The team is now embarking on its most ambitious project yet, a wide-reaching virtual reality network called Project Sansar that is, in many ways, aiming to become a new layer of reality that gives individuals and businesses a space to experiment with VR environments for their first time.
I had the chance to sit down for a demo of Sansar with Linden Lab CEO Ebbe Altberg this past week and take an early look into some of the platform’s first environments.
Traversing the worlds of Sansar and chatting with my guide, Linden Lab VP of Product Bjorn Laurin, was a mostly seamless experience but still an oddly unsettling one. It’s not that anything was particularly creepy about the place I was viewing through an Oculus Rift headset. Sansar is visually placid and often beautiful, but it’s also startlingly scalable and boundless. Scale is something that’s often taken for granted in an age of video game epics like Skyrim and GTAV, but when every horizon you see through your own point-of-view is conquerable, you’re left to either feel very bold or very lost.