Linden Lab announces Sansar Public Creator Beta

Posted on by Inara Pey
The Sansar Apollo Museum, by LOOT Interactive

On Monday, July 31st, Linden Lab announced the opening of the Public Creator Beta for Sansar, their new platform for creating and publishing social VR experiences. In announcing the launch, Linden Lab issued a press release which states in part:

SAN FRANCISCO – July 31, 2017 – SansarTM, the world’s leading social VR platform, today opened its creator beta to the public. Sansar empowers individuals, communities, schools, studios, corporations, brands and others to easily create, share, and ultimately sell immersive 3D social experiences for consumers to enjoy on HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, and Windows PCs. Developed by Linden Lab®, the company behind the groundbreaking virtual world Second Life®, Sansar is a brand new platform built from the ground up to enable everyone to become a creator.

At opening, Sansar’s Atlas directory already features hundreds of engaging virtual experiences, including multiplayer games, recreations of historic sites and landmarks, art installations, movie theaters, museums, narrative experiences, jungle temples, 360º video domes, sci-fi themed hangouts, and much more. Creators invited to the platform during a limited-access preview have published thousands of amazing public and private experiences, and with the opening of beta today, the world is now invited to join them.

Monkey Temple by Unit 9

The press release goes on to highlight some of the capabilities associated with Sansar, including:

  • Simplified Creation & Cross-Device Distribution: Intuitive drag-and-drop editing makes it easy to create a scene with assets imported from common 3D modelling tools or purchased from the Sansar Store.
  • Use of tools from the likes of Speech Graphics for accurate avatar lip-syncing and facial animations (via audio with or without a headset) and IKinema for accurate mirroring of user’s hand / arm movements when using HMD controllers
  • A relationship with TurboSquid to provide creators with access to hundreds of additional high-quality 3D models in the Store today, with thousands more being added in the coming months. This will be extended with integration with TurboSquid’s StemCell initiative to make it easy for TurboSquid’s community of 3D modellers to immediately upload and sell their creations in the Sansar Store, further augmenting the assets readily available to Sansar creators.
Sansar Dwarven City by David Hall

Sansar System Specification

Accompanying the press release were the recommended system specifications for running Sansar:

Sansar Pricing

Basic Sansar access is provided free to users, with subscription options available to those who need them.

Things to Note – Particularly from a Second Life Perspective

I’ll have more to say on using Sansar in separate upcoming articles. However, in the briefest of terms:

  • The Sansar Public Beta is not the “fully fledged” Sansar platform; rather it is another step in the platform’s development
  • This means that much of what is taken for granted in Second Life cannot at present be done in Sansar – do not expect to jump in and find loads of vehicles to drive / fly / sail or to start flying around yourself. These kinds of capabilities will come in time
  • The Sansar avatar is still being developed; therefore what you see on joining Sansar is not “all there is” to the avatar. Expect enhancements and greater customisation to come in time
  • Sansar does not offer “in-world” design / building capabilities in the same way as Second Life. It utilises a separate editing environment and a “published” run-time environment.
  • Do not expect to see tags over avatars heads – this can make the identification of other difficult, but has been done with a purpose (floating tags don’t work particularly well in VR without breaking immersion)
  • Sansar has both voice and text chat, the ability to IM people and to create Friends lists. Chat and IM work in a similar manner to chat and IMs in SL: open text chat and voice are restricted to the the current instance of the experience you are occupying; text IMs will go to friends wherever they are in Sansar relative to you.
  • Most moving between different experiences is achieved via the Atlas – Sansar’s equivalent of the Destination Guide. Teleporting is also possible, where provided
  • Adult content is currently not permitted in Sansar. This is because the platform currently lacks a maturity rating system of the kind we see in Second Life.

 

 

 

 

Published by Inara Pey

Eclectic virtual world blogger with a focus on Second Life, VR, virtual environments and technology.

15 thoughts on “Linden Lab announces Sansar Public Creator Beta”

  1. Customer support for Super Creator is 24 hours, but for Professional is 1 business day?
    Aside from 24 hours = 1 day, the fact that Professional costs more and apparently adds weekend to the response time… what am I not seeing here?

    thanks,
    -ls/cm

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  2. Are our avatars name going to use our real names? I looked at the Sansa account creation and it asks for verifiable info. At what point, if any, are we allowed to create a Sansa avatar name? None of the articles I have read today references this info or references if it will allow us to bring over at least our SL name.

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    1. You need to provide verifiable credentials to create a Sansar ACCOUNT – those can be as simple as an e-mail address, although as Sansar is trust based, you may have to give more information depending on what you wish to do. AVATAR creation is a separate process. You can have multiple avatars / looks until a single Account. I’ll have a blog post out shortly on the basics of account and avatar creation.

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  5. First impression from someone who couldn’t wait to try it, and jumped in with a lot of curiosity.

    – first you get the same doubts Xmara had (my initial enthusiasm has a little stop)
    – then if you read the TOS, it can be creepy. For instance it gives you zero privacy (for a bit I was considering to give up, I’m sure a few of people did)
    – a peek at the store showed me a bunch of random stuff without any organization. Unless you use the search function it seems hard to find anything (it’s not a good impression, but I suppose that it is still in alpha state / not feature complete. So I didn’t care much for now).
    – “Atlas” in the current state, like the store, is an unorganized list. To find anything you may like, you have to rummage among this “random” list, ranging between weird to meaningless stuff, unless you like a bit of everything (again I suppose it will be improved, unless Linden Lab is thinking that full minimalist is better.. Excessive minimalism is not efficient to me in this case)
    – Once tried to load an experience it took forever. Eventually I gave up a couple of times, killing the client, not sure if it froze or what. At last a simple experience loaded… in a couple of minutes.
    – So I tried again. The Egypt experience took about 10 minutes to load on my 12 Mbps DSL. Yay, loaded at last! But… it’s just a room? 10 minutes for a little room? Ok, there are doors. I enter… an half dozen of minutes later I could move to the next room. (I think that if I call a friend inviting her or him to share the social VR experience, I could have a walk before he or she joins me)
    – Zen Garden took very long as well. Then as a dozen of avatars entered, my frame rate got killed. And I don’t have a poor and old PC. (at this point I’m wondering how Sansar could be better than SL for conferences if it’s the same as bad, unless it was a bug or whatever)

    Eventually I closed the client with a feeling of disappointment and enough time wasted.
    The graphic engine is surely better than SL and somewhat on par with current computer games (I’m not comparing it just to SL). Avatar customization is basic, but straightforward (I was one of the very few with a customized avatar anyway). It is not much different from character customization in some modern games, or even the now gone Cloud Party (killed by Yahoo). 1st person view is ok even via mouse and keyboard and no VR gears (I miss the view of my own avatar, though, talking about immersion, in SL it’s possible). Anything else is disappointing, even the avatar movements.

    Maybe I’m missing something and for sure I’ll read your next articles about Sansar. For now I ended up skeptical and I feel like it’s going to have a bunch of people bouncing away and never giving another look.
    I’m not sure if Sansar will reach millions of users.

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    1. Took me forever to load an experience as well. 20 minutes and I closed the client serveral times, because I thought it was frozen. Well, it is still a “Creator Beta”. So let’s not expect too much.

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      1. People seem to be having mixed load times. I’ve tended to find a wired connect far more reliable than wifi. On average, and thus far, the longest I’ve had to wait for a large experience to load is about 2 mins. Most are a count of seconds.

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        1. It varies, depending on the amount of content, from about 1 minute up to five minutes. Reminds me of Blue Mars. And Blue Mars is dead due to a lack of audience. Even 1 minute is way too much, the attention span of the average user does not even last for ten seconds. This alone will most probably make it a HUGE flop. In times of high speed internet and high speed online applications the average potential PC/mobile user will wait for one minute to visit a nice looking 3D house lacking any kind of interactivity ONCE, but never twice. I guess it will not become better, but worse cause there was basically NO progress there since the closed beta started. It only became slower and slower.

          Linden Lab should completely focus on the goggle crowd and forget about desktop for sansar. Maybe the goggle pioneer crowd accepts all the delay and lack of advanced functionality. The average desktop user won´t. It´s not 2004, when LL got away with a very incomplete application because LL was the only player on the pitch and hit a nerve. It´s 2017 and even minecraft has more entertainment value to offer to the desktop user than this visual polish without any appealing character that they call “Sansar”.

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  6. Reblogged this on Magick Thoughts ❤ Le meilleur de Second Life and commented:
    Oh what I wouldn’t give to be able to drop into Sansar with the rest of the public. If I could know what it feels like to be there on the first day and see what my friends from SL and around the world are creating this would be epic.

    But for now I and many tens of thousands of Mac users will not have this opportunity. Many of the brilliant creative minds are Mac users and developers and this is such a terrible waste to not hire some Mac developers in the 3 years Sansar has been being developed. What happened there?

    If only I could go in and take pictures and make art and blog about it……. I myself and many others in responses to blogs and statuses on Facebook are very left out since we are on Macs.

    These are my thoughts on the matter. I do hope to see you all in Sansar some day, but until then at least registered my name so no one takes it. (grins).

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    1. This can happen to the SL viewer installer as well. You can manually whitelist the installer if you wish.

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