project sansar – Augmented & Virtual Reality Confabulation

March 26, 2020

Linden Lab Sells Social VR Platform Sansar to Focus on Second Life

Second Life creator Linden Lab stepped into the virtual reality (VR) field back in 2017 with a social platform called Sansar. One of the earliest open-world VR apps designed around social interaction Sansar has had a very mixed life and now Linden Lab has handed the reins over to Wookey Project Corp. which has purchased the platform.

Wookey Project Corp. is a San Francisco-based technology company which has assumed full control over Sansar. In a blog post, Linden Lab said this was done: “to streamline its focus to continue the development and operations of the leading virtual world Second Life and licensed money services provider Tilia.

“We are proud to have given birth to this amazing platform for creativity and live events, and encourage our community to continue the process of supporting Sansar as it shifts to new ownership.”

Linden Lab has always struggled to maintain a healthy ecosystem and user base, trying to do so through live events such as last years Monstercat: Call of the Wild Experience. This was a virtual party to celebrate the label’s eighth-anniversary featuring performances from more than a dozen Monstercat artists.

It seems Wookey might be going for a similar tact with a Sansar post saying users can expect: “More of the amazing events you know and love! More cosplay karaoke, more zero-gravity game nights, more of the massive interstellar shows that Sansar’s known for – thousands joining from anywhere in the world for one-of-a-kind live performances. You can also expect more features for meeting, socializing and hanging out with friends from around the world.” Whether this will grow the community remains to be seen. One thing that could help is wider device support, with further details on this expected in the coming weeks.

Sansar Rave

With the sale, Linden Lab is now moving away from VR as Second Life isn’t compatible. Even at 16 years old the platform still has around 40,000 active users creating content.

As people are forced to work and socialise remotely, 2020 is certainly going to be the year where online VR interaction can grow. Sansar already has competition from the likes of Somnium Space and AltspaceVR, with Facebook Horizon also due out this year. For further updates as Sansar looks forward, keep reading VRFocus.

March 25, 2020

Linden Lab Sells Sansar To Wookey Project To ‘Streamline’ Focus On Second Life

Linden Lab has announced that they’ve sold Sansar to San Francisco-based tech company, Wookey Project Corp., which has assumed all operations without service interruption to the community.

I couldn’t find anything about this company, Wookey Project, because their website seems bare, but the news is verified on the official Linden Lab blog. Reportedly, Linden Lab decided to make this move in order to “streamline its focus to continue the development and operations” of user-created virtual world, Second Life, which still appears to be going strong.

Sansar had a lot of promise when it was first revealed and seemed poised to capitalize on the opportunity to establish a new social VR landscape, especially since it was created by the developers of Second Life. From the very start Linden Lab was focused on trying to help creators make money in Sansar.

According to the announcement, “effective immediately,” Wookey Project now has full and total ownership of Sansar and is contracting with Tilia Inc. as a third party for back office functions, so Linden Lab no longer has any ownership or management at all. VR is also explicitly stated as a continued focus for Sansar moving forward as well:

“Sansar will continue to evolve as the premier platform for live events and entertainment including (but not limited to) support for VR, while Second Life is positioned as the Internet’s leading user-created virtual world platform. Both Linden Lab and Wookey Project Corp. will continue to develop our respective platforms independently.”

With the implosion of High Fidelity, explosion in popularity of VRChat, continued evolution of Rec Room, reliability of Altspace, and new platforms like Sinespace rising up, what do you think of the current social VR landscape? Let us know down in the comments!

The post Linden Lab Sells Sansar To Wookey Project To ‘Streamline’ Focus On Second Life appeared first on UploadVR.

April 12, 2018

Social VR platform Sansar Brings More Ready Player One Content to Viveport

Linden Lab’s social virtual reality (VR) platform Sansar launched in beta form last summer for HTC Vive and Oculus Rift. Only available through the studios own website, today marks the first time Sansar has been made available on a VR store, now downloadable via Viveport.

Ready Player One Hero

Sansar has recreated Aech’s Basement, a central location from Ernest Cline’s novel, which interprets the original ILM design for Ready Player One. This new space joins Aech’s Garage, already available to Sansar users. Visitors can test their 80s pop culture know-how as they peruse Aech’s collection and interact with Aech, voiced by actress and Emmy-winning writer Lena Waithe – creator of Showtime’s The Chi and star of Netflix’s Master of None.

“Viveport has always recognized the value of transformative virtual experiences, and we couldn’t be happier to partner with them in sharing Sansar with the world and expanding its reach,” says Ebbe Altberg, CEO of Linden Lab in a statement.

This launch adds to the growing library of Ready Player One content for HTC Vive on Viveport, alongside titles like Battle for the Oasis by Steel Wool Studios, Gauntlet from Directive Games and Rise of the Gunters from Drifter Entertainment.

Rise of the Gunters

“We’re excited to bring Sansar’s boundary-pushing VR content to Viveport, and we look forward to sharing unforgettable experiences inspired by ‘Ready Player One’ with our users,” adds Rahul Sandil, VP of Marketing at Viveport.

Sansar is a free to use virtual world created by the team behind Second Life. VR users can host events and live-stream, watch parties, explore and create new spaces, and connect with friends from around the world. They can also create thier own content which can be sold to other user via Linden Lab’s store. Available for download on PC, the beta title is compatible with HTC Vive and Oculus Rift. For any further updates on Sansar and Viveport, keep reading VRFocus.

July 31, 2017

Create Your Own Social VR Experience as Sansar Beta Goes Live

Regular VRFocus readers will likely know about Linden Lab and it’s social virtual reality (VR) platform Sansar that’s currently in development. Designed as a place that’ll enable everyone to create, share, and ultimately monetize social experiences for HTC Vive and Oculus Rift, over the last few months the project has been in a creator preview with 2,000 developers building content. Today Linden Lab has announced the opening of the creator beta for Sansar, allowing anyone to dive in and create content.

Sansar is free to use for those with a compatible head-mounted display (HMD), with additional capacity and customer support available to creators through paid subscriptions, starting at $9.99 USD/month.

Sansar

The studio has revealed several other details regarding Sansar’s open beta launch. As the platform is designed to bring people together, more than 50+ avatars can be within an experience in Sansar at any given time, and automated instancing allows creators to reach unlimited audiences.

“Sansar democratizes social VR,” said Ebbe Altberg, CEO of Linden Lab in a statement. “Until now, complexity and cost has limited who could create and publish in this medium, and Sansar dramatically changes that. It’s been inspiring to see the thousands of virtual creations that have already published with Sansar during our limited preview, and I’m looking forward to the explosion of creativity we’ll see now that we’ve opened the doors in beta.”

As previously reported, Linden Lab has teamed up with IKinema to use its inverse kinematics tech allowing for avatars in Sansar to mirror users’ full-body movements. Linden Lab also partnered with Speech Graphics to enable the complex facial animation of the avatars to be synced to what is said in the mic.

To help creators advertise and share their creations each Sansar experience will have a unique link that can be shared across Facebook, Twitter, email, blogs, basically whomever the creator wishes. The platform will also enable users to earn money by selling, renting, or charging for access to their experiences through the Sansar Store for Sansar Dollars (S$). As development of Sansar continues, in the future Linden Lab will allow creators to be able to monetize entire experiences.

For the opening of the beta, the platform will host a week of launch activities so that users can experience what Sansar is all about. This will include an appearance by Buzz Aldrin in the Apollo Space museum, curated tours by Egyptologists of the lost Tombs of Tomanokin, and a free throw tournament with an NBA star.

VRFocus will continue its coverage of Sansar, reporting back with the latest updates.

Sansar Pricing & Subscriptions

	Free	Creator	Super Creator	Professional
Experiences	3	5	10	20
Customer Support	Email	Email 48 hrs max response time within business hours	Email 48 hrs max response time within business hours Live Web Chat	Email 48 hrs max response time within business hours Live Web Chat Phone
Price	Free	$9.99/mo	$29.99/mo	$99.99/mo

July 11, 2017

IKinema Adds Natural Avatar Movements to Linden Labs’ Sansar

IKinema, a specialist in motion capture and natural avatar movement technology, has announced today that Linden Labs has integrated its technology into the social virtual reality (VR) platform Sansar.

IKinema’s full-body inverse kinematics for VR allows studios to procedurally animate 3D characters of any shape or size in real-time. This enables characters to respond to virtual worlds in a more life-like and natural way, thus creating a greater sense of immersion for players.

Sansar IKinema

IKinema, CEO, Alexandre Pechev said in a statement: “The IKinema and Linden Lab relationship is an exciting engagement as it presents the gateway to a foray of virtual experiences. We’re delighted that our technology will bring higher fidelity for a more engaging and convincing experience to the Sansar community; we pride ourselves at being at the forefront of next generation VR and AR experiences.”

“Sansar democratizes the medium of social VR, empowering people to create and share their own experiences,” said Bjorn Laurin, VP of Product at Linden Lab. “Avatars that move naturally are important to the quality of the social experiences users can create and enjoy on our platform, and integrating IKinema’s tech helps us to deliver that without requiring any peripherals beyond VR hand controllers.”

Currently in creator preview, Sansar will allow users to create unique social VR experiences with thousands already built and published by invited participants. An open creator beta will begin this summer.

VRFocus will continue its coverage of Sansar, reporting back with further updates.

June 21, 2017

Linden Lab’s Sansar to Showcase two Museum Experiences at Sotheby’s NYC The Art of VR

Starting tomorrow Loot Interactive’s The Art of VR event will be taking place at Sotheby’s NYC. As part of it Linden Lab and Suzanne Lloyd will be debuting two virtual reality (VR) experiences, The Apollo Museum and the Harold Lloyd Stereoscopic Museum, both of which have been built utilizing Linden Lab’s new social VR platform, Sansar.

In the Apollo Museum, visitors can virtually explore true-to-scale models of the Saturn V rocket, Command Module, and Lunar Module, then walk the entire mission from launch to re-entry via a Museum-length mission map; and teleport to a recreation of the Apollo 11 moon landing site. For those unable to attend the experience launches for PC, Oculus Rift, and HTC Vive later this year.

“The Apollo Museum that LOOT Interactive has created with Sansar is an awesome example of what social VR can bring to museums,” said Bjorn Laurin, VP of Product at Linden Lab. “Social VR lets you experience things you otherwise couldn’t, and using Sansar, LOOT Interactive has created a unique and engaging educational experience. Exploring exhibits is more fun when you can do it with other people, and it’s an incredible feeling to be on the moon at the site of the Apollo 11 landing with your friends.”

Sansar_ApolloMuseum-1

While the Harold Lloyd Museum features the Hollywood legend’s collection of stereoscopic photography. Digitised utilising photogrammetry, the virtual museum is filled with objects, videos and pictures of Harold’s lifetime achievements. Harold Lloyd produced over 200,000 3D pictures, including shots of Marilyn Monroe, Betty Page, the opening of Disneyland, and more.

Suzanne Lloyd, President of Harold Lloyd Entertainment, said, “My grandfather would be thrilled to see that his time capsule of vintage 3D photography that spanned over three decades of people and landscapes all over the world is being reintroduced to the world through virtual reality. I look forward to expanding my grandfather’s library with the LOOT Interactive team for this generation and many more to come.”

“We are enormously proud to be introducing Social VR to the world with the Apollo Museum and the Harold Lloyd Museum,” said David Sterling, LOOT Managing Director. “Social VR is an entirely new type of dynamic entertainment that will entertain us and enrich our lives like nothing that has come before.”

The Art of VR takes place at Sotheby’s NYC, from 22nd-23rd June, while VR In the Sky at the One World Trade Center, runs from 12th-13th July 2017, both of which are open to the public. Click here for tickets and more info.

March 7, 2017

New ‘Sansar’ Video Glimpses More Virtual Worlds Made on the Social VR Platform

Sansar is the next-gen virtual world platform from Linden Lab, the creator of Second Life (2003). Due to launch in Spring 2017, Sansar is a new take for the company on virtual worlds, this time built from the ground up with support for virtual reality.

There’s no denying that Linden Lab did some things right with Second Life, a $500 million GDP in 2016 is a testament to that. But they also did some things wrong, even Linden Lab CEO Ebbe Altberg will admit.

“Between the Creator and the Consumer, Second Life never really settled on which was our primary customer,” Altberg told Road to VR in an interview at the company’s San Francisco headquarters in January.

That realization is the basis of Sansar, which represents an entirely new take on virtual worlds for the company. Unlike with Second Life, the Linden Lab is shifting away from having a single massive virtual world, choosing instead to set itself up as an enabler of creators by making Sansar a platform, rather than an all encompassing virtual landscape. More like the ‘WordPress of social virtual spaces’, the company readily compares.

That means that users will not ‘enter the world of Sansar‘ any more than they would ‘visit WordPress’ to find content online. Instead—much like accessing a website via a URL that’s built atop WordPress—users will seek out and choose to visit individual virtual worlds built atop Sansar.

Sansar is made to serve creators, Linden Lab says; it’s the creators who will build virtual worlds that serve users and customers. At least that’s the hope.

Unlike Second Life, Sansar is built from the ground up for virtual reality. That means everything from teleporting locomotion to native support for VR motion controllers. And while the most advanced creators will build complex virtual worlds that are imported from third-party tools, Sansar does offers users the ability to acquire, rearrange, and remix pre-made assets from inside Sansar itself, including while in a virtual reality headset.

Since inviting the first creators to start building inside of Sansar all the way back in 2015, the company has kept a tight grip on what virtual worlds inside of Sansar actually look like.

1 of 8

A new video released by Linden Lab today (heading this article) showcases some of the first worlds made by creators who were granted access to the platform’s preview. In Spring 2017, the company plans to open the doors so that anyone will be able to download the platform and explore the worlds therein.

During my interview with Linden Lab CEO Ebbe Alterberg back in January, I got to tour some of the virtual worlds build on Sansar:

Giant Movie Theater

The first place I saw was a movie theater. A massive screen sat in a vast outdoor expanse with the night sky overhead. The seats in front of the screen were mostly covered over in windswept sand; as if there was once a huge theater that had deteriorated long ago, save for the screen, seats, and a huge flight of stairs leading down to them. The screen itself really felt massive (I’ve seen a number of other movie-theater VR experience that for some reason didn’t give a good sensation of scale). The screen was streaming a video from YouTube and the audio was playing throughout the entire space. Altberg said creators will soon be able to set virtual sound sources in Sansar so that the theater could have virtual speakers from which the sound originated.

Photogrammetry Tomb

Next was an Egyptian tomb which Altberg said was a real space that had been captured with photogrammetry. As we explored the tomb’s hieroglyphic-covered corridors together it became apparent that Sansar has 3D positional audio built it, allowing me to easily tell where Altberg was even when I wasn’t looking at him. That’s important not only because it helps your mind map the space and people around you more easily (which adds to immersion), but also because in multi-user scenarios, it’ll be much easier to tell who’s talking (which is also helped by automatic lip syncing).

Videogame Village

The next space we visited was a beautiful world that looked like a mashup between the Ocarina of Time (1998) and Jackson’s Lord of the Rings aesthetic. It was a bright and cheery village full of green foliage and earthen homes built into the sides of hills; a series of small foot bridges arched across the roofs of one home to the next. The space was very dimensional, with little paths winding up hills here and there, taking us to comfortable nooks enclosed with trees. The space had a definite stylized videogame look to it, but even though it wasn’t aiming for realistic visuals, it was probably the most charming and beautiful place I saw during my tour. In the center of town we came across a big monument of a cutlass that was sticking tip-down into the ground. Water cascaded down from the handled in ordered lines, and poured into pools at the base of the monument. Although the entirety of this virtual space was uninhabited at this stage, it called out to be the starting point of a great adventure.

Learn more are Linden Lab’s Sansar ambitions in our deep dive interview.

The post New ‘Sansar’ Video Glimpses More Virtual Worlds Made on the Social VR Platform appeared first on Road to VR.