- I mean, if it works for you,
it doesn't work for everybody,
but if it works for you,
and you have the right kind of,
especially for me, if you
have like a social interaction
with someone in VR, then you can't,
you cannot come away
with any other conclusion
that this is gonna like
significantly change
how people interact and
do things in the future.
[Laughing]
- [Character] The meaning of life...
- It's freeing, it's very freeing
when you're an avatar
and you're in a space
that kind of defies reality,
so you feel like you could
be anyone or be anything
and do anything you want to.
So when I'm in there and
I see people around me
I much more freely talk to people,
I'll do like crazy dance
moves and things like that.
Things I would never do in real life.
[Characters Chatting]
- How do you go to school,
how do you go to work,
how do you get trained, how
do you learn a language,
how do you meet
your loved one,
how do you interact with your friend,
how do you, like, basically
everything human beings do
you can do virtually.
I've only thought of
two things you can't do,
actually produce an offspring,
and eating.
- [Narrator] This is Linden
Lab, creators of Second Life.
- I signed up for Second
Life about a year ago.
Back then, my life was so great
that I literally wanted a second one.
In my second life, I was
also a paper salesman,
and I was also named Dwight.
Absolutely everything was the same.
Except I could fly.
- [Narrator] We sat down
with some of the team
to hear about their
latest endeavor, Sansar.
- So, Sansar is a...
So it's Sanskrit word for world,
or Hindi, world, Hindu word as well
meaning world or universe,
and there was a region
inside of Second Life
called Sansara, which is another spelling
of the word also used.
So the code name for
Sansar started as Sansar.
- [Sean] The dream of Sansar, I think,
is a user-generated universe,
a new universe that's user generated.
- Not even thinking VR at that point.
Just kind of a new virtual world engine,
y'know, from, based off the
learning from Second Life.
- One of the fastest growing
sites on the internet
is a 3D world, and it's not a game.
- So this was like five years ago,
and I think that's when,
a few months into it,
that sort of the Oculus event happened.
- That's kind of our bread
and butter as a company.
- [Ebbe] Facebook bought
Oculus, for a crazy amount.
- Two billion dollars for
the privately held Oculus VR.
- Which in the long run
might not be so crazy,
well, y'know, I'm betting
it won't be crazy,
well it'll look like a great buy.
- VR's gonna change our
lives in every single way,
quiet honestly.
I was, when I first interviewed
with Ebbe three years ago,
I hadn't done much VR, and I got in
and I met him on Mars.
And he was in some other
part of the building.
And it was transformative,
and I just suddenly saw the future.
- (mumbling) there was hype
and how quickly it was gonna change.
- [Announcer] We think
we're at a tipping point
where the devices are at
a certain price point,
the consumer interest is
now starting to build.
- But having been around for a long time,
you kinda know that people overreact
on the what's possible in
the short term, and sort of
underreact to what's possible
in the long term, so.
That's why we made it
so that Sansar could
be both desktop and VR.
- People can import models into Sansar,
so there's gonna be FBX or OBJ.
People can import scripts,
people can import animations.
- [Ebbe] Giving people
an economy to sort of
path real, y'know meaningful
lives within that world.
- So, in theory, the only thing we manage
is the exchange rate and it's set.
So 100 Sansar dollars to every dollar,
and then free for all.
It's a y'know, market economy,
y'know come in and make money.
- [Ebbe] Creating that
entire avatar system's
and people can create an identity.
- We wanted it to look stylized
but not overly stylized where
it kinda looked cartoony.
- Get the scale of performance
to make it be sort of
large and magnificent,
but also performant enough
that you can get your 90 FPS.
- It's a real challenge
to fit AI, animation,
physics, rendering, all into
much smaller time-slice.
About 11 milliseconds.
- There'll be a lot of
virtual worlds over time,
a lot of them.
I mean you already have y'know,
between Second Life, and Sansar,
and High Fidelity and
VR Chat, and Rec Room.
I think virtual
interaction will displace
physical interaction
more and more and more and more over time.
So I mean, you watch younger generation,
the amount of screen time,
versus older generation.
I mean that's just kind
of a trend you're seeing.
And as these technologies
become more and more
comfortable, easier to
use, more affordable,
and the experiences are more relevant,
it's just gonna continue.
And that trend is
obviously gonna continue,
it's not like shit is gonna get worse.
It's just gonna get better.
- [Sean] If a popular
gaming engine updates,
everybody's content on that engine
will have to be updated,
and then they have to rebuild it
or maybe its broken forever.
So we didn't want that to happen
so we built our own engine.
- We kinda give people a blank slate.
When you give people a blank slate,
you add complexity because
they have to fill it
with something, whereas just
giving them pre-made worlds
to play in or socialize in.
- I dunno, this is how I would start,
if I was just a user and
wanted to make a scene.
Just come up with ideas on my
own or brainstorm with friends
something that could be cool.
Then you find a template
that you would think would be
a decent starting point,
and then from there
you would go onto the Sansar store,
and y'know if you come up with,
oh, I wanna do a medieval fantasy thing.
Go onto the store and just trying to find
what you can that can fit into that.
If you're someone who's
pretty adept at 3D, like,
you could start making
some of your own stuff,
(mumbling), things like that.
So just kind of have an idea of like,
what you want your scene to be,
the intention that you have
will help guide you through it.
- You gotta think about
where people can go,
what they can see, how they can interact
with physical objects, how they,
how you can make it so that they feel
like they're in their avatar,
how do you make it so that
your avatar is a T-rex,
little short arms, that they feel
like they're controlling
those arms, one to one.
- [Colin] We wanted it to look stylized
but not overly stylized where
it kinda looked cartoony.
- Hello
- So it was sort of this,
but we didn't want it to make,
to be aiming for like a realism,
where then you get the uncanny valley
and then they just feel odd and off.
- We definitely tried to
provide the possibilities for a lot
of different types of worlds.
As opposed to like a type of a world.
Remains to be seem if that's
a winning formula or not.
- [Narrator] One of the
formulas Sansar is betting on
is their in-game economy.
- Quality creators are gonna want
something in return for the work they do.
So we put in from the beginning
that people can buy and sell things.
- [Off-Screen Player] Just trying to,
put some stuff on the
store before I go to bed.
Be productive.
- If it's a shirt or a
palm tree or whatever,
then sell it on the marketplace,
and as I accumulate Sansar dollars,
at the end of the day I
can get those converted
back to real money, so I go
buy myself a real hammer.
- I create, let's say this chair.
It's this amazing chair
and everyone wants it.
Well, someone who makes
houses starts selling houses,
loves this chair, and starts
putting it in chain economies,
supply chain economy, puts
the chair in their house,
and they sell it, you get paid
for every chair they sell.
So you can imagine as it grows
and you're a popular
merchant, that it's not about
you anymore, selling this
chair from your store,
it's about all the other people
who are selling it for you.
- Fairly common thing to see in games,
but you usually can't convert,
the loot you've collected
over time to real money
and some are fiddling with it,
you see Roblox do pay out to some degree.
I know Minecraft is experimenting
with stuff like that,
and there will be more.
- So in Second Life, which
is a 15 year old product,
there are millionaires.
So there are people that make clothing,
and their furniture, et cetera.
So Sansar is obviously much
earlier in its life cycle,
so we're not paying out millions
of dollars yet to people,
but I think the opportunity is there
when the users start coming in,
at least more than we have now,
to get to that kind of scale.
And if you come in early,
you're able to kind of
set yourself up as an early creator
and someone who creates whatever it is,
clothes, props,
sunglasses, whatever you what.
- So we have huge
concerts sometimes, right,
where we, Sansar is becoming
the future of events,
that's sort of like our goal, right,
we wanna, we want people
to come into Sansar
to do things that they can't do,
or don't have time to do, or don't have
access to it in real life,
such as go to concerts, right.
We had a, these Dutch
DJ's come, Blasterjaxx.
- We definitely been
thinking about scalability
from the beginning, that was one of those
key differentiating
things from Second Life.
In Second Life, regions sort
of have a geographic context.
Just like a physical space.
Like we could not put a
million people in this office,
right, we would run out of space.
So Sansar we made it so can
instance worlds on the fly,
so if a lot of people are in,
let's say this is the
world, there's room here,
and it gets full, we'll just
make a copy and start fiddling.
- We have smaller game,
smaller community stuff
where the existing community gets together
to just hang out.
So sometimes we'll do what
you do with your friends,
we'll go watch movies and
we'll go bowling in world,
or sometimes we just sit around and talk,
I mean it's, sometimes the
event is just getting together.
- I think one of my favorite
moments was World Oceans Day,
we had a whole ton of people
raising money for a great cause
and we were all these little
baby sharks on the beach,
and I just, the whole time
walking up and down the beach,
and just like saying hi to people
and talking about the oceans and y'know,
how we need to conserve the life within it
and you just find a commonality, I think,
when you talk to folks.
- [Character Off-Screen] Does anybody here
know how to fix a broken pumpkin?
[Laughter]
- Eat it?
- With a pumpkin patch.
[Characters Complaining]
- Galileo, how much are you
paying the comedy act here?
- 13 dollars
[Laughter]
- Ultimately, you wanna
have like a huge amount
of different types of subject matter to,
lot of different people
being in this world
for completely different reasons.
Just like in the physical world,
like we all have different interests,
we all have different hobbies,
we all have different friends,
we all have different cultures,
we all have different
all kinds of things so.
- Trying to get to the meta-verse.
- You get out of it what you put into it,
y'know, what are you gonna do
when you put that headset on.
You could go solo, you could go explore,
you could do questing, or you
could sit in the circle hub,
(character laughter drowns out sentence).
And maybe you do both.
But in the end it's up to you.
- It is a tool where you can
push hard in one direction
on whether it's like
a cell shaded,
very stylized world,
or, y'know, a more realistic looking thing
like we did for Ready Player One.
- It's both a place for people who can
express themselves
creatively, find themselves,
and then also, meet people.
[Characters Chatting]
- The most interesting is,
I mean it's great to hear
about people making money and stuff,
but it's people that's just like,
I was able to actually have a
better life because of this.
And whether it's the
woman with Parkinson's
that couldn't really do a
whole lot in physical space,
but in virtual worlds you can go dancing
and swimming and horseback riding and,
do all these things
that just made her have
a fulfilled, interesting life.
That's awesome.
- [Player] Y'know we
(murmurs), still early access.
As much as we love to complain,
but it's amazing place.
- We may have left behind
some key secret ingredients
on Second Life that did not
get embedded into Sansar,
that is kind of the difference between
success and fail, remains be seen.
Because it's not like we took all of it,
we took certain concepts over
and added some new ones,
but left some behind,
and is this the right formula?
It's not 'til we get to
like 10x or something
that you go okay, this
investments was worth it.
Only time will tell.
[Guitar Music]
