Tag: Sansar

Editorial: Why Conferences Held in AltspaceVR and VirBELA Have Been So Successful—And What Lessons Other Social VR Platforms and Virtual Worlds Can Learn from Their Success

Please note that I am taking a vacation from the blog for the next two to three weeks, except for sponsored blogposts (and the occasional editorial such as this).

The coronavirus pandemic has led to the cancellation of hundreds of real-life conferences, and led to a surge in business for platforms catering to virtual conferences, such as VirBELA and AltspaceVR (Photo by chuttersnap on Unsplash).

This week, I have been attending various presentations and events at the Immersive Learning Research Network’s 2020 virtual conference. Most of the sessions are taking place in a white-label* version of the virtual world VirBELA, and it would appear that this world will remain in place after the iLRN 2020 conference ends, as a meeting place for various groups of researchers.

The iLRN 2020 organizers are also using FRAME (a VirBELA project) for virtual poster sessions: smaller group gatherings around particular research topics. These poster sessions were accessible right from a browser on desktop, mobile, or even in virtual reality (more information on that can be found here).

The popular success of this conference in VirBELA (with well over 200 people in-world at any given time), plus the associated social events taking place in AltspaceVR, has got me thinking about another highly successful conference which I attended (and presented at) back in February 2020, the first-ever Educators in VR 2020 International Summit. In that case, most of the conference sessions were held in AltspaceVR, and the Educators in VR conference was really an opportunity for the platform to shine (there were also events taking place in ENGAGE, rumii, Mozilla Hubs, and Somnium Space, with livestreaming to other platforms).

What were the factors that led to such successful virtual conferences in AltspaceVR and in VirBELA?

  1. Scalability of the Platform: In both cases, you could pack a large number of people into a shared virtual space. This was especially notable in the case of VirBELA, where the simple (but still highly customizable) avatars, coupled with many possible graphics quality settings in the client software, meant that you could have well north of a hundred avatars attending a single session without noticeable performance issues. And AltspaceVR’s cartoony avatars serve an important purpose: making the platform much easier to render on less powerful computers and devices.
  2. Broader Device Support: VirBELA offers both Windows and Mac clients, and their Intercom Apps are compatible with iPhone, iPad, and even iPod touch! And AltspaceVR boasts support for a wide array of devices: when I last compiled my comparison chart of 16 social VR platforms last November, the list included Oculus Rift, Oculus Quest, Oculus Go, HTC Vive, Valve Index, Windows MR, Gear VR, and Google Daydream (please see the image below, taken from their website).
  3. Better Features: VirBELA is stuffed to the brim with useful features which make hosting a conference a breeze (e.g. the ability to quickly shift focus to one of three different presentation screens, or the podium/stage). AltspaceVR has also had a whole bunch of new features added to make holding events much easier (such as the ability to mute the audience, a raise your hand feature to ask questions, etc.).
  4. Responsive Support: It’s very clear that, in the cases of both the Educators in VR and iLRN 2020 conferences, that the platforms were heavily involved in providing support and troubleshooting to the conference organizers. Such support, often offered in real time, is critical to the success of any virtual conference.

So, what lessons can other social VR platforms and virtual worlds learn from these successes, as they seek out new customers in the pandemic-fueled boom in virtual conferences?

First: You need to find ways to work around the technical limits in the number of people who can gather in a virtual space. For example, Sansar is absolutely gorgeous, and I could see it being used for conferences—if you could get more than 30 avatars into a single world! (However, Sansar does allow for multiple broadcast instances as a way to get around that limit.)

Second Life also has significant technical limitations on the number of avatars you can pack onto one sim before it heaves in protest (again, for major events such as the Live Stage at the SL 17th Birthday celebrations, a stage is located at the intersection of four sims to allow a larger audience).

In March 2018, I wrote an earlier blogpost about simultaneous avatar capacity per region in various virtual worlds here (this information is now probably out of date, though). VirBELA’s and AltspaceVR’s low-poly avatars make it much easier to gather a larger crowd at events in a single region than the beautiful but high-poly, poorly-optimized mesh avatars of Second Life. Sinespace’s Breakroom offers users the choice of dressable, higher-poly avatars or one-piece, non-customizable lower-poly avatars, which I presume will render better.

To summarize this first point: the more users you can bring together, the better.

Second: The more devices and means of access you can support, the more likely your platform will appeal to a larger number of people. As the team developing Sansar and the old High Fidelity learned to their chagrin, betting the farm on high-powered, PC VR users was a tactical error. The majority of people attending these conferences do not have a VR headset, using desktop computers with flatscreen monitors and even in some cases mobile devices like tablets and cellphones. You need to meet the users wherever they are.

Third: If you expect to attract the conferences, you will need to offer the features that conference organizers are looking for. Breakroom is an example of a product which offers a wide variety of features targeted to business, education, and conference customers. There is nothing worse than to try a jerry-rig workarounds for the limitations of a platform, trust me.

Finally: You need to provide real-time, responsive customer support. This is one area where many platforms simply fail to deliver the level of concierge support required to host conferences. For example, both of the recent Blockdown virtual crypto conferences (which were held in a special, white-label version of Sinespace) were well-staffed with Sinespace employees and volunteers to ensure that things ran smoothly. It’s a cost of doing business if you want to attract business.

If you were to hold a conference in Sansar (which you wouldn’t, because of the limitations outlined in points 1, 2, and 3 above), and if something were to go wrong, you would probably have some trouble getting the real-time support you needed from the team at Wookey (although I assume it will be an all-hands-on-deck situation for the upcoming Lost Horizon festival; Sansar simply cannot afford to fumble this opportunity to showcase their platform to the world).

For example, the Lost World Global Music Festivals two-day event (which has the great misfortune to be scheduled the exact same weekend as the Lost Horizon event), is having some trouble getting the word out, and frankly, Wookey-owned Sansar should be providing assistance in both promotion and technical support of events held on their platform, instead of relying on unpaid and overworked volunteers (I would hope that at least someone at Wookey is tasked with tech support if something goes wrong that weekend, but I suspect that the company’s entire focus will be on the Lost Horison festival, instead of the competing Lost World event).

In short, bare-bones customer support sends a message: you’re on your own. Corporate users such as conference organizers expect a higher standard of service, otherwise they will take their business elsewhere.

For example, ENGAGE has landed lucrative business with HTC (including a partnership as part of the Vive XR Suite) as a direct result of the successful HTC Vive Ecosystem virtual conference held on that platform in March this year. Sinespace also seems to be well-attuned to the needs of the business and conference market with their new Breakroom product (and, of course, their support for white-label corporate and conference use of their flagship Sinespace product).

The success of platforms such as AltspaceVR and VirBELA leads to positive word of mouth among the conference attendees, who can see the potential applications, and which naturally leads to increased business opportunities; it’s a virtuous circle.

The question is: will Sansar and other social VR platforms and virtual worlds pay attention to the lessons being taught by the highly successful and popular virtual conferences held this year by a number of platforms?

*White labeling is when a product or service removes their brand and logo from the end product and instead uses the branding requested by the purchaser. Recent examples include the iLRN 2020 conference (held in a white-label version of VirBELA) and the Blockdown series of conferences (hosted in a white-label version of Sinespace). This is a feature that is attractive to corporate and conference customers, which is not offered by many social VR platforms and virtual worlds to date.

UPDATED! #BlackLivesMatter: Meditating on Race, Racism, and Social VR Platforms and Virtual Worlds

Image source: Black Lives Matter

The problem is that white people see racism as conscious hate, when racism is bigger than that. Racism is a complex system of social and political levers and pulleys set up generations ago to continue working on the behalf of whites at other people’s expense, whether whites know/like it or not. Racism is an insidious cultural disease. It is so insidious that it doesn’t care if you are a white person who likes black people; it’s still going to find a way to infect how you deal with people who don’t look like you.

Yes, racism looks like hate, but hate is just one manifestation. Privilege is another. Access is another. Ignorance is another. Apathy is another. And so on. So while I agree with people who say no one is born racist, it remains a powerful system that we’re immediately born into. It’s like being born into air: you take it in as soon as you breathe.

It’s not a cold that you can get over. There is no anti-racist certification class. It’s a set of socioeconomic traps and cultural values that are fired up every time we interact with the world. It is a thing you have to keep scooping out of the boat of your life to keep from drowning in it. I know it’s hard work, but it’s the price you pay for owning everything.

—Scott Woods, African-American poet and blogger (source)

I have been avoiding the news, because I was afraid it would depress me even more than I already am, but I had a severe case of insomnia last night, and I woke up at 2:00 a.m., unable to fall back asleep.

I blogged a few items that were on my to-do list, then I lay down on the sofa and opened up the Apple News app on my iPhone and read all the latest news, about the outpouring of anger and outrage in many cities across America, about injustice and police brutality. About a President who had peaceful protesters tear-gassed and shot at with rubber bullets, so that he could pose with a Bible as a prop, in front a church for a photo op. Rev. Michael Cohen reported in Maclean’s, Canada’s national newsmagazine:

If there is one thing we have discovered to our cost about Donald Trump it’s that he can always surprise us. Not with delight at his eloquence or empathy, or some desire for harmony and decorum, but in horror at some new presidential depth.

And as the sun set over the capital of the United States, the most powerful man in the world had the police fire rubber bullets at non-violent protestors so that he could walk from his news conference in the Rose Garden of the White House to St. John’s Episcopal Church. He stood in front of this historic church, renowned for its commitment to social justice, held a Bible and posed ostentatiously for the cameras.

Just yards away, young people who had been demonstrating against racist violence and the murder of George Floyd wept with tears produced by tear gas and by frustration. Yet Donald Trump, supremely indifferent and even mocking, held high a text that roars love, peace, and justice.

This was blasphemy. In the most authentic and repugnant sense, it was blasphemy.

Global News reported:

The president held up a Bible and posed for photos at the front entrance with Attorney General Bill Barr, Defence Secretary Mark Esper and other administration officials, all of them white.

He did not go inside the church, instead returning to the White House without further mention of Floyd or the protests.

“We have a great country,” Trump said as he posed for photos. “Greatest country in the world.”

…

Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde, who oversees the Episcopal Diocese of Washington that includes St. Johns [Episcopal Church], issued a statement that called the combination of Trump’s photo op and the actions of police “antithetical to the teachings of Jesus and everything that our church stands for.”

“I am outraged,” she said.

“The President did not pray when he came to St. Johns; nor did he acknowledge the agony and sacred worth of people of color in our nation who rightfully demand an end to 400 years of system[atic] racism and white supremacy in our country.”

“In no way do we support the President’s incendiary response to a wounded, grieving nation,” Budde added. Instead, she aligned herself and her diocese “with those seeking justice for the death of George Floyd.”

All this crisis and chaos makes me want to escape even further into the safe, comfortable confines of my social VR platforms like Sansar, and virtual worlds like Second Life. In Second Life, Sansar, and on so many other metaverse platforms, it is so easy to create an avatar that looks absolutely nothing like yourself. You can be anybody—even a Black/African-Canadian person. And, from time to time, I have been.

Yes, I full well realize that some people have a problem with me, a White person, creating a Black avatar, considering it offensive and calling it “racial appropriation”. Wagner James Au of the blog New World Notes addressed the topic in a 2017 blogpost. But I still wanted to explore what it meant, in some small way, to be perceived by other avatars as a Black woman or man, to walk a virtual mile in somebody else’s shoes, and view the virtual world through somebody else’s eyes. Many, if not most, of the avatars in Second Life do not correspond to real-life identities (a notion that probably would shock someone unfamiliar with SL culture). And in absolutely no way was it intended to be disrespectful.

But my admittedly very infrequent experiences as a Black avatar in Second Life, or elsewhere in the metaverse (e.g. Sansar), DO NOT FOR ONE MOMENT equate with the reality of the pervasive racism that so many Black people face in America and, yes, in Canada too. We are not immune from racism here in Canada, as much as we like to think we Canadians are more liberal, open-minded, and welcoming than our American cousins. (In particular, our country’s predominantly White settler culture still has to come to terms with its truly shameful, centuries-long history of racism against its Indigenous population. But that is the subject for another blogpost.)

Second Life and Sansar and many other metaverse platforms are often overwhelmingly White/Caucasian, markedly more so than real life. Stop for a minute and ask yourself why that would be. Is it because real-life Black people pick a White avatar just to see what it was like to be a different race, as I did?

Or is it because they wanted to avoid standing out, in much the same way as many people who identify as female in real life choose a male avatar to avoid being hit on and treated as sexual objects by sexist, misogynistic, Neanderthal men? (My main Second Life avatar happens to be female. My years of personal experiences as Vanity Fair at Frank’s Jazz Club and various other popular music spots in Second Life have provided me with a highly insightful perspective on the kind of badgering which some women have to put up with, in a way that would have been impossible in real life as a man!)

Back in 2014, Wagner James Au reported on a study done at Ohio State University, where the lack of avatar racial diversity in Second Life impelled Black users to create White avatars:

According to a study by Jong-Eun Roselyn Lee at Ohio State University, Discovery Magazine reports, a lack of avatar racial diversity in an MMO impels black users to create white avatars. Lee’s study was conducted in Second Life, but seems generally applicable to MMOs in general where it’s possible for usres to designate their race:

“Lee gathered 56 study participants — half identifying as white and half identifying as black. She then had them read a fabricated magazine story titled “Meet the Coolest ‘Second Life’ Residents.” The eight Second Life avatars profiled in the story were either all white, in the low-diversity scenario, or an equal mix of white, black, Hispanic and Asian, in the high-diversity scenario. She then had them perform two tasks: Create and customize their own virtual avatars, and rate their willingness to reveal their real racial identity through the appearance of their virtual avatar. She found that black participants reported less willingness in the low-diversity scenario, and that they also created whiter avatars, as judged by objective raters. By comparison, white study participants were largely unaffected by either the high-diversity or low-diversity scenarios.”

In other words, when the “cool avatars” are presented to be all white, black users tend to choose white avatars for themselves, while keeping quiet about their real race. This academic study matches the anecdotal reports we’ve been writing about on this blog, beginning in 2006 with “The Skin You’re In“, in which a white user experienced prejudice after she started using a black avatar. (An experiment another white user tried last year.) African-American users like Eboni Khan have told me about this phenomenon from their own perspective too:

“You don’t find many African-American people being dark online. Which is funny, because there are plenty of dark black people in real life. I came from [another online world], and I was one of the few chocolate avies. Most were caramel. They blamed it on clothes being designed more for caramel [skinned avatars]. But that’s a cop-out. I think it speaks to larger issues with race and skin tone. But you can’t preach to people online who only want to get virtual ass. So I keep my observations to myself.”

Here’s a link to the bibliographic details and an abstract of Lee’s paper from ResearchGate, if you’re interested and want to go read it for yourself: Does virtual diversity matter?: Effects of avatar-based diversity representation on willingness to express offline racial identity and avatar customization. (You’ll have to get the journal article via your local academic or public library, though. It’s not freely available.)

Race and racism is a very touchy subject, both in real life and virtual life. And I am being extra careful here, mindful of my White perspective, not to cause offense (but if I have done so anyway, I apologize). And I do not, by any stretch of the imagination, consider myself an expert on the topic.

But I do think that on the various metaverse platforms on the ever-evolving marketplace (which I do consider myself somewhat of an expert on), people have an unparalleled opportunity to interact with each other, and communicate with each other, without any bias as to your race (unless the person you are talking to chooses to self-disclose their identity as a person of colour).

I have had wonderful, wide-ranging conversations with people—and made many online friends—without any idea of what that person looks like. So I would think that social VR platforms and virtual worlds could have a potentially useful application in combatting racism in all the forms outlined in Scott Woods’ quote up top: not only overt hate against Black people, but also White privilege, access, ignorance, and apathy.

But equity, diversity, and inclusion in virtual worlds is not guaranteed; people (and their avatar representations) have to work, and they have to work hard, at creating the more just world they want to see, both in real life and in virtual life. Current news events are a stark reminder that we cannot just declare ourselves non-racist; we have to be actively anti-racist. And we need to bring that mindset into the virtual worlds we inhabit, as well.

You can start by educating yourself on the issues, as I intend to do. Journalist Katie Couric has compiled a detailed list of anti-racism resources to help you get started.

An image from this week’s global protests (source)

UPDATE June 11th, 2020: Linden Lab (the creators of Second Life) has issued a statement in support of Black Lives Matter, Social Injustice Has No Place in the Physical or Virtual World, that reads in part:

Like many of you, we are feeling a combination of horror and outrage over the history of racism against Black lives. What we continue to witness is deeply disturbing and demanding of immediate social change.

The killing of George Floyd seen on video around the world is only one in a long and unacceptable series of violent and racist attacks and discriminatory behavior directed against people of color. 

We stand in solidarity with Black Lives Matter, all victims of systemic oppression and violence, and with Black communities across the U.S., the globe, and the virtual world in condemning racism and any and all actions that promote division.

Our mission at Second Life has always been to help build a better world, and in support of Black Lives Matter, we will be donating $10,000 each to three charities that are active in helping to fight oppression and injustice including the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC).

The company followed up with a second blog post, Exploring Black Lives Matter in Second Life, providing links to in-world locations such as the Walls of Freedom memorial (which I wrote about here), the Stand for Justice event, The Black Excellence Project, and the Virtual Black History Museum. The post includes the following 4-minute video:

Global Music Festivals Is Holding Two 12-Hour Events in Sansar on July 3rd and 4th, 2020 (and Yet Another Sansar Editorial)

After having just written an editorial criticizing the perceived lack of live music events in Sansar, guess what? I signed onto Twitter, to find the following tweet:

Join the Lost World Global Music Festivals on the 3rd-4th July the two 12 hour streams will be live broadcast on Twitch and into a Virtual World in Sansar especially built for this event.

Is this event an encouraging sign? Yes. Is it enough on its own? No. Let’s hope that Sansar actually does some effective promotion for this, instead of just leaving the job up to the organizers and word-of-mouth. I did a quick Google search and found the following plea for volunteers from one of the organizers, posted to the r/virtualreality subReddit:

We are working on our next music festival inside Sansar. Which can be attended in VR also Non VR. The last one was such a success we have been asked to do more, but we’re still looking for some help. We know a lot of people are sitting at home that might want to volunteer a little bit of their time. If you are a Club promoter, Event organizer or have experience in PR get in touch.

Again, I will say this: if Wookey-run Sansar is just going to sit idly by and expect unpaid volunteers to do all the heavy lifting for events (including promotion), then I’m sorry, but that’s just not good enough. In its short history, Sansar has already burned through its first set of volunteers, people who have simply given up and moved on to other platforms (and I am one of them).

If Sansar expects to survive and thrive, then they are going to have to do the extra work to get at least a dozen Global Music Festivals onto their social VR platform! As we saw from the history of the old High Fidelity, simply having big events every couple of months doesn’t work, either; you need a steady stream of live events to keep people coming back, making connections, and setting down roots in any virtual world.

Wookey-run Sansar needs to learn from the example set by competing platforms such as AltspaceVR, which has just been running circles around Sansar lately in their work to attract, cultivate and promote live events. Just compare the event calendars of AltspaceVR and Sansar and you can see for yourself what effective event promotion can do. It’s a virtuous circle: more promotion means more people, who in turn create more events when they see what a platform like AltspaceVR can provide.

MARKETING IS A COST OF DOING BUSINESS, SANSAR. DO SOME. Simply calling yourself a live events platform isn’t enough; you have to back up those words with some action, and put your money where you mouth is. Anything else is lazy, short-sighted, and stupid.

As RuPaul says, “You better work!”

Sansar Editorial: Where Is the Marketing?

The New Sansar Update Load Screen:
A Focus Squarely on Live Events

Why did Sansar fail?

And no, I do not consider Sansar a success, despite the most valiant efforts of the remaining staff who are still working on the platform, and the COMETS, a small group of hard-working volunteers creating and promoting events. Linden Lab themselves did not consider Sansar a success. Why else would the company sell the money-losing platform to Wookey, a company known for buying other companies which have fallen into financial distress, in a last-ditch effort to turn some sort of profit out of it?

What disturbs me most about the change in ownership is that Wookey does not seem to be doing anything different from what Linden Lab has done. The focus remains squarely on live events, but so far, I do not see a whole hell of a lot of those happening, aside from the Monstercat: Call of the Wild series of concerts (okay, there was also a Virtual Rave Prom last Friday, with DJ Yultron).

If this is supposed to be a live events platform, where are all the (NON-volunteer driven) events? Where are the performers? We should have had some announcements by now, surely. During the change in ownership, Sansar lost a lot of those events, and I do not see a lot of new events to replace those that were lost.

Tong Zou, a YouTuber who recently posted a lightly-edited one hour and 40 minute video of his adventures exploring Sansar, had this to say at the very end of his video, after finding Sansar essentially empty in his travels, and only finding a handful of other avatars hanging out at the Nexus:

I mean, this is pretty much the only players on Sansar right now, which is really sad, because in my opinion, Sansar has the best worlds out of any social VR app, but they have the least people, so what the heck? Why do AltspaceVR and VRChat have more people than here, I don’t get it. Not enough marketing or something, I dunno. This is all the people in Sansar. Give me a break. Linden Lab has got to do a better job of promoting this game. This is just sad. This game deserves better than this. This app deserves better than this. C’mon, there only about 10 people here across the entire app.

Tong Zou hits the nail on the head when he says that the company (no longer Linden Lab, but Wookey) needs to actively promote Sansar. If the Wookey-owned Sansar is doing any marketing or promotion, I sure the hell am not seeing any evidence of that. And if they are hoping that word-of-mouth advertising is going to work to attract people to Sansar, they are badly mistaken.

Seriously, what the hell are they doing? From my perspective, Sansar is simply drifting aimlessly. Just because you’ve built a social VR platform that allows for the creation of beautiful worlds, and allows for customizable avatars, and supports a marketplace for content creators to earn money, you can’t just set it out there, among all the current and upcoming competition (e.g. Fortnite Party Royale, Facebook Horizon), and just expect it to grow on its own, without promotion. There’s simply too much else out there competing for attention.

For example, Oasis, the Chinese-based social VR platform I wrote about a while back, has recently done promotions with a number of smaller YouTube vloggers to promote their platform (here, here, here, and here are four examples). I can’t remember the last time I came across a sponsored YouTube video for Sansar.

Where is the marketing push? Sansar isn’t just going to magically sell itself.