Pick of the Day: Pictures from the Grand Opening of the Star Wars Production Art Exhibition at the Hollywood Art Museum

I was able to get into the Hollywood Art Museum experience a little bit early, and I have some exclusive first photos of this stunning new Star Wars production art exhibition! In my opinion, this is one of the very best experiences built in Sansar to date, and if you’ve never been to Sansar before, it’s absolutely worth setting up an account, going in-world, and seeing all the items on display in this wonderful museum experience up close! Best of all, if you have a VR headset and hand controllers, you can actually pick up many items to get a better look at them! (I bet you can’t do that in a real-world museum!)

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Entrance to the Exhibition
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The First Section of the Exhibition
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Creating A World Section of the Exhibition
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Beyond The Theater Section of the Exhibition
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Another View of the Creating A World Section
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SIN dressed as Darth Vader

Many items on display have an audio track that you can invoke to get a bit of an explanation of what you’re seeing (nobody else can hear it, just you!). If you’re clumsy and drop one of the collection items on the floor, you can hit a reset button on the pedestal to put it back in its proper place.

Just drop whatever you’re doing and come see this exhibition! Even if you’re not a Star Wars fan, it’s a wonderfully designed and executed experience, an excellent demonstration of Sansar’s potential for virtual museums, and absolutely worth your time.

Atlas Hopping, Episode Sixteen!

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Ebbe (the man in the beanie, jeans and grey Sansar T-shirt) talks with Drax and the other Atlas Hoppers at 114 Harvest

We had a special guest join today’s episode of Atlas Hopping! Linden Lab’s CEO, Ebbe Altberg, came along with us. Today we visited four experiences:

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Nic’s Freebie World

Ebbe told us he expects to be hanging out in-world and at meetups a lot more often in future, which is good to hear!

Here’s Drax’s livestream of today’s event:

 

Pick of the Day: M2D City

M2D City by Mario2 Helstein is an imaginative futuristic cityscape, complete with flying cars.

M2D City 1

There’s even a subspace garage, where a door opens to release a flying car.

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Lots of night-time neon in this experience! It’s fun to wander around and gawk at the fantastically-shaped skyscrapers and the traffic flying around at all levels of the sky.

Creator Controversy Over a Planned Sansar Feature: Should Consumers Be Able to Edit Materials on Purchased Items?

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Well, there has been quite the lively discussion over on the official Sansar Discord channels! Busiest I’ve ever seen it on there. Galen explains the reason for the kerfuffle in this post on the General Discussion forums on the Sansar website:

During this morning’s product meetup, there was some discussion of a forthcoming feature allowing users to edit the materials on items they’ve purchased in the Store. This will be limited to items placed in a scene and not include avatar attachments. Moreover, creators still can’t take items they have modified in a scene back into their inventory for reuse. So it’s limited.

Nevertheless, several people were concerned about the idea of their products being altered without their permission.

I honestly don’t see a problem, but I wanted to bring the debate up here in hopes that those who have misgivings about this new feature would explain their concerns.

…

I guess my first thought is that it’s not illegal to add stickers to a new laptop or paint your dining table some other color. So why not expect customers to modify things they’ve bought in Sansar? Is that somehow different from the basic fair-use concept that we’re used to with most products we buy?

I think the most obvious objection is one of representation. Someone does a shabby job modifying something they bought from you and now that shabby version of your product represents your brand and could reflect badly.

Some creators are upset about this planned functionality in the next Sansar release (still slated for mid-December). Debi Baskerville weighs in:

First, this should be a right controlled by the creator and not given away by Linden Lab to whoever buys an item.

Second, if a creator wants to grant that permission then a UV map should be provided to the purchaser for which a higher price could and rightfully be charged by the creator for the UV map.

I hear arguments against allowing for personal volume controls .. not allowing people to fly and so forth because it takes away the rights of the creator of an experience. How is this different? The creator of any mesh model should have the right to set the permissions of the items they sell. Period! And until that mechanism is in place doing this is much too premature. We don’t need the cart before the horse!

From a customer viewpoint, I know I regularly tint objects I buy in SL; however, I nearly never retexture anything mesh because there’s much too much work involved. The only reason tinting works in SL is because you can select faces and tint those face independently of other faces on the object. That won’t work in Sansar. So tinting in Sansar is rather useless.

I see no value in being able to retexture or retint any objects in Sansar unless the objects are made specifically with that in mind, such as the building sets that have basic shapes and sizes for component building.

So, what do you think? Sound off, either in the posted link to Galen’s thread (see above), or in the comments to this blogpost!