As we experience the second coming of VR, what can we learn from this enduring Virtual World?

$68 million paid to Second Life creators in 2017 alone
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In advance of Second Life’s 15^th Anniversary in June, its makers Linden Lab have released an infographic celebrating the successes of the platform since it first launched in 2003 (feeling old yet?).

• 428,000 years of total time users have spent in Second Life
• $68 million paid to Second Life creators in 2017 alone
• 57 million accounts created since 2003

These statistics highlight how Second Life has allowed its users to not only connect with others, but also make millions in real money through the platform’s virtual economy.

428,000 years: The total time users have spent in Second Life since it launched in 2003
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For more on what’s in store next for Second Life and Linden Lab’s new Virtual Reality Social Platform Sansar, you can hear it directly from the horse’s mouth – CEO Ebbe Altberg:

57 million accounts were created in Second Life since 2003
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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 Infographic: 15 Years of Second Life 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.

For immersive technology to take hold in the mass consumer market, it will need to engage users, letting them easily create and share their own content.

When they started YouVisit in 2010, Abi Mandelbaum, Endri Tolka and Taher Baderkhan wanted to share their diverse experiences. Hailing respectively from Colombia, Albania and Jordan, they understood how inspiring it was to actually see all the different places and experiences that the world had to offer.

The ultimate value of VR is to allow the average person to capture and share their life experiences
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Having met as University graduates, all 3 Co-Founders shared a common frustration of having had to apply to schools in the US without being able to do a campus tour beforehand. Virtual Reality, they felt, would empower people to make more informed – and fun – decisions in every aspect of their lives. The ultimate value of this technology, however, would be in allowing the average person to capture their own life experiences and share them.

“In a world where we are constantly capturing life’s moments via SnapChat, Instagram or other social applications – virtual reality is the ultimate “selfie,” says their CEO Abi Mandelbaum

YouVisit is seeing consumers and brands create interactive, immersive content for every need
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Their Experience Builder platform provides a free way to let the average person create virtual experiences from the media resources they already have at their disposal, whether it’s 360-degree video or traditional pictures. Once you share an experience, your friends and family can access that content on any VR headset such as Google Cardboard, Samsung Gear VR or the upcoming Daydream app, for which they’re one of the first partners – or stream it on mobile devices (both iOS and Android). There is also the option to host the content on the YouVisit platform and embed it onto a 3^rd party site for desktop viewing.

“User-generated experiences are what will help to fulfill the growing need for highly-engaging interactive VR content and enable today’s consumers to become VR content creators in their own right,” says Mandelbaum

They are now seeing consumers and brands create interactive, immersive content for every need. There are over 40,000 user-created experiences in the platform so far, which have attracted over 15.5 million views worldwide. These uses range from capturing big life moments such as a weddings to sharing a group hike up Mt. St Helens or allowing a teacher to take their students on a summer trip to South Korea.

YouVisit says they’ve tried to make the Experience Builder platform as intuitive as possible, with an interactive interface that allows the user to simply upload their content, arrange it and incorporate interactive elements. They compare it to something on the level of Microsoft PowerPoint, which most users are relatively familiar and comfortable with. As 360 cameras continue to become more feature rich and the prices continue to decline, VR experiences are likely to expand in complexity and the stories people create will also become more interactive and engaging.

VR experiences will expand in complexity and the stories people create will become more interactive and engaging
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We need to ensure that the average consumer has a stake in the expansion of VR technology
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The total amount of time it takes to build an interactive non-linear experience depends solely on the user – taking into account how much content they would like to include in their virtual environment, how they would like it displayed and what interactive features they want to include. Some experiences built purely from a combination of 360 and 2D images, while others choose to include additional written explanations, hotspots that connect viewers to additional videos or images and other features that add new layers of interactivity to the overall experience.

“We have seen small businesses leverage our free platform, creating virtual portfolios of their past work or business processes,” explains Mandelbaum. “With expanded features these experiences will evolve from literal depictions of the real world to take on more video-game like qualities as new capabilities enable the viewer to explore and uncover the virtual world around them. As consumers continue to become more familiar with viewing, interacting with and creating their own experiences, this will not only create a demand for brands to grow their investment in the technology, but also ensure that the average consumer has a stake in the expansion of this tech market – similar to how they have helped to shape the development of mobile applications.”

As well as engaging in high-profile commercial partnerships such as the West Hollywood experience, YouVisit plan on keeping the platform free for consumers in the long term. They’re betting that having a broader content ecosystem and community of VR creators will encourage brands to further engage with the medium and consequently invest in its development in 2017 and beyond.

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 Creating The Ultimate VR Selfie appeared first on Tech Trends.