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During the talk I brought up if there was any talks with NVIDIA to get offical support from them.   I was particularly interested because of how much NVIDIA has invested in their streaming service that has been very successful in terms of speed/ latency and quality.

Heres a link: http://shield.nvidia.com/grid-game-streaming

Would it be an interest to see more what they could offer project sansar?

 

 

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The basis of Second Life is it's diverse community. The biggest risk with Sansar is breaking up that community, it is one of the reasons why the OpenSim alternatives to Second Life never had the power of Second Life. People go, or stay, where their friends hang out. Another equaly strong basis is the current (old) stable userbase as we have experienced much and didn't leave.

How long is Sansar going to run paralel with Second Life and when will the current userbase be requested to set up new camp? (When SL remains open we oldies won't leave)

Will Sansar run on low-end computers (that run Second Life) and be compatible with Second Life that way? (so we don't have to leave any of our friends behind)

The current Premium scheme has land as it's basis. What benefits will the old SL clients have in Sansar based on their current Premium scheme?

Mainland is one of the strong points of Second Life, vehicles exploring the continents. I strongly request to have that same experience within Sansar. Why not export mainland and our current holdings there to Sansar?

Is it an option to have teleports from Second Life to Sansar using a sansar:// path calling the sansar viewer and destination?

Is there any way to verify the validity of providers of micro purchases of L$? (for instance using Phone Text Messages)

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Ebbe, I read in interviews you gave to the press that Linden Lab is keeping an attentive eye on the development of VR devices and that you guys are talking to several companies in the field. I am sure you read that Improbable is attracting lots of interest for an innovative technology that allows to create immense virtual worlds in short time and little effort. Dave Hillier, a former Linden, works at Improbable. Not much is said about what this technology is and does, though some articles seem to imply that it allows the creation of massive procedural worlds. Is Improbable one of the companies Linden Lab is talking to and is there any sinergy that would let Linden Lab leverage Improbable's technology? 

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Will Project Sansar have its own Marketplace site or will the current Marketplace be used for both?

Personally I don't think SL's current Marketplace should be used for both because it would just cause confusion for new users of both SL and Project Sansar.

If Project Sansar does have its own Marketplace will it follow the same rules and restrictions as SL's Marketplace?

The way I see it a new virtual world can have new rules which gives LL the opportunity to make changes to avoid some of the pitfalls we have experienced here SL.

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Canary Beck wrote:

Thank you very much for your answering the questions posed at the session. I have two questions with regards to the new user experience, one question regarding target marketing, and one about general positioning:

A) As a result of the A/B testing that you've been conducting during the new user acquisition process, what specific (or general) things will you change in Second Life -
after registration
- that you believe will improve new user retention?

This is a focus area and three shorter term projects is to simplify onboarding from SLURLs, test some custom gateways operated by creators and improve tracking and instrumentation in SL so we can better understand behavior from source click through registration and then inworld as well to better understand the full path and actions users take. Until we have some of these improvements it's hard to find clear obvious things to improve. None of the A/B tests so far has found a clear improvement overe the default we have today. 

 

B) What are the
most important things
you have learned from your testing of the new user experience in Second Life that you will apply to Project Sansar?

 

 

Make it easy for creators to acquire and retain their visitors and make it easy for users to enter directely into any experience. 

 

C) is there a
target market
- that you feel is under-represented in Second Life - that you will be specifically targeting for Project Sansar? (e.g. corporate, health, or education sector, etc.)

 

 

All markets are under-represented. Someone is going to build a platform for 10s and 100s of millions of people.

 

D) Lastly, a bit of a general blue-sky question, if you could cite the
number one problem that virtual worlds solve for people
, what would you say it is?

 

 

I believe virtual worlds and VR empower and enable people to do and be almost anything. This will completely change how we socialize, learn, teach, work and entertain ourselves. 

 

If you'd rather respond to any of these questions privately - you can reach me at canarybeck@gmail.com - thanks for your time, I really appreciate it!

 

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Mike Denneny wrote:

During the talk I brought up if there was any talks with NVIDIA to get offical support from them.   I was particularly interested because of how much NVIDIA has invested in their streaming service that has been very successful in terms of speed/ latency and quality.

Heres a link: 

Would it be an interest to see more what they could offer project sansar?

 

Streaming (render on the server) is interesting but the issue is cost. The day will come but we're not there yet. Between nVidia, Amazon, Microsoft etc. hopefully the competition will drive pricing down soon to make it something we can offer at a price that users are willing to pay to make it worthwhile. 

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Indigo Mertel wrote:

Ebbe, I read in interviews you gave to the press that Linden Lab is keeping an attentive eye on the development of VR devices and that you guys are talking to several companies in the field. I am sure you read that
 is attracting lots of interest for an innovative technology that allows to create immense virtual worlds in short time and little effort.
Dave Hillier, a former Linden, works at Improbable. 
Not much is said about what this technology is and does, though some articles seem to imply that it allows the creation of massive
procedural worlds
. Is Improbable one of the companies Linden Lab is talking to and is there any sinergy that would let Linden Lab leverage Improbable's technology? 

I spoke to them briefly but they were a bit cagey about what they'll do. Maybe they want to compete? Not sure. So no, we're not working with them now.  

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Cathy Foil wrote:

Will Project Sansar have its own Marketplace site or will the current Marketplace be used for both?

Personally I don't think SL's current Marketplace should be used for both because it would just cause confusion for new users of both SL and Project Sansar.

If Project Sansar does have its own Marketplace will it follow the same rules and restrictions as SL's Marketplace?

The way I see it a new virtual world can have new rules which gives LL the opportunity to make changes to avoid some of the pitfalls we have experienced here SL.

Sansar will have a new marketplace with new tech and user experience. 

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Given that many people won't have the latest and greatest machine or device. Will Sansar have better optimization than SL currently has so users don't have vastly different experiences i.e (like having a computer that meets minimum requirements but even at the lowest settings experiencing debilidating lag.) I know a few people have over the years been required to replace parts on machines or whole machines due to being worked harder in the past with SL.

 

Are you considering or going to likely use procedural generation for landspaces in sansar?

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Since Sansar experiences don't have to fit into a slot into a contiguous world, the experiences can be arbitrarily large in area. You'll be limited to what you can put on/into an experience, not the area.

That having been said, there is a (large) theorectial limit to what the physics simulator wants to deal with.

 

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Sansar and Second Life have fundamentally different approaches to a lot of Virtual World features, so, as Pete Linden said, there's not a direct analog to the Mainland in Sansar.

We are curious about what specifically residents like about the Mainland? Provided infrastructure? Large contiguous areas? A sense of community? Neighbors with common interests? Affordability? The catchy name?

 

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From my experience at least i can offer an answer to some of your questions. For users who enjoy using vehicles the biggest attraction to using the mainland areas is that it offers large continguous areas for those who would find buying up large collections of sims cost prohibitive in order to enjoy that kind of experience. There are communities that have evolved from these shared experiences i.e sailing groups and aviation groups which has added to the overall experience. 

 

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Hi Ebbe and your fellow Lindens! So two questions,

 

I spoke with fellow creators and a few others with invested interest in sl like me!  We were working out ideas (think of it like fantasy football with out all the sportsing) for things that might be beneficial to boost the amount of land purchased in SL.

I know our current system is hugely flawed, and its probably hard to change it because it's been so ingrained now for 12 years.

But would the lindens consider ever offering a fourth type of sim? one that was considerably cheaper and could be purchased as both mainland and private? 

The idea was a social sim, the same prims as a regular sim, with the caveat that no business, gaming, or residential could be on it. It would be a sim purely for emmersive roleplay, parks, art, and other social settings. While privately owned and ran (think of how current rp sims are managed), they would have to stay totally open to the general public.

I know the idea is kind of simplified, for lower cost, in addition to business, skill gaming, and residential sims, we could see a lot more fun sims to add to the experience.

As it is now, a lot of these sims are short lived, or they have to be attached to a business.

My other question was about project sansar, first let me say I love the idea of a tax, and lower land for residents and new users. I want new users to have a more affordable experience that will keep them around longer. But I was told a lot of quotes from reddit ar actually wrong about the 5% tax. I was curious if you guys know the number yet? I'll admit I'm alittle afraid of Sansar going the route of IMVU and gauging too high for it to be profitable for both creators and LL.

 

Thank you for reading

Tyr Rozenblum

 

ADDED:

1. I was curious also about the possiblity about morphs and head sliders. With the growing popularity of mesh bodies and heads, I was wondering if we would ever get to use the head morphs/sliders in the future? It would probably benefit head creators, as well as those wishing to have a little more HD experience.

2. Animated mesh: I know that I have helped contribute to many users fall im frame rate (sorry guys you know ILU), doing mesh creatures with my partner Nina. The problem is saving frame for frame and over lapping mesh using alpha is just, not a responsible way to do things. Yes we still do it, but its the only way to have any kind of animated pets and animals via mesh. Is there plans in the future to add ACTUAL ways to do animated creatures? You know without killing your friends and loved one's frame rate. 

 

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Danger, actually I am surprised that you ask because it should be obvious. Well, ok... asking never hurts... :)

As one of the founders of a community (East River) that is located on mainland by choice, I can tell you that there are several factors: history, geography, sense of community, identity, friendship, large contiguous land that doesn't restrict activities, room to expand an ever evolving community, cost.

One of our initial motivation was to preserve the heritage of the previous community of sailors located in Mowry Bay. Another important factor is being part of a large contiguous area and the desire to improve the quality of the environment, and prove that it is possible to have a nice environment and avoid the typical chaos of mainland through the common effort of residents who join forces. Size of the community and the cost of tier are also important factors. The land owners/stakeholders that run the federation of groups that makes the East River Community own land in more than a dozen regions. It would be too expensive and too limiting having a community of that size on private islands. Last but not least, friendship, identity and sense of community are what makes us stick together and preserve our corner of mainland. Most of the people running our community are about 8 - 10 years old.

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We have a dedicated core team of people working on improving Second Life and keeping it fresh. Naturally, we don't like to announce new features until we're absolutely sure that they're going to ship on a predictable date, but here are some features that we can talk about. I referred to some of these projects in my Meet the Lindens interview.

o Experience Keys - Actually, this feature is already out, and it allows Premium creators to create experiences using experience keys and experience tools. We know that there are several creators working on some really impressive experiences.

o Chrome Embedded Framework - CEF will replace the old WebKit method. This will fix a lot of problems, such as media on a prim. The new framework will also add a lot of functionality.

o Community Gateways - we're starting (re-starting) a trail program to allow specific communiies to attract, register, and on-board new users themselves.

o Premium Membership - we've been adding additional benefits to Premium Membership over the last several months, and we have a new benefit coming in August!

o New Starter Classic Avatars - Out last Avatar refresh added several new mesh avatars, and this project will modernize the classic (non-mesh) starter avatars and their animations.

o SLURLs - There are a whole lot of paths that someone clicking on one of your SLURLs on the web might end up, and many of these paths are, shall we say, non-optimal! This project will clean up those paths so that visitors can more reliably get to where they're supposed to be.

 

 

 

 

 

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Blue, I believe that Linden Lab's support to Allegorithmic Substance is a direct consequence of the rendering engine they have chosen to run Project Sansar on. Both Unity and the Unreal Engine support Substance by default. And the fact that Unity supports C# as a scripting language makes me guess that Unity is the engine picked by LL for Sansar... ;)

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Tamara Artis wrote:

In Second Life it is easy to copybot someone's creations, open up a shop in-world and sell them. We also see numerous accounts on SL Marketplace that sell empty boxes - just using pictures of well known photographers as their vendor images. If the account is reported, the shop gets closed and reopened in a few days under a new alt account. This ruins the experience and made many talented artists give up SL. It also creates a bad image about Second Life. I speak only about copyboting items created in SL, we all see how many items are stolen from various 3D websites and sold here. I even saw photos on Marketplace that show real life clothing! Do you have any plans to avoid this in Project Sansar? Or will it be same old saying "we can't do much about it"? 

I also would be very interested to hear if LL has given much thought to the kind of think Tamara mentions, and which can often ruin the enjoyment of SL for both buyers and legitimate sellers. 

Secondly, merchants have started MANY threads about the malfunctioning and missing functionality of the marketplace -- and by that I mean the simple things that could be easily done, like reducing the size of the keyword field so the keyword spammers would have to be more selective about keywords. That alone would solve half the marketplace search issues. If anyone at LL (besides Dakota( EVER is interested in hearing merchant feedback on the marketplace, say the word and I will post links to threads.

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Danger Linden wrote:

We are curious about what specifically residents like about the Mainland? Provided infrastructure? Large contiguous areas? A sense of community? Neighbors with common interests? Affordability? The catchy name?

 

i will have a go at this

+

why do people buy mainland ?

bc their landlord is LL and not another resident

if we get a experience room/space in Sansar and hopefully we can get from LL as the landlord and not have to get off another resident then will be pretty good

also

if we can move our room and join it to others then will be even better. Is what I think Indigo and Marianne and them into community building are about

lots of small "owners" coming together, not dependent on a large resident landlord having to enable this for us

the coming together of small owners is what mainland is all about

  

+

why do people like mainland (for other than the coming together) ?

bc of the far distances they can travel. Is RL 34kms from the top of the SL world to the bottom without having to teleport.

does anyone do this ? Yes. me (:

if in Sansar a experience space can be virtually bigger than this without sim crossing or teleport then you (LL) will answer this pretty good. Every vehicle owner (or even people who walk) will love it

+

eta ps

if can drive/fly my vehicle thru a portal from one experience to another then I be in heaven (:

 

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