Social VR platform and once-proposed Second Life successor, Sansar, appears to have gone offline without explanation.
The official website for the platform cannot be reached as of writing and, if you try and boot into the actual experience via Steam, it fails to connect. Sansar’s social channels are yet to make an official statement on the matter. In fact its Discord channel is filled with users asking what’s going on, whilst its Twitter account hasn’t posted since August.
We’ve reached out to Sansar owner Wookey Project about the issues.
@wookeylive Sansar is down and the community is in the dark on why it is down. Can you please fix or give an official statement to all of the amazing builders, creators, event hosts, and all the other wonderful community members who are confused? #savesansar
Sansar, which also supports flatscreen, is one of the many social VR platforms vying for a place in the so-called metaverse and was originally started up by Second Life developer Linden Lab years back. But, in 2020, Linden Lab sold the platform to San Francisco-based Wookey Project Corp, shifting to refocus on Second Life. Since then, Sansar has hosted a few events like live music performances but has largely been pretty quiet stacked up next to the likes of Rec Room and VRChat.
We’ll update you as soon as we have more answers about what’s going on with Sansar.
OpenSim is more flexible and economic to use when compared to other game engines like Minecraft, Mozilla Hubs, and Sansar, especially when it comes to creating and designing virtual worlds that can be applied for education. This is despite the OpenSim game engine being considered obsolete in graphical quality, said Techland grid owner and teacher Michela Occhioni.
“I have not found, until now, a platform that can be easy used in short time as OpenSim,” she told Hypergrid Business.
Occhioni uses Techland grid to teach math and science to underage and other students and for teaching sustainability topics to students in middle school.
Although the education version of Minecraft is widely used in educational paths, it is generally for virtual worlds targeted at elementary school students, she said. And while it is a huge competitor for the open-sourced OpenSim, it is not open-source and to collaborate in it, students and teachers need to have a PC server in the same local area network or rent a Windows server, which can get pricy.
“Sansar needs too much teachers’ skills,” she added, referring to Linden Lab’s VR-friendly successor to Second Life. “And Mozilla Hubs is good but just for mostly for exhibitions. It is not possible to make interactive objects or you have to do it in Blender, which is difficult for student and teachers. Vircadia can be a solution. I am studying about it.”
“I visited other virtual world with my Quest 2 or PC, such as SineWave, Altspace, VRchat, Rec Room, Vircadia, and Mozilla Hubs,” she said. “They are promising. I’m studying on, but probably not yet ready to be used at a large scale. Until now the real winner is Minecraft because pupils use it outside school, so teachers had only to give the mission, but I do not like it too much, probably because I love OpenSim.”
When using virtual worlds for education, there is a huge potential for students to improve modeling, scripting, image editing, video editing, communication skills in storytelling and dialogues, and other skills that can be taught to students within the same environment. It can also help them acquire soft skills such as team work, collaboration, brainstorming, doing shared jobs, sharing objects, and of course socialization at a distance.
“I have experienced projects during lockdown where students logged from home, they notice a sense of presence and the feel to be really near their classmates making practical activities,” she said.
“I use the world in my teaching job, both to implement structured educational paths and carry out collaborative projects where students start from scratch a project,” she said. “I have to manage the desire for my world to be visited by outsiders and the fact I have underage students. So I create some restricted zones to visitors or temporary I block the access.”
Hypergrid connectivity is also turned off, she added, so students can’t teleport to other worlds.
Virtual worlds for sustainability
Techland Sustainability Hub. (Image courtesy David Kariuki.)
Another virtual world education project implemented at Techland grid is the Sustainability Hub. It is the starting point of the grid and features the starting points for several different educational paths including waste management, urban sustainability, water resources and so on. In addition, it hosts a section devoted to the planet Earth dynamics, to help students understand Earth systems as a whole.
Occhioni has been using this hub to teach sustainability topics to students since 2011. Currently, she is using it to teach sustainability to students in middle school from different regions of Italy.
She hopes to give a presentation about this project at the December OpenSim Community Conference for people interested in knowing more.
You can visit the Sustainability Hub in-world to learn more.
These virtual metaverses everyone keeps espousing may promise a digital nirvana full of fluffy clouds and people getting along like they’re in a Disney movie, however, simply offering a place to chat isn’t enough, we need entertainment. Some might say these virtual worlds are the entertainment but not everyone wants to be creative, some of us just like to put our feet up and switch off. Well, all that and more is being dreamt up and catered for.
Facebook Horizon
Hello there
First and foremost these digital realms are designed as communication platforms. Able to connect friends and family with a greater sense of togetherness than a video or phone call can provide. Or you can meet entirely new people, stepping into an area that’s completely dedicated to your favourite pastime, TV show or even your occupation. Spending hours nattering about subjects others have no clue or little interest for.
Hanging out with mates is a very natural thing for any human, most of us need to connect with one another in some way and the pandemic has brought this into the spotlight like never before. It’s why VRFocus will be going more in-depth about the social features and issues of metaverses in a future edition. As for now what we all really want is to have some fun in a digital universe with limitless potential.
Burn up the dance floor…
There are numerous social platforms appearing that support both VR and non-VR devices and they’re trying to persuade new users with a variety of means. They’re also gunning for different markets, namely younger audiences with a fresh, colourful feel whilst those focused on adults tend to have a far more serious vibe.
It’s this latter segment where you can see a real push in specific entertainment marketing. Rather than building blocks users are given art, music and culture to explore and enjoy. For instance, Sensorium Galaxy which is due to launch later in 2021 is heavily focused on the dance music route. It’s going to have a dedicated music world called PRISM where DJ’s will perform exclusive sets. Some big names have already signed up like Eric Prydz, Carl Cox, Armin van Buuren and David Guetta. So if you like to dance your socks off it might be well worth a look.
Sensorium Galaxy isn’t the only one leveraging the power of music. Already well versed in this medium is Sansar which has been holding events for a while now. The latest will be Australia’s Splendour in the Grass music festival digitally recreated as Splendor XR for two days in July.
Music easily bridges many divides and brings people together with a foot-tapping beat, so it’s no surprise that it would make a great catalyst for metaverse adoption.
We are such stuff as dreams are made on…
However, music is only one small avenue these platforms can utilise. There’s a vast cultural resource metaverse’s can tap into – and have already been – when it comes to entertaining the masses. Over the last year, a prime example has come from film festivals. Unable to host premieres in-person, events like Venice Film Festival, Cannes, Tribeca and Sundance have all turned to interactive mediums to connect with audiences worldwide. They’ve even found greater success as these events are no longer elite, prestigious showcases few outside their industry can attend, providing true global appeal like never before.
This is even more so for niche technologies like virtual reality (VR). Cannes XR, Tribeca Immersive and NewImages Festival combined this summer to create XR3, an immersive film festival via Museum of Other Realities (MOR), exploring an art space that allowed guests to step into each experience as if it were a live installation.
MOR isn’t really a metaverse as such. VRChat, on the other hand, is and that played host to SXSW Online XR, one of the best representations of this topic to date. SXSW is usually held in Austin, Texas but for 2021 the organisers recreated areas like Congress Avenue and the Red River Cultural District, all freely explorable. There was even a cinema to watch regular 2D content.
When all of this immersive entertainment is so easily accessed why go anywhere else?
SXSW Online XR in VRChat
Get those creative juices flowing
Undoubtedly though, the biggest draw for any of these virtual realms is user creativity. Places like Rec Room, Roblox (non-VR), VRChat, and the upcoming Facebook Horizon are all built on the premise of user content creation, giving the people who inhabit these worlds the freedom to build whatever they want. Because, quite simply, it keeps everyone invested and coming back for more.
Rec Room has millions of users across multiple VR and non-VR platforms, allowing them to create their own rooms which can be as simple as somewhere to hang out or entire games to run around in. You can even earn money, where tokens are exchanged for in-game items. Collect enough tokens and they can be redeemed for actual hard cash, Rec Room expects to pay out over one million by the end of the year. Playing and getting paid, if that’s not an incentive what is?
Places like Rec Room, Roblox and others are definitely geared towards that younger age bracket mentioned, like giant Lego toyboxes to jump into and explore. Finding a happy medium where all of these scenarios can easily co-exist is the eventual goal as none of these virtual planets quite cater to everyone. How these worlds will collide is another matter entirely.
There’s still so much uncertainty around in-person live events, how many people can safely attend and whether social distancing can be maintained that some festivals are still going down the digital approach. And virtual reality (VR) social worlds like Sansar continue to make that a feasible reality, with the platform collaborating with Australia’s Splendour in the Grass music festival to create Splendour XR which opens its doors for two days in July.
Just like Sansar did with the Lost Horizon festival, Splendour XR will be a multi-location event with three stages featuring international superstars as well as enjoying yoga at Global Village, exploring Tipi Forest or there’s always Little Splendour for the kids.
Of course, the main draw is the acts with Splendour XR featuring the likes of Khalid, Duke Dumont, Chvrches, and Bands of Horses (among others) on the first day. Whilst day two has the likes of The Killers, Charli XCX, Vance Joy, Of Monsters and Men, Hot Dub Time Machine helping to fill out day two.
“Working with Splendour we have been challenged to go above and beyond anything we’ve done before. This is going to be the most impressive virtual live event that the consumer market has ever seen, and we can say that with absolute confidence” said Pouyan Afkary, Business Development, Sansar in a statement.
While Sansar is designed to be fully explored in VR, Splendour XR is viewable via mobile, tablet, browser, and desktop as well. To help guests around the world view the festival all video content will be available on-demand for seven days after the event ends. However, the VR experience won’t be, so you’ll need to attend the two days as they happen.
“Splendour has always offered patrons a deep programming experience with The Forum, Global Village, Little Splendour and more on offer alongside our favourite artists,” said Splendour in the Grass Co-producers Jessica Ducrou and Paul Piticco. “We could not be more excited about Splendour XR and the opportunity to take the Splendour goodness online to our existing community and also to new audiences around the globe.”
Splendour XR runs from Saturday 24th to Sunday 25th July 2021 with tickets starting from $19.99 USD (£19.99 GBP) for a single day/$34.99 (£34.99 GBP) for both days. There are also party pack bundles if a group of you want to join. Being an Australian festival Splendour XR will operate globally on a single timezone, 12 pm to 2 am AEST (GMT +11) with all programming starting from 2 pm. Setting up a Sansar account is free.
For further updates on the latest virtual festivals, keep reading VRFocus.
Winter has faded away and the Spring sunshine is here but going outside to enjoy parties, festivals and other gatherings with friends and family is still a little way off. Not to worry as event organisers still have big plans and just like last year there going to be digital. HTC Vive has announced its partnering with social platform Sansar to help deliver Lost Horizon’s Spring season of live-streamed events.
Lost Horizon is put together by the team behind Glastonbury’s Shangri-La experience, offering a mixture of music and art. There are six stages (Gas Tower, Freedom, Nomad, Shangrilart Gallery, SHITV and Landing Zone) each with its own programming and style. Artists taking part this year include Jaden Thompson, Kill the Noise, Malone, The Martinez Brothers, and Tisok.
“We all hoped that we’d be back in the fields and live venues this summer, but as soon as we realised that would be impossible, we knew we had to open our doors and share our platform and knowledge, creating bespoke worlds for any event that wants to take its audience into the virtual world,” said Robin Collings, director at Lost Horizon and Shangri-La, in a statement.
To join in with the festivities you’ll need to set up a free Sansar account if you don’t already have one. You can then jump into the social platform using Oculus Rift, HTC Vive or Valve Index, or stream via a PC browser, tablet or smartphone. Just like any event tickets are on sale, either individually or $20 USD for the season ticket. However, thanks to HTC Vive’s participation Viveport users can access the events for free, simply follow this link for the redemption codes.
“We are so happy that Lost Horizon is opening its doors to the entire event industry to create unique, creative shows for a global audience,” adds Sheri Bryant, President of Sansar. “Sansar is here to provide the technology that powers all partners through the challenging times the music events industry is experiencing right now. We take comfort in knowing the upcoming Lost Horizon virtual shows will bring a sense of togetherness and social interaction for music fans around the world.”
The Lost Horizon seasonal events don’t purely provide music and art, there’s also a focus on human interaction with guided meditation, hidden wormholes, interactive games and secret quests to explore. For continued updates, keep reading VRFocus.
There’s an added bonus in-store for HTC Viveport users this month – access to the latest live events inside Sansar.
Two events are coming up inside the virtual socializing platform which can be experienced either inside VR or on flat screens. The first is, Tobacco Dock Virtual, and users will also be able to take part in events from the upcoming Lost Horizon season for free. A season pass for the festival usually costs $20.
Tobacco Dock Virtual recreates the London venue for a weekend of live music and more on April 2nd and 3rd. Events include a Chase and Status DJ set and performances from Adam Beyer, Jaden Thompson and more. Plus you’ll be able to fully explore the venue, which has hosted events like EGX Rezzed in the past.
Lost Horizon, meanwhile, is a digital venue for music and art, created by the team behind the Shangri-La installation at the Glastonbury music festival. Free events for Viveport users include DJ sets from the Monster Cat label and a showcase from Ed Banger Records. These shows kick off on April 10th and run right through to mid-May.
To be clear, the offer is available for all Viveport users, not just Viveport Infinity subscribers. You can grab codes for free passes from here and, once signed into Sansar itself, redeem the codes from HTC.
Live VR events have seen a boost over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic and, while they can’t match the real-life experience, they’re currently the closest you can get to them. Will you be taking part in Sansar’s live events? Let us know in the comments below.
Live events have become all but non-existent in 2020 due to the pandemic so where possible a lot have ventured online. Last month Wookey Project Corp. owner of virtual social platform Sansar announced music and arts festival Lost Horizon was being put together by the team behind Glastonbury’s Shangri-La. Today, HTC Vive has revealed its giving Viveport users free premium passes to attend.
To get hold of one you’ll need to head over to Viveport, hit Premium Tickets, and then enter the code VIVEPORT2020 at the check-out. There’s a massive lineup of artists with seventy-plus live performances scheduled across the two days over four music stages. Musicians include Fatboy Slim, Carl Cox, Peggy Gou, Jamie Jones and many morefamous names. To ensure as many people as possible can enjoy the festival its available via PC, VR or mobile as well as being streamed live via Beatport and Twitch.
Glastonbury’s Shangri-La team partnered with VRJAM and Sansar to bring this experience to life, and the event is free to attend. The Premium Tickets Viveport is offering has a few extra goodies like an exclusive piece of art from Lost Horizon creatives, Instruct Studio; a virtual shirt from Instruct Studio and more.
Free to download, Sansar launched back in 2018 for devices like Oculus Rift and HTC Vive. Like any social universe Sansar you can host virtual meetups, watch comedians, customise your own avatar and just enjoy hanging out in VR.
Wookey Project Corp. is the new owner of Sansar after original creator Linden Lab sold the platform earlier this year to focus its efforts on Second Life and licensed money services provider Tilia.
The Lost Horizon begins later today, starting from 3pm BST and running through until 3am BST on Sunday. If you’re not a Viveport user then Premium tickets are available by wat of a charitable contribution, with proceeds going to Amnesty International and the Big Issue.
While Sansar has struggled in the past online social portals are becoming far more popular. Whether its the cryptoworld of Somnium Space, educational platform Engage or the entertaining world of AltspaceVRthere’s plenty on offer. For further Sansar updates, keep reading VRFocus.
Back in March Linden Lab announced that it had sold its social virtual reality (VR) platform Sansar to Wookey Project Corp. as it focused efforts on Second Life. Today, Wookey has announced its first major event to be held in Sansar, a music and arts festival called Lost Horizon.
The event is being put together by the team behind Glastonbury’s Shangri-La experience as well as VR Jam, putting together several stages of superstar DJs, underground acts and visual artists.
Aiming to recreate that festival experience in VR, the team will be replicating real-life attractions from Shangri-La, including the Gas Tower, Freedom and SHITV stages. Performers will include Carl Cox, Fatboy Slim, Jamie Jones (Gas Tower) and Coldcut, A.Skillz, Krafty Kutz, Henge and Alabama 3 (Freedom). There will also be a new stage called Nomad featuring drum-and-bass labels like Hospitality, Critical Records and Born on Road.
“Now more than ever, fans are looking beyond traditional live shows to connect with the artists they love. They’re online, they’re savvy about streaming, they’re eager to experience music unconstrained by where they live, and there’s a clear demand for events that transcend old boundaries,” says Sheri Bryant, President of Sansar in a statement. “With Lost Horizon, we’re delivering the music festival of the future: deeply immersive, fully online, accessible to anyone and anywhere with a PC or phone at their disposal. We’re at the vanguard of something truly incredible, and we couldn’t be more excited to turn this page.”
Gas Tower stage, Lost Horizon. Image credit: Sansar
“Our mission is to pioneer new ways of sharing culture and creating a global community that we feel defines us and our ethos,” Kaye Dunnings, Creative Director at Shangri-La and Lost Horizon adds. “We need unity more than ever right now, in an industry that is falling away in front of us. By creating a digital platform to experience art and music in a new way, we are at the forefront of defining the next generation of live entertainment and creative communities as we know them.”
Accessible across PC, VR and mobile (via a free app), Lost Horizon will run from 3rd – 4th July 2020, simply download Sansar to get started. Just like any other festival, you’ll need to purchase a ticket, these go on sale later this week. Proceeds will then raise money for The Big Issue and Amnesty International. The festival will also be streamed live via Beatport and other partners.
Should any further announcements be made, VRFocus will keep you updated.
Extended reality company Magic Leapannounced this week that it is abandoning the consumer market and laying off employees.
According to Bloomberg, 1,000 employees are being let go, or about half the company’s workforce.
The company had raised about $2.6 billion from investors for its mixed reality headset, promising a light-weight, user-friendly device with high-end graphics and a powerfully immersive experience. The company never delivered. The headset that finally hit the market was expensive and little different from Microsoft’s Hololens, which is also enterprise-focused.
“The recent changes to the economic environment have decreased availability of capital and the appetite for longer term investments,” Magic Leap CEO Rony Abovitz said in a statement. “While our leadership team, board, and investors still believe in the long-term potential of our IP, the near-term revenue opportunities are currently concentrated on the enterprise side.”
Augmented reality, mixed reality, and virtual reality all fall under the extended reality umbrella and the general idea is that they transform the world around us. That transformation can be small, like the way Google Translate can replace text on a sign with its translation, or the way that Pokemon Go puts little creatures into your surrounding environment. Or it can go most of the way so that, say, the entire world around you changes but you can still your hands, or your keyboard, or the faces of people around you. Or the transformation can be all-encompassing so that everything you see in the world around you is replaced by a virtual overlay.
The main problem is that the hardware hasn’t lived up to the hype, the content isn’t there, and communications are still too slow. For good extended reality applications, you want user-friendly devices, plenty of stuff to enjoy, and communication and performance speeds that are fast and stable enough not to make people throw up.
This is a shame because, in theory, the coronavirus pandemic could have brought in millions of new users for these platforms, as it has for video conferencing apps such as Zoom.
On the other hand, video conferencing has only recently gotten to the point where it is practical and usable on a regular basis. I do conference calls every day as part of my job, and in the past I wouldn’t ever bother with the video, just dialing in via telephone. I’d say that 95 percent of all my calls prior to the pandemic were on audio only. The video calls were flaky. Something invariably failed to work. There were too many different platforms, and each one constantly required that I install new updates before using them. Plus, it was too much of a pain to dress and have the right lighting for a video call.
Lately, that’s flipped for me. Nearly all the calls I’m now on are video calls. I come to my desk each day preparing to be on video. I don’t do the full makeup routine — I am a print journalist, after all! — but I do what I can. My desk and lighting and office are set up for video. And the technology providers are meeting me half-way. The platform are getting better, more user-friendly, more secure, more functional, more dependable, on what seems like a daily basis.
There’s a cascading effect. Once I know that at least one of my calls that day will be on video, I’m going to be ready for video, and it makes it that much more likely for me to do video for all my other calls.
With virtual reality and virtual worlds, there’s a similar problem at work.
It’s too much of a pain to use for just one meeting. But if you are going to use it for one meeting, then you might as well use it for your other meetings.
Zoom and other conference platforms are doing one major thing right, though — they’re making the video part optional. If someone still just wants to log in with audio only, they can.
We need a graceful way to do the same with virtual reality and virtual world meetings, to scale back easily to video or audio only, and still have things work.
Virtual meetings are the killer app for these platforms, and right now it’s the perfect time to roll them out.
I’m talking to a few different vendors right now about the platforms that they’re setting up for in-depth write-ups.
And, personally, I’m also interested in hosting more of my meetings in immersive environments. I’d love to bring Zoom or Skype or Google Meet into an OpenSim environment — does anyone have this working? And do you know of other platforms that can bridge virtual reality, virtual worlds, video and audio? Let me know by email or in the comments below.
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.
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 Spaceand AltspaceVR, with Facebook Horizonalso due out this year. For further updates as Sansar looks forward, keep reading VRFocus.
