The latest Sansar promo showcases a lovely virtual reality experience created by Ria in the upcoming social VR platform. Unfortunately (because this is an official Linden Lab promo), it also includes some dubious claims, with Ria at one point exclaiming that right now, "there is nothing even remotely like Sansar out there"... which is not true at all, as Linden Lab knows full well, because for one thing, the company's invested in Philip Rosedale's High Fidelity. (Not to mention all the other competitors in the social VR space which have similar aspects to all or most of what Sansar is purporting to offer.)
Then at another point, Linden Lab marketer Draxtor asks Ria the very leading question, "When Sansar goes live later this year, do you think it'll have a broad appeal among the general population?" Which again has so little basis in fact, it's not even worth considering now or for many years, if at all:
Sansar is being launched this year as a platform primarily developed for the premium Oculus Rift and VIVE VR devices, which are a niche of a niche of a niche -- forecast to have an install base of under 2.5 million at the end of this year. That's already small, but as I noted last month, even the owners of Rift and Vive devices are hardly using them:
As of this writing (according to VRLFG) there's less than 2500 players total across all VR games on Steam (out of some 8-12 million concurrent Steam users). AltSpaceVR, which is perhaps closest to Sansar and High Fidelity in the social VR space, currently shows just 14 total players (23 total over the last 24 hours). There's an estimated 750,000-1.5 million owners of Oculus or Vive headsets now on the market, so you'd except at least 1% of them would be using their devices on Steam. But actual usage is well below 1%.
Or to put it another way: On any given day, there are more roughly 10x more people in Second Life than are using any VR experience for the PC. (None of which comes close to having broad appeal in comparison, say, to the 100 million people playing Minecraft, or hundreds of millions playing multiplayer PC/console games, or the billions playing mobile games.)
This isn't to criticize Ria, who's created what looks like a really beautiful and whimsical Sansar experience -- but Linden Lab should know better than to saddle her talent with marketing hyperbole.
realXtend has been more advanced then Sansar for about 5 years so it does not matter how advanced they make Sansar if VR has flopped then it will too.
You noticed Philip has slowed the hype train down since VR has tanked and is likely looking for a new angle to move forward with after the promises of everyone walking around with scuba gear on the face never panned out.
Posted by: Just Say'n | Thursday, July 06, 2017 at 03:01 PM
Linden Lab lying about their product is nothing new. Their corporate page also used to say they were the creators of the first virtual world, which was nowhere near true, either.
Posted by: Dartagan Shepherd | Thursday, July 06, 2017 at 03:27 PM
Because the USA has a 'liar-in-chief', corporate monkeys like Ebbe and LL feel lying is 'okay'.
Welcome to SecondLie.
Posted by: leonard | Thursday, July 06, 2017 at 06:28 PM
Lying market does work, consumer zombies do bite the bate, look at Trump, he is running the Nukes
Posted by: Carlos Loff | Friday, July 07, 2017 at 04:56 AM
It panned out beautifully, they just wanted to coin at the expenses of consumer zombies, they are quite happy withtheirnew mansions, cars and pools, they knew it was a hype, took the wave and now on to something else, yes it panned out, exactly what they expected it to be, coins coins coinssss
Posted by: Carlos Loff | Friday, July 07, 2017 at 05:01 AM
LL lying oh my gosh how unusual. Draxtor hyping Sansar This is why I don't trust anything he says anymore. It is a beautiful video but Ho Hum who cares about Sansar.
Posted by: Willow Dion | Friday, July 07, 2017 at 09:16 AM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_sbSwHxhfSM Sansar Update
Posted by: jjccc coronet | Tuesday, July 11, 2017 at 03:18 AM
I'm sorry but if what this Ria created is the best of Sansar, I'm definitely not interested.
Walking around 3 rooms? Yawn. We've been doing that for years in SL - on our own land, in our own homes.
Music? Already got that in SL.
3D camera view? Got that in SL.
Oh, I see - we have to wear hyper-expensive scuba gear on our heads to see it all? Uh, no thanks.
Posted by: rvw | Monday, July 17, 2017 at 08:14 AM