Project Sansar from Second Life creator Linden Lab is a new virtual world, built for virtual reality which promises world building tools capable of generating scenes like the one featured here which was created in “just a few hours”.

See Also: First Glimpse of Linden Lab’s Next-gen Virtual World, Project Sansar
See Also: First Glimpse of Linden Lab’s Next-gen Virtual World, Project Sansar

Project Sansar is a virtual world project that’s remained largely in stealth since in inception at Linden Lab. A new screenshot has now been released, which demonstrates the visual fidelity capable for those willing to invest just a few hours with the new application’s world building tools.

The screenshot is a high resolution version featured in a recent tweet from Linden Lab CEO Abbe Altberg, who states that the world featured in the image – a realistic multi-user Mars environment – took “just a few hours to create”.

Project Sansar is in development for the PC and has confirmed support the Oculus Rift at this time. Altberg recently spoke to Road to VR to describe the motivation behind Project Sansar.

“Second Life is going to have its 12th birthday this year. The way Second Life was built was quite substantially ahead of its time,” Altberg told me. “It achieved something that, back then, was borderline nuts to even try to accomplish…. to retro-fit SL, to modernize that stack to become as performant as you need it to be would be a massive undertaking, and we decided it would be easier and less disruptive to start anew, and leave SL as it is for those that love it for what it is.”

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To emphasise, the screenshot is merely an example produced by Linden Lab to demonstrate what’s capable with the tools on offer in Project Sansar. A spokesperson stated to Road to VR recently that “We won’t actually create content nor will we dictate a cohesive style for Sansar experiences; instead, users create the experiences and they’ll be extremely diverse in type and style vs. a singular cohesive “game” world. These [screenshots] are merely to show the diverse range of experiences our current alpha users are creating and how much detail you can derive from our platform.”

Release date for Project Sansar is as yet unknown, but with 3 major players releasing consumer grade VR headsets this year, we’re hoping to hear more about that some time soon.

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Paul James
Based in the UK, Paul has been immersed in interactive entertainment for the best part of 27 years and has followed advances in gaming with a passionate fervour. His obsession with graphical fidelity over the years has had him branded a ‘graphics whore’ (which he views as the highest compliment) more than once and he holds a particular candle for the dream of the ultimate immersive gaming experience. Having followed and been disappointed by the original VR explosion of the 90s, he then founded RiftVR.com to follow the new and exciting prospect of the rebirth of VR in products like the Oculus Rift. Paul joined forces with Ben to help build the new Road to VR in preparation for what he sees as VR’s coming of age over the next few years.
  • Kenny

    “A few hours to create” in the same way multiplayer maps for the new Doom game can be created in a few hours also. Nevermind that the prefab pieces parts assets took a couple hundred man years to assemble and each level looks cut from the same cloth…

  • draxtor

    In re SL [and Ebbe can be heard on the latest “Lab Chat” in detail about this and other topics http://draxfiles.com/2016/01/22/show-101-lab-chat-returns/ ] = at least a third of the company is actively adding features and fixing performance issues with SL.

    So: yes – SL is what it is – a gigantic world built and monetized by the user’s imagination – and it will remain that but there is also substantial improvement being made by a team of very smart engineers!

    Case in point: Project Bento adding over 100 bones to the SL skeleton and allowing unprecedented content creations. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WEzfh1S5Y6Q

    The video has relatively little new content because this was just released a few weeks ago but watch the power of regular folks thriving in a democratized content creation environment at work: I’d venture to guess LL has a big leg up in the competition creating a similarly revolutionary space for VR as well….

    • SC

      Project Bento should take over all of SL and redo the whole thing, because as it stands, SL itself looks dated, tired, pixelated (is horribly laggy, even though it’s practically an entire ghost town now) and like it was created by kids with little to no programming knowledge. I refuse to even waste my time on Sansar.