Linden Lab Claims 16,000 Sansar Experiences Have Been Created -- But Only 1,011 Are Publicly Available on the Atlas, And Little Visited

Interesting interview about Sansar by VR researcher Eva Hoerth with Linden Lab's Jason Gholston (from the Augmented World Expo last month) just went online. Lots to discuss, but one point in the beginning of the video deserves special notice -- around 4:55, Gholston says that over 16,000 Sansar experiences have already been created. What's curious is that there's currently just 1,011 experiences that are publicly available on Sansar's Atlas.

Why the massive disparity? One possibility is that there's some 15,000 experiences that are still set to private, and/or were started but discontinued. Whatever this 16,000 represents, it doesn't track to actual usage:

According to Sansar's API which counts unique visitors to public experiences (see above), we're still seeing daily peak concurrencies of 5-20 people total, and monthly average usage of 8-10. (A number that hasn't grown since Linden Lab's Ready Player One brand tie-in for Sansar.) It's quite possible that there's many more Sansarians who hang out, uncounted, in private experiences, but even if that population was 10x what's being counted in public experiences, that would be some 50-200 folks. Where is everyone?

Comments

[jimjane]

They probably meant the # of people who "experienced" something.

So a total of 15,000 people had an experience.

[Pulsar]

So that's the fate of about 94% of the experiences created there. Wow. Surely there may be various reasons to not publish, but given how desert it's there, so many unpublished "experiences" sounds like: people came, gave a try, left; almost all of them.
There are a couple of mines too among those 15k+ unpublished. I guess it doesn't help to deal with an interface and a platform that feels like a tech demo, struggling with its slowness unless you have a 100 Mbps VDSL/FTTC network at least, putting time and effort (and maybe money), just to end up with you alone sitting there with your creation, and realize that only an handful of people or nobody at all will see or enjoy it - unless you take pictures or you make a video - So it won't even appeal museums so much at this point. Some talented and pro people made beautiful things, but almost nobody visits. Ok, VR didn't took off yet, but you can see the difference with other platform, namely VRChat. Of course you can do it for just yourself. After spending some time and effort in making a Sansar "experience", you could say: "well, I had fun, at least" (and I hope you had), but it sounds a little like the Fox and the Grapes. Or you can still continue to hope that one day... a year passed since it has been made public, articles were written, LL took advantage of events and movies. A desert. Not even a trolling episode helped LOL. And the video above from Augmented World Expo, after 2 days, has about... 40 views. I won't say it's hopeless, but no matter how much LL boasts it, at this point Sansar seems the least popular and least successful among all the alternatives made so far and I'd invest my time elsewhere.

[Susan]

The Lab is just taking way too long to develop Sansar into something usable. I was very interested in making clothing for Sansar. I own one of the private experiences there. They have an excellent system for clothing their avatars - but there is no one there to buy the clothing. And why would there be? The avatar body is quite good but you can't change the shape of it - at all. The heads have sliders but there is no way to make them look good. You can't change your skin or even add makeup.

If you go to most experiences all you can do is look around. You can't even sit on a chair. Not everyone wants to play games like hover derby. I think that whoever was tasked with making the avatars dance with an emote was either unqualified or playing a joke. Not exactly mocap or what you'd expect from a next gen virtual world.

Sansar is a beautiful world with great potential. It's building area is much better than having to use a Unity or Unreal sdk but it's still too difficult for the average avatar - even if they are just buying bits from the store to assemble. But it doesn't seem like anything is being developed lately. I watch for news of updates but there isn't any.

I'd like to see a roadmap before I go back and consider developing for Sansar. I really, really, want to get back into making clothing in MD. I just can't see any reason to, at least right now.

[Mondy]

I've said the same thing on the Sansar Discord chat. Give users the ability to dance and sit properly so they can meet up and interract beyond just chatting and standing around.
There are some user spaces that look fantastic and some things are fun to do. I actually just visited an experience where I took a boat ride and took a tour around an atmospheric forest on an airship, it was pretty cool. I have an avatar that I can dress pretty decently in several outfits and looks quite cool apart from being able to get the shape and face exactly as I want like Susan mentions, but she does have nice hair.
What I'm missing is friends to enjoy those experiences with, and there are some *fantastic* experiences. I wish people could see them. I've tried to show my SL partner a couple but her bandwidth in Australia is so slow they take forever to load even though her PC is superior to mine. And once you want to teleport to a new experience that isn't cached on your computer, you have to wait to download the entire scene before you can enter.

[Eliot]

Another anti-sansar blog from a sinespace shill. Well i guess you have to get paid somehow.

[Galen in Sansar]

How many experiences have been created along the way does not correlate to how many people visit at the same time in a given day ("concurrency"). If it did, you might wonder how there could be over 1,000 experiences listed. So why would you be surprised that there would be 15k experiences (more likely "scenes" and possibly deleted experiences/scenes) that are unlisted?

Here's my own May 26th analysis of the data I've collected: https://ryanschultz.com/2018/05/26/guest-editorial-by-galen-a-tale-of-two-sansars/