Once again, Inara Pey blogs the Sansar Product Meetups held on Tuesday, March 6th and Thursday, March 8th.
Day: March 10, 2018
Atlas Hopping with Berry and Drax, Episode 29!
It’s that time again!
Today we visited the following four Sansar experiences:
- The Radioactive Island, by Radioactive Rosca
- Ready Player One: Aech’s Garage, by Sansar Studios
- Coffee with Dinosaurs, by Zenpoly Baker
- and wrapping up at Alfy’s Arena Live Music Stage, for a performance by Wolfie Starfire, a well-known singer/songwriter and guitar player from Second Life!
Strawberry’s livestream is here:
And Drax’s livestream is here:
A First Look at STYLY
The VR-capable virtual worlds marketspace is getting even more crowded! This past week, I heard about another new product called STYLY. They bill themselves as “a platform for creating high quality, beautiful VR spaces without any coding”. They offer a web-based 3D scene editor called the STYLY Editor, which is supposedly drag-and-drop (I haven’t really played much with it yet). Apparently, you can import assets from Sketchfab, 3D Warehouse, the Unity Asset Store, YouTube, SoundCloud, MAYA, Blender, SketchUp and even Google Tilt Brush / Blocks.
Here’s what the default template looks like when you first load up the STYLY Editor:
Clicking on the Insert Asset button in the upper left-hand corner brings up a menu of things you can bring into your scene: models, images, music, videos, even PDF files.
Scenes created in STYLY are published to the STYLY Gallery, and can be viewed using their WebView web browser-based tool (just click the little cube in the bottom right-hand corner of the gallery entry; see the second picture below for an example). You can also visit scenes using your HTC Vive virtual reality headset (support for Oculus Rift, Gear VR, and Google Daydream is promised soon).
There’s some seriously weird and trippy stuff! There are already over 1,000 scenes to explore. Note that the STYLY software is still in beta, and some scenes seem to take a long time to load in the WebView. Here’s an example of an art installation:
And here’s a fairly realistic-looking beach scene, which appears to have moving water:
You can watch more videos on their Vimeo page. There’s also a STYLY User Group on Facebook. I can’t wait for them to add Oculus Rift support so I can try them out!
Sansar Pick of the Day: Avalon Lounge
One of the often-heard complaints in Sansar is that there is no designated central meeting area. Sinespace has their Welcome Centre with greeters, AltspaceVR has their campfire where you can chat and toast marshmallows, and for a while High Fidelity used a Welcome Wagon concept, rotating between six different HiFi domains every two hours (I think they’ve replaced that with a single location now, though). Some people felt that having a common gathering spot would make it easier for avatars to meet each other.
Jenn, the Community Manager for Sansar, and Ebbe, Linden Lab’s CEO, both rightfully pointed out that there was nothing stopping any of us from creating such a space ourselves. And so David Hall has decided to create the Avalon Lounge, a comfortable, spacious lobby with helpful teleporters to other popular fantasy and sci-fi Sansar experiences.
It’s a large circular space on three levels. Flying cars arrive and depart from the uppermost level (these are actually teleporters to two of C3rb3rus’ experiences, 2077 and Darkwood Forest).
On the two lower levels, there are teleporters to other experiences located around the perimeter. Each has a sign indicating the destination.
And these are some wonderfully creative teleporter portals that David has made! Check out the video of them in action:
A nice touch is the addition of various objects around the lounge which remind you of other popular Sansar destinations, such as a statue I recognized from the Urban Art Experience, and arcade games from 2077. Thoughtful additions, and evidence of the care that David took in pulling all this together.
Vanity Fair is wearing an appropriate astronaut outfit created by the talented Nya Alchemi:
- the Atomic Age Space Suit (S$150)
- the Atomic Age Helmet (S$100)
- the Atomic Age Jet Pack and straps (S$100)
- and the Atomic Age Shooter (S$50)