How Sansar Differs from Second Life: One Early Preview User's Perspective

A longtime Second Life user and professional developer I'll call "Shin Ra" just shared with me his (or her) experiences in Sansar, which they've been using over the last few months during the closed Creator Preview. Without going into specifics that might violate Linden Lab's NDA, Shin Ra compares Sansar to Second Life this way:

SL and Sansar are different animals. Neither is better than the other at everything. There are things that I wouldn't dare to do in SL that might fit in an Experience or set of experiences in Sansar (especially ideas that in SL would require severe tier upkeep because of land requirements), and there are things I could do in SL that I probably will never be able to in Sansar if they opt for a conservative toolbox of functions.

It's like the difference between Disneyland and your hometown.

The reasons for that are many, Shin Ra went on:

Sansar is Disneyland. Great attractions, shiny things all over, modern technology seeping out of every Experience in the hands of competent Creators... Potential for a vast range of sized Experiences ranging from intimate comedy club settings all the way to potentially a small stadium, without the restrictions of altitude or sim width/breadth of SL. If Linden Lab keeps putting their nose to the grind and makes reasonable decisions, the worst that can be said technically of it is that it was a competently executed system for supporting creativity.

But living there might be tricky: Experiences currently seem very locked down, with interactions with physically enabled objects in an Experience the only way to leave any sign you were there. Unless you publish an experience, you're basically stuck as a tourist. Whether you're okay with being absolved of all creative power outside of a reserved sandbox that nobody else can interact in by your side at the moment is really a personal decision (I honestly hope that some work is done to allow for collaborational Experience design by the time Sansar goes gold - it would allow for teams and larger-scale experience builds, and might take a little of that issue away.)

Second Life is your hometown. The posters on the wall that are still there are kind of tacky, your fellow residents are occasionally problematic, perhaps to the point of blocking and booting. Every step and gaze will always feel clunky with what few tools you have to move yourself and the camera. The rent (if you have land or adverts in-world) is potentially insane if you have more than a quarter sim. And occasionally you will look out the window of your diner and be greeted by disembodied dongs flying past en mass chanting offensive memes.

But every sandbox is a potential explosion of creativity when the right residents are standing it it, even if they only use canned sculpties or parametric prims for building, and unlike Sansar right now, it's a lot easier to find a community to belong to in-world at most times of the day.

So it's a simple question, albeit one with an answer that varies wildly from time to time and even person to person: Do you want to go to Disneyland? Or go back home? Unlike in the real would, your answer is not going to be locked in - the only limitations would be your hardware, your tolerance for utter rubbish vis-a-vis discovering new things, your friends list and your willingness to have a clear delineation between being a creator and experiencing things.

Well, that and leaving your SL inventory behind on excursions into Sansar.

All in all, I'm not sure whether to envy or pity the current-era Second Life Resident, especially when they have everything they need to go into both worlds.

Which is the million Linden Dollar question. Again, I believe nothing Shin Ra says really reveals anything that Linden Lab staff have not already said (or hinted at) about Sansar in public, especially in comparison to SL. Still, it's interesting to get that perspective from someone who's been deeply immersed and personally invested in both worlds. (Which frankly, cannot be said of most Linden Lab staff.)

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Comments

[Metacam Oh]

Less interested than Ive ever been in Sansar after hearing this. Sounds like Blue Mars which was trash

[Thommy Boy]

Sounds great to me. I don't want a rehash of SL. If I want the SL experience, I'll login to SL. I want to be able to easily create a controlled simulation for training/education, with the hope of using a VR headset without the vomit inducing lag lag lag of SL.

[Wagner J Au]

"Blue Mars which was trash"

Ow. I'm biased because I consulted with them but Blue Mars had a lot of cool ideas for developers. But the offline publication system definitely hurt the sense of serendipity that SL has.

[JohnC]

This reads like a sad lament for for what SL could have been, and Sansar will never be.
If accurate, then it is crystal clear that we no longer need to ask questions as to if Sansar is to be a SL2 of any kind. Clearly it is nothing like SL nor intends ever to be so.
It is also obvious that they have bet the the house and the family fortune on the success of Headset VR. The ”experiences” mentioned are obviously pretty meaningless without a VR headset. So creating anything there that does not involve a headset is meaningless. No Headset = no Sansar.
So there is no in world community, just random “experiences”.
Do I want to spend months and months creating one of these “experiences” ? Absolutely not.

[Iggy]

Give me Home town. We had GWAR come out of Richmond.

You won't find Oderus Urungus in Disney's parks. He could be right out of SL, in fact.

Maybe in time they'll loosen up Sansar. And maybe it will work on my laptop. I won't hold my breath.

[Patchouli Woollahra]

@johnC/@metacam - You have to remember that the Creator Preview is an early stage thing for Sansar. - it's quite possible that given the exclusivity of invites to it that there is not much depth in the pool for 'community'. The same criticism could have been levelled at Second Life back in 2002 just as easily. What Sansar is being hurt by in this case is a headier level of expectations. 2002 Second Life was a bunch of curious folks making and playing with a strange new toy. People are expecting tons more from Sansar.

Also given that NDA is not being broken by details, we don't know if Sansar also has a fallback mode that uses the mouse and good old fashioned 2D screen. We don't know what building facilities for experiences in Sansar are like exactly. It may smell bad, but I refuse to judge the Sansar team in a vacuum. On their part, they really need to let go and be open about what the product is shaping up like so far, after all this time of

These are early days. Let us see whether LL antes up or folds before we call or fold on this new system ourselves. It would certainly help if they broke more details on how this system would work, but I might understand if it can't be done because it's still a work in progress. I just don't have to like it!

[Patchouli Woollahra]

@iggy: it's already working on some folks' laptops with full VR - The latest NVidia GTX1000-class GPUs have reduced the gap between desktop and laptop enough that any laptop with sufficient CPU and RAM that packs one of these babies will support VR (and presumably by extension, Sansar) and do it quite well. As soon as AMD follows suit with similar matching upgrades to their Radeon and FireGLs the party will start warming up.

It's frankly only a matter of time before the main issues with VR are tethering and input rather than framerate and fidelity, at least on medium-high specced laptops.

Also: as much as SL is my main stomping ground, I have been around enough to realise that I cannot be a frog in a well. I'm still waiting on a chance to access Sansar in a properly rigged state. Until that happens, I will not damn the people who work on it for anything other than excessive secrecy and prolonged development.

Please don't be a frog in a well.

[JohnC]

I certainly don't damn the people working on it in any way. And I am not even criticizing the product, it is what it will be and you either like it or not. I am however damning to some degree whoever is in charge of publicity, it is they that are responsible for forcing leaked enigmatic statements such as the one posted here, by an anonymous author.
A statement which does however seem to ring very true if you match it up to what has been officially said so far. Which is why it is safe to say it ain't no SL.
But you know what I am really tired of hearing, it's the way that this VR thing is pushed as the next step for humanity, and then immediately afterwards we are told not to expect to much, “ok it won't seem like the next big step for a while by any mildly intelligent being, but trust me, trust me, just pay the price and in just a little while all will be well. It is the gap between hype and the reality of the product that turns me off. I don't care what it will be in the future, all things worth while develop over time, I am concerned with what it appears to be now.
But because of the weird world of computing at the moment, where no company is expected to release a bug free product, and no one would think of not adding the beta tag to immediately get around any complaints, people dutifully except whatever they are given and even begin to sing the song of the seller until they are willing victims.
Trust in me, just in me
Shut your eyes, and trust in me.
You can sleep safe and sound
knowing I am around
Slip into silent slumber
Sail on a silver mist
Slowly and surly your sense
will cease to exist :)

[cyberserenity]

Good news for us that want to create worlds not games.

[Patchouli Woollahra]

@johnC: I'll readily accept your stance that VR is not a cure all. in fact, some recent attempts to make VR so cheap that it becomes an escape for the poor from their problems gall me.

There just needs to be a balance in how one reacts to developments in the field. it's no panacea for all ills, but neither is it a total crock of crudwattle.

[Adeon Writer]

Thank you for this peice, as an outsider to Sansar, it was VERY impormative.

I am now sure with 100% confidence that I have zero interest in Sansar.

[JohnC]

“Good news for us that want to create worlds not games”
This is exactly what I would choose to do.
But, I am not sure how you mean this. That Sansar is good for World creation, or that the fact that it offers no opportunity at all for such world creation is a good thing for alternative approaches.
As I see it, if you could create a “world” of any kind with what is hinted at in this article, you are deluded. The most you could create is a kind of social room, where you and a limited amount of friends can meet to kick around the first incarnation of VR. Strange as it may seem, and as much as I hate to admit it, for a long time, games will be the only places where VR might pretend to offer a “world” of any kind. The sort of totally free open world, free form environment that is now only available SL and OS, is not what we see on offer here. This is just a retrograde step backwards, a kind of Pong or space invaders relatively speaking.

[Timo Gufler]

The Lab boasts with their decade of experience regarding what people want to do. I just wonder, why they never ask us anything...

[JohnC]

They do what they want to do, with total disregard for lesser beings like us. Imagine if that last disaster of a CEO, or whatever his title was, had floated the idea for LL to disappear for a year or so and create Block world, an Oh so sad failed attempt to cash in on the Minecraft Phenomena. Would anyone, except the shareholders, have thumbs up the idea. Of course not.

[sirhc deSantis]

As we have no idea who 'Shin Ra' is (but I reckon there are a few who could make a pretty shrewd guess) or what it has done during its stint as a 'longtime Second Life user and professional developer' its take is just so much marsh gas. So nothing new there really.

The epitome of the 'unnamed inside source'.

[Lapiscean Liberty]

Can someone show me the man behind the curtain? I wish to return home. I feel it will be a nice place to visit, but not sure i wanna live there.

[hereanamewillgo]

Different customers, think of blockworld and its promotions with franchises and that is my guess. LL has experience working with brands before and Sansar is explained as an experience platform. They are using the resources available and some forget many left SL due to nothing to do. Sansar is all experience from the hints we have from LL. Sansar sounds profitable. SL is as well. Interesting times.

[Iggy]

@ Patchouli, not a frog in the well, but a frog who teaches on a campus with 90% Mac OS laptops, including my own. There's not even any talk of VR on the campus for education at present.

So not much in this for me except croaking, until the hardware becomes as cross-platform as the Microsoft USB mouse I prefer to use with my Macs.

[Patchouli Woollahra]

@iggy: most betas of code are unfortunately often limited to a few platforms or just one initially. to port to extra platforms requires additional resources at any stage. It doesn't help that none of the main competitors on the headsets are exactly supporting Mac properly, which is a terrible idea and needs to change if VR wants to be taken srsly as a inclusive medium for all comers.

And after what LL did with educators in SL, they deserve every bit of ignorance and couldn't-care-less your campus can muster about VR. This will become unjustifiable only when every kid can get in on the action for only the cost of a textbook... and when educators can safely budget for their needs without having the rug pulled out under them in mid-semester.

Knowing your circumstances, I apologise for my dismissal of your viewpoint earlier.

[Yourthere Sometimes]

@ Iggy

Oprah fans can be a rather obsessed bunch. I've heard rumours of a fan who was so dedicated to her and her show that he built himself a home deep within the basement of her studio. He lived off of leftover danishes and coffee, and got around the building unseen by using a series of employee only passages and catwalks. He watched every broadcast from perches under the stage and above the ceiling, and here's where it gets really creepy, he even had a peephole into her dressing room.

What's worse, it's said that he had a terrible temper and was prone to violence. Any changes to the show's format would result in sabotage and death threats on the studio execs' desks, and upon hearing a (baseless) rumor that her show would be cancelled, he beat one unfortunate company vice president half to death. Finally, his hideout was discovered during renovations to the building. He attacked a construction worker, then fled when confronted by security. After a late night chase down the Chicago river, he was killed by a mob of drunken teamsters.

But his legend lives on. You may also have heard of this strange individual. The man known as...

The Phantom of the Oprah.

[Patchouli Woollahra]

@YTST: Your point being?

[JohnC]

I think it is a very healthy pass time right now to be super critical of all things new VR related. The Hype sellers don't need no help. Even hard core fans of the idea should think seriously about what is the actual reality of the product and what is just desire fueled wishful thinking. There will certainly be many useful applications for VR as it progresses, but we are at the stage right now where the majority of products, beyond games, are pretty pointless, and merely demonstrations of what can be done. This would be fine if it was dirt cheap or better, free to experience. But it is far from free, and many greedy people know that. There is a lot of fake VR out there. You are to believe you are in a virtual world, when in fact you simply have 128 or 360 vision while glued to the spot, or being moved on a set track. The stuff experienced through a connected mobile device is not the same as that experienced through a Vive etc. In a few years when the hype storm has passed VR will have found it's place in society, and I doubt it will be as all pervasive as predicted now. The headset is a huge turn off for ordinary people, just show it to some and they get a sick claustrophobic feeling, leave alone having it strapped to their face. Sure, anyone will give it a go and be predictably stunned by the experience. Some will even eventualy put up with it integrated into their work environment. A whole new generation of black eyed, retina blasted, face masked scared, hard core gamers will emerge without doubt. But long term use by the masses, as is predicted for all of us by the hype storm, does anyone really see that happening through choice. Of course, as media companies run the world right now, it may well be forced upon us simply by deleting alternatives. I say give them a hard time and make them work for their money. And stop treating them like they run the online world and tell us what we want.

[Timo Gufler]

@hereanamewillgo
As you seem to know the backgrounds so well, why not combine the brands into a superior versatile platform instead of pigeonholing the community and wasting resources with unsuccessful ventures?

[Clara Seller]

"It's like the difference between Disneyland and your hometown"

There are aspects of this that are also very uninspiring. Creatively, it's like the difference between Main Street and WalMart.

[Chic Aeon]

That was a well written report and it appears to be quite fair -- at least from the writer's perspective.

I don't always agree with our unnamed reporter (Like really? leaving anonymous might have been a more appropriate move!) but do definitely respect him/her *wink*.

I did not find any info that had not already been mentioned or broadly hinted at in official posts. So no big surprises for me.

The one puzzling statement for me in the article was, "your willingness to have a clear delineation between being a creator and experiencing things".

I am not sure why we would have to choose. I can see that those that collaborate inworld via sandbox etc might not like the publishing aspect of the platform, so for those who build WITH someone that detail might be a deterrent.

I was at Cloud Party so I am guessing this will be a bit like that. And as it has been mentioned officially there will be gateways that lead to the experiences (again, in my mind anyway -- echoes of Cloud Party).

Also, it has been mentioned officially that VR gear will NOT be necessary in Sansar. I have no interest in it at the moment so I am happy with that. While the experiences using VR hardware and more traditional mouse and keyboard would be different, it doesn't necessarily mean that one is better than the other. I am currently playing Obduction made by the Myst gang. I am using the old point and click user interface (there are several choices) and enjoying the experience immensely.

Sansar is just beginning. Those of us that have been around SL for a decade remember texture shoes and hair you made in the viewer. Look where SL is now.

[Patchouli Woollahra]

Finally, someone whose viewpoint doesn't veer to manic optimism or Augustinian depression.

@chic: Offline building instead of building inworld and on the fly means that Sansar Lindens may be able to bring in ways to optimise the viewing of a set of content without worrying as much about those optimisations being broken. SL's sloth is in part due to its need to be extremely flexible and hence taking many of those techniques off the table.

Shin Ra seems to be trying to sit very hard on the fence to be fair to both Bjorn's team and creators looking in from outside. But you can suspect he can't be entirely objective on this. Sansar has been extremely divisive for most of its known life to date and while I find the "Us Vs Them" thing going down rather awkward and pointless for the most part, I've studied enough media studies to know that this fear is very primal. It really is up to LL to work on whatever is necessary to render these concerns moot. And by that I don't mean taking actions that reduce SL's attractiveness directly - I don't know about you guys, but I'd be royally pissed off about that.

[JohnC]

Why would anyone bother to build "experiences" in Sansar that are not VR headset related. The Platform is obviously all geared up for the VR headset user. The "but anyone can have a go at building anything they like" caveat, is obviously added to cover themselves if it all goes pear shaped and bombs. When they eventually package their product it sounds from all the available information that they will attempt to promote it as a VR headset platform. If that is so then would that not be like opening a hamburger stall at a dedicated vegetarian event.

[Willow Dion]

My decision to not bother even trying Sansar until the third or fourth quarter of 2017 seems better and better. It sounds dull to me.

[Jake and the Fat Man]

If Sansar is a platform for experiences..hmm.. then why would they sell off Desura. thousands of game quality 'Experience Creators' made a home in Desura, Linden Lab could have tapped into all those creators.

Why is the new platform called Sansar after Indian mythology when linden lab has done everything it can in the last 5 years to run out the Arab,African,Indian and central Asian communities.

Is Sansar back door for NSA surveillance? like second life became according to edward snowden.

[Iggy]

@ Yourthere, a wonderful and snide metaphor. One I like, too!

But I'd prefer Roderick Usher. I built a House of Usher simulation in SL for students and used it in 5 different classes.

So maybe Roderick would be a better metaphor, driven mad by a crazy world where the rules keep changing, rather than said Phantom. The sort of person who learns that fast-talking outsiders cannot be trusted easily, especially when they change things constantly and do not consider the effects on those who once trusted them.

But well written, sir. Well written!

[Violet]

The issue that is never discussed is- You can build this wonderful world with the best developers- If you do no have customers the business will fold---
SL is mainly a niche MMO what motivation is there for most of to leave? What economic sense does it make-- Sure like Disney World- you go you play- you leave and may go again next year--- Why would anyone give up their items and creative space for the Glitz akin to a PS4 Game

[phantom republic]

Saddened that it's going to be more about personal experiences than community. Not that I expected it to be SL 2.0, but I definitely was hoping for something that could improve on the limitations of dated architecture.

Experiences are cool. I've occasionally enjoyed them in SL, but the reason I log in as frequently as I do today isn't because of something I do ... it's because of "the world" Philip Rosedale imagined, and all of the people inside it.

I've always said that without community, SL is just one big lonely place. I don't know that Linden Lab ever got that ... they're still looking for web 2.0.

The virtual world will be built on a sense of community ... we are social animals after all. The "next" Second Life will get that, and will blossom. I had hoped that would a product of LL ... now I'm not so sure.

[Ana Imfinity]

According to http://www.gridsurvey.com/ we see a continuous depopulation of SL. With current trend, SL will die in 10 years. However, with Sansar opened, I think SL will last 5 years.