Life has gotten way busier and in my final year at graduate school at UCSB and squeezing in beach and surf time when I can, gaming on a computer is a low priority. Only thing that keeps me in SL is sim ownership of Valkyrie Forest - still a busy sim, going strong, and very successful. But I did want to reserve my original SL name in Sansar, Danika Stenvaag, so I hopped on-board the creator train. My first visit to Sansar reminded me of Blue Mars (I only visited Blue Mars a couple times out of curiosity in its early days, but never did much with it). I chose for my very first 'experience' (as Sansar sims are called) a visit to the NASA Apollo exhibit (recreation of the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum). I walked around the Saturn V and checked out the lunar exhibits which were pretty cool. Would have loved to see 3D moon maps but can't have everything. I posted some images below. I'm a silhouette in shadows in some of these images!
My avatar looks pretty much stock and rudimentary but oh well. As long as I could scoot around and explore. I didn't see many people in Sansar. All the places I explored were empty except for Zen Gardens - there were a few people there standing around. I helped a lady with her mic so she could voice and showed another guy how to open chat, send text messages, and find friends. The viewer is sparse with view obvious controls, but once you figure it out, it's pretty easy. Still can't run, fly, or sit yet. They haven't worked that out yet. When I returned to Zen Gardens a few days ago, there was nobody there this time. I couldn't find any info hub with people.
If you build it, they will come, is not always true. I can only speak from my experience in what works to bring people and what made Valkyrie Forest popular and that ingredient is 'community.' Valkyrie doesn't get it from raiding or having the latest build trends. It's community. Social interaction is the life blood to make any VR experience successful. Without this, you're dead. There's a great future for VR, but currently, I think people visit Sansar out of curiosity, walk around to look at the graphics and stuff, then log off. I do wish LL much success and hope they learn from SL.
Here are some pix of the Saturn V, Apollo exhibits and yes, I'm a dark shadow in some of these:



I checked out a forest experience because... well... you know me... forest girl and all

I stepped off the ship, wandered through the forest, up into the mountains to get a view of the place, then kept hiking over the range to the edge of the sim where I fell off the side into a gray-white mist, before returning to the place I started. All sims (experiences) are similar to sky boxes, not connected, no continents, no oceans. You teleport from one sky box experience to the next using an atlas and wait for it to load, something like Blue Mars used to do:




I wanted to keep trekking up into the mountains, but like all things in life, there are endings, and I reached the end of the simulation and fell over the side into limbo:

I took more pix of other places, but this is just a small sample of Sansar.