Today’s theme was creepy places to visit. Ebbe Altberg (CEO of Linden Lab, the makers of Sansar) joined us again. The Atlas Hoppers visited the following five Sansar experiences:
Here’s Drax’s livestream of the event (Strawberry is still on vacation):
A real-life real estate company is using VirBELA for their virtual office space, the Oddity Central website reports:
eXp Realty, one of the world’s fastest growing and most successful real estate companies, has become famous for not investing in any actual real-estate, opting instead for virtual reality offices that allow its agents and brokers to interact and socialize from anywhere around the globe.
Glenn Sanford, eXp Realty’s founder and CEO, founded the company a decade ago, soon after the real estate market collapse of 2007. He couldn’t afford to buy or rent office space, and figured that focusing on a system that allowed his team to work remotely would help the company avert disaster, should another real-estate crisis occur in the future. So eXp Realty relied on services like Google Docs and spreadsheets, project management solutions like Trello, and communications app Slack to help its workforce work together without actually sharing the same space. But three years ago, the company took this remote collaboration system to a whole new level, by building a campus complete with offices, meeting rooms, auditoriums, lounges and more, in virtual reality.
Now, I do take issue with calling the VirBELA platform “virtual reality”. You can’t actually visit the eXp virtual offices in a VR headset, which is my definition of social VR. I would call VirBELA, like Second Life, a “virtual world” rather than “virtual reality”.
Apart from a small leased space in Bellingham, Washington, that acts as a headquarters but is actually just a storage space full of file cabinets, and a few empty locations in places where physical addresses are mandated by law, eXp Realty only exists in the virtual world. The real irony is that the whole purpose of the company is to help people buy and sell real world properties, like houses and office buildings.
“The virtual campus is a big part of our growth engine. If we were to have the constraints of physical offices, the growth we’ve had simply wouldn’t be possible,” Scott Petronis, chief technology officer of eXp Realty, told Singularity Hub.
This is quite the marketing coup for VirBELA, which is a much smaller platform than Second Life. Historically, Linden Lab has found it difficult to attract and retain real-life business clients in Second Life. I’m sure that they’re not too happy that they missed out on providing virtual world services to a big, profitable company like eXp Realty.
There’s been quite a bit of discussion and debate over on the official Sansar Discord channels about whether or not people have been creating alts (alternative avatars) in order to avoid paying Linden Lab for a Sansar subscription.
You see, every avatar counts as one Sansar account. And every account is allowed to build up to three Sansar experiences for free. If you want more than that, then you’re supposed to pony up for a paid subscription (here’s a chart of the levels):
Some people who do have paid subscriptions have rightfully pointed out that there’s nothing stopping someone from creating multiple alts and using them to make as many free experiences as they want, without ever paying for a subscription.
I come to Sansar from Second Life, where, as I have written about before, I have created (and deleted) dozens of alts for various purposes. So, for me, it was natural to want to create an alt (Vanity Fair) for the modeling of female fashion for this blog. It’s not because I wanted to create more experiences for free (Vanity is using zero), but because I wanted to keep a separate female inventory of clothes. What Sansar really needs to implement sooner rather than later is proper inventory folders. Having to scroll and scroll and scroll through my clothing folder in the Lookbook is getting ridiculous.
Another reason people create alt accounts is to work on projects together. For example, when Tyler Scarborough created the set for the Metaverse Newscast, he asked me to create an account that he could use to build the experience, which I did (this was back in August 2017, which I believe was even before Linden Lab had set up their subscription levels plan). Sharing an account was, and still is, a necessity for most collaborative work right now. Until Linden Lab gives us the proper tools, it’s the only option we have to work together on projects, and they know that.
As my academic research project at work, I am creating a user-navigable, three-dimensional version of the Mathematical Atlas website (a guide to the mathematics literature for undergraduate and graduate students originally created by Dr. David Rusin), using Sansar as a software platform. For this research project, I created a separate account, for two reasons:
At the moment, the only experience I have for my research account is an unpublished empty flat plane. I have no plans to publish an experience for my research project for at least a year, and probably longer (my research time and money are both limited).
So in total, I have four Sansar accounts and only two published Sansar experiences: Ryan’s Garden and the Metaverse Newscast studio. That’s not likely to change in the near future. If at any point I go over the 3 experience limit, then I will pay Linden Lab for a subscription. I think that’s only fair.
So, you see, there are some good reasons for people to create alts. But that still leaves a potential loophole for unscrupulous people to exploit, and a potential revenue problem for Linden Lab. How to fix it? Here are five suggestions: