When 2 SL Photographers travel to Sansar…

It has been a few months since my last visit to Sansar and to be honest, I did not really feel the urge to go back. My visits there, despite the experiences being awesome to look at, were lonely and because I am a desktop user (I do not have VR gear) the options are not that great as in Second Life – for me.

The other night Huckleberry Hax and I were talking about Sansar and decided to give it another try and go on a field trip together, just to see how it would be when you are actually with someone to share the experience (I had never seen another avatar in Sansar during my earlier visits, so this would be a new one for me!).

Because Huck was curious about a newly opened experience ‘2077‘, that would be the place to go. We logged out of Second Life and started up Sansar where we met in 2077, in front of the metro-station. Well, to be honest, I logged in into the wrong experience first, and had to look up 2077 once I was online – after discovering you cannot send a teleport request to someone via IM.
(Actually, you also cannot send clickable links in messages, but oh well, copy/paste to a browser works too!).
Going from one experience to the other took some time, but eventually we found eachother!

I am not as familiar with the Bladerunner movie as Huck, so I had to rely on him to say it indeed reminded him of it. Now, being two ‘SL Photographers’ and since there is not much one can do but walking around and chat, we tried to find out how to make nice pictures! (OK, first Huck had to help me getting the hang of walking around, I was a bit lost with the controls and looked like a real n00b, with my face against a wall for the first 5 minutes).

Taking pictures in Sansar can be done. While you do not have easy camera controls and they do not save in high res, we eventually figured out how to zoom and cam around and we managed to take some really nice pics of the impressive surroundings. You cannot change the environment settings like light and such, so you will have to do with the experience as it is. The textures, reflections and light/shadows are superb! No blurry textures, no rezzing or grey areas, it is all just there right in front of you. And around you!

And we saw other avatars too! Yay! While Huck was busy trying to shoot video footage, I was camming around and took pictures.

Is Sansar worth a visit? For sure it is! I just need to stop comparing it to Second Life and once logged into Sansar treat it like the new world it is. Sansar, for me, is not a replacement for Second Life though, but maybe a nice extra for if I want something else to take pictures of every now and then, since that is currently all I can do in there. Maybe if animations (like sitting on something or dancing) are possible this might change :).

You should read Huck’s blogpost about our field trip too, he made some really cool GIFs!