“Amazon Elastic Beanstalk was claiming that our service was up and running fine but we couldn’t retrieve any logs or connect,” he wrote. “Re-deploys continued to provide the same experience. Our identical sandbox environment remained running, so this did not appear to be an issue with our system. While experimenting to resolve this issue, we took down and could not restore our production environment on Amazon EB.”
He said that he is working with Amazon’s support to fix the problem but doesn’t have an estimated time yet for when the service will be back up.
“This is not the first time we’ve had an outage due to Amazon EB, so we will explore other platform options in the future,” he added.
This is the second time this year that the service has gone down. The service also suffered an outage this past spring.
In August, Colosi told Hypergrid Business that the system had been suffering from technical issues for the past few months, but that the problems had been resolved.
Colosi used to run the Second Life Marketplace and the Lindex exchange. He is also pitching Gloebits as a currency to non-OpenSim platforms and online games and virtual reality apps, and the broader the user base, the more stable the currency.
The Hypergrid Hoppers are heading over to Ireland tomorrow, Dec. 15, to meet Santa Claus. Virtually, that is.
“The end of the year is coming and we will hop to the place where Santa has one of his main package stations,” Reiner Schneeberger — also known as Art Blue in-world — told Hypergrid Business. “At this time of the year his packaging machines work day and night to fill the baskets of the ones believing in his existence. The Amazon of Terralysium you may say, when the Elysium happens on Earth.”
And the work continues unaffected by the virus, he said. He and co-organizer Kisma Reidling, also known as Juliette Surrial-Dreaming in-world, said they talked to Simon Coveney, Minister for Foreign Affairs and Defence.
“As Minister for Foreign Affairs we’ve been working on the Santa Claus issue for a number of weeks now,” he told HG Hoppers. “It’s important to say to all children in the country that we regard Santa Claus’s travels as essential travel for essential purposes and therefore he is exempt from the need to self-quarantine for 14 days and should be able to come in and out of Irish airspace and indeed in and out of Irish homes without having to restrict his movement.”
Hypergrid travelers may be able to meet Santa in person on Tuesday, December 15, 2020 at 1 p.m. Pacific time.
“We have to ask for clearance to enter the airspace where Santa is waiting for our arrival,” said Schneeberger. “You know Ireland is a member of the European Union and there exists the General Data Protection Regulation. Everyone has to agree with GDPR.”
That means that travelers have to agree to the destination grid’s terms of service when they first teleport in, he explained.
Tuesday’s trip starts out, as usual, on the HG Hoppers region of the Craft World grid. The hypergrid address is craft-world.org:8002:HG Hoppers.
(Image courtesy Reiner Schneeberger.)
“From there we take the hop to Misty Isle,” said Schneeberger. This is the second trip to the Misty Isle for the Hypergrid Hoppers, who previously visited this land of fairies, elves and leprechauns in 2019.
Misty Isle is the creation of Moses Ra and Stormy Scorpio. Scorpio will be one of the artists featured in the immersive art show Amerika Art Interbiennale.
Painting by Kisma. (Image courtesy Kisma Reidling.)
The Hypergrid Hoppers, a club for the explorers of the OpenSim hypergrid, is going to Amerika Monday. That’s a virtual world where the travellers will be able to get a preview of Biennale Amerika Art festival.
The trip will begin at the HG Hoppers region of Craft World at 1 p.m. Pacific time on Monday, Nov. 16. The hypergrid address is craft-world.org:8002:HG Hoppers.
The trip will take about an hour.
“We are going to Amerika,” said Reiner Schneeberger — also known as Art Blue in-world. That is the message for the next Immersive Biennale, he told Hypergrid Business, which will be announced at the 2020 OpenSimulator Community Conference on December 5 and 6, where he will speak about immersiveness in real and virtual spaces.
Hypergrid Hoppers get an early look to see how painters can take part in the Biennale Amerika Art, which will happen in the real village Amerika, a tiny community in Germany.
Amerika Art is also the name of a virtual world by Leipzig Lab, an innovator in digital media training, which also runs Leipzig Art, with real gallery spaces.
Painting by Kisma. (Image courtesy Kisma Reidling.)
Amerika, the village, is part of the town Penig, located south of Leipzig. It has the Amerika Museum, telling the story of early settlers leaving Germany to go to “Amerika” — the German spelling for America — how the village got the name.
Kisma Reidling, a painter living in Newport Beach, Cal., has shared her art, which will be presented at a one-day showing in the Surreal Art Gallery, a gallery that was created by Hyde Hackl.
The HG Hoppers will have a chance to see how Amerika Art provides a framework for real life painters in an immersive world. There will be an award category for best ways of showing art by real life painters in a virtual world.
Terra Nova and Utopia Skye were both write-in grids. Most years, there’s at least one smaller grid that does well in this user survey.
Overall scores of the 11 grids that had the most responses. (Hypergrid Business data.)
Where do OpenSimmers live and visit?
Between them, the respondents had visited 67 different grids and named 33 different grids as their primary homes.
Kitely was the grid that was home to the most respondents, followed by OSgrid, Craft, DigiWorldz and Discovery.
Where do OpenSim users make their home? (Hypergrid Business data.)
We also asked our readers about the grids that they had visited.
OSgrid, OpenSim’s largest and oldest grid, was the most visited — 71 percent of our readers had been to that grid. The next most visited was DigiWorldz, at 53 percent, followed by Kitely with 51 percent.
Where do OpenSim users like to travel? (Hypergrid Business data.)
The numbers add up to more than 100 percent because most people have visited more than one grid. In fact, the average OpenSim users has been to almost five different grids — that they recalled during this survey.
Most residents said they were very happy with their grids — 94 percent would “absolutely” recommend them to others, up from 91 percent last year. Just 3 percent said “maybe” and fewer than 2 percent said they would not recommend.
Would you recommend your grid to others? (Hypergrid Business data.)
Technology, support, community, and content
I did not ask people to compare different grids and tell me which one is better. After all, nobody out there has visited all the grids and tried them all out. Instead, what I do every year is ask people what they think about the grid that they spend the most time on.
Typically, people rate their home grid highly. And that makes sense — after all, that’s the grid where they decided to spend their time. That’s why most grids had average responses of “very good” or “excellent” — which I scored as 4 and 5, respectively, when I tabulated the numbers.
As grids get larger, however, they also get more people who are generally discontented. In addition, larger grids may have problems maintaining their technology or support. And, as a result, smaller grids often do very well in these rankings.
You’ll notice that the difference between grids is often a fraction of a percent, so please do not take these results as pure gospel. Plus, with the relatively small number of users we have in OpenSim, the margin of error is high — one highly dissatisfied resident can skew the results quite a bit.
Technology
This year, when our readers were asked how they would grade their grid’s technology, Mobius Grid, Terra Nova and Utopia Skye tied with perfect scores, followed by Craft and then Kitely. Those who lived on their own personal grid scored their grid the lowest for technology, which makes sense since they would have to provide their own support.
OSgrid was second to last. OSgrid is the largest OpenSim grid, allows people to connect regions that they host at home, for free, on their own computers, and all of its management is by a team of volunteers. OSgrid is also the testing ground for new OpenSim features and releases. All these factors combined mean that any particular region might be running slowly on a home Internet connection, or be using an older version of OpenSim.
These survey results also only show how users feel about the technology — not about the effort that the grids have put into their platform. Kitely, for example, has done a great deal of work on custom code, in addition to contributing code fixes back to the community. And OSgrid is where the OpenSim developers do their testing. Neither of these contributions are necessarily reflected in the poll numbers.
How readers rated their home grids on technology. (Hypergrid Business data.)
Support
In support, two grids received perfect scores from their residents –Terra Nova and Utopia Skye, closely followed by Kitely.
OSgrid scored lowest, but, again, the grid is all volunteer-run and regions are hosted on home computers. And there’s only so much that volunteers can do to help since everybody’s home computer and networking configuration is different.
How readers rated their home grids on support. (Hypergrid Business data.)
Community
For community, Terra Nova had a perfect score, followed by people’s personal grids, Mobius, and Tranquility.
How readers rated their home grids on community. (Hypergrid Business data.)
“My personal grid” usually has lowest score for community, for obvious reasons. Okay, if it’s not obvious to everyone, then let me explain. You see, a grid that you run yourself, on your own computer or on your own server, will only have the community that you yourself can gather together. If it’s a one-person grid for, say, creative building, then you’re not going to have much of a community at all.
That wasn’t the case this year. Maybe people have been getting better with enabling hypergrid connectivity and inviting their friends to visit?
Content
In content, Terra Nova again had a perfect score, as did Utopia Skye, followed closely by Craft, Tranquility, and Tangle.
How readers rated their home grids on content. (Hypergrid Business data.)
For the latest list of all grids on the OpenSim platform — or some fork of it — check out our Active Grids List.
If you would like to see a full list of results — minus any identifiable information — please email me at maria@hypergridbusiness.com.
Additional comments from the respondents
The following are representative comments about the grids. There were more than 80 comments in all, higher than last year, some of them quite lengthy, and if anyone wants to see them, or use them on their websites, just email me. Again, I won’t include any personally identifiable information.
In addition to leaving out some of the repetitive comments, I’ve also skipped those that had negative personal attacks or that seemed libelous. And, of course, I also edited out any personally identifying information. The comments have also been very lightly edited for spelling and grammar.
“Very good community. Very stable and very encouraging of education and the arts as well as content respect. The website could use an update it does not reflect well the constant improvements that this grid makes.”
“I’ve been on many grids and 3rd Rock Grid is by far the best.”
“Craft is the grid where I continue to realize my project the Museo del Metaverso, Craft is my home.”
“Craft World is a real friendly grid with a lot of beautiful sites and loads of nice content. And the owner, Licu Raum takes good care of the grid and the users.”
“Craft World is my second home. I have three regions there. I’m impressed with the stability of the grid and the friendliness of the main admin. The community is arts-oriented and sophisticated. There are lots of cultural and social activities and the schedule is always full. Highly recommended.”
“Great grid for education.”
“I love Craft very much.”
“I spend enough time on Craft World, bringing you projects of a high technical-scientific level both from the constructive point of view, thanks to the owner Tonino Lane, and for the contents, preferably aimed at students and connoisseurs. Craft World is also a friendly world, where you can chat amiably and dance with your friends, visiting suggestive and unknown places, often restored in their structural integrity or based on the owners’ imagination.”
“I’ve personal contact with Licu Rau and other people in the staff, and the relationships is always optimal.”
“It’s a very special grid to perform arts of any kind.”
“The best one for learn how to work in world, and the best one for work in peace.”
“I have been there for years — stable and very good.”
“DigiWorldz is by far the best grid out there and I have been to many of them, but DigiWorldz is my home now.”
“DigiWorldz just does it better.”
“I came from another grid where the owner told many lies, begged everyone for money, and blamed it all on DigiWorldz, so I thought I would go there and check it out and write a story about this bad grid, ha ha, but once I got there the people were so friendly, the owner was so nice, and everything worked better in this world than all the others so I decided to stay forever and couldn’t be more happy.”
“I have recommended the group to others in that big closed grid to come here and some have!”
“The support on this grid is amazing! I have never had to wait more than 30 minutes to have any issue resolved. The owner is a great person who takes the time to explain things in terms I understand, the community is friendly and helpful, and performance on this grid is the best I’ve seen. I have been involved in OpenSsim for more than eight years and this grid is by the best of any I’ve tried. I’ll never leave DigiWorldz.”
“I’ve had the opportunity to go to other grids to set up my region, compared many but I’ve chose to stay on Discovery Grid. The rezzing is fast and, except for maintenance times, it is always up and running. It’s a grid I can count on so I’m staying and I would recommend highly. Also any questions and issues I’ve had — ended up my errors — have been answered quickly.”
“There are problems with this grid’s management style.”
“This is one of the — if not THE — best running OpenSim grids I’ve been on. Things load fast and I am able to upload items here that I have trouble uploading on other grids.”
“This is one of the many grids I have my PyroVR Fireworks business actively located in and one of the most stable. Grid owner Balpien Hammerer is the main reason I expanded here after InWorldz shut down.”
“Any problem, any question, you are given a prompt helpful answer.”
“I have consistently found Kitely to be the very best grid in all aspects since joining in 2016. i’ve spent time on pretty much all other major grids and only DigiWorldz comes anywhere close.”
“I think Kitely is a great grid that provides people with the space and a great amount of prims to use. I was able to make a 30,000-prim castle there, the grid performance is great IMO.”
“If they could be convinced to do regions on all the time and connected to each other they would be second to Second Life and actually convince many from Second Life to to try OpenSim.”
“[Kitely owner] Ilan [Tochner] always listens and implements new features if there is enough demand. Mega Worlds of 64 regions are currently offered. Many of us asked for an ocean option so that we didn’t have to look at flat land right off. They added that within days. They added the ability to rent parcels on the 4×4, 6×6 and 8×8 VAR worlds.”
“Ilan and Oren [Hurvitz], Kitely co-founders, are innovators with vision yet who also listen to users and customers, and try to develop the OpenSim-based platform accordingly. The recent Mega World offering — up to 8×8 — is an example.”
“It is good to have an affordable and functional place to create and build. The Community Meetings and the Blender Meetings have been very informative.”
“Kitely continues pushing boundaries and offering the best of technology and service to its patrons.”
“Kitely is a truly excellent choice for a virtual experience. When logging inworld, waiting a few moments in the arrival station for a region to come online is really a minute thing compared to the absolute quality of Kitely. Recommended highly!”
“Kitely is a drama-free grid and a drama-free business.”
“Kitely is my favorite grid by far and a big part of that is due to the community of people and to the owner, Ilan Tochner, who’s customer service is amazing. I’m excited to see so many new people coming in and regions being built!”
“Love Kitely, very affordable!”
“My partner and I have fallen in love with all Kitely has to offer and their support has been outstanding.
No grid is ideal. Every grid has its pros and cons. I rate this in comparison with other grids, not with how we all wish they were.”
“The 8×8 worlds are having high performance.”
“When our company looked at grid options to support our scenario-based training needs, Kitely offered the most for the cost. We started with a 4×4 var and now have grown to an 8×8 var. I am in reality what I would call a power user, not a programmer or IT professional. And for my needs the Kitely support has been outstanding.”
“You get more bang for your buck with Kitely. Their technology is beyond most and because of it, they are able to pass savings along to their customers. Their customer service is unbelievable as well. They get back to you right away, the owner in most cases takes the time to contact us if there is any issue. I also find the active Kitely forum and Marketplace to be a great help to me.”
“I have been a part of this grid around the first year it was created and over the years the community has slowly grown but most importantly the additional things they add to it are amazing! As a main Second Life user that hops onto the OpenSim side of things every so often I am usually forced to have to adapt to some big changes due to limitations many grids seem to have or in general what the OpenSim seems to lack itself for whatever reasons they may have. Mobius Grid has improved a lot of functions that match up pretty close to Second Life itself and it’s easy to understand, easy to work with and great for those who are just starting out!”
“The staff are very close and welcoming folks who are quick to try and improve the experience for their users, from quick responses on problems to helpful support on starting out with their avatars. If a problem comes up within the grid they are fast to take action accordingly which gives a person ease of mind to feel safe in a community knowing they will be given the best support at a quick and easy rate.”
“The grid also feels very up to date with Second Life as well in means of pushing to use experience, full use of Bento, BoM, custom avatars to start with as well as using a base that many other grids use which comes in handy for those who wish to hypergrid!”
“I highly recommend this grid to those who wish for a peaceful, friendly, supportive and creative community of gamers or even those who are casual and wish for something different. Example: humans, mobians, anime, furries or cartoon like things that stand out from the rest!””
“This grid is ideal for gamers and animation or comic fans.”
“Tangle Grid is one of the best I have ever been with.”
“Fast and best support. The owners are always there to go above and beyond for us. ”
“I find Tangle Grid is a amazing grid and very helpful grid owner and nice friendly grid and I highly recommended you should visit there as well.”
“Tangle Grid has always been there to help other people and other grids. They are always trying to get all grids involved in things like their expos. They are always there to help their residents with problems even if they are not grid related. The price plans are great you never have to pay for prims you don’t use. The Pay-By-Prims system is super for us cause I don’t need a lot to be happy with my region. They also take time to explain things to new comers. I am proud to call Tangle Grid my home.”
“Eu adoro o Terra Nova.” (Google translate: “I love Terra Nova.”)
“Terra Nova eu adm, Virtual Life Brasil ja adm e o Adreans tenho conta la a anos, mas fico mais em Terra Nova que esta bem estabilizado e como minhas construcoes.” (I’m guessing at the translation but maybe something like: “I’m in Terra Nova, and also in Virtual Life Brasil, and also on Adreans World for many years, but I spend more time on Terra Nova because it is stable and I like building there.”)
“Exclusively build on this grid. Plus Dinkies are here, which obviously is primary for me as the Tuna Bandit
OldeSoul Resident.”
“Since inception, Utopia Skye grid has been my home. It’s been a place of peaceful beauty. The club, the meditations, the events, are all what make this place one that I love to be on. I do visit other grids from time to time, but rarely. Mike continues to maintain our code base to near perfection. I very rarely have any issue on this grid tech wise or otherwise.”
“This is one of the many grids I have my PyroVR Fireworks business actively located in and one of the most stable. Grid owners Mike Chase and Calliope Andel, are the main reason I expanded here after InWorldz shut down and also worked closely with them for The Golden Touch Theater back in InWorldz and currently with them in USG.”
“A great grid, great community — via Stark — technology seems better and more stable but OSgrid still has the most users hence splitting my time between grids.”
The OpenSimulator Community Conference is an annual conference that focuses on the developer and user community surrounding the OpenSimulator software.
“2020 is a year in which the world has taken a beating emotionally and physically. It is our fervent hope that this year’s conference will be a time of healing and shared joy as we remember how much we value socializing, working, learning, and creating within these marvelous 3D spaces,” said Conference Co-chair Cynthia Calongne.
The conference will showcase the artistry, innovation, technology, history, archaeology, educational discoveries, and love of life in the OpenSim community.
OpenSimulator is an open source multi-platform, multiuser 3D application server. It can be used to create a virtual environment as a 3D world which can be accessed through a variety of clients and multiple protocols. Users can also visit other OpenSimulator virtual worlds across the web by using the Hypergrid protocol. With an expansive architecture of independent, yet virtually connected grids accessible via the Internet, OpenSimulator is the server software for hosting social, educational, creative, business, and technical communities within the embodied, distributed Metaverse.
Organized by the metaverse-focused nonprofit AvaCon, this year’s conference features presentations on the latest software release, visions for the future, and technologies or content today that are shaping the future of the platform.
(Image curtesy OpenSimulator Community Conference.)
The OpenSimulator Community Conference 2020 features two days of fast-paced presentations, panels, performances, and workshops that spotlight the best of the OpenSimulator platform and community. In the evenings, the conference will celebrate another year of discovery and wonder as DJs and performers host dances and parties.
Last year’s conference featured innovations in OpenSimulator and in-world favorites such as the Animesh dancers on stage. For artistry and philosophy, Art Blue and Juliet Surrealdreaming saved the world in a fridge. Rachel Umoren presented healthcare for babies and their moms to reduce infant mortality using virtual reality, and educators and researchers showcased their learning simulations and technical feats.
The art exhibits contributed by talented designers combined with the art experience hosted by Cheops and ADRET WEB ART reminded attendees of the magic of immersive artistry and storytelling.
The Community Virtual Library stepped into the boxing ring during the Virtual Worlds Smackdown, analyzing the benefits of virtual reality and virtual worlds. Kayaker Magic and Mike Lorre challenged the audience to think of new ways to use scripts and for technology, Mister Blue advanced the community’s technical prowess through the use of Docker containers.
Viewers are always a hot topic at the conference, and 2019 launched the SceneGate and EchoVoice viewers from the Infinite Metaverse Alliance and the Thales Group.
“Last year’s conference was a terrific success with two days of presentations, panels, exciting expo and Hypergrid experiences, hundreds of attendees within the 3D virtual world conference space, and thousands more watching on via live video stream.” said conference organizer Joyce Bettencourt. “We will be building on that success by offering more opportunities for the community to be involved and furthering outreach to attract new users. With the continued interest surrounding virtual reality technologies, we want the VR community to know that OpenSimulator is a great platform for building the open metaverse.”
The mega worlds can support up to 80 simultaneous visitors and up to 150,000 prims on a dedicated Amazon server. They can be configured in a number of sizes, from the smallest, a single region, to the biggest, an eight-by-eight region, with a new option, a six-by-six region, added today.
Kitely CEO, Ilan Tochner.
“It’s something many people have asked us for over the years and now they can get it, but only if they order before this deal ends,” Kitely CEO Ilan Tochner told Hypergrid Business.
Although the deal itself ends at the end of the month, customers who order these regions will be able to keep them indefinitely.
“We launched this offer two weeks ago and have had an average of one such world ordered per day by new communities moving to Kitely and existing ones enlarging their Advanced Worlds,” said Tochner.
That required six months of back-end work on the platform, said Tochner, since standard OpenSim lacks this functionality.
“We needed to get a clear picture of all the internal processes and their effect on performance and scalability,” he said. “We began by adding detailed low-level monitoring across our entire system to enable us to track the various process bottlenecks. We then spent time improving the OpenSim bot testing tools so that they’ll more accurately simulate real viewer behavior.”
There’s still work to be done, he said, especially in reducing login lag.
Oren Hurvitz
“Achieving this level of performance is the result of many infrastructural changes Kitely has made to OpenSim,” said Oren Hurvitz, Kitely Co-Founder and VP R&D. “Those started with Kitely upgrading the latest OpenSim release — version 0.9.1.1 — with more than 600 proprietary performance, scalability and reliability patches it developed for its virtual worlds on demand service. Kitely then replaced OpenSim’s regular assets and inventory systems with its own cloud-based alternatives. This involved Kitely switching to running its main grid database on Aurora Serverless, Amazon’s auto-scaling database solution, so it will be able to handle big spikes in usage ad-hoc.”
One of the biggest problems with supporting a large number of concurrent users is that they have to download large amounts of data.
“Many regions use thousands of unique textures and meshes which viewers then need to download from OpenSim when users teleport or log into these regions,” he said. “This can be especially slow if many users enter a region for the first time for an event and all their viewers try to download the region’s assets at the same time.”
In order to eliminate this bottleneck, Kitely moved those assets to CloudFront, Amazon’s content delivery network, he told Hypergrid Business.
“CloudFront uses a worldwide collection of very fast servers to serve files, so it can serve assets very quickly to a great number of users,” he said.
The AviWorlds grid, formerly owned by Alexandro Pomposelli and now owned by Josh Boam, is down due to a server migration.
“We will be back up in a few days,” Boam told Hypergrid Business. “We’re upgrading our asset server to a faster and more robust system.”
Josh Boam
The upgrade will help the grid address capacity issues caused by an influx of new users, he said, and is the second phase of this upgrade. The first phase was completed a week ago, when many of the grid’s features were migrated.
“This is the remaining half and the longest half,” he said. “Transferring the millions of assets to our new server in Germany is taking some time.”
You can follow the grid on Facebook here, though the page isn’t frequently updated and there is no news about the downtime. The grid doesn’t seem to have a Twitter feed or a status page, though there’s a notice on the home page that the grid will be back up tomorrow, which is currently looking doubtful.
The Great Canadian Grid is back, grid owner Rod MacDougall — also known as Roddie Macchi in-world – told Hypergrid Business.
“I have spent an entire year day and night learning the back end of everything,” he said.
Rod MacDougall (Roddie Macchi)
Previously, MacDougall used an OpenSim hosting provider to manage the back end, a decision he said contributed to the grid’s closing this past March.
“Finally, no one to sabotage us,” he said. “I am still learning but I am very happy to know I have things working again — without anyone’s help.”
In addition to a dispute with his hosting company, DigiWorldz, other factors that hurt the grid were an unsuccessful crowdfunding campaign and a coronavirus-related hospital stay.
Users will have to create new accounts on the grid, via the registration page.
Users can also rent regions, starting at just CAD $5 (US $3.80) per month for a 15,000-prim region.
MacDougall said that he is able to offer prices this low because he’s no longer spending more than CAD $500 a month on technology support services on top of the base server costs.
“I was devoted and dedicated to spending day and night to learn as much as I can to get us back,” he said. “No more letting anyone dictate us or have control over us. I’m very excited to finally do it the way I’ve always felt it should be done.”
The loginURI and hypergrid address is login.greatcanadiangrid.ca:8002.
The grid has an in-world currency, MC$, free OAR region uploads and free IAR inventory uploads, free stores for creators, and daily database and OAR backups.
“I started working on an extension to OpenSim that makes it work in peer-to-peer mode… I’m really excited to say that this is working!” she wrote.
The email went on to detail some behind-the-scenes details of how the hypergrid was implemented, and where folks could download the code and try it out.
By the spring of 2009, several major grids were hypergrid-enabled, including OSgrid.
By November of that year, of the 33 known public OpenSim grids, 22 were hypergrid-enabled.
This month, we have 348 public OpenSim grids in our database
Only about two dozen of these grids are not hypergrid enabled.
The hypergrid accounts for 92 percent of OpenSim’s active monthly users, and 95 percent of its land area.
Meanwhile, our database doesn’t include hundreds — possibly thousands — of grids run by individuals, schools and companies without a lot of fanfare, often behind a firewall. These grids, too, are often hypergrid-enabled, either full time, or just when the hypergrid is needed.
For example, a school might turn on hypergrid during setup, to help bring in content and staff for building projects, or for staff training, then turn it off when classes are in session.
The hypergrid is the virtual world equivalent of the World Wide Web, allowing anyone to put up a world and connect it to a whole metaverse of other people’s worlds.
OpenSim is the only platform that does this. Meanwhile, other virtual world and virtual reality platforms are closed ecosystems.
Here’s hoping that OpenSim’s example will be followed sooner, rather than later, with the coming virtual reality metaverse.
