital world,” Linden Lab CEO Ebbe Altberg said.

It is really good that Ebbe keeps telling people this, because that is without doubt the most valuable thing about our Virtual World; we have tons of people with years of experience spending time in VR and creating VR experiences while it seems that so many other people are just getting started… and are reinventing the wheel again and again but that is a story for another time.

With its new VR platform, Linden Lab is aiming to solve that. Called Project Sansar, the platform that will allow just about any user — regardless of technical skill — to build their own VR content at a very low cost. The platform is being billed as “the WordPress or the YouTube of VR.”

Although I’m not so sure yet if we won’t need much technical skill to build (in stead of create with stuff others build) their own VR experience, at least not for a while, I am glad to see it being promoted as the WordPress or Youtube of VR, I think that is a very good way to sell it and maybe the new name of the world should represent this.
Hello VRTube?

The platform is not open source, but it will be compatible with industry standard tools. For example, creators will be able to upload a variety of common 3D file formats (such as .fbx and .obj), and scripting will be done with C#, rather than a language unique to the platform.

No Collada (DAE)?

In Second Life, a person or business can spend nearly $300 a month to host a space (it’s half price for educators and nonprofits, but that’s still a hefty sum). Altberg promised that hosting a Sansar experience will cost in the “tens of dollars” per month.

Now that is good news.
We’ve already been told that “tier” will be a lot lower in Sansar but I think this is the first time we’ve been given a sort of number.
Of course we do not know how much land or “prims” we get for this but I like to think that this means I will be able to host something the size of 1920s Berlin (4 regions) with many more prims for less than $50 a month.

USA Today also published an article about Sansar that you can read by clicking here.
Again, I’ve quoted a few things that stood out for me;

“We’ve never referred to it as Second Life 2.0,“ says Linden Lab CEO Ebbe Altberg of Project Sansar in an interview here. “We think we’re building what will be the easiest ways for users to create virtual reality experiences that are social.  And to make it easy for people to create, share and monetize these experiences.”

The writer is also invited to try Project Sansar and describes his experience;

Donning Oculus Rift headgear, my Sansar demo began on a virtual replica of Mars, before I was teleported to an ancient Egyptian tomb, where I could inspect the hieroglyphics on the walls up close. Soon, I found myself “inside” a 360 video and later spent time in a virtual reality toy room where I was encouraged to knock down a bridge and bat other objects around.

As for moving SL users to Sansar;

Altberg hopes to draw users from Second Life to Project Sansar, while acknowledging the likelihood of some cannibalization. “We obviously have the largest ready to roll audience…. But rather me than someone else,” he says.

Ebbe ends with;

“The luxury we have (in developing Sansar) is that we have already seen people successfully do all of the things I mentioned in Second Life. The true strength of VR will be social.”

 

Ebbe Altberg speaks about Sansar and shows footage

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collision, ebbe altberg, ebbe linden, pictures, project sansar, sansar, screenshots, video, virtual reality

Recently Ebbe Altberg, CEO of Linden Lab, was a speaker at the Collision Conference.

During his talk he showed a video about Sansar and a few screenshots were shared online before, also on my blog here.

Just now, minutes ago, Collision uploaded a video of Ebbe’s contribution.
It doesn’t actually show Ebbe talking but the images he used in his presentation.
And of course we’re all sad we can’t see Ebbe and judge whatever he was wearing (anything but a vintage 3 piece suit is acceptable) it is also quite nice because it means we get to see the Sansar video in great detail, in stead of just on a screen behind Ebbe.

The speech itself is good but not much is said that we didn’t know yet.

In short he talks about how big VR is going to be and that users will not just be consumers but also participants.
He explains that Linden Lab has a lot of experience and calls Second Life the biggest virtual world to date.
I am not sure if it is if you’d also count other computer generated worlds we know from some games, but I wouldn’t be surprised and I am of course sure that it is the oldest and biggest user generated online virtual world.
Either way, you can’t remind people too often of this as it seems that the wheel keeps being reinvented.
For instance, just the other day I stumbled upon something called ‘Hypatia‘ by a company called Timefire who claim that they’re building the first Virtual Reality City….
A ridiculous claim of course.

Ebbe talks about how SL is being used for business meetings, helping people who suffer from PTSD, people dealing with phobias, he mentions the lovely Fran who has Parkinson’s but finds much joy from Second Life, as seen in the wonderful Drax Files episode you can see by clicking here.

He talks about Education, the over 500 institutions that use SL (would have been more without the Tier fiasco of a few years back I reckon) for their lessons.

Ebbe talks a bit about the current state of VR, the headsets are coming, expensive but prices are coming down rapidly and of course an Oculus headset is cheaper than a similar VR rig would have cost a few years ago.

The next subject is the democratisation of a medium and that Project Sansar will make it possible for everyone and anyone to create and share.
He explains that most of us do not know how to actually create, just like in RL we live in a world where most of the things around us are made by others.
It always worries me a bit when that is mentioned because I keep wondering if Sansar will have easy building tools.
Being able to build whatever you want in SL, even if it isn’t easy, is one of the best things about SL and I think it is essential for Sansar as well.
Then again, I assume that most SL users are not creators.

Linden Lab has been working on Sansar for 2 and a half years now, a big investment but luckily SL is still “kicking off a lot of money” for them.
There are 75 people working on Sansar.

One of the creations made in the alpha stage of Sansar is a co-project between the Sorbonne University and the Ministry of Antiquities of Egypt, which shows laser scanned 3D models (of 50 million polygons!) of tombs and historical locations which the Sansar team then decreased to 40 thousand polygons and uploaded.
Which is very exciting but it does raise the question; why didn’t they build and upload it themselves in Sansar?
Either way, now anyone, anywhere could explore these tombs in Sansar (once it opens to the public).
A great example of a wonderful educational display.

Next we get some actual Sansar Video footage, the first we’ve seen since that very short video on a screen behind Ebbe at another conference.

First we see someone (Jason) using controllers and a headset (vive) to ‘create’, but what he is really doing is just moving things about and Ebbe says that you don’t really need to know how to actually create those objects, which worries me a bit again.
Because I want to create those objects and Blender isn’t easy.
Nevertheless, it looks cool and very much like I’d imagine it would be, we’re doing our SL moving about of stuff, but with controllers and a headset, even though we of course don’t NEED those for Sansar.

 

 

Next we get a smooth video which has been edited and comes with flash music showing quite a few very interesting and I must admit, impressive shots.
Skip to 12:38 if you want to see the footage.

We see a wonderful museum of the Partially excavated Ancient Greek (IV-III B.C.) villa Ortli in Crimea (did they use this model?) which looks very good and contrary to what I thought to see first time; the shadows do fall nicely over the ruins in stead of ignoring them.

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The Egyptian ruins look nice, but very much like a 3d scanned model, which of course it is.
Nevertheless as a history addict with many connections in the world of archeology, I’ve seen this kind of thing before, but it becomes interesting when we see an avatar walking out of the tomb, into the light.
We’ve got working shadows and someone who isn’t walking with the dreaded SL duckwalk.

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She then walks across a winter landscape with wonderful mountains, snow everywhere and a bright sun above.

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Then we move on to the cinema that we’ve seen pictures of before.
It is wonderfully retro Art Deco and I for one would love to go visit it soon.
The film playing is the new ‘Captain America; Civil war’ film, if I am not mistaken.
Let’s assume they were watching the trailer… for copyright’s sake 😉

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Then we find ourselves in some sort of post apocalyptic Mad Max kind of landscape, with more walking avatars and a working kind of cable car system.

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We then see someone diving into the sea, but if you look closely you see some sort of platform in the middle, so I think that what we’re actually seeing is a place where you as an avatar can enjoy a 360° video.

More apocalyptic stuff with a nice windlight setting.

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And finally we see the Golden Gate bridge, which we’ve also seen before but this time without the flying crafts but a lady walking across it.

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If you want to see any of these screenshots a little larger, check them out here on my Flickr account.

According to Ebbe all of what we saw was created with no engineer involved.

He ends with announcing that applications for Project Sansar are now open and the world will be available to everyone later this year.

He concludes with saying that VR will impact almost everything and Project Sansar will allow anyone to create, share, monetise and socialise within  these VR experiences.

You can see the entire video here;

 

Linden Lab opens applications for Project Sansar

Tags

project sansar

Today Linden Lab opened up the applications for their new virtual world; Project Sansar.

Besides the occasional image and a tiny video, still very little is known about PS but I think that many Second Life users are very keen to go and have a look.

I quote from the press release;

SAN FRANCISCO – April 26, 2016 – Linden Lab®, the creators of Second Life®, today announced that applications have opened for an upcoming “Creator Preview” for Project SansarTM, the new platform for user-created social VR experiences. Interested 3D content creators can now apply at ProjectSansar.com and accepted applicants will begin to receive invitations later this summer.

Slated for general availability at the end of 2016, Project Sansar will democratize virtual reality as a creative medium. It will empower people to easily create, share, and ultimately monetize their own interactive social experiences that can be enjoyed in VR with head-mounted displays like the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive, as well as via PCs and, later, mobile devices. The platform enables professional-level quality and performance with exceptional visual fidelity, 3D audio, and physics simulation, while also solving the complex engineering challenges that have previously limited creating and publishing social VR experiences to just sophisticated professionals.

“Creating social VR experiences is too hard and expensive today, and that limits the value and growth of this incredible new medium,” said Ebbe Altberg, Linden Lab CEO. “Creating your own VR experience shouldn’t require an engineering team, and Project Sansar will make that possible. Over the past few months, a small number of creators have already made an impressive variety of awesome social VR experiences with Project Sansar, from virtual versions of real-world locations to fantasy worlds and stylized game-like environments, and more. We’ll soon be ready for many more creators to join Project Sansar, and we can’t wait to see what people will create.”

I myself am cautiously excited about PS and really want to get inside and see what my options are, will I be able to recreate 1920s Berlin there or get started on 1940s London or will PS just not be suitable and will I have to stay behind in Second Life?

Only one way to find out!
So I signed up right away and hope to be let in when they open the backdoor.

The website where you sign up looks very smooth, that Project Sansar logo looks very professional.
The name has been trademarked, someone has spend time designing the logo, there is a website… almost as if they are sticking with that name…

Are you going to sign up and if so, what are you planning on trying in PS?

TNW website publishes interview with Ebbe about Second Life and Project Sansar

Tags

"second life", ebbe altberg, ebbe linden, interview, project sansar

Today an interview with Ebbe Altberg (aka Ebbe Linden, CEO of Linden Lab) was published on ‘The Next Web‘ website.
It has over 600.000 ‘likes’ on Facebook and over 1.6 million followers on twitter.
So no small fry.

It has a very catchy title, or as those pesky young kids call it; “Click Bait” worthy;

Think Second Life died?
It has a higher GDP than some countries

The audio was recorded at the Web Summit in Dublin and lasts about 10 minutes.
You can hear all of it by clicking here.

There isn’t much said we didn’t already know and no new exciting facts about Project Sansar were leaked, but it is a nice interview and once more Ebbe shows that he is pretty good at making people realise that Second Life is still doing well and has provided the people at Linden Lab with a lots of experience on running a virtual world, one that gives them now, on the eve of the Virtual Reality Renaissance, a very interesting position.

Sadly they used a rather dull picture to illustrate the article; a screenshot showing all the avatars that were replaced by nicer ones just the other day.

Road to VR talks about Sansar

Tags

ebbe altberg, ebbe linden, project sansar, rad to vr, sansar, virtual reality, VR

The website Road to VR is one of the most active and up to date websites on the subject of Virtual Reality.

Today they published a short article on Sansar and in it Ebbe said a few interesting things.

Such as;

We’ll do a lot of things to help users understand how to create performant content. There’s a lot of work yet to do, but we have plans for things like automatic optimization of content, polygon reduction of content that preserves quality at the same time, including showing users that create content some sort of visual indication of how performant their content is going to be across various platforms… I’ve already see stuff in Sansar that I know you’d never see in SL.

I like the sound of this.

Giving users the tools to build whatever they can imagine is crucial for Sansar to succeed and be something more than all those other VR worlds that are and will be popping up.
One of the problems with SL is that we have those tools and can build whatever we want but as many of us aren’t that experienced, this sometimes results in corners of our world that don’t look very good or take a long time to load.

So the golden formula for Sansar will be easy creation tools + automatic optimisation = great VR.

Please read the entire article on the Road to VR website by clicking here.

Project Sansar login page online

Tags

linden lab, project sansar, sansar

The Project Sansar website has recently come online and shows the login page.

You can see the page yourself by clicking here, it is animated and several wireframe creations appear.

As those invited to the workshop at Linden Lab tomorrow will have to sign an NDA, these images may be all we’ll get to look at for a while.

I did try and send an email to the ‘forgot password’ address, but alas, it came back to me, no luck in trying to blag myself into the Project 😉

Make sure to check the collage of all the wireframe images made by Ernst Dommershuijzen at the bottom of this blog.

What do you think of the page?

Collage of all the wireframe images, made by Ernst Dommershuijzen.