Surprisingly buff Linden Lab CEO Ebbe Altberg recently appeared as an avatar in Second Life to share some details about Second Life 2, i.e. the VR-enabled Project Sansar -- several revelations likely to be bombshells to many:

Today you need Maya to work in Sansar, this will change in June, when they open up Beta access to a broader set of creators.

Sansar will be opened to the public at the end of the year.

LL is now working on integrating the HTV Vive VR headset with Sansar, the headset also used for Steam VR and Ebbe expects it to work next week.

Sansar is aiming for an age range of 13+ but there will be content ratings.

Right now Sansar is being build for PC, Windows specifically, Oculus and Vive HMD. They are preparing for Android and iOS... There is a streaming solution for Sansar like we’ve seen in the past being offered by third parties... A Mac viewer is described as going to be looked at somewhere further along the line.

There will be an exchange system that allows you to transfer Linden Dollars to whatever the Sansar currency will be.

There will be lots of different building tools in Sansar but LL will strongly support 3rd party tools and thus a common file format... But there will also be tools inside Sansar such as terrain and layout tools, but also basic object manipulation tools so you can take assets and arrange a scene.

Sansar uses a sort of ‘baking’ progress, so in stead of building something ‘live’ and seeing it work right away, like we do in SL, you have to ‘publish’ what you’ve build.

Much more from Jo Yardley here, view machinima video of his SL talk courtesy Mal Burns below. Reading between the lines, the likeliest points of controversy and interest are these: