A new documentary explores how embodying digital characters in virtual worlds like Second Life empowers people of all abilities to find their voice and identity.

In Our Digital Selves: My Avatar is me! filmmaker Bernhard Drax travels from Los Angeles to rural South England to tell the stories of 13 ability-diverse people ranging from 24 to 92 years of age who find solace and inspiration in the user-created Metaverse that exists in their computers.

It’s a raw and intensely emotional investigation into the power of living vicariously through an avatar
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This is not escapism, it’s augmentation
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Drax sends his documentarian avatar Draxtor Despres into the virtual universe of Second Life (SL) as well as next generation VR platforms like High Fidelity and Sansar to find out why a 40-something disabled Chicago native feels best represented by a colorful superhero gecko but Cody LaScala – confined to a wheelchair his entire life and interacts with VR via a trackball and his foot – makes his avatar an exact replica of his physical self and asserts that he doesn’t see himself as disabled, but rather as someone with “different abilities.”

“In Second Life you can choose to be a refrigerator if you want, and that has really momentous implications for embodiment,” explains researcher Tom Boellstorff, who together with his colleague Donna Davis conducted a 3-year study entitled “Virtual Worlds, Disability and New Cultures of the Embodied Self” with funding from the National Science Foundation.

This movie makes me want to be a better person, a more responsible human - Deanya Schempp
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“This is not escapism, it’s augmentation,” says Boellstorff, whose research approaches the question from an anthropological perspective as a way to understand digital culture and how communities form and share information as social capital in the virtual world.

As Davis explains, virtual worlds like SL provide people with safe spaces where they can find and express their true selves: “People turn to Second Life to share very intimate conversations in a way they never would with a person in the physical world, because they feel they safely can.”

In Second Life you can choose to be a refrigerator if you want, and that has really momentous implications for embodiment
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By designing more inclusive technology the industry will also be making those experiences better and more meaningful for everyone
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For those that speculate about the potential of social VR, it is interesting to note how inhabiting a virtual world allows these people to form and maintain meaningful relationships and connections with others, as SL user iSkye Silverweb recounts:

“I don’t think my partner and I ever would have met in the physical world, even if we were in the same city, and it is because I am deaf.  Communication IS an issue for me; I would always be concerned about it, with meeting anyone.”

It’s a raw and intensely emotional investigation into the power of living vicariously through an avatar, and how this – as one user puts it – “provides her with sustenance” and helps people to cope with all manner of both mental and physical disabilities.

As the recent death of Anthony Bourdain so painfully highlighted, mental health issues often amount to an “invisible disability,” yet in SL, Jadyn Firehawk explains how she could make her avatar visually represent her bipolar condition: “I made something in Second Life, I call it a ‘brain sling’.  When somebody wears a sling on their arm, nobody asks them to lift a heavy object.  A ‘brain sling’ or some equivalent of it, it IS a way of wearing a sign,” she says.

Interestingly, however, doing that seems to also have empowered Jadyn to find a new freedom of expression and achieve more within that virtual world. In SL, Jadyn is a Master Builder who has come to embrace a whole new set of abilities and creative skills which she actively shares within the community.

I don't think my partner and I ever would have met in the physical world, even if we were in the same city, and it is because I am deaf
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Deanya Schempp, who collaborated with Director Drax on the project, explains that she volunteered to do the closed captions for this movie pro bono, as she felt that the subject, the people, and the research deserved to be heard. What she didn’t realize, however, was the impact that project would have upon her personally:

This movie makes me want to be a better person, a more responsible human. As I listen and watch, I come to understand that it is not these folks who are disabled: The disabled ones are the ones who will not be able to look beyond the cartoon appearance of virtual worlds, or even of this movie, to listen and learn from other human beings whose daily lives are so much different from their own. The disabled ones are those who cannot see beyond appearances to respect the human there.

“Disabled people just don’t think about their disabilities on a daily basis–or at least not until some insensitive blockhead points at us and reminds us we’re supposed to be this thing called disabled,” agrees Second Lifer Daisy Gator.

In Our Digital Selves: My Avatar is me! filmmaker Bernhard Drax tells the stories of 13 ability-diverse people ranging from 24 to 92 years of age who find solace and inspiration in the user-created Metaverse
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Over the course of the documentary, Drax and the various documentary protagonists also met (both virtually and physically) with technologists such as Philip Rosedale – Founder of Second Life who is now developing a new Virtual Worlds called High Fidelity – and Ebbe Altberg – Linden Lab’s current CEO – about how they intend to intend to design the future of social VR with disability in mind.

“We need to build highly extensible open-source systems that enable those who would provide varied forms of access and accessibility to the system to be at the table,” says Rosedale

By designing more inclusive technology, however, the industry will also be making those experiences better and more meaningful for everyone, as Boellstorff concludes:

“If there’s one thing you learn when looking at these things is that when you’re inclusive and accessible it benefits everyone, not just people with disabilities.”

This article was originally published on The Next Web

Exploring digital identity through avatars https://t.co/YqNTtckyOs

— TNW Contributors (@TNWcontributors) June 11, 2018

For companies looking to get into Immersive technologies such as VR/AR/MR/XR our Virtual Reality Consultancy services offer guidance and support on how best to incorporate these into your brand strategy.

Alice Bonasio is a VR and Digital Transformation Consultant and Tech Trends’ Editor in Chief. She also regularly writes for Fast Company, Ars Technica, Quartz, Wired and others. Connect with her on LinkedIn and follow @alicebonasio on Twitter.

The post Finding our True Selves in VR appeared first on Tech Trends.

With the launch of its new fashion marketplace, Linden Lab wants to attract more users to Sansar.

While still in public Beta, Sansar does seem to be gathering some momentum. In October I was impressed by the quality of the scary and atmospheric experiences they showcased in a Halloween competition that I helped to judge, while only last week they also opened the virtual doors of their Hollywood Museum to showcase some exclusive Star Wars movie memorabilia.

While still in public Beta, Sansar does seem to be gathering some momentum
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Marvelous Designer is a 3D fashion design tool used by numerous mainstream brands and independent designers to visualize true-to-life 3D garments
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Now Linden Lab has announced it is launching a fashion market for user-created avatar clothing. It will be powered by integration with Marvelous Designer sofware, which is widely used in the film and games industry to create digital clothing. It can virtually replicate fabric textures and physical properties to the last button, fold, and accessory, which is pretty important if people are actually going to start spending money to kit up their avatars and spending more time in social VR platforms like Sansar.

Linden Lab has announced it is launching a fashion market for user-created avatar clothing
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Users will now be able to play around with those realistic cloth simulation as they customize the fit and style on their avatars
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Marvelous Designer is a product of CLO Virtual Fashion a 3D fashion design tool used by numerous mainstream brands and independent designers to visualize true-to-life 3D garments. CLO can be used to express a variety of design details for every type of garments from simple T-shirts to complex outerwear, and Sansar users will now be able to play around with those realistic cloth simulation as they customize the fit and style on their avatars.

“Our experience operating Second Life has shown how important and valuable user-created avatar fashions are, and with Sansar, we’re taking it to an exciting new level,” says Ebbe Altberg, CEO of Linden Lab. “Our integration with Marvelous Designer means that not only can you change what you wear, you can customize the fit and style to adjust how you wear it in Sansar. For example, you can roll up your sleeves, loosen your collar, and arrange your scarf just as you like it.”

For designers, Sansar’s fashion market could prove to be a tangible business opportunity
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Linden Lab says that this opens up new creative and entrepreneurial opportunities for users. For designers, Sansar’s fashion market could prove to be a tangible business opportunity, if Second Life (SL) is anything to go by. Over the past 15 years, SL users have created nearly two billion virtual objects, and avatar fashions account for a major portion of the $500 million (USD) user-to-user economy, and some designers have earned millions of dollars from their virtual fashion businesses.

“Innovative fashion companies, world-leading film and gaming studios, and creative hobbyists around the world are already using Marvelous Designer to create incredible virtual clothing designs,” said Jaden Oh, CEO & CTO at CLO. “Our integration with Sansar is the first of its kind, and it makes it easy for our users to sell their creations in this new market.”

New and existing Sansar users can currently get a 60-day free trial of Marvelous Designer
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New and existing Sansar users can currently get a 60-day free trial of Marvelous Designer, and Linden Lab is clearly hoping that this move will not only help kick-start Sansar’s in-world economy, but also increase user take-up and engagement by allowing them to customize their avatars in creative ways. Fashion is a major part of how humans convey individuality and personality IRL, and the same applies in virtual reality.

This article was originally published on VRScout

Time to Dress to Impress—in Social VR #Sansar via @alicebonasio https://t.co/HoAPe4lSki pic.twitter.com/CqZh6U3e0A

— VRScout (@VRScout) December 28, 2017

Tech Trends offers comprehensive Virtual Reality Consultancy services to support businesses looking to adopt VR/AR/MR technologies into their brand and communications strategy.

Alice Bonasio is a VR Consultant and Tech Trends’ Editor in Chief. She also regularly writes for Fast Company, Ars Technica, Quartz, Wired and others. Connect with her on LinkedIn and follow @alicebonasio on Twitter.

The post Dressing Up Social Virtual Reality appeared first on Tech Trends.

Immersive technology companies are increasingly integrating their AR, VR and MR offerings with Blockchain. Why?

Merging our physical and digital physical realities is the ultimate promise of immersive technologies such as Augmented Reality (AR) Virtual Reality (VR) Mixed Reality (MR) – and others in this acronym alphabet soup – which is what makes them such a good fit for Blockchain.

Merging our physical and digital physical realities is the ultimate promise of immersive technologies
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The interesting thing about Blockchain is that it, too, is all about blurring the boundaries between virtual and real. Or perhaps it just exposes that a lot of what we consider to be “real” exists largely in the ether in the form of bits and bytes. What Blockchain does is make the ephemeral feel permanent, and therefore more valuable.

Philip Rosedale is the founder of one of the earliest virtual worlds – Second Life. He told Forbes in a recent interview that virtual worlds need a simple system that allows people to reliably assert ownership.

“I think that Blockchain is super important for money, for digital assets, and most importantly for identity. Not just in the virtual world, but in the real world. It stores that information in a way that only the owner who has the private key can be associated with that little chunk of the Blockchain. The owner can update the object, sell it, move it around. No company or central organization is able to do that once it’s printed in the Blockchain.”

If Blockchain had been around 13 years ago when Linden Lab first launched Second Life, Rosedale believes they would have built the platform around it, and indeed he seems keen to now incorporate the technology into his latest Social VR venture High Fidelity, as are many emerging competitors in that space such as Decentraland which just held its highly anticipated first property auction this month.

The interesting thing about Blockchain is that it, too, is all about blurring the boundaries between virtual and real
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Augmented Reality start-up Lucyd, for example, recently created their own cryptocurrency (the LCD token) and is currently raising funds through an ICO (initial coin offering). Having secured a series of AR patents, Lycid are now designing an interactive AR display that uses your smartphone for processing power and data. Essentially the lens will let users look up from their phones and interact with their apps within a large, smooth AR interface.

Being on the Blockchain they claim, will allow them to develop and distribute AR-native content much more easily so that anyone can develop, share and experience content.

With over 60 million concert tickets sold every year in the US, it is clear that the market for experiences is booming, but equally clear that there is a limit to how many tickets can be sold to access them physically. Which is where companies like of CEEK VR come in.

With over 60 million concert tickets sold every year in the US, it is clear that the market for experiences is booming
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CEEK is a platform founded in 2015 that extends the reach of sold-out shows through its Virtual Reality Venues by allowing users to experience them virtually. It has so far signed up over 100 top artists like Elton John, Lady Gaga, Sting, Bon Jovi and Katy Perry, but believe that incorporating Blockchain technology will allow them to massively scale their operations and realize the dream of a “decentralized VR entertainment Metaverse.”

“CEEK VR’s offering will remove the hurdles of creating premium content and virtual goods featuring licensed music and celebrity assets by offering clearing house services through Smart Contracts that automatically pay respective rights holders and publishers. This means more people will be creating quality content in addition to all the concerts,” says CEEK’s CEO Mary Spio.

Clearing rights for songs, for example, takes a very long time and requires employing full-time staff every time new songs are added to a platform, especially if they are owned by multiple stakeholders – as is the norm in the music industry. By enabling transparent, immutable record of ownership and usage rights to be kept in the Blockchain, however, this process can not only be scaled and automated over millions of songs, but becomes much more accountable, meaning artists will get paid for their work in a much more timely fashion, and reach larger audiences in the process. The picture it paints is very much of a win-win for the creative industries, which has often struggled to cope with disruptive technologies in the past.

If Blockchain had been around 13 years ago when Linden Lab first launched Second Life, Rosedale believes they would have built the platform around it
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Virtual tokens can be used as tickets to VR events and virtual items, but they are also enabling celebrities on the platform to create their own worlds, currency and items in less than an hour, with the potential for unlimited earning. Celebrity minted coins and virtual merchandise items take on the traits of cryptocurrency as each are assigned their own Ethereum address. This means exclusive items can be created, and artists can even sign those items with special cryptographic token signatures that cannot be duplicated and are authenticated on the Blockchain in terms of rarity and value.

Gaze Coin is another Blockchain-powered platform that monetizes VR & AR through enabling such celebrity partnerships. By using gaze tracking, it calculates the amount of time a player spends looking at or immersed inside specific content and then creates a micropayment – advertisers are charged for the time, content owners are paid and gamers are rewarded.

Monetizing virtual goods and services in a frictionless way will be the cornerstone of building these new virtual worlds
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The company is now planning on trialling the first of its “Celebrity Coins” next year. The Kim Kardashian West’s KCoin is linked to the KK Goes to Hollywood app which already attracted 42 million downloads and which has generated nearly $200 million in revenue since June 2014. They stand to make even more, however, by adopting a monetized VR platform where instead of purchasing virtual goods, players can purchase Kardashian’s branded and endorsed products both virtually and eventually in real life.

“For the first time the Kardashian’s have been toppled in the Google search rankings, and by Bitcoin. The idea of linking the two might seem far-fetched, but we see it as the next step,” says Jonny Peters Founder of Gaze Coin. “If the app’s KCoin became a cryptocurrency it would enable brands to track and reward players for influence and advertising, as well as the purchase of real-world goods in virtual stores. So we’re doing it,” he says.

Spio also agrees that creating and monetizing virtual goods and services in a frictionless way will be the cornerstone of building these new virtual worlds. “Tokenization does that, and users will enjoy more premium VR content as well as new earning and spending possibilities,” she concludes.

Article originally published on The Huffington Post

Will Blockchain Supercharge Immersive Tech? https://t.co/2zK93HAJrf via @HuffPostBlog

— Alice Bonasio (@alicebonasio) December 17, 2017

For help getting your own VR/AR/MR project off the ground, get in touch about our Virtual Reality Consultancy services 

Alice Bonasio is a VR Consultant and Tech Trends’ Editor in Chief. She also regularly writes for Fast Company, Ars Technica, Quartz, Wired and others. Connect with her on LinkedIn and follow @alicebonasio on Twitter.

The post Powering Virtual Technologies With Blockchain appeared first on Tech Trends.

To accompany the release of Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Linden Lab unveils a Virtual Reality exhibition at its newly opened Sansar Hollywood Art Museum.

The wait is over and the latest Star Wars is finally out in cinemas (YAY!) but that also means fans have to  put up with the endless marketing tie-ins as everyone tries to piggyback off the franchise’s popularity – NOT so YAY

Specially at Christmas, as I walk around the shops and stare at all the random products leeching off the Star Wars brand, I’m constantly reminded of the scene in Spaceballs where Yogurt pimps his merchandise.

Sometimes, though, you still come across a genuinely awesome tie-in that reminds you of why you fell in love with Star Wars in the first place. And Sansar’s VR exhibition of exclusive historic production art at The Hollywood Art Museum (HWAM) does that.

Sometimes, though, you still come across a genuinely awesome tie-in that reminds you of why you fell in love with Star Wars
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HWAM’s first exhibition is a unique collection of Star Wars production pieces, including the very first drawings made for the film franchise and never-before-seen production art from the original trilogy by Lucasfilm alum Joe Johnston, Ralph McQuarrie, Phil Tippett, Drew Struzan, Colin Cantwell, and more.

HWAM’s first exhibition is a unique collection of Star Wars production pieces, including the very first drawings made for the film franchise
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The museum's creator Greg Aronowitz, is a director, designer, writer, producer, and practical effects professional
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The museum’s creator Greg Aronowitz, is a director, designer, writer, producer, and practical effects professional whose credits over the past 30 years or so include Terminator 2, Jurassic Park: Lost World, X-Files and Saving Private Ryan.

Aronowitz is also an avid collector who has amassed an incredible collection of Hollywood production art, from storyboards to costume sketches
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Aronowitz is also an avid collector who has amassed an incredible collection of Hollywood production art, from storyboards to costume sketches, concept drawings, models, and more. The pieces give you a glimpse of the creative process of making these iconic films, from Citizen Kane to Tranformers, which he’s always been keen to share.

But although there are plans to eventually build a real-world version of the museum, so far the objects didn’t really have a home where they could be accessible to the general public.

“The dream of a brick and mortar gallery is still a bit out of reach, but Sansar made it easy to create a virtual museum, where we can make the work available to artists, students, movie fans, and anyone around the world who’s interested in the creative process and history behind some of the world’s most beloved titles,” says Aronowitz.

As the HWAM exhibition opened on December 9^th, they also simultaneously hosted a pop-up gallery at one of Los Angeles’s oldest art supply stores, where George Lucas’s visual effects company, Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), acquired many of the supplies the artists used to create early Star Wars works in the mid-seventies. The event featured both some of the physical art and VR stations where attendees viewed the Sansar experience.

You can access the experience on the Sansar desktop site via Windows PC (be warned, it does take a while to load, but it’s the price you pay for having such polished visuals) or with a VR Headset such as the HTC Vive or Oculus.

You can access the experience on the Sansar desktop site via Windows PC or with a VR Headset such as the HTC Vive or Oculus
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This being social VR you’re also welcome to mingle with other fans, although I did get accosted by a persistently annoying troll that wanted me to hug her as I was looking at some of the gorgeous pen and ink sketches on the wall. You can just mute them out and get back to your geeking though, so it didn’t really spoil it for me. And if socialising is your thing, there are a several social events and parties planned in the museum to coincide with the movie release.

This being social VR you’re also welcome to mingle with other fans
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At various points as you walk your avatar around the rooms you trigger helpful audio information which tells you the story behind some of the objects
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The beauty of having such an exhibit in Sansar is that the graphics are good enough to do the objects and drawings justice. I spent several happy minutes marvelling at the details of obscure blueprints, sculptures and storyboards.

At various points as you walk your avatar around the rooms you also trigger helpful audio information which tells you the story behind some of the objects. And just like in a regular museum you can just read the plaques next to the exhibits.

The beauty of having such an exhibit in Sansar is that the graphics are good enough to do the objects and drawings justice
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It is easy to picture how I’d be given the choice to dress up my Avatar in Star Wars costumes or even the entire exhibit hosted in Tatooine
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But what isn’t like a regular museum experience is that with a lot of the physical objects – basically anything sitting on a plinth – you can just pick them up – and not get told off. Play with stuff to your heart’s content and it will just find its way back to where it belongs, undamaged and ready for the next fan to have a go.

The Star Wars exhibition feels like walking through a set from the film
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And of course that is just the beginning. Sansar is a very young platform indeed, only recently out of Beta, so we’re yet to see some of its crazier possibilities realised by the creator community. With something like this though, it is easy to picture how next time around I’d be given the choice to dress up my Avatar in Star Wars costumes like at Comic-Con or even have the entire exhibit hosted in, say Tatooine.

“With Sansar, not only are we able to present pieces in context – the Star Wars exhibition feels like walking through a set from the film, for example – but the museum is also a social space. We threw a virtual party on opening night, I’ve lead groups on guided tours of the collection, and we’ll host talks with artists as well It’s a very interactive space, with more accessibility than the physical museum could ever have, says Aronowitz”

There is huge scope to have fun with this sort of content and experience, and I’d be amazed if Sansar’s creative community doesn’t step up to that plate soon, much as they did when creating the Halloween competition experiences I helped judge in October. In the meantime, it’s not a bad taster of what’s in store for VR fans.

Play with stuff to your heart’s content and it will just find its way back to where it belongs, undamaged and ready for the next fan to have a go
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This article was originally published on VRScout 

See Original, Exclusive Star Wars Artwork in VR via @alicebonasio https://t.co/KYDH7rFIwA pic.twitter.com/PKmN9455cw

— VRScout (@VRScout) December 13, 2017

For companies looking to get into VR/AR/MR our Virtual Reality Consultancy services offer guidance on how these technologies can enhance and support your brand strategy.

Alice Bonasio is a VR Consultant and Tech Trends’ Editor in Chief. She also regularly writes for Fast Company, Ars Technica, Quartz, Wired and others. Connect with her on LinkedIn and follow @alicebonasio on Twitter.

The post Geeking Out in Sansar with Star Wars VR Movie Memorabilia appeared first on Tech Trends.

Could Decentralised ownership using blockchain technology help kickstart the social VR revolution? Emerging platforms are looking to democratise ownership of immersive environments.

VR has often been considered something of a solitary experience, but that’s changing fast. Social VR platforms are on the rise, and as the acquisition of AltspaceVR by Microsoft shows, major players in that space are taking notice.

AltspaceVR was recently acquired by Microsoft
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In the VR gold rush a spate of social VR platforms have proliferated. High Fidelity, for example, is a sandbox environment allowing players to create their own avatars and social worlds and explore others all interconnected in one limitless Metaverse. It also features a marketplace where you can purchase avatars and additional 3D building elements.

VR Social platforms have proliferated
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Vtime is a stationary platform which offers fully rendered interesting environments for up to 4 people at a time wherein they can interact. One unique feature of the Vtime platform is the vCast feature which allows you to host and record your own chat show in VR. With around $1.5 million in venture funding VR Chat is developing a sandbox platform that allows you to interact and explore virtual worlds. VR Chat features full body and lip sync and eye tracking as well as a SDK that allows you to create your own worlds and avatars.

Supported by $5 million of funding, RecRoom from Against Gravity has also become a popular platform for social VR recreation featuring a games room where people can join and play games against each other in VR from all around the world. Noted for its great sense of community it makes great use of its touch and vive controllers in such games as golf, paddle ball or charades.

Momentum is building around social VR
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This shows how momentum is building around social VR, and although it’s unlikely that such platforms will replace social media in terms of popularity overnight, the question is certainly being asked about who will emerge as “Facebook of VR.”

Facebook itself is keen to be the Facebook of VR
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With Mark Zuckerberg announcing a year ago a host of new Social VR features at the Oculus Connect 3 keynote (such as the ability to create ‘parties’ and ‘rooms’ wherein friends can gather in VR environments), appointing Rachel Rubin – previously vice president and executive producer of The Sims 4 at Electronic Arts – as the head of Social VR and subsequently channeling $250 million into VR development, it seems clear that Facebook itself is keen to step up to that plate.

Tech giants have so far shirked the responsibility which comes with their vast power
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Yet as the ongoing revelations about Russia’s use of platforms like Google and Facebook to influence elections in the US and elsewhere show, allowing any one company such widespread reach gives it extraordinary power. And tech companies have not so far shown that they accept the responsibilities that come with such great power. A possible alternative? Decentralized ownership.

“We believe virtual reality will flourish once users have a more prominent role in controlling their creations. Currently, the companies that create the virtual worlds own all of the content built by the users. They are the ones who profit, reap the benefits from the network effects, and have the power to undo, change or censor what happens within the world itself. The true potential of VR might be realized, and certainly surpass what already exists, if this power were put into the hands of the users instead,” believes Ariel Meilich, founder of blockchain-based virtual platform Decentraland.

A blockchain is a digitized, decentralized public ledger of cryptocurrency transactions. Essentially each ‘block’ is like an individual bank statement. Completed ‘blocks’ (the most recent transactions) are added in chronological order allowing market participants to keep track of the transactions without the need for central record keeping. Just as Bitcoin eliminates the need for a third party to process or store payments, and isn’t regulated by a central authority, users in any blockchain structure are responsible for validating transactions whenever one party pays another for goods or services.

Decentraland started as an open source initiative in 2015
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Meilich says that the project began in 2015 as an open source initiative to build a virtual world, before pivoting into a blockchain tokenization model. Earlier this year, the company’s ICO (Initial Coin Offering) raised over $25M USD – in less than a minute. They are now planning to launch in early 2018 following its first land auction which will take place in December.

The notion of monetising Virtual Real Estate and assets is well established
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The notion of monetising Virtual Real Estate and assets is far from new, however. Second Life (SL), the longest enduring commercial virtual world launched back in 2003 thrives on the principle of enabling users to make money from digital assets.

Decentraland users will collectively own and regulate the platform
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Monetization was a bit aspect of the platform from the outset, incentivizing users to create high-quality content by allowing users to retain copyright for these virtual goods. The profits stemming from this virtual economy are very much real, with many SL users deriving a regular income from such activities, and Linden Lab itself being a financially independent company thanks to the fees and commission it makes from these.

Monetisation has been a big aspect of social VR platforms like Sansar
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With Sansar, Linden Lab is now laying its own stake to that next-generation of virtual worlds by offering similar functions to High Fidelity in terms of development, yet taking a more user-centric approach which also focuses on enabling monetization for individual users, who can earn Sansar Dollar (S$) for their VR creations. This in-world currency can be cashed into various currencies via PayPal and traded on a dedicated online exchange called the Sandex. This built-in economy with real-world application is borrowed directly from Second Life and its Linden Dollar (L$).

“If I can make an experience by building just a few original content assets and buy the other stuff, I can do way more interesting experiences at a much faster pace, because I don’t have to build everything from scratch. In the real world you see companies and brands specializing in certain types of content, and it’s no different in virtual worlds, we’ve seen this in Second Life,” explains Linden Lab CEO Ebbe Altberg.“

What makes Decentraland fundamentally different from other virtual platforms is that it’s not only the content that will be owned by users, but the platform itself. This means the community will also have collective responsibility for regulating it. According to its creators, the blockchain structure – which uses the Ethereum network – creates a mechanism for consensus among strangers that allows this to work at scale.

“The networks provides landowners with actual ownership over their property and the creations that reside on it,” explains Meilich. “As is it decentralized and the content does not reside on our servers, we do not have the power to modify it or censor it. At some point, we could turn off our servers and the world would keep running.”

This all opens up new and interesting possibilities for users to communicate with each other, as well as new business models that enable them to create, share and monetize immersive content and experiences. But so far we haven’t seen any one model emerge as a clear winner and claim that crucial “first mover advantage” in the social VR space. The race is, by all accounts, still wide open, which is what makes for such exciting watching.

This article was originally published on The Next Web

Will blockchain help make Virtual Reality more social? https://t.co/G5CAeBhxhg

— TNW Contributors (@TNWcontributors) November 6, 2017

To find out how to leverage VR/AR/MR in your enterprise, Tech Trends offers bespoke Virtual Reality Consultancy support

Alice Bonasio is a VR Consultant and Tech Trends’ Editor in Chief. She also regularly writes for Fast Company, Ars Technica, Quartz, Wired and others. Connect with her on LinkedIn and follow @alicebonasio and @techtrends_tech on Twitter.

The post Democratising Social VR with Blockchain appeared first on Tech Trends.

Sansar Creators were up to some really cool tricks, and the results were some spooky Halloween VR treats…

I am often impressed by the way Sansar looks
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I am often impressed by the way the Sansar VR platform looks. Some of it might be buggy, but overall, the slick visuals you see on its user-generated experiences wouldn’t look out of place in a AAA game. In the social VR space, still dominated by blocky avatars and limited landscapes, the sheer variety and polish in Sansar makes it stand out – in a good way.

But this all comes at a price, and anybody familiar with gaming will be know the trade-off between how good something looks and how long it takes for to download, all too well. In order to test out all these textured, beautifully lit, atmospheric experiences, I therefore had to spend what felt like a long time loading them on a very powerful PC.

To render Sansar experiences properly still takes a lot of computer power
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Which made it both fund and challenging to be one of the judges in Sansar’s Halloween-themed competition, which awarded one lucky winner a 10,000 prize, and which featured a broad range of spooky environments and experiences. It was a chance to see first-hand what the platform has enabled its users to create in VR, even without if they don’t have the benefit of vast amounts of technical knowledge to do so.

The visuals in some Sansar experiences are worthy of AAA game titles
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Granted, many of the people onboarded onto Sansar’s Creator’s Beta (which went live earlier this year) are actually gifted designers. Yet what Sansar is building towards is a set of tools and functionalities that allows everybody to create and kit out their own virtual worlds however they wish, without having to worry about a steep learning curve – a factor that definitely contributed to stalling growth in Linden Lab’s original Metaverse, Second Life.

“Sansar is about empowering everyone to create, share, and benefit from their own social VR experiences, and we want to make it accessible to as many people as possible,” agrees Bjorn Laurin, Linden Lab’s VP Product.

So, without further ado, here’s the lowdown on ‘Sansar Scariest’ competition winner and additional honourable mentions, which have just been officially announced by Linden Lab:

Winner

The Diner by C3rb3rus

A dark, seemingly abandoned Diner that’s just on the side of the quiet road and an old-fashioned drive-in movie theater set the scene for an unsettling encounter with the unknown. Did you hear that? It sounds like someone calling for help!

Even by Sansar standards, the lighting and textures in this experiences were amazing, incredibly nuanced. From the giant flying saucer spinning away to the MGM lion roaring from the drive-in movie screen in the distance, every element felt well-executed and real. Which is probably why it produced the best – spoiler alert – “jump out of your skin” moment of any of the experiences I tried.

Honorable Mentions

Paranormal Investigation by Abramelin Wolfe

Join the ‘Ghost Catchers’ and take part in a paranormal investigation this Halloween exploring a very haunted house. Many rooms with many ghosts. Some nice, some…..not so nice!

This felt like something I would have paid for if it was a console game. Carefully crafted visuals, well-timed and well-judged sound effects, this is an experience that has something for everybody, including Ghostbusters fans like myself, who will delight in having the library books floating off the shelves all around them. Definitely not the most original in terms of theme and composition, but absolutely beautiful to look at and a pleasure to explore.

Stasis Interrupted – Chapter 1 by Tyler Scarborough

A space ship where something has gone horribly horribly wrong – find your way to the escape pod, or face a most terrible fate! Try not to get lost in all those dark, flickering halls.

Sorry if this counts as a spoiler, but they had me at “It’s like Alien, but with Zombies.” If you’re a fan of either genre (or, like me, preferably both) you will pr

obably like this experience quite a lot. The creators got the slick look and foreboding mood of Ridley Scott’s original masterpiece just right, something that can be surprisingly challenging (as the latest films in the franchise painfully demonstrated, but let’s not go there). This is all about building up suspense and atmosphere, and even during my relatively short test-drive it managed to do that in spite of some bug issues (haha).

Miner Difficulties by Through The Waterfall

The dark is a very scary place….. better bring a light.

This was an interesting example of creators trying to experiment with storytelling and narrative rather than merely focusing on world-building. This uses various mechanisms (such as assigning you a bird “guide” to help steer you in the right direction. Unfortunately I lost my bird and it didn’t come back, leaving me rather lost…

Joyride by Alex

Follow the path , don’t stray . Keep on walking all the way. Studio Skye presents a Halloween journey to oblivion.

Joyride felt like the most multi-faceted and surprising experience of them all. It kept me constantly guessing from the moment when it first had me ducking to avoid the phantom cars rushing towards me. The landscape changes all the time, shifting from realistic visuals to Tim Burton-esque surreal tableaux. When I finally had to move on to the next experience on my list, it was with some regret, as it definitely felt like there was a lot left to explore here.

There were many atmospheric Halloween Experiences on Sansar
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Linden Lab plans on integrating Windows Mixed Reality HMDs with Sansar
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Linden Lab acknowledges the issues I raised regarding processing power, as well as the barriers that the high price and setup difficulty of HMDs pose, but overall Laurin sounded an upbeat note on the consumer VR space:

“It’s exciting to see all the activity in the VR hardware market, not only with new HMD options, but also with more VR-capable computers,” he told me when I asked about the release of Microsoft’s Mixed Reality Headsets. “We’ve been experimenting with some of the Windows Mixed Reality headsets, and do plan to make it possible to use Sansar with them in the future,” he confirmed.

Laurin also seems unconcerned with the growing competition in the Social VR space, and tells me that they were actually encouraged by the recent Microsoft acquisition of AltspaceVR.

“It was sad to see Altspace closing due to financial difficulties, and we think it’s great for their community and our industry overall that Microsoft has picked them up. It’s encouraging to see very large companies recognizing the value and potential of the medium of social VR,” he says.

If Sansar is to become (as is their ambition) the dominant social VR platform and the standard building, sharing and monetizing content in the medium, there are certainly issues that need to be addressed. Yet considering this is still such early days, I think it’s fair to say it’s good to see the progress that has been made, and to enjoy a few thrills along the way.

Sansar Shows Off User-Generated VR Content in Halloween Competition via @alicebonasio https://t.co/42L3rV5l66 pic.twitter.com/pqaX5tjbZk

— VRScout (@VRScout) October 31, 2017

This article was originally published on VRScout

If you would like to find out how to leverage VR/AR/MR in your own project or enterprise, Tech Trends offers Virtual Reality Consultancy support

Alice Bonasio is a VR Consultant and Tech Trends’ Editor in Chief. She also regularly writes for Fast Company, Ars Technica, Quartz, Wired and others. Connect with her on LinkedIn and follow @alicebonasio and @techtrends_tech on Twitter.

The post Sansar Unveils Scariest Virtual Reality Halloween Experiences appeared first on Tech Trends.

As Linden Lab opens the long-anticipated Sansar Beta, there’s already a whole multiverse to explore, and create. 

Tech Trends has been following the progress of Sansar for a while now
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What now feels like a very long time ago (it was in fact only April 2016, but VR has come a long way since then) I met Linden Lab CEO Ebbe Altberg at their San Francisco HQ to chat about what was then called “Project Sansar”, their ambitious social VR platform.

Much like “The Facebook” in tech less is often more, so the “Project” bit has since been dropped, and Sansar has now opened to the public in Beta following a closed creator preview earlier this year.

Until now, complexity and cost has limited who could create and publish in this medium, and Sansar dramatically changes that.

explains Altberg, who says he’s now looking forward to an “explosion of creativity”

Indeed, Sansar’s Atlas directory of public experiences already features hundreds of virtual experiences, including multiplayer games, recreations of historic sites and landmarks, art installations, movie theaters, museums, narrative experiences, jungle temples, 360º video domes and sci-fi themed hangouts, says Linden’s Communications Director Peter Gray.

We wanted to make Sansar available to everyone as early as possible, and there are still a lot of features and capabilities that we’re excited to add to the platform soon, as well as many improvements to the current featureset.

Which is all very well and good, but, to be perfectly honest, it still looks damn sexy (not in a naughty way, although that might well come soon). Over the past year I’ve seen a lot of these platforms popping up – many of them with amazing potential – but their wow factor usually hinges on the immersion of VR itself rather than the visuals.

Sansar stands out in the Social VR space with slick visuals and functionality
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Sansar, however, definitely stands out in terms of slick visuals and functionality. It doesn’t feel half-baked, and this is due not only to the stunning environments, but to the avatar features, which – thanks to a partnership with IKINEMA – incorporate full-body Inverse Kinematics to enable avatars to mirror users’ full-body movements. Additionally, Speech Graphics sync facial animations automatically to match speech patterns, all of which goes a long way towards enabling much more natural social interactions in VR.

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.

explains IKinema CEO Alexandre Pechev

A lot of work has gone into getting Sansar to this stage – Linden Lab has a dedicated team of over 70 people working on the platform, and development has been on-going for several years – but in order to fulfil their ambition to become the dominant platform in the VR space, they are counting on two very unique advantages:

It is able to self-fund the platform’s development, and the source of that funding is also the longest enduring “metaverse” out there, Second Life (SL). And means they have a lot of data on what works – and doesn’t – in the virtual world.

After 15 years, Second Life is still going strong with a thriving creative community
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After 15 years – a veritable lifetime in tech terms – SL is still going strong with about a million users, consistently generating real-world profits for Linden Lab and giving it access to a very engaged creative community, many of whom are very excited about Sansar as Gray confirms:

There’s been strong interest in Sansar among Second Life users since we first announced the project. “Many SL users are thrilled by what they can create today and are loving the many compelling Sansar experiences that are already available to explore.

It’s tempting to think of Sansar as a sort of “SL 2.0” but it wants to be much more than that. To capitalize on the new wave of enthusiasm for Virtual Reality, this new platform needs to become accessible and intuitive in a way that SL never really managed to be. One of the key obstacles which stalled the platform’s growth was its steep learning curve – which suited the hardcore community but put off casual users – and the difficulty of sharing content outside the platform itself.

With Sansar, however, people can go directly to whichever experience they want, says Gray. Each of these hosted multi-user experiences has a unique link that can be shared with whomever the creator wishes. Via Facebook, Twitter, email, blogs, etc. and viewed either with VR headsets like the HTC VIVE or Oculus as well as on desktop mode on PCs. Each instance of an experience is currently allows 35+ concurrent avatars, and automated instancing will enable creators to reach unlimited audiences, says Gray:

Let’s say you’re an educator interested in space exploration. You can click a link to visit the Apollo Museum experience that LOOT Interactive created with Sansar, and you’ll go straight there. You might then choose to browse the Atlas directory and find a social VR basketball game that looks fun, or an immersive art experience that intrigues you, and could invite friends to join you there. If instead, fantasy roleplaying and VR horror experiences are more appealing, you can go right to those.

Sansar operates a freemium model, where users can join for free but extra support is available to creators via subscriptions starting at $9.99 per month. It has a drag-and-drop editing interface that makes it much easier to create scenes either by importing assets from common 3D modeling tools or purchased from the Sansar Store.

Sansar has a Freemium model that lets users monetize their creations
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Monetisation is a key part of their strategy, which makes sense considering Second Life’s successful track record in making a virtual economy pay for both itself and its users. They created a marketplace called the Sansar Store Creators can sell virtual objects – thousands of items are already available to purchase in Sansar Dollars (S$) – but in future Linden will also enable users to sell, rent, or charge for access to actual experiences.

But which among those thousands of experiences published so far have most caught the eye of the team at Linden Lab? VP of product Bjorn Laurin is partial to the Apollo Museum experience and Grey couldn’t quite decide between Little Giant – where you can share in the colourful imagination of a 3-year old child as her toys literally come to life – or Secrets of the Worldwhale where you walk up to a wizened old rat to begin an adventure exploring “an eerie world on the back of an ancient whale and discover hidden treasure.”

Altberg, however, choose as his personal favourite a project spearheaded by Second Life veteran Draxtor and Ria (who also created the Little Giant experience). 114 Harvest is a collaborative storytelling project about a quaint little town that harbours a dark secret, and the potential for developing such collaborations is evidenced by the fact that the 114 Harvest Facebook group quickly attracted nearly 1600 members. If this early interest is any indication, it seems fair to expect that Altberg might get that explosion of creativity after all

This article was originally published on The Next Web

Tech Trends’  Virtual Reality Consultancy services offers support for companies looking to enhance brand strategy with immersive technologies such as Virtual, Augmented and Mixed Reality

Alice Bonasio is a VR Consultant and Tech Trends’ Editor in Chief. She also regularly writes for Fast Company, Ars Technica, Quartz, Wired and others. Connect with her on LinkedIn and follow @alicebonasio and @techtrends_tech on Twitter.

The post You Can Now Start Creating Your Own Virtual Worlds with Sansar appeared first on Tech Trends.

Linden Lab’s ambitions to make Virtual Reality accessible to everyone are shaping up nicely, if this newly released video is any indication.

While it doesn’t contain any new product announcements, the footage showcases the functionalities they’ve been promising and testing out in their closed “Creator’s Preview” for the last few months.

You can watch the video below, or read the complete overview on UploadVR

Linden Lab's Social VR Platform Sansar is on track for Open Beta release this Spring
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New @LindenLab video promises Sansar Open Beta this Spring! via @alicebonasio #VR #Sansar https://t.co/RXP7WrTyva pic.twitter.com/NIXCg7a5Gq

— Upload (@UploadVR) March 7, 2017

The post Building Excitement Around the Sansar Social VR Platform appeared first on Tech Trends.

VR weddings will soon become commonplace, but we are yet to figure out the legalities of what that will mean for love and relationships in the virtual age.

On May 25th, 2017, bride and groom Elisa Evans and Martin Shervington will get together with friends and family at one of their favorite hangout spots: a quirky florist that doubles up as a bar in the Welsh city of Cardiff. They will then don their HMDs, and join the remainder of their guests scattered all around the globe for the world’s first official VR wedding ceremony of its kind.

The value of VR is its ability to allow people to connect emotionally with one another
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“The value of VR is its ability to allow people to connect emotionally with one another,” says  Gerald Gottheil from AltspaceVR, the social platform which is facilitating this. “What’s interesting about doing a wedding is that while other social VR events might bring people together, they’re focused on the event itself – we’re watching a film, a show, playing a game – in a wedding the whole purpose of having this event is to connect emotionally by showing support between friends and family for the couple who are making that commitment to each other. It’s the purest example of using VR to connect people.”

Read the full story on UploadVR

A Love Story: @AltspaceVR is hosting the world’s first virtual reality wedding. via @alicebonasio #ValentinesDay #VR https://t.co/gvil2Xn1fJ pic.twitter.com/Thu0lh1ZvN

— Upload (@UploadVR) February 15, 2017

Tech Trends’  Virtual Reality Consultancy services offers support for companies looking to enhance brand strategy with immersive technologies such as Virtual, Augmented and Mixed Reality

Alice Bonasio is a VR Consultant and Tech Trends’ Editor in Chief. She also regularly writes for Fast Company, Ars Technica, Quartz, Wired and others. Connect with her on LinkedIn and follow @alicebonasio and @techtrends_tech on Twitter.

The post Getting Married in Virtual Reality appeared first on Tech Trends.

Linden Lab CEO Ebbe Altberg talks about how Sansar is enabling creators to make their own virtual worlds and monetise them.

“We learned some positives but also a lot of ‘that’s not how you do it’ from Second Life, so we’re having a much more user-centric approach from the beginning, and trying to make sure we stay away from the territory of complete geekdom.”

Sansar enbles users to monetize their Virtual Reality Creations
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When I last spoke to Linden Lab CEO Ebbe Altberg a few months ago, he was hopeful they’d be able to open Sansar to the public at the start of 2017. We were meeting virtually in a Beta version of the much-anticipated Social VR platform – I was in London and he in San Francisco – and everything worked smoothly enough for me to believe they might actually pull this off.

And they probably would have done, if he’d been willing to make a few compromises, but that’s not really Altberg’s style. Since our first meeting back in April at San Francisco’s Linden HQ he made it clear that they were in this for the long haul, and that they’d focus on building robust foundations for a platform that would last and scale for decades to come. So while it might be a bit disappointing to have to wait a bit longer to get our hands on Sansar, I find his perfectionist and patient approach refreshing in the feverish gold rush climate of the current VR boom.

It’s about you and what you want to do. That’s empowerment
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“We have over 12,000 creators registered for access to the platform, so we have way more creators than we need to get the feedback, and to ensure they get the tools they need to be successful. We’re really asking these early creators to explain what it is they want to do in Sansar, and if we think the platform is not yet ready to do that, we’re asking them to wait.”

And the care they’re taking seems to be appreciated by those chosen for that early onboarding. One of them appears in a new video released today, showcasing a “Grand Hall” environment inspired by a New York hotel. Its creator, Loz Hyde, shows us around some impressive visuals, which he praises Linden Lab for.

It’s about you and what you want to do. That’s empowerment,” says Hyde. “I’ve been to other virtual worlds in beta stage before, but Sansar is taking it from another direction. We’re initially sold on a product on the visuals, so let’s get something that looks fantastic first. In Sansar you’ll be able to create videogames, education is going to be amazing, medical science, if you want to build a business and sell furniture, you’ll be able to do that. Just like building a city from scratch, you start off by laying the foundation and it grows organically.”

And creating that organic growth is the reason why Sansar has announced that it will start supporting monetization straight away. Creators can now start earning money from Sansar, as Linden Lab rolled out the platform’s official currency – Sansar Dollar (S$) – and its online exchange, called the Sandex. Money earned for their creations in S$ can then be cashed into various currencies via PayPal. This structure of having an in-world currency is directly borrowed from Second Life, which has traded the Linden Dollar (L$) for well over a decade, with nearly $60 million’s worth being redeemed last year alone. Altberg says monetization is one of the core pillars of Sansar’s strategy, but this doesn’t stem from any pressure to start cashing in, but rather to incentivize creators and remove friction from the process of generating content.

Creators can earn money from Sansar as Linden Lab rolled out the platform’s official currency, Sansar Dollar (S$) and Sandex online exchange
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“If I can make an experience by building just a few original content assets and buy the other stuff, I can do way more interesting experiences at a much faster pace, because I don’t have to build everything from scratch,” explains Altberg. “In the real world you see companies and brands specializing in certain types of content, and it’s no different in virtual worlds, we’ve seen this in Second Life. You have the furniture people, the vehicle people, the people that do trees, avatar parts. You can only be good at so many things, and that creates the scale where creators are now helping each other become successful by combining their efforts.”

Hyde was one of the original 200 or so creators that have been gradually granted access to the platform over the past few months. These have now been joined by a further 500 in December, and the company promises to “rapidly increase” this number over Q1 2017. They also plan to release major updates on a monthly basis and disclose a more concrete timetable for onboarding users early in the new year. The crucial decision then becomes at which point those creators can start sharing those experiences, which of course means setting the all-important public release date. But while it’s unlikely that they will delay that for much longer, they are determined not to rush it either.

“My advice for anybody who’s excited about the VR space is to make sure they have decent runway because it will take a while for the market to mature so that you can monetize this properly,” says Altberg. And that runway is a luxury that Linden Lab itself has, as a result of Second Life’s enduring appeal to over a million users who finance the development of Sansar through SL revenues.

Many of those SL users are also involved in cutting-edge VR/AR/MR work and aren’t shy of hacking its Open Source client to make it do all sorts of interesting things. In fact, a large proportion of the 10k+ applicants Linden Lab had for the early Sansar’s creator preview were Second Life users, including Loz Hyde, who – in addition to doing professional CGI work in Hollywood films such as Guardians of the Galaxy, 2012 and Terminator Salvation – has his own brand of 3D creations in Second Life called Meshworx.

If I can make an experience by building just a few original content assets and buy the other stuff, I can do way more interesting experiences at a much faster pace, because I don’t have to build everything from scratch
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For Linden Lab, this can be a bit of a mixed blessing. On the one hand the community is a priceless asset which they regularly tap but on the other their almost evangelical loyalty to a legacy platform can make it challenging to market Sansar as a new and entirely separate platform; one that appeals to users who’d frankly be surprised to learn that Second Life is still around. But as much as Second Life users are able to build very effective workarounds that make it work with VR and even AR content, it makes sense to build Sansar as a separate platform, says Altberg, because it needs to handle VR as it scales into the future, and that means that the architecture needs to consistently handle things like a minimum 90fps frame rate.

Visually, that difference really shows in the images and videos released so far, and that’s one of the things that makes Sansar stand out from other Social VR platforms emerging in that space. This also ties into the fact that, unlike its competitors who have been quick to embrace mobile VR, Linden Lab opted to restrict Sansar to working on tethered HMD’s such as the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and PlayStationVR.

“I believe there is a point in the future where hardware advancements like tracking, controllers, CPU/GPU performance, network bandwidth will all add up to make really social interactive virtual mobile experiences, but at the moment the really immersive experiences are still the domain of tethered, PC- Driven VR,” explains Altberg.

There is a point in the future where hardware advancements like tracking, controllers, CPU/GPU performance, network bandwidth will all add up to make really social interactive virtual mobile experiences
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That doesn’t mean, however, that things won’t change in future. Mobile experiences are already getting a lot better, he concedes when I mention developments such as Google’s Daydream, but the problem is that if they allowed it on Sansar now, they’d get some content which was compatible some was not, and he doesn’t want creators to have to worry about those issues. Further down the line, they’re planning on adding features to automatically make content more compliant, dynamically adjusting the fidelity and complexity depending on what hardware you’re using. At the moment, however, the focus remains on making the platform structure robust enough so that it will be ready for mobile when that convergence finally arrives.

“As Sansar matures and the mobile VR platform matures, they will intersect,” Altberg said. “But we’re just not sure exactly how at this stage.”

Likewise, he sees a future where Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality will become increasingly blurred – perhaps in what we’re starting to define as “Mixed Reality.” In that scenario, some of Sansar’s experiences could be set against real spaces rather than virtually created ones, and seen through devices such as the HoloLens.

“It’s not something we’re spending any energy on today though,” he said.  “I just know that we’re building technologies that have interesting potential opportunities in future, but we have our hands full just dealing in virtual reality as we know it.”

The fact that we can talk about VR “as we know it” shows how far we’ve come over the last 12 months, and sets 2017 up to be an interesting year for players like Linden Lab.  The reason why Sansar is such an interesting contender in that space is precisely because it combines an uncompromising practical focus with a long-term vision which is much more flexible, and dizzyingly ambitious. Whenever I speak to Altberg, I get the distinct impression that being “The WordPress of VR” is just the start as far as he’s concerned.

But to achieve all that Sansar is setting out to, he acknowledges, they will have to strike a tricky balance: Enabling people such as Hyde to create amazing content, while still keeping the interface intuitive and user-friendly for the average consumer. That’s something that Second Life never quite achieved, but in building Sansar, Linden Lab is determined to draw lessons from its predecessor.

My advice for anybody who’s excited about the VR space is to make sure they have decent runway because it will take a while for the market to mature so that you can monetize this properly
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“We learned some positives but also a lot of ‘that’s not how you do it’ from Second Life,” said Altberg. “So we’re having a much more user-centric approach from the beginning, and try to make sure we stay away from the territory of complete geekdom.”

.@SansarOfficial from @LindenLab is coming soon and wants you to make money from creations https://t.co/jcnu9R0XMK via @alicebonasio #VR

— Upload @ #CES2017 (@UploadVR) January 4, 2017

For companies looking to get into VR/AR/MR our Virtual Reality Consultancy services offer guidance on how these technologies can enhance and support your brand strategy.

Alice Bonasio is a VR Consultant and Tech Trends’ Editor in Chief. She also regularly writes for Fast Company, Ars Technica, Quartz, Wired and others. Connect with her on LinkedIn and follow @alicebonasio and @techtrends_tech on Twitter.

The post Making Money from Social VR appeared first on Tech Trends.