WATCH: New Sansar Demo With User-Made Content

Here's Linden Lab CEO Ebbe Altberg at a Wall Street Journal conference this week, showing off how we move content around in a Sansar living room with a VR rig. We've seen similar demos before, but perhaps new here is that he's doing this, he says, with user-generated content he "bought" in the Sansar market from one of the several hundred early users in there now. (I can see why one of them compares Sansar to Disneyland.)

My biggest concern isn't that, though, it's this: 

Why does Linden Lab only demonstrate Sansar in relationship to expensive to buy and expensive-to-install VR rigs like the Vive and Oculus Rift which are currently owned by less than a million people?

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Comments

[metacam oh]

because they don't think things through. They want to attract the billion zombies on Facebook who pay nothing for Facebook who will magically shell out 600 for oculus and somehow make sansar profitable. Even the demo looks kinda cool, but the implementation of it and the management of it. They just don't get it. I mean I'd like to find out what research they did and who they talked to before they decided to build Sansar.

[Estelle.Pienaar]

They are presenting Sansar in relation to VR stuff, because that brimgs them free air time. No media will feature them for building an SL2.

I am more concerned about Ebbe's presentation skills. He seems ro be as unrelaxed as a sixth grader at an oral exam...

[Nick Rhodes]

Let's remind Ebbe wants to drop the learning curve to make a VR experience. With all due respect, he seems noob enough to make that point. The jittering looks like he tries to find his way in the dark and afterwards his face says "I did it, goddamnit"… Texture, shadow rendering are fine and the bending knees to release the flower pot is nicely immersive… Otherwise, not even a resizing option to show off. I Hope this there is a deeper game like in Westworld.

[JohnC]

I guess I am just lazy and definitely getting old, but I really do not want to stand or even sit for hours on end waving my arms around as I build complex environments. And neither do I want to play games where I have to actually become almost as fit as the hero on the screen in order to perform the same actions. I am sure given a month or so these controllers would become second nature to use. But you know I right now get this feeling of being force fed these ideas. Ebbe is a kind of joke really as a demonstrator, a big clumsy guy who obviously only had a quick go with the controllers before he came on screen. Are we to believe that he has been working hands on with the development team for the past couple of years and is still this bad at using the controllers. He is acting like the top people at LL have always acted, like they have no idea about the product they produce. Just imagine if they did not have a guaranteed initial audience of ex SL users to rely on, this video would have nothing at all to make it stand out in any way from all the rest of the VR wannabe crowd right now.
From a personal creative point of view it still looks terrible, and worse of all, it does not look inviting enough to even want to give it a go.
I was messing around in Hi Fi last night and suddenly realised that there was no text chat. I wonder if Ebbe or Phil have considered just how many people they will turn off when they only allow voice chat. As far as games go that's just about every RP community I know of in SL, out of SL, or anywhere. Voice just does not work in on line RP.
Ok so in time we may get some on screen keypad. Talk about making things more difficult. This whole thing is obviously aimed at the Facebook chat room crowd, who in the end care very little, if at all about the environment they are in, they are there to chat and will try out any means to that end. VR as a long term lifestyle is being targeted at the wrong people. But that does not mean it will not make loads of money for it's investors for the first few years. Soon Sansar will look like SL with thousands of empty, abandoned, badly constructed “experiences”, created by people who gave it a go for fun but then moved on.

[cyberserenity]

Not really new is it?

[Mondy]

"I was messing around in Hi Fi last night and suddenly realised that there was no text chat."

Unless they turned that feature off you might have missed something. It was there last time I looked :)

[JohnC]

No news at all really. But then you think about it. A company that owes it's existence, and derives all of it's funding from to an online community, decides to keep this community relativity in the dark about progress and it's intention with it's new product. And chooses instead to, rather pathetically, demonstrate the product to a completely different audience.

[sirhc deSantis]

So first product will be anti-nausea (something) yay I have my creativity impulse renewed :)

[Connie Arida]

Virtual worlds have always been a solution looking for a problem. Headsets are now seen as something that needs a solution called "virtual worlds".

[JohnC]

Connie
Virtual worlds have always been a solution looking for a problem. Headsets are now seen as something that needs a solution called "virtual worlds".
The fine art of the succinct statement :)