VR Industry Unsure Where to Place Sansar & High Fidelity

Via The VR Fund's Tipatat Chennavasin, here's a pretty handy infographic of the virtual reality industry/ecosystem as it exists today:

Notable is the placement of High Fidelity and Project Sansar (which presumably is what Tipatat meant he used the Second Life logo): Square in the "Social" category. However, from what we know of High Fidelity and Sansar, they're not only aiming for the Social market, but also the Distribution market and also the 3D Tools/Engines market. But it's an understandable confusion on Tipatat's part, because thirteen years after launch, the general market still isn't sure what Second Life is supposed to be. And it points to the problem these two would-be successors to Second Life both face:

High Fidelity and Sansar are the only platforms trying to be both a professional 3D platform and a consumer community, and far as I know, the only ones planned to have their own internal virtual currency and marketplace. For that reason, community is the very thing Linden Lab and High Fidelity have to get right. Because without communities, they have no competitive edge -- or clear place in an increasingly crowded market.

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Comments

[Graham Mills]

I think you could justify including SL and OpenSim on the basis that they support the Rift.

Looking just at the Education providers, some of the websites are dead/under construction, some look like contractors/single-experience kickstarters and one proved hard to find based on its logo alone. Only unimersiv.com struck me as well done. Personally I'd have included Google Expeditions here as well as SL and OpenSim (which admittedly is harder to present as a single product). Both the latter two have active education communities.

I can understand that some of these companies are listed as potential beneficiaries of the VR Fund. However, I don't think it helps to have such a narrow focus. Companies like zSpace and Virtalis actually have products in the field.