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Sansar and Launching Brands


Chic Aeon
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Recently a well-know blog did a survey and found that 38 percent of SL businesses "are already preparing to launch their brand in Project Sansar".

 

Beyond the adage that you can say just about anything you want with statistics, the general announcement has been bugging me. I am guessing the folks that voted -- voted; that's not it. What I am wondering is HOW can folks "already" be preparing to launch their brand in Sansar  -- whether moving or adding a platform -- when we know so little.

 

I am certainly interested in seeing the tech and the possibilities, and while I like many snippets of info that have been released -- especially the echos of some Cloud Party ideas, I am certainly not committing myself blindly. Hi Fidelity sounded pretty exciting until I got in there with the first wave of the second wave of Alphas :D and we found out some head shaking things. Many departed.

 

So I am wondering if those folks that voted were actually content creators OR if they were "just folks" that like to take surveys and really aren't into the business side of VR. There were plenty of people who signed up for early content creator review at Sansar that had never made anything (they posted that info on other forums).

 

So??????   How many are already working in the new file types and actually feel committed.

 

Just wondering.

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Chic Aeon wrote:

Recently a well-know blog did a survey and found that
38 percent of SL businesses "are
already
preparing to launch their brand in Project Sansar".

Interesting, especially since it seems that less than one percent of SL business owners have even the faintest idea what creating content for Sansar implies. It seems most just assume they can simply bring their existing SL work methods and business models and keep running business as usual, only - for some unexplained irrational and miraculous reason - better, bigger and faster.

 


Chic Aeon wrote:

Hi Fidelity sounded pretty exciting until I got in there with the first wave of the second wave of Alphas
:D
and we found out some head shaking things. Many departed.

I certainly did. ;)


Chic Aeon wrote:

So??????   How many are already working in the new file types and actually feel committed.

Preparing? Yes, to some degree but committed? No way!

Far too many unknown factors: Who are the customers there? Experience creators only or will there be room for direct sales to end users too? What are the technical/performance requirements? Will Sansar succeed or will it flop? And perhaps even most important: considering Linden Lab's horrible record when it comes to handling b2b, do I really want to enter another venture where I have to rely on their whims?

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ChinRey wrote:


Far too many unknown factors: Who are the customers there? Experience creators only or will there be room for direct sales to end users too? What are the technical/performance requirements? Will Sansar succeed or will it flop? And perhaps even most important: considering Linden Lab's horrible record when it comes to handling b2b, do I really want to enter another venture where I have to rely on their whims?

Agreed on the unknowns and head shaking at "committed" folks numbers (still not buying that although about half of the people answering the survey said they had NO plans to join Sansar or HiFi).

 

From the official text and videos that I have perused I get the sense that the real intent was to make a space where other "big players" could create experiences that could be then monetized as gateways --- think maybe MadPea?   But along the way it seems like that idea has expanded as there have been mentions lately of "regular folks' (my quotes) being able to "create their own world" (pretty close to the video text as I remember LOL) by purchasing items and designing their own environment. So NOT just a world for content creators.  I can guarantee that doesn't work out well *wink*.

 

Some of the tech specifics have been known and made public for quite awhile. Different file types and programming languages but likely not all that far away from the tech we know or would be willing to learn.  There are a fair amount of ideas adopted from Cloud Party and I really loved Cloud Party -- so that is attractive to me. And I just like new adventures.

 

 But no, of course we don't know how well it will do and it takes TIME. The folks here thirteen years ago no doubt remember when the world was VERY young. That same pioneer spirit will need to be a part of the outlook of those that venture over.

 

Someone wrote awhile back that Linden Lab wanted SL's top 100 creators to move over (or add to their SL presence). I doubt that will happen -- certainly not in the beginning unless there are some incentives (disclosed or not). But personally I am interested to see the new world and discover if it fits  "me" :D.

 

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Chic Aeon wrote:

But along the way it seems like that idea has expanded as there have been mentions lately of "regular folks' (my quotes) being able to "create their own world" (pretty close to the video text as I remember LOL) by purchasing items and designing their own environment. So NOT just a world for content creators.  I can guarantee that doesn't work out well *wink*.

 Yes but a sim (or whatever the enclosed environments in Sansar are to be called) wil still have to be designed as a whole, not assembled from fragments. And that means there have to be strict limits to what resources/items each user of the environment can add to it.

This is the one factor so few people in Sl seem to to be able and willing to comprehend: the sheer amount of data required for a SL style virtual environment. Let me try to illustrate this:

Imagine a Linden Homes sim filled up with happy residents. 48 houses, each filled up with ... 20 pieces of furniture, each piece of funriture has two 1024x1024 res textures - and then of course a bunch of scripts and animations and such. That's several thousand assets and well over a gigabyte of raw data for the furniture only! Now, move this to a place where the hosues themselves and the surroundings around them are just as varied an un-optimized as the furnishing, put an avatar in each house, each avatar three time the complexity of the house it's in, expand the whole scene to 256 times the size...

We're actually dangerously close to talking about millions of assets and terabytes of raw data here. It all have to be retrieved, transferred and processed one way or another. And of course, the data has to be reprocessed somewhere between two and four times as often as it is in SL today.

I'm sure there is room for a lot of improvements to the three C's of auto-optimization (Culling, Caching and Compression) compared to how they're handled in SL. But a lot of improvements is not enough here. We'll need an earth shattering, revolutionary breakthrough in optimization technology and that's not going to happen this year.

Realistically, the only way to make a Sansar experience performance as intended is to make it the way modern high performance games are made: you start with a very strict resource budget, you sue instancing for all its worth and anything that won't fit the resource budget you jsut find a way to do without. In such an environment there is very little room for content chosen and added by each individual user.

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ChinRey wrote:


Chic Aeon wrote:

But along the way it seems like that idea has expanded as there have been mentions lately of "regular folks' (my quotes) being able to "create their own world" (pretty close to the video text as I remember LOL) by purchasing items and designing their own environment. So NOT just a world for content creators.  I can guarantee that doesn't work out well *wink*.

 Yes but a sim (or whatever the enclosed environments in Sansar are to be called) wil still have to be designed as a whole, not assembled from fragments. And that means there have to be strict limits to what resources/items each user of the environment can add to it.

This is the one factor so few people in Sl seem to to be able and willing to comprehend: the sheer amount of data required for a SL style virtual environment. Let me try to illustrate this:

Imagine a Linden Homes sim filled up with happy residents. 48 houses, each filled up with ... 20 pieces of furniture, each piece of funriture has two 1024x1024 res textures - and then of course a bunch of scripts and animations and such. That's several thousand assets and well over a gigabyte of raw data for the furniture only! Now, move this to a place where the hosues themselves and the surroundings around them are just as varied an un-optimized as the furnishing, put an avatar in each house, each avatar three time the complexity of the house it's in, expand the whole scene to 256 times the size...

We're actually dangerously close to talking about millions of assets and terabytes of raw data here. It all have to be retrieved, transferred and processed one way or another. And of course, the data has to be reprocessed somewhere between two and four times as often as it is in SL today.

I'm sure there is room for a lot of improvements to the three C's of auto-optimization (Culling, Caching and Compression) compared to how they're handled in SL. But a lot of improvements is not enough here. We'll need an earth shattering, revolutionary breakthrough in optimization technology and that's not going to happen this year.

Realistically, the only way to make a Sansar experience performance as intended is to make it the way modern high performance games are made: you start with a very strict resource budget, you sue instancing for all its worth and anything that won't fit the resource budget you jsut find a way to do without. In such an environment there is very little room for content chosen and added by each individual user.

Another factor that few in SL seem to be willing and able to comprehend is that the way Second Life is set up is not the only way to set up a SL style virtual environment.

I came to SL from the Sims series and still play it occasionally. The current version of The Sims is The Sims 4. In it, your "family" lives in a "world" that has layers like an onion.

The first "layer" is their immediate home lot. This can be fully customized and filled with various interactive furniture, etc, including custom content by others.

The next "layer" is the "neighborhood" around their lot. A Sim can walk around this neighborhood and interact with objects but can't change them. They can also see and walk around replicas of their neighbors' houses, which look identical to the customizable houses on the neigbors' lots. However, they can't see inside the house replicas and all the interior fittings aren't actually there. You can go into a neighbor's house, but you need to go through a loading screen and enter a separate simulation in order to do so.

The final "layer" is a 3D environment outside the neigborhood that can be seen but neither changed nor walked through and interacted with.

Each house in the neigborhood is a different simulation that needs to be loaded separately, but they all look like they're part of the same place. Now understand this - according to very plausible rumors, The Sims 4 was originally intended to be an online environment.  Your "neigbors" would have been controlled by different people in different places. They would have built their houses themselves and only the "impostor" replica versions would need to be sent to their neigbors. It was changed to a standalone game after the online-only SimCity reboot turned out to be a mess, and to accomodate the community of Simmers who tend to run to the control freak end of the spectrum.

Using similar technology, there's no reason your 48-house Linden Home region can't be actually 48 separate simulations that all look identical except for the houses themselves, and each one would only require a fraction of the resources of a whole SL style region. The Sims 4 runs well on my 2011 vintage laptop that barely breaks double digit framerates on low settings in a small skybox when I use it as my portable Second Life machine.

 

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I think the outcome of the survey is pretty predictible, and also accurate. There are not many bussiness models in SL. Those remainings are those who can't move to Sansar (rentals, Gor-related, everything that implies scripting in LSL, also sculpties builders, game makers, etc)

On the other side, the mesh builders probably voted out of SL. Better envirnonment promised by Sansar would be an increase on such bussiness. The software used for 3d modelling is the same. A higher budget for advertising Sansar over SL will also be noticeable :)

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Chic Aeon wrote:

Recently a well-know blog did a survey and found that
38 percent of SL businesses "are
already
preparing to launch their brand in Project Sansar".

38% of businesses or 38% of respondents to the survey? I think the former is absurdly difficult to estimate given the number of small businesses in SL, and how some are marketplace only, inworld only, both, or an abandoned marketplace shop that will exist into eternity. Respondents to the survey will probably favour those who are preparing or think they are, whatever that means.

So I guess I'm agreeing with you and just adding another question.

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I think they are preparing mentally - thinking about it because there is no way of knowing what conditions need to be met in order to launch a successful business. 

Or LL let 100 creators to play in Sansar and 38 of them decided to prepare their businesses to launch. 

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Tamara Artis wrote:

I think they are preparing mentally - thinking about it because there is no way of knowing what conditions need to be met in order to launch a successful business. 

Do I have a store name? Check

Do I have a logo? Check

Do I have any mesh skills? Check

Do I have a business plan? Ehm, business plan? I will just go there and see what the conditions are, I might continue my current SL business there.

Am I prepared? Yes!

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