Amazon Unveils Sumerian, VR Creation Platform Directly Competing With High Fidelity, Sansar, Et. Al.

Behold the new Amazon platform called Sumerian:

Amazon Sumerian lets you create and run virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and 3D applications quickly and easily without requiring any specialized programming or 3D graphics expertise. With Sumerian, you can build highly immersive and interactive scenes that run on popular hardware such as Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, and iOS mobile devices (support for Android ARCore coming soon). For example, you can build a virtual classroom that lets you train new employees around the world, or you can build a virtual environment that enables people to tour a building remotely. Sumerian makes it easy to create all the building blocks needed to build highly immersive and interactive 3D experiences including adding objects (e.g. characters, furniture, and landscape), and designing, animating, and scripting environments. Sumerian does not require specialized expertise and you can design scenes directly from your browser.

In other words, Sumerian is a direct competitor to Sansar, High Fidelity, Decentraland, and every other would-be VR platform enabling user-generated content for VR experiences.

Unless I missed it, the only differentiator High Fidelity et. al. can now offer is monetization through virtual currency. However, Amazon could easily add direct in-app payment monetization via payments for content from anyone with a credit card registered on Amazon (which basically means roughly half of everyone on the Internet), or indirect monetization through Amazon affiliate codes. (I.E., Click on some virtual furniture depicted in a Sumerian experience, get taken directly to the Amazon web page where you can buy a real world copy of that same piece of furniture.)

The other advantage Amazon Sumerian has is that virtual experiences created on it are hosted on Amazon Cloud Services:

As with many other AWS services, Sumerian is “free” to use: you pay only for the storage for what you create.

Sumerian's leading competitors either use AWS themselves or have a cloud service option -- High Fidelity recently announced a partnership to do just that. But AWS is the industry gold standard. In other words, competition among VR platforms just got a lot more fierce -- while their future got a lot more cloudy. (See what I did there?)

Comments

[Vivi]

The big shots won´t make the mistake IBM made back in the old days, by investing into a chaotic tech garage like Linden Lab was (and still is). They´ll go for it by themselves.

This will not make it easier for Linden Lab to promote their little incomplete sandbox model, most likely the Lab will fail miserably. Sansar is not really a thing to get a hype started with as SL was in 2004. It´s just another eye candy hi-tech thingy no one really needs and no one really cares about.

Instead of betting on something useless like Sansar LL should have invested into renewing what they have - in regards to accessibility, usability, customer support. Should have grabbed their still existing customer base for taking them along into their next thing - Migration paths included.

[Maxwell Graf]

The more worlds the merrier, I say! (now if I can learn from my own past and not spend a year exploring/learning Sumerian while it is in beta still...)

:)

[NorthernKiara]

Seems it only available for business use and not personal. Hmmmm......

[Masami Kuramoto]

Other differentiators:

Sansar is centralized, closed-source, Windows-only.

Sumerian is centralized, closed-source, multi-platform, browser-based.

High Fidelity is decentralized, open-source, multi-platform, available through Steam.

With Sansar and Sumerian, the interface for publishers is separate from the interface for audiences. High Fidelity has only one interface, supports in-world building.

[Ryan Schultz]

Interesting times, indeed! And Amazon has very deep pockets, lots of money to throw at development. It's going to be a very competitive market for VR-capable virtual worlds. Sumerian is definitely being targeted at corporations, though, not people who are interested in avatar customization. In fact, reading through the PR stuff, there's no mention of user avatars at all, just AI-based "hosts" that look like refugees from The Sims!

[irihapeti]

agree with Maxwell Graf. The more the merrier and the better of we the consumers will be

a general side note

sometimes we can under-estimate how good LL as a body are at this. The institutional knowledge embodied in LL is vast and earned through hard and long experience. An experience gained thru working with a highly-skilled, highly-educated in the way of these things, dedicated long time core user base

at times some of the LL alumni have gone off to implement their own take on how do this, and yet their efforts to date have largely come to nothing in terms of user uptake. As have other efforts by entrants with deep money pockets

if I was to bet on who is going to end up in the top 3 successful future providers, then my money would be on LL being there

[Tom naza]

I like HighFidelity ... looks like my spectrum games in the 80's ... good old times.

[Walmartone login]

This service by Amazon is awesome to create VR graphics. I have tried it and its awesome.