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Project Sansar from Second Life creator Linden Lab is a new virtual world, built for virtual reality which promises world building tools capable of generating scenes like the one featured here which was created in “just a few hours”.

Project Sansar is a virtual world project that’s remained largely in stealth since in inception at Linden Lab. A new screenshot has now been released, which demonstrates the visual fidelity capable for those willing to invest just a few hours with the new application’s world building tools.

The screenshot is a high resolution version featured in a recent tweet from Linden Lab CEO Abbe Altberg, who states that the world featured in the image – a realistic multi-user Mars environment – took “just a few hours to create”.

Project Sansar is in development for the PC and has confirmed support the Oculus Rift at this time. Altberg recently spoke to Road to VR to describe the motivation behind Project Sansar.

“Second Life is going to have its 12th birthday this year. The way Second Life was built was quite substantially ahead of its time,” Altberg told me. “It achieved something that, back then, was borderline nuts to even try to accomplish…. to retro-fit SL, to modernize that stack to become as performant as you need it to be would be a massive undertaking, and we decided it would be easier and less disruptive to start anew, and leave SL as it is for those that love it for what it is.”

To emphasise, the screenshot is merely an example produced by Linden Lab to demonstrate what’s capable with the tools on offer in Project Sansar. A spokesperson stated to Road to VR recently that “We won’t actually create content nor will we dictate a cohesive style for Sansar experiences; instead, users create the experiences and they’ll be extremely diverse in type and style vs. a singular cohesive “game” world. These [screenshots] are merely to show the diverse range of experiences our current alpha users are creating and how much detail you can derive from our platform.”

Release date for Project Sansar is as yet unknown, but with 3 major players releasing consumer grade VR headsets this year, we’re hoping to hear more about that some time soon.