Category: Sansar Personal

July 31st, 2019 marked the second anniversary of Linden Lab throwing open Sansar’s doors to any and all who might want to try out the company’s (at that time) VR-centric social platform. In 2018, I marked the platform’s “first public anniversary” with some observations and thoughts, so I thought I’d do the say on the platform’s “second anniversary”.

When the doors first opened, and as the Lab forewarned at length, Sansar’s capabilities were nowhere near as built-out and Second Life (with its – then – 14-year history of development), the platform was fairly roundly beaten by some in SL as being dead on arrival. I personally felt such reactions were overblown, simply because we had been so clearly forewarning. but, I did (and do) still feel that launch was perhaps premature, and possibly the result of a knee-jerk reaction to the (genuinely) overblown predictions of growth within the VR marketplace.

• Working to bring the Desktop (non-VR) mode more up to parity with the platform’s VR mode (wrongly seen by some pundits as a “de-emphasising” of the platform’s VR focus).
• Adding far more capabilities for direct interaction by users within experiences – including the recent (and still developing) quest system, and support for things like guns for shooting games, etc.
• For VR users, full-body tracking has been introduced, with plans to continue to improve it.

• Use-generated events capabilities have been released, allowing experience creators to host their own events.
• Support for custom avatars has been added, together with avatar scaling, etc.
• The licensing / permissions system was introduced, and the Sansar Store finally integrated into the client.

At the same time the platform has seen numerous improvements to the UI, both in Desktop Mode and in VR mode; Users have been offered more of a feeling that they have their own “personal space” when logging-in directly to the Sansar client (rather than by way of an experience on the web Atlas) through the “Home Space”, and so on. There have also been a broad range of under-the-hood tweaks, updates and change through Sansar to better support avatar counts within experiences, to reduce experience load times, to improve overall performance and stability, etc. And, of course, creator capabilities have continued to be expanded.

So Sansar has hardly stood still over the course of the year, and is something of a decent beast to how it looked just a year ago.

Click gallery images for views of the Sansar Home Space

That said, there are some capabilities within the platform that are still lacking, or which have stirred a degree of controversy, together with decisions by the lab that have perhaps resulted in raised eyebrows.

An example of the first of these is the fact that there is still no easy way for content creators to offer updates to their products on the Sansar Store (outside of scripts) – a pretty fundamental capability if you want commerce to thrive on the platform.

The upcoming release of Sansar’s Avatar 2.0 has also caused some upset in that it will effectively put an end to the current avatar form, and “break” things like rigged hair and clothing (at least until the creator re-rigs it to the new avatar). However, this is countered by comments from within Second Life that once deployed, it may well encourage more avatar-related creators to give Sansar a go, given the enhancements it will bring to the Sansar avatar.

In terms of raised eyebrows, the decision to launch on Steam at the end of 2018 was perhaps the biggest. Again, given the overall state of Sansar’s development at the time, it appeared to be premature. Yes, Steam is considered the biggest platform for VR games, but Sansar’s lack of capabilities meant it might not gain traction among the more “consumer” type of Steam users – those who like to play fully-rounded games.

However, the decision can perhaps be made more understandable if referenced in terms of economics: provisioning the platform on Steam comes at a cost (30% of sales). This required an adjustment to the fees charged by the Lab – a bridge perhaps best crossed sooner rather than hit a much larger audience of creators with the increase further down the road.

The subject of Steam, however, perhaps brings us to the elephant in the room: user numbers.

Much has been made of this – particularly by pointing to the Steam stats. However, it’s important to remember that the Steam stats only represent one portion of those coming into Sansar: those accessing the platform through Steam’s own gateway (or who have maybe tied their Sansar account to Steam). As Linden Lab has noted, they don’t include people coming into the platform either directly through Sansar’s front door on the web, or by their local (non-Steam) installation of the client, or through specifically publicised events. Thus, when looking purely at the Steam stats, it is possible the entire picture isn’t being seen.

Nevertheless, and with the exception of recent events, it is not unfair to say that user numbers for Sansar have been disappointingly low. This has even been remarked upon by Landon McDowell, the Lab’s Chief Product Officer, and the person most directly in charge of Sansar’s development.

More recently, there have been some significant upticks in Sansar’s user counts – notably due to Linden Lab’s partnership with Monstercat, the Canadian independent electronic dance music record label. But again these tend to be spikes, rather than signs of a growing upward curve – which remains something Sansar has yet to really achieve. But this doesn’t mean Sansar has in any way “failed”.

The fact is, the virtual entertainment market is a highly competitive space; as such building an audience will take time (as the old adage goes, “it took my X years to become an overnight success”). With Sansar, this ability to to grow an audience has undoubtedly been hampered by the lack of broader capabilities.

However, there are signs that Sansar is now approaching a point in its development where it can start to appear to be far more sophisticated to incoming users, be they creators or “consumers”. Game play mechanisms are now appearing, opportunities for more direct immersion and  engagement (regardless of whether or not a user has a VR HMD system) are growing, and even the avatars themselves are about to become a lot more engaging. Thus, the potential for Sansar to grow its user base over the next 12 months is potentially there.

There are still significant questions around Sansar and its future, not just in terms of raising its user count, but in terms of keeping pace with developing technology around VR (it doesn’t, for example support the Oculus Quest or similar  Snapdragon based hardware). But again, it’s still too early to write-off Sansar on the basis of what it currently lacks, simply because it is still in development.

At the end of my look at Sansar’s first “public” 12 months back in July 2018, I noted that Sansar was not a place where I’d want to spend all my virtual time – and that is still the case today. But, having observed the development of the platform through the past year (and reporting on them), I confess to being somewhat optimistic that Sansar could well be in a stronger position in a year’s time.

Update, January 31st: the next Comedy Gladitors line-up has now been confirmed as Steven Hofstetter (host), with Josh Wolf, Jamie Kennedy, Zainab Johnson, and Greg Fitzsimmons, as noted below. The event will take place on Monday, February 11th, 2019, commencing at 17:00 PST  (03:00 GMT, Tuesday, February 12th, 2019). Tickets are available for the “early bird” rate of US $4.99 through until Wednesday, February 6th, 2019, thereafter most likely US $9.99 in keeping with the first Gladiators event.

Sansar has recently hosted two comedy events – in fact the first two in a pair of series. The first, Comedy Gladiators, took place in December 2018, and featured Steven Hofstetter together with Ben Gleib, Maz Jobrani, Alonzo Bodden, and Mary Lynn Rajskub. I wasn’t able to attend the event given the US / UK time difference, but did provide some coverage of the event ahead of time.

Four more events in the series are currently planned, all specifically suited to US audiences, set to by held on the following Mondays at 17:00 PST:

• February 11th, 2019.
• February 25th, 2019.
• March 11th, 2019.
• March 25th, 2019.

The upcoming shows will include Josh Wolf, Jamie Kennedy, Zainab Johnson, and Greg Fitzsimmons.

The second series of events launched on January 12th, in collaboration with the San Francisco Comedy Festival. This featured comedians David Cross (Mr. Show and Arrested Development fame) and Amy Schumer (MADTv, Insatiable, Shameless), together with openers Irene Tu and Chad Opitz). A further Sketchfest event will take place on Saturday, January 26th, featuring Michael Ian Black and Andy Kindler, supported by Emily Catalano.

All of the events are offered as ticketed activities – attendees pay via the Sansar Store in order to have access to an instance of an event. Starting with the January 26th event, Sansar users on Steam will also be able to pay for tickets via their Steam wallet. But what are these events actually like?

I cannot actually tell you first-hand, as I’ve yet to make one (as noted the Comedy Gladiator event was far too late for me, while 9:00pm UK time on a Saturday evening generally means I’m out-and-about in the physical world. However, Steven Hofstetter recently issues an extract the first Comedy Gladiators event, which helps to illustrate things.

This event saw a far amount of publicity ahead of it, with the Lab issuing a press release about the series launch, which was picked-up by a number of outlets. Steven Hofstetter also promoted it through his YouTube channel (although the promo video has since been removed, given the event has taken place).

From this clip, I got the impression the participants had at least had some experience of using VR ahead of the show, even if certain aspects of their avatar’s reactions to their own movements caught them by surprise.

At the time I wrote about the first of the SF Sketchfest event, I noted that:

Compared to the Comedy Gladiators event hosted in Sansar on December 10th, 2018 (read more here), the SF Sketchfest is receiving fairly low-key and what seems to be very short-notice advertising through social media.

As I couldn’t help but feel the event appeared to be somehow rushed – not that I had any evidence for feeling that way; it was just a gut feeling. However, reader Susan Wilson – who had been looking forward to the Comedy Gladiators event in December 2018, appeared to confirm this nagging doubt I had about the SF Sketchfest, when writing about the event:

Well, that was a waste of money. I heard the first comedy show in Sansar was great so I was looking forward to it but this was awful. Two famous people bumbling around a room, not even telling jokes. The openers were honestly better, at least they stood on the stage and did comedy. I was hoping for a comedy club experience in VR. This was more like watching “comedians” experience VR and not be very funny about it at all. It was nice to finally be able to sit down in Sansar though!

And I have to confess, a video of the session Baz DeSantis pointed me towards last week does tend to back this assessment up. Focusing on David Cross and Arden Myrin (who was not listed in the original line-up) while on stage (or rather, with the audience), it is fair to say that what is shown is less stand-up comedy and more a exploration of VR by a couple of people who have never previously tried it.

However, the flip side to this is that, while the session may not have been the kind of stand-up comedy presentation one might expect, there was also something of a level of interaction within it that one might not expect from a physical world venue of this kind; the hosts / focus of the show moving freely among the audience, chatting with them, exchanging hugs, etc.

The show also took an interesting left-turn a little over half-way through the recording, becoming something of a Q&A session. On the one hand this allowed a degree of insight into the comedians: why they become involved in comedy, but on the other, as it started it did feel forced and almost like a fall-back option should the session didn’t go in an intended direction.

Would I have come away from the event feeling happy? I’m not really sure; as a “stand up comedy event” the SF Sketchfest session to me falls very wide of the mark, and I’d like agree with Susan Wilson’s assessment. But as an opportunity to meet and chat with a couple of comedians in an informal, “unplanned” situation, it is an interesting experiment and I did find the latter half of the video somewhat engaging (I confess to previously being utterly unaware of either David Cross or Arden Myrin, so have no idea of their comedy styles).

But that said, if these kind of event are to succeed in drawing an audience, the SF Sketchfest does suggest that Linden Lab perhaps need to give more thought either into how the events are presented, or in preparing the participants in advance for what they are getting into if this type of event and Sansar are to be seen as a platform for stand-up comedy that can reach a very different audience.

I’ll leave you with the video of the Sketchfest event of January 11th (do note the language can be a little raw). Should any of you attend the January 26th event, I’d be interested in reading your feedback in the comments.