'Second Life' Creators Develop A VR Social World Named 'Sansar' (technologyreview.com) 85
An anonymous reader writes:
After four years of development, Sansar, the new virtual reality world from Second Life's creators will arrive later this year on Oculus Rift and HTC Vive headsets. "It is trying to solve some of the big problems that plagued Second Life for years," reports MIT Technology Review, "such as that most users come in through what is essentially a front door and have a hard time finding things to do once they get in... In the demos I tried, I navigated via an atlas that shows a simple clickable thumbnail image of each destination along with its name."
But it still has to prove itself to users like John Artz, an associate professor at George Washington University who once taught a class about using Second Life for business applications. Artz "thinks Sansar will still suffer from the same fundamental issue that dogs Second Life: while the technology behind it is good, he says, it just got boring after a while."
Second Life still has 800,000 monthly users -- and in Sansar, virtual land will be cheaper, with Linden Lab concentrating "more on making money from selling virtual objects like clothing for avatars and furniture."
But it still has to prove itself to users like John Artz, an associate professor at George Washington University who once taught a class about using Second Life for business applications. Artz "thinks Sansar will still suffer from the same fundamental issue that dogs Second Life: while the technology behind it is good, he says, it just got boring after a while."
Second Life still has 800,000 monthly users -- and in Sansar, virtual land will be cheaper, with Linden Lab concentrating "more on making money from selling virtual objects like clothing for avatars and furniture."
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Third Life is gonna be YUUUUUGE!
Solve problems like... (Score:5, Insightful)
It is trying to solve some of the big problems that plagued Second Life for years, such as that most users come in through what is essentially a front door and have a hard time finding things to do once they get in... In the demos I tried, I navigated via an atlas that shows a simple clickable thumbnail image of each destination along with its name.
Wrong. Creeps and trolls killed second life and they will kill "Sansar".
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Being a long time SL player, it's not the creeps and trolls that killed it. The quality of the playerbase has simply greatly deteriorated. Nobody wants to be social anymore, people just sit in their private little prison cells and interact with their 2 friends and never do anything alse. You try to have a little bit of fun or want to play a harmless (emphasis on harmless) prank on someone and you instantly get labeled as a troll and a creep. You come over and say hello and you just get ejected and banned ou
Re:Solve problems like... (Score:4, Funny)
Maybe someone should program third life inside second life to get people to talk to each other
Re:Solve problems like... (Score:4, Interesting)
I think the perception of it having died comes from the hype generated starting around 2006. For several years, every big organization tried to find a reason to exist in SL, leading to ridiculous concepts such as Coke machines dispensing cans of soda; like avatars need to drink. Eventually people came to realize that SL wasn't the next World Wide Web as so many claimed it would be, and the corporate interest faded.
SL remains the leading virtual world, allowing an unfettered marketplace for content creation. It's a fun environment for meeting people, programming, 3D development, writing, and many other creative and technical activities.
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Maybe people turn on ban lines because they're tired of users who want to impose their own idea of "fun" and "harmless pranks" on them. You don't get to dictate how other people use SL. Either they'll want to interact with you or they won't, and just like in Real Life don't be an annoying asshole and "no means no". So when a friend and I are standing on their Mainland parcel discussing the build they want to do and some jackass kept walking around us and bumping into us, then yes, that asshole first of all
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I don't know what sims you are hanging out in but SL is more than alive for me. I take in live music at the End of Time sims, go listen to blues at Fogbounds, and to take mesh and scripting classes at the Builders Brewery.
SL is just like any other interactive medium, you get out of it what you put in to it. If all you are doing is hanging out with a couple of fiends in one sim then maybe you might want to get out and check out some other sims. There is plenty of things to do. You just have to go find
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Wow, my language got used for a product name? (Score:1)
In Mongolian, sansar means outer space.
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disagree (Score:5, Funny)
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In First-Person Shooters, "StC" stands for the "start-to-crate" time. Guess what the "C" in "StC" stands for in social virtual reality.
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Two reasons:
1) Minecraft had a much larger group of young children in their audience
2) Nobody wanted to build blocky-cocky ?
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>The problem with second life sems to be that if you let people build whatever they want, they invariably build cocks. ... you're right... and right now I'm willing to bet 50 bucks the wall is going to have an oddly phallic appearance...
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Actually, and I wish I was kidding, I know someone who for a while designed and sold assholes.
Re:disagree (Score:4, Funny)
How do you communicate in this? (Score:3)
Considering Second Life's strength is the social element, I presume this VR version has some sort of built in proximity voice chat. Because you sure as hell aren't going to be typing text chat with an Oculus or Vive on you head. And it's sure not going to be very social without a robust communication.
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Because most people can't touch-type without seeing the keyboard at all. Sure, some people can do it. But I dare say not most.
It's hard enough even using a controller in VR. And it can very disconcerting, as it adds to the discrepancy between what you're doing/feeling and what you're seeing.
Re:How do you communicate in this? (Score:4, Informative)
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s/had/has
SL still has voice chat, the provider is Vivox.
About Second Life (Score:5, Interesting)
Second Life was an exciting combination of people trying to do different things.
Many people came to Get Rich Quick, by reselling server (virtual "land") parcels,
or making clothing and accessories and other objects, or by providing entertainment
services (live music, virtual sex trade).
Some companies came in order to promote themselves, either as
corporate impressions, or even marketing real-world products through
interactions in the virtual world.
Some groups came to try Education on the platform.
Some came to try it out as a virtual Business Meeting space (especially when Voice became supported).
A lot of people came (or quickly discovered) for fun creating with the
3D modelling, making toys, vehicles, games of many kinds, housing,
static/kinetic artwork, scenery, clothing, etc.
And the bulk of the population came to play with all of the above,
not to mention the general activities of Shopping, dressing up your
avatar, and just plain socializing.
All of the above suffered from: technology limitations (the attempt to use it
or business was particularly laughable, given the platform's reliability)
and from Linden Lab's...ummm...dynamic (chaotic and consternating) policies,
and from IP issues.
The "real estate" trade, which allowed a tiny handful of people to actually
get rich, was deliberately killed off by the company as a strategic move.
A notable big business sector in SL was illegal gambling devices,
which came to an end due to legal problems with the U.S. Government.
Most of the content creators who were making significant money went
out of business when two things happened, one after the other.
First, there was no way to prevent copying of most content, and it got
to the point where everything was promptly stolen by illegitimate
competitors. (If your client software can render the content, it can generally
capture the content for theft and re-creation.) Shortly after this became
untenable, new features were introduced to significantly enhance the
quality of new content (aka "mesh"). Creating that content required
external tools, beyond the capabilities of most creators, and it also
resulted in fragmentation of the user base with lots of confusion
about the content. This was after all the "VR" hype and get-rich-quick
had died down, and after people had figured out that SL was not ready
for prime time in the business and education sectors.
Although the primary communication method was text messaging, SL had
about the worst messaging system you could imagine. Very primitive,
and for most of the platform's history, Group instant messaging was
unreliable and crashed all the time. (And though it sounds unforgivably
incompetent, it was related to scaling issues on both the rather
complex server architecture and the structure of the client program.)
Some people will mention griefers, and that was an issue to some degree.
It was only after the place was dead that they finally implemented
rudimentary features for virtually muting people (that is, making them
invisible to you), and even that is not enough. Privacy and Security
seem to be hard to figure out.
Linden Lab cites the newbie user experience as a problem.
Just figuring out how to operate was problematic and confusing.
Some huge (90% ?) of people never even completed the introductory
experience necessary to actually enter the main world.
When they did make it, they were dumped randomly into "help areas"
which were totally infested with griefers just waiting for the fresh
meat. Although some improvements and variations were made on this,
they were not really good enough. And always, those who got past that
were still left wondering, "What is this place for? Is it a game?
How do I win? I heard i could make money here somehow."
And the user interface was indeed a rather technical challenge for
most people (hence the Sansara statement about Sl being ju
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Some folks came to strike:
IBM faces Second Life strike - Flying furry penis pickets: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2... [theregister.co.uk]
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It has always been hard to believe the Linden Lab user statistics, and I very seriously doubt there are nearly a million active users. That's got to be WAY off.
Around 800000 unique monthly users is about right, of which around 30-50 thousand are logged in at any one time. Sunday...what we oldbies call SLunday being the busiest day.
And almost everyone complains/wonders, "Where is everyone?", because (a) there are fewer people and (b) it is hard to find them.
You have to remember that SL has enough regions that people are seriously scattered in clumps amongst the 10's of thousands of regions. But it is EASY to find people by using the map. Look for clumps of green dots. In fact that's what we used to call the "green dot effect". Also, join the groups that match your interests.
Pretty close to the truth, but the timeline's off (Score:2)
The gambling rackets and the real estate biz was tied in so closely together that when LL banned gambling, it took down the other almost immediately. This had a chain reaction in a massive run on the SL virtual banks, forcing one of the four to immediately go under, nearly bringing SL as a whole to it's knees. The valuation on the Linden took nearly 75% off vs the Dollar. You were pretty much looking at a mirror event compared to the Panic of 1819, only the SL Panic was based on prohibition on gambling.
LL
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Ok then... (Score:2)
Second Life had some success back then because it was among the first 3D sandbox virtual world thing... people would at least try to see how it worked because it was something different. Not sure what would be the point these days with so many of those in the market already, even more if they are putting micro-transactions in it.
Well, I guess it's among the first of it's type on VR. Then again, the market is still tiny right now.
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P.T. Barnum never gets old.....the sale of "virtual real estate" and "virtual items" within a "virtual world."
"There's a sucker born every minute."
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the sale of "virtual real estate" and "virtual items" within a "virtual world."
There's a long history of people being willing to pay for access to something they enjoy or need.
The subscription business model has worked and continues to work for online games, streaming movies, cable TV, streaming music, internet access, satellite radio, cell phone service, fitness clubs, car washes and innumerable other products and services. Season tickets to operas, playhouses, sports teams and amusement parks are also a form of subscription.
Hell, taxes are a form of mandatory subscription that prov
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Pre-made objects (Score:1)
in Sansar, virtual land will be cheaper, with Linden Lab concentrating "more on making money from selling virtual objects like clothing for avatars and furniture."
Back when Second Life was the great new thing, several companies announced that they were bringing out competing software (I recall Sony was one of the competitor wannabes). The competitors were all going to have one difference: Professional looking pre-made objects like clothing and furniture, rather than the community made stuff in Second Life. And all of them failed to gain the community following that Second Life had because of this.
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One more Indian term. interesting. (Score:3)
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In game purchases are gross (Score:2)
I hate in game purchases with the heat of a thousand suns. I would rather pay a good sum for a quality game. Whatever... I am probably in the minority and I am feeling like an old curmudgeon anyway so this is nothing more than a rant. There...feel better now.
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Then knock yourself out...I didn't say it was difficult or stressful. I just don't like it. Most fun when your kids find these types of games. Not this one specifically as it is more adult oriented, but the gaming landscape is infested with this. It never ends.
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There...feel better now.
It's okay, old timer. You can just relax now and go back to shouting at the kids on your lawn.
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[sic] I would rather pay a good sum for a quality game [...]
And there's your problem right there. Your assumption that SL is a game. It's not, although you can play games there. It's a place to meet/build/whatever is your kink. In fact kink seems to be the most popular thing in SL. That or Gor sims, which seem to be mainly populated by misogynistic assholes and grandmothers who want to RP the whole warrior sex/slave thing, Having said that, you can have fun in SL in the BDSM community and even in Gor if the role playing is good.
As to the purchasing of in game
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The decline and fall ... (Score:3)
I joined SL more than a decade ago. At the time corporations and news media had a presence. CNN, IBM, Sun, etc... I attended conferences at Sun's amphitheater and listened to avatars give speeches and present videos. NASA had a hugh display of VR rockets. There was a life size model of the Startrek Enterprise, and of the TItanic, IIRC. Over the course of a couple years those sites became defunct because SL did NOT turn out to be a medium conducive to business. The population map showed that the spots with the greatest number of avatars were those showing porn movies or populated with avatar couples having virtual sex using animated genitalia. Who knows how many marriages were destroyed when avatar owners made real contact with the owners of their avatar lovers. I suspect that password protected "communities" probably had pedophilia or worse going on. That's when I stopped using SL. The VR SL will not bring any new visitors to SL. It will just make a lot of basements a lot stinkier, and turn loose onto society even more hyped up sexual perverts not satisfied with self-gratification.
PS- (Score:2)
I just remembered a big problem attending Sun's lectures, or PBS Science or music events: when the number of avatars approached around 100 the lag killed performance, for both video, sound and avatar movement. Is that fixed? Can 500 or a 1,000 avatars attend an event without causing a crash?
Go VR, Go all the way (Score:2)
I'd like to see SL improve their compatibility with 3D mice, like 3DConnexion's products. Yeah, they are pricey as sin, but they can work in other applications, and in SL actually improves the experience, but not after some seriously high level tweaks done to windows.