BEYOND VIRTUAL WORLDS
(Image source http://secondlife.com}
Project Sansar ~ Lets TALK about this !
Is anybody excited/involved with Project Sansar ?
Hi, I may be a tad off here, but I was an avid user/player/citizen of Second Life aka Linden Labs first project.
I hit that world as it was declining and old news, but I just loved it.
I never had a decent enough computer to get the full experience and so had to experiment with
different viewers, and majorly tweaking the interface to get any kind of use with my sub par machine.
I mean I had a decent machine but it was a tad below the minimums that SL really need to run proper.
NOW, Sansar, is going to be full on VR, which I think may be another issue of over reaching.
VR appears to be quite resource intensive, and thereby exclude quite a number who would otherwise participate.
On the otherhand they are re vamping the whole approach of client server, and it should be fine on PC even though not fully taking in the full VR experience. -Just my initial opinion and from what I have managed to read about it, I am on a list of creators and hopefully will get credentials for testing this month sometime, so I can say more then.
Don't take my initial opinion for fact I am probably totally wrong, it may be the total immersion that we want as community and environment and business developers.
My thoughts are these.
It will have an economy just like SL did, and remains to be seen how they will flesh that out.
I DO know that the exchange of linden $ and whatever currency your RL country played in was merely clicks and verification's EZ
I could easily see Steem playing in this !
In fact I'd like to form a consortium and build out some sort of Steem/Sansar exchange & settlement bank with them !
Talk about USING Steem ! Even today the Linden economy is HUGE.
Tying Steem into that could be a HUGE economy booster for "the Steem"
I am new here so this may be an old topic, I am a guy, north of 50 years old and SL was wicked fun, there was quite the older community there, TONS of great music and visually stimulating, not to mention games from slot machines to playing board and other games, whole islands and communities around vampires, war games role playing and the like, it had/has adult content too which seemed to be a large draw for some.
Linden is building this to take advantage of modern computing and designing it to fit on many platforms and hardware, and fairly opensource, so pretty much if you can imagine it, you can build it as a creator and monetize it.
so my questions are:
How many ways can we tie Steemit into this new environment ?
Can we get an REAL bank/exchange going with Linden Labs ?
If we/you whales have not explored this as yet, WHY NOT !?!
How can we get our posts and content into Sansar IE: create virtual news paper stands and vending machines where peeps can pick up or watch content from HERE IN THERE...
Anyone wanna "Play" in Sansar with me ? LOL
maybe build out an island/game/bar/music venue with shops etc ?
I think having a way to exchange Linden Dollars to Steem dollars would be fantastic! However, ever since Linden Lab shut down 3rd party exchanges, I could see that not being a very real possibility :(
If I remember correctly, they supposedly revoked all rights for others to sell L$ for other currencies for "fraud prevention". I always thought it was just them wanting more control over who gets commissions from selling their game tokens, and they wanted that only to be them.
One thing that has been bouncing around in my mind for a while now though is a virtual world like second life that is run on a blockchain with the "mining" accomplished by regular activity of the users, kind of like Steemit.
The only thing closest to that idea that I am aware of is High Fidelity which is being created by the original creator of SL. It's been a while since I have checked in on that project, but I do remember for a while at least they were considering implementing a cryptocurrency that would be used in commerce and to pay people running the servers in a decentralized manner.
My main drawback to High Fidelity and Sansar so far are their heavy reliance on VR tech, which I don't have and I don't know anyone who has either. I think I would enjoy something like second life that is PC based but with the addition of cryptocurrency and decentralization. Something more modern that could capture the magic of SL from so long ago...
I wasn't aware of them shutting down 3rd party exchanges. humm, too bad.
However since Steemit is a new up & coming, and reputation based, perhaps this could be something negotiated at the Steemit executive level ? I did see Commercial banks in world, with reputations, so I could see Steemit in the new iteration Sansar, since sansar is promising to be quite a departure from SL and superior
as a friendly platform to build upon. Open in every sense of the word is what I get from the stuff I have read, and I agree that the VR stuff is not that prevalent and may never be until the prices come down and the resource intensity is dealt with. Sansar is largely built for every platform with VR being a large part but it's also supposed to manage the client/server better and more future proof than SL was, if you remember a lot of the C/S issues were baked into SL, and thus not able to be fixed other than building machines specific for SL.
They are going to learn from that lesson and build it far more adaptable and future-proof. Remains to be seen though how that shakes out... but it should be better than SL for PC based interaction.
I actually recently downloaded High Fidelity, anxious for Some sort of new virtual world.
PC only and just under their min hardware recommends, I could get in and navigate in the noob training room but after that couldn't do anything because I was lacking the VR hand controls, so that is not PC and totally VR which will limit it's growth in the space IMHO...
The Block-chain and it's speed could possibly manage the resource intensive graphics ?
I mean a LOT of GPU are really only to crunch the vast amount of data of modern graphics, so
in my reasoning building a graphical engine that is based on the block-chain processing could vastly speed up resolving to display !?! it may take someone familiar with both graphical game engines AND block-chain to flesh that out though, but I think it would be revolutionary !
In that vein, I also think that AI may take advantage of block-chain processing, As I understand things, as our graphics, algorithms, data sets get huge, this is where multiple cpu cores and multiple distributed computers working on PARTS of the calculations in parallel is required can speed things up. It will take a change in industry attitudes as 99% of even advanced software does NOT take advantage of even multiple cpu's on todays machines, so far it's only been academic exercises in distributed computing and only as proof of concept, such as the multiple GPU hard password crackers etc almost nothing in the real world even in the HUGE environment of drawing/design IE solidworks, can only do parts, it was NOT written for it you have to hack it to get it to send parts of tasks to other CPU's. even in a 12-24 CPU environment the processing is linear and not truly distributed. This is possibly where Block-chain could shine !
It think it will eventually, but it's going to take a paradigm change in thinking and education, after it's proven for specific tech like AI, banking, # crunching etc, we are only seeing baby steps currently, albeit important baby steps !
3rd party exchanges aren't totally gone, I think the ability to buy L$ is still there, you just can't sell L$ except through the Lindex.
I hadn't thought of blockchain tech being used to process graphics, which is an interesting idea! It would probably be super resource intensive at this point in time though. I was thinking more of it being used to track in world object ownership, inventory, and origination of assets, maybe a better way to fight against copybotting. Also it would obviously be used for the in world currency which wouldn't be tied down to the platform and be freely exchangeable, in contrast to the current situation with the Linden Dollar.
I am slowly starting to see more "game" stuff popping up on steemit, so who knows, maybe someone will build a virtual world on top of steem! Or maybe someone better than I could approach some of the smaller grids to see if maybe there is a way for them to integrate Steem Dollars into their grid?! THAT would be interesting! Instead of putting out a tip jar for donations to cover tier, you could just write a story on Steemit and be covered for the month! :D I think Opensim and Steem would compliment each other nicely!
I just found this article here on Steemit that I thought you might be interested to read, I thought it was pretty interesting!