Inside Project Sansar, the VR successor to Second Life The door is bright red, perched at the top of a mossy stone staircase in the middle of a floating island. When I approach, a mysterious tune begins emanating from it, as if playing from the other side. Right now, it’s just a simple prop, and there is no other side. But when I ask Linden Lab’s Bjorn Laurin, he tells me the door is supposed to lead to Narnia — and by next year, there’s no reason it shouldn’t. The space we’re both inhabiting is part of Project Sansar, a new virtual reality experience from Linden Lab. In the mid-‘00s, Linden Lab struck gold with digital world Second Life, which played host to 1.1 million users at its peak. Second Life retains a user base of some 900,000 monthly active users, and CEO Ebbe Altberg brags that creators earned $60 million in real-world cash last year selling digital goods. When virtual reality started gathering steam with the Oculus Rift, Linden Lab hacked in crude support for Second Life. The graphics were aging, though, and its complicated controls didn’t make much sense in VR. Instead of pursuing patches and upgrades, the company began work on a new virtual world. But according to Altberg, Project Sansar isn’t just supposed to be a headset-friendly Second Life clone — it’s a major overhaul of the basic structure. Second Life uses the metaphor of a single, finite universe, where Linden Lab makes money off expensive virtual “land.” In Sansar, environments can be endlessly duplicated to accommodate more people. To use Altberg’s metaphor, Linden Lab will slash Second Life’s high property taxes, taking a cut of virtual object sales instead. See http://ift.tt/2g4KOzs
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