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.
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.
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.”
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.
Creators of MMO Second Life, Linden Lab, have announced that Bing Gordon, Chief Product Officer KPCB is joining the Linden Lab Board of Directors.
Linden Lab say that they are looking to Gordon for advice on strategy and marketing as they improve Second Life and launch their new virtual reality (VR) platform Sansar.
Sansar is a new product from Linden Lab, a type of VR social media where VR users can share their experiences. More than 10,000 creators are signed up for early access to Sansar, and Linden Lab expect the product to go into open beta sometime in 2017.
“We’re honored to have Bing join our board of directors and work with our team,” said Ebbe Altberg, CEO of Linden Lab. “He’s helped to bring to life some of the most influential entertainment experiences in recent memory, and as we prepare to open Sansar for all creators, his insights, expertise, and counsel will prove invaluable.”
“Linden Lab has a wonderful legacy and future, based on its technical excellence and forward vision,” said Gordon. “Over the past 14 years, Second Life has proven the value of user-created virtual experiences, and enabling people to create their own social VR experiences is a massive opportunity for which no company is better positioned than Linden Lab is with Sansar. I’ve been spending a lot of time working with Ebbe and the team over the past six months, and it’s an exciting time to officially join Linden’s board.”
Gordon has worked extensively with companies in various industries such as education, health and commerce with regards to both marketing and introducing gamification in order to make products more engaging for consumers. He has also previously worked for Electronic Arts and has served on the board of Amazon and Zynga.
VRFocus will bring you further updates about Linden Lab’s VR products.
The first thought I had as this new Sansar video arrived in my inbox was how Linden Lab still seemed on track to deliver an accessible and very good looking product. As an increasing number of platforms scramble to lay their claim to the social VR space, Linden Lab steadfastly refuses to rush things, or deliver anything that looks half-baked. Yet in spite of that there haven’t been significant delays, and in the sometimes overhyped world of VR, delivering on one’s original promises can be a very exciting thing in itself.
The other thought that immediately followed was that I could practically hear the sound of collective outrage emanating from the faithful Second Life community as they heard Sansar described as something “unlike anything the world has ever seen before.” Not that it will stop most of them from being first in line to sign up for it, of course. Not only do those million or so SL users still put the platform to all sorts of creative uses, in fact, but many in the community were also chosen to join the highly skilled first batch of creators selected to put the closed version of the platform through its paces.
At the moment, however, they – along with the rest of us – will have to wait a while longer to get their hands on the platform. Sansar is set to remain in its invitation-only creator preview stage until Spring 2017, when it will go into open beta.
So while the two-minute video didn’t offer any earth-shattering new announcements, it does show plenty of stunning visuals, beautifully rendered movement, and impressive-looking UI. Apart from delivering a new slogan for Sansar (Created Reality) the voiceover generally reiterates all of the messages which its CEO Ebbe Altberg has been delivering ever since we first spoke with him for a fireside chat back in 2015 to discuss their plans for the Virtual Reality space. Over the years Linden Lab has continued to dedicate considerable expertise and resources to their budding VR platform, and it is probably fair to say we’ve been consistently impressed with the previews we’ve seen so far.
“No longer is VR limited to professional developers and engineers,” the narrator in the video promises. Users will be able to collaborate with other creators and innovators, re-create history, delighting friends, colleagues, customers and the entire world with their creations, she says.
In addition to the environments which we’re already familiar with from previous demos and screenshots, the video also showcases some action shots of the creator platform in action. The narrator tells us that it allows creators to easily generate, share and monetize content at the click of a button: “creators can upload original assets from common 3D formats, repurpose existing content, or get new assets from the ever-expanding Sansar store,” easily adding lighting, spatial sound and scripting and interacting with others through detailed avatars. We also get a glimpse of what the Sansar store looks like, with several items up for sale and prices listed in Sansar Dollars.
While it’s unlikely that trade inside this currently walled garden is booming (only a few hundred creators have been invited to the platform so far), Linden Lab is keen to build and populate a robust marketplace ahead of opening Sansar to the public. The ability to monetize is a cornerstone of the company’s strategy after all, much as it has been for Second Life – which still generates enough profit for the company to self-fund the development of Sansar.
Sansar continues to boldly claim it will transform the way we live our virtual lives from education and commerce to entertainment and live events.
“Get ready because the future of 3D creation and interactive social VR is coming,” she concludes as it’s revealed that the voice we’ve been hearing is in fact coming from an avatar sporting a t-shirt with the Sansar logo. There’s nothing unusual about her at first glance, but the lip sync is pretty impressive for those who know how hard that is to get just right. It’s something that Altberg and his team were particularly excited about when I met them in London last year – the way in which their tech can – regardless of what language you are speaking – coordinate your voice not only with your avatar’s mouth, but with the facial muscles and movement of their face so that it looks much more natural.
It remains to be seen how quickly this space will grow, but with improved headsets hitting the market in 2017 and prices already starting to drop, it looks like Sansar’s bet not to compromise on quality could pay off. While there are a lot of social VR platforms open to the public already, it is likely that consumers equipped with better quality headsets will also eventually crave better quality content, and this video confirms that Sansar certainly has the potential to deliver that.
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.
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.
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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.
