Sansar: Linden's Attempt to Revamp Virtual Worlds

Steve Anderson : End Game
Steve Anderson
The Video Store Guy
| The video game industry has gone from a mole hill to a mountain in no time flat, Chris DiMarco is your Sherpa as you endeavor to scale Mount “Everquest”

Sansar: Linden's Attempt to Revamp Virtual Worlds

There's no doubt that Linden Labs has done some amazing things when it comes to the virtual world concept. In many ways, Second Life was one of the first big virtual worlds around, and though it's not as popular as it once was, it's still got the world's imagination in tow. Now, Linden Labs is set to try again with its new advance: Project Sansar.

So what is Project Sansar? Based on what the early word suggests, Project Sansar is a spectacularly ambitious project that features virtual reality operations to take what was already a surprisingly immersive world and make it even more so. Basically, Project Sansar is to  virtual reality what Second Life was to regular computers.

If this sounds ambitious, prepare to have your mind blown wide open: Project Sansar isn't the creation of a far-off age. Creators are already working to get early access to Project Sansar's operations, and even those early adopters won't have much of a lead over the competition. The whole thing opens up to everybody starting early in 2017.

Linden Labs CEO Ebbe Altberg described it further, saying "Sansar is more of a platform where every experience is an entry point in itself. It’s a little like WordPress. If you build a blog on WordPress, you are not part of a WordPress world. You can easily move from one experience to another. We want to make it easy to attract your own followers to your experience. There’s no need for a continuous geography for all of these experiences. It’s a much bigger surface area exposed to the outside world, rather than just Second Life.”

That's an extremely exciting prospect, and one that actually may have more legs than anyone suspects. See, right now, the kind of platforms that can run VR are fairly short on variety, and very, very long on cost. Which means, in turn, that there probably won't be many users of Sansar...at first. However, as costs drop--and with computers, you know they do; Moore's Law is still in play on at least some level--so too will the numbers of users rise. Sansar will benefit from a continual increase of new users that can step in after the fact and join in the fun, meaning there's no big slug of users to bog the system down and then fade away later, like what happened with EA's SimCity release not so long ago.

Only time will tell just works out for Linden, but there's every possibility that Sansar may just end up the next big thing after all.


Featured Events