Transcription of: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2mQj7TpE-Wc
----------

UploadVR: Hello, I'm with Ebbe Altberg, CEO of Linden Labs, the makers of Second Life and something new we're going to talk about. But -- Ebbe, you're a long-time entrepreneur as CEO, tell us a little bit about your background; how did you come into Linden Lab?

Ebbe Altberg: Well, I'm good friends with one of the board members. We were actually room-mates in college. And he decided about a year and a half ago to put a new CEO in place, and it was the right time and place for me and Linden Lab and the board, so it happened. For me it's a great job. My background from way back is a combination of art and computing, computer science, in college studied fine arts. So this blend of art and technology and VR, and enabling users to create content is the perfect sweet spot.

UploadVR: That's amazing, I had no idea. Art and computer science?

Ebbe Altberg: Well I didn't have a computer science degree, I went to Midway college, but they had a concentration on computer applications. I basically took every computer science class there was. So I hopped between the computer lab and the art study: Print making, write code, paint, do some artificial intellegence or whatever, back and forth. So, I was equally happy with both of the arts.

UploadVR: (laughs) That's awesome, I love that. It makes so much sense, the Second Life environment is a total maker/artistic space. But that can only be done, right now, at least, with a little bit of coding know-how. But what's coming up? What is this whole Sansar thing that I'm hearing about?

Ebbe Altberg: Yeah, so Project Sansar is something we've been working on, for some people, closing on two years, but as for significant effort, well over a year. It's been us building a new platform from the ground up, to enable users to create virtual experiences. We've taken care of a lot of the tricky parts: the hosting, a lot of the horizontal capabilities that a lot of virtual experiences want: Social communications, we provide a currency so people can transact, trade, monetize, and make money on the things they make. So in that sense it's sort of in the spirit of Second Life, but we're doing quite a few things differently to really take advantage of VR. I mean Second Life has support for Oculus, but we can't get Second Life to get the frame rate required to make it smooth and comfortable. So to create a platform that allows VR to be a top-notch experience, we have to build something from the ground up. So, since we're the leader in user-generated, or user-created virtual experiences with Second Life, we want to make sure that no one will take that away from us. Se we decided to build a platform for the future. I mean Second Life has just had it's twelfth birthday, it will be running for a long time to come, a lot of people have some really powerful experiences in there, anything from people getting married to students learning, to people role-playing, to health professionals helping people with post-traumatic stress disorders so it's a huge range of interesting use-cases. And VR is just going to take this to another level, and we just want to make sure we can take advantage of VR natively. So that's we're building. Of course it's still early, we're a couple of weeks away from letting a few test users come in and start creating content. That process of having, just sort of, under NDA, a few users and grow to maybe a hundred or whatever that the platform will tolerate, and the testers are happy to participate in through the end of the year, then a beta somewhere in the first half of next year, and something we might feel comfortable putting a "1.0" on at the end of 2016 or something, so it's a long journey. But we're trying to build a platform that will last decades.

UploadVR: Yeah, that's important for VR.

Ebbe Altberg: Yeah today it's very difficult to create VR experiences. I mean, some things are getting easier, a lot of people are going to be able to share photographic 360 content, that's going to be create, but to have interactive social experiences, that's going to take a whole lot more, and today you have to be a fairly well-staffed engineering organization to produce one of those experiences and we want to make that simple enough that you can really just be an experienced content creator without the need of hardcore technical skills. I mean still, 3D modeling and scripting and stuff like that has some tricky aspects to it, but you shouldn't need to compile code and know how to distribute your code and figure out how to monetize that, and there'll be so many experiences that will require communication, social capabilities, the ability to transact, so we can just provide those horizontal capabilities, all the hosting and that complexity.

UploadVR: In the article in Variety that came out today, they compared you as 'The Wordpress of VR', right?

Ebbe Altberg: Yeah we provide that example wither it's Wordpress or YouTube, sort of showing the power of what happens when you enable users, empower users to create content.

UploadVR: What does that workflow look like for Sansar?

Ebbe Altberg: For starters, it will be quite technical, you will register, you will log-in, you'll install this application which includes some add-ons for Maya, and you'll use Maya to create the content. You'll create a full scene, very large scenes, and you just publish that and we host that on our servers, and then that experience you can send links out to, and people follow the links and walk into that experience.

UploadVR: Just like that, straight from Maya?

Ebbe Altberg: Straight from Maya, push a button, and then you have a virtual environment that you can share.

UploadVR: That I could bring all my friends into?

Ebbe Altberg: Yep, bring all your friends in.

UploadVR: Or the friends that have the alpha access.

Ebbe Altberg: (laughs) Well eventually everyone will be able to access it, and you can do it on a PC with a regular monitor or in your HMD with an Oculus or whatever other HMD's we want to support over time, and someday we also want to be able to get it to work on mobile, so that you can at least check out the world or the place or the experience on a lot of different devices, and socialize, learn, entertain, whatever it is that you want to do. And Second Life already has a huge number of use-cases as I mentioned, like music, art, education, health. All of these things will happen. We just want to make sure people do it on *our* platform. So, lower the skills required to create and socialize.

UploadVR: So, Second Life exists, it has about a million monthly actives, is that right?

Ebbe Altberg: Yeah at the peak it was just north of a million, and now we're just south of a million.

UploadVR: You teeter around that line, right?

Ebbe Altberg: Yeah it's been actually a slow and steady sort of decline. The platform's aged, there's a lot of options for things for people to do today that they didn't have 8 years ago, but it's still very strong. Last year alone people cashed out 60 million dollars that they made creating content and experiences, and lots of different business models inside of Second Life - just like the real world - people in the real estate business, people in the entertainment business, people in the content business, there are people making lots of money creating a lot of fashion, fashion is a big industry, because everyone wants their avatar to look cool. So you've got to have great hair and shoes, and a great dress, and people also do a lot of socializing and partying inside Second Life, and you can't show up to parties all the time with the same stuff, so you've to have cool clothing for the occasion, so --

UploadVR: (laughs) Got to put your virtual bow-tie on?

Ebbe Altberg: (laughs) Yeah, so a lot of shopping taking place.

UploadVR: What's the GDP look like in Second Life right now?

Ebbe Altberg: So GP is around half a billion dollars. So people basically take their real-world currency and basically buy Lindens, which is the in-world virtual currency, --

UploadVR: What's that exchange rate look like?

Ebbe Altberg: It's very steady around 250:1, to the dollar,

UploadVR: So one dollar, 250 Lindens?

Ebbe Altberg: One dollar gives you 250 Lindens, and then you go buy and sell stuff with your Lindens and then whenever you want to you can cash them out back to you, whatever your currency of choice.

UploadVR: So the Sansar is going to be it's own, can I call it planet, can I call it a world, it's going to be outside the current Second Life world, right?

Ebbe Altberg: Yeah it's going to be, you can sort of call it a parallel universe, it's going to be independent of Second Life, and it's going to be less world-focused. Second Life is very much *a* world, where you enter the world and then you discover things within it. With Sansar we've taken more of a platform approach, where you don't necessarily think of entering the world and then discovering things, you might discover things from outside: a search on Google, see a cool video on YouTube, whatever, which will lead you into any one particular experience. So every experience can attract it's own audience. So that's why we've referred to it's similarities to WordPress. You don't go to Wordpress.com necessarily, you go to the blog, and that in the future instead of just being a blog it will be a virtual experience that you can enter.

UploadVR: That's incredible. How is the pricing model different from Second Life as it exists today? Because right now in Second Life you charge for a plot of land, right? It's a monthly fee? Is that the same sort of model going to be applied to Sansar or are you guys experimenting with something a little different?

Ebbe Altberg: We're going to make some differences there. In Second Life land is quite expensive. Land is basically a simulator, which is basically a server, so we rent out these CPU's and GPU's that people have their experiences hosted on. And they're quite expensive, $295 for a 256 by 256 meter piece of land that you can build on.

UploadVR: A month?

Ebbe Altberg: A month.

UploadVR: So that can be an expensive hobby.

Ebbe Altberg: Yeah it can be quite an expensive hobby. In Sansar we want land to be both much larger, and be able to have a much higher concurrency, and be much more beautiful, and much cheaper. So we want land to be much cheaper, but to compensate for that to some degree, also have sales tax on the GDP come up, because today we get very little money from all those transactions in-world.

UploadVR: It's low, right? It's under 10%?

Ebbe Altberg: In-world transactions are basically tax free. And if you put your virtual items on the marketplace that we have, we take 5%, which is very very small.

UploadVR: It's less than any sales tax in the real world.

Ebbe Altberg: If you go to any virtual content goods, wither it's music or apps or anything like that, you see 30% the sort of norm in the industry. So we'll have higher sales tax, and then lower the property tax to make sure that we can be appealing to many more users to start creating content and have their experiences hosted, and then instead of charging them up-front for the infrastructure, if you will, is to more participate in their success, as their business grows. So that's what we'll do. I mean in Second Life you have these unfortunate situations where people build these beautiful things, but they're not highly monetize, so at some point they have to take them down because they can't have them just sit there for people's entertainment with no return for $295 a month, so we don't want content to not be created or to have to be removed because of cost so we want to reduce that as much as possible so we have as much content created as possible. So, lower the barrier to entry for creating content and having it hosted, and we'll get more of a piece of the GDP.

UploadVR: That's going to be a crazy, crazy, next couple of years as this plays out. I'm super excited to see how people play with it. Right now Second Life is used for really everything right, from concerts to theaters where  there's tickets completely played out and it's all sold out, right? It's going to be insane what you can do when there's a VR focus planned from the beginning.

Ebbe Altberg: Although VR will take years to reach critical mass and the number of users that have the hardware required to do that, but you can do it on your screen on the PC and choose when to do VR and when to do PC, and ultimately mobile as well, but there's so many use-cases and we enable and empower users to earn a living in ways that they otherwise couldn't. Because a lot of people make their living creating and entertaining, and running all kinds of business. We just had a musician that earned enough money doing concerts in Second Life that he could actually have a real-world record made. He's sitting on a mountain top somewhere in Colorado. We have a woman who makes really fancy dresses, couture-type dresses, and she's sold, I think she said about 300,000 dresses.

UploadVR: She sold 300,000 dresses?

Ebbe Altberg: Her average price is about 4 USD.

UploadVR: Four dollars.

Ebbe Altberg: Yeah four dollars. So about 1000 Lindens.

UploadVR: Over one million bucks.

Ebbe Altberg: Over many years. But yeah still.

UploadVR: That's insane. Are they all unique or is she just selling the same dress? Like I go to Azura and it's the same vests or jacket that I have?

Ebbe Altberg: Well it's brands. There's a lot of popular in-world brands, fashion brands. I met a guy just not long ago who has a premier Jeans brand. So he's made his living, his only income for six years now, making jeans. he's a big jeans brand.

UploadVR: Denim is big in Second Life.

Ebbe Altberg: So fashion is big, home and garden is big. People want to have beautiful furniture and fireplaces and the things want to have in and around your homes. There's a lot of hobby activities: sailing activities, planes trains automobiles, bicycles. Interesting communities around themes. Vampire communities, there's one really cool community, there's one from Holland, Jo. She's built 1920's Berlin. So Berlin as it was in the 1920's. And the people there, the architecture, the fashion, everything is 1920's. The music -

UploadVR: We're going to need a screenshot of that so we can show it.

Ebbe Altberg: - yeah. And so the people there do all these German customs. They go up to the hotel and they do dancing. So people get their avatars animations, and -

UploadVR: So they're doing this on a computer right now.

Ebbe Altberg: They do it on a computer, yeah.

UploadVR: And, for anyone who's tried VR, hopefully everyone who's going to be watching this has had least had the opportunity to experience it, but it's the next level, like you can't really compare the two.

Ebbe Altberg: It's very different to just be looking at the world, versus being in the world. And for Second Life we have audio, and it's 3D audio, but still, getting true proper spacial audio, like we're getting in Project Sansar, it makes a huge difference. Just being able to tell what's happening in front of you behind, behind you, above you, where in Sansar you can go up behind someone and say 'boo' and they'll turn around.

UploadVR: (laughs)

Ebbe Altberg: That's quite a different thing. But still, for some people the PC experience we've had now for 12 years in Second Life still has that same level of immersion, where people are still in there. For some people, their persona in Second Life is almost the preferred personal to them then potentially and then sometimes their real-world persona.

UploadVR: Maybe they can't be the person they want to be in the real world.

Ebbe Altberg: Yeah, that's true for a lot of people. There's a lot of people with physical or mental challenges where -

UploadVR: Even cultural.

Ebbe Altberg: Yeah, there are people who are afraid of socializing in the real world, phobias of all kinds, and here we also have a lot of handicapped people. You don't have legs, but in Second Life you can run, swim, fly, dance. There's this wonderful old woman in Second Life. She has Parkinson's disease. And the activity she performs in Second Life, going dancing, running, swimming, doing all these things, is actually working her brain in a way that she had noticed that her physical well-being has improved. It's now easier for her to walk in the real world because she just sort of moves/uses that part of the brain for -

UploadVR: It's a beautiful use-case for what it can do. For what these sort of avatar-simulated worlds can do. There was a study I think it was, I can't remember who it was, but it was about ghost limbs. And in VR, wounded military veterans who could be given a leg in VR and then get feeling in their ghost limbs, because their brains are being tricked. But it's the same sort of thing, it's saying what it can actually bring, how much it can trick your mind. And it's tricking your mind now. That's happening to her on the web. [Now] when she's in an HMD...

Ebbe Altberg: It's a whole other level of trickery there yeah. So it's going to be extremely powerful. A place to go check out, the work done by Jeremy Bailenson at Stanford. He's done 20 years of VR research. And than the lab at Stanford, if you haven't been there, you should try and get in there -

UploadVR: I haven't been.

Ebbe Altberg: It's really cool, it's a great lab, and they do these fascinating experiment to just understand what good VR can do and what the empathy you can get through it. So playing with people's sex's, people's age, people's race, there's all kinds of interesting things you can do to actually make people better in all kinds of ways.

UploadVR: And in education as well, I know of people saying you can personalize people's experiences so that they can get the most optimal environment for learning and information retention. Down to the gender, race, age, of the people in their virtual environment, and now they're perceiving them, it tricks your brain into doing certain things and that customization within a virtual world is incredibly effected.

Ebbe Altberg: And they've measured these changes. So Jeremy has interesting studies. One was trying to figure out how people think about paper consumption. You can read about paper consumption, watch videos about it, and then have a VR experience that I did where you go into the forest and you chainsaw down a tree, and you feel the tree falling and hit the ground, the floor rumbles, which of those three groups started using less paper?

UploadVR: (laughs) The VR group.

Ebbe Altberg: Yeah? So it's an extremely powerful medium. Which is also are scary, right? As soon as you can have a lot of power for good, people have power for bad, so we have to be careful and be aware that you will be able to scare the shit out of people and potentially have some bad things happen, so you have to be aware of that. But you can't stop because of that.

UploadVR: I mean you can't, in the real world shit happens all the time, and it's worse. It's a lot darker.

Ebbe Altberg: People die like flies in the real world. In virtual it's a lot safer.

UploadVR: A final question, something personal from you. Tell me what is getting you excited about this Sansar thing coming out. It's going to be two weeks from now hopefully.

Ebbe Altberg: (laughs) That's just the beginning.

UploadVR: (laughs) Let's say two to six weeks, give you a window. But it's going to come out, you're going to get alpha users on there. They'll begin testing it.

Ebbe Altberg: This is before alpha even, but anyway, yes.

UploadVR: Pre-alpha. But what will personally for you. What do you see being the one of the most powerful use-cases for something like this? And it doesn't have to be the most monitizable opportunity.

Ebbe Altberg: I think it's going to ultimately going to change the way we entertain, the way we socialize, the way we learn, the way we teach, the way we play, so I'm challenged to think of almost any sort of real-world use-case that will not somehow be impacted by virtual reality. It almost doesn't matter what profession or what entertainment that you're involved with, in the future VR can do something for you. And you're seeing NFL quarterbacks now using VR to train. So it's going to impact so much. And we're trying to create a platform where all these things can happen. And a lot of things, we won't know it until we see it. So for us it's about providing the tools and the platform that just enables the broadest set of use-cases of things people can do and talk about. We're 100% dependent on the users creating these experiences. We're not creating these experiences. We're creating the platform and tools that enable them to create those experiences. That's where I think most of the interesting content and experiences will come from. And there will be a lot of awesome, commercial triple-A games, or experiences and stuff like that, but when I think about where you spend your time on the internet and what types of stuff you consume mostly, I feel the most interesting stuff is created by other users. And there's also so many nuances, just like the real world, to different use-cases and cultures and languages, that you're going to have so many different flavors of similar things. And people will make it theirs. And that's ultimately what empowers me: To be able to empower/enable creativity to happen. I've spent most of my life working in the software industry related to tools, wither it's word processors or platforms that enable people to buy and sell, what they can know or what they do, so this is the ultimate, in many ways, final medium for creativity, for experiences.

UploadVR: I would agree with you, man. So, I'm a developer: In the future I'm either going to choose Unity, I'm going to chose Unreal, or I'm going to chose Sansar.

Ebbe Altberg: Well, those will all be options, and there will be others as well, there will be High Fidelities and depending on what you need different ones will be the right choice for you. But, we're really confident Sansar will be a really good choice for a lot of people for a lot of different use-cases.

UploadVR: So for the folks watching, can they sign up for an alpha, can they now get on an invite list?

Ebbe Altberg: We don't even have that. Right now we're before that, right now we're just hand-picking people that we know have the tech skills that --

UploadVR: I'm surprised you're even talking with me right now about it, on camera!

Ebbe Altberg: (laughs) It's such a long journey that it's better to be transparent. I mean we're not transparent to the point where we'll let everybody hop on just yet because would probably just frustrate people and it wouldn't be worth their time or our time.

UploadVR: Too many cooks spoil the broth.

Ebbe Altberg: Yeah, so for now it's just a matter of adding adding specific people that have the exact skillset and time and dedication and willing to fight the bugs and server flushes and everything that will happen for a while. But next year we'll start to open the doors for people to line up and --

UploadVR: So stay tight everybody, it's coming. It's going to be here soon. Well thank you for building this for the community. It's a huge step forward for all of VR, for content creators everywhere. You guys are OG's in this space, when it comes to virtual worlds, so it makes sense for you to be leading the pack like this.

Ebbe Altberg: We have a lot of experience and we hope to be even more successful ten years from now than we are today. But it's going to be a fun ride, that's for sure. And thank you guys, for doing all what you do for the community, to bring all the VR people together, helping people socialize and learn from each other so I really appreciate -

UploadVR: We're similar, in that way.

Ebbe Altberg: Yeah!

UploadVR: We're in the real world, for now. But you guys do it virtually.

Ebbe Altberg: It's helpful to us to be able to participate in what you guys do, and hopefully soon we can help out in return by giving access to some cool tools to make your jobs better and easier.

UploadVR: I'll hold you to it. I'll wrap up there.

Ebbe Altberg: Cool.

UploadVR: Alright man. Thanks for coming.

Ebbe Altberg: Cheers.

UploadVR: Cool.