Author: Maria Korolov

Posted on

OpenSim active users rise with cooler weather

This time of year — in the northern hemisphere, at least — people start spending more time inside as temperatures drop and school starts.

So it’s no surprise that the total number of active users on the public OpenSim grids is going up.

According to their published stats report, there were 44,129 actives this up, up by 1,128 from this time a month ago.

However, the total land area went down, by the equivalent of 738 standard regions. All of that drop — and then some — is accounted for by the fact that a single grid, CandM World, didn’t report its stats this month. Last month, it had over 1,800 regions. Today, the website just shows a security error message, so it could just be a configuration error.

We are now tracking a total of 2,675 public grids, of which 311 are active and 244 published their statistics this month. If you have a stats page that we’re not tracking, please email me at maria@hypergridbusiness.com — that way, your grid will be mentioned in this report every month, for additional visibility with both search engines and users.

This month, OSgrid was the largest grid by land area, with 34,103 standard region equivalents, while Wolf Territories Grid was the most active, with 6,950 unique logins over the past 30 days.

OpenSim land area for Sep. 2024. (Hypergrid Business data.).

Our stats do not include most of the grids running on DreamGrid, a free easy-to-use version OpenSim, since these tend to be private grids.

OpenSim is a free, open-source, virtual world platform, that’s similar to Second Life and allows people with no technical skills to quickly and cheaply create virtual worlds and teleport to other virtual worlds. Those with technical skills can run OpenSim worlds on their servers for free using either DreamGrid, the official OpenSim installer for those who are more technically inclined, or any other distribution, while commercial hosting starts at less than $5 a region.

A list of OpenSim hosting providers is here. Download the recommended Firestorm viewer here and find out where to get content for your OpenSim world or region here.

Hypergrid Business newsletter is now available

Every month on the 15th — right after the stats report comes out — we will be sending out a newsletter with all the OpenSim news from the previous month. You can subscribe here or fill out the form below.

Get our monthly stats and all other OpenSim news delivered right to your mailbox every month.

We don’t spam! Read our privacy policy for more info.

Top 25 grids by active users

When it comes to general-purpose social grids, especially closed grids, the rule of thumb is the busier the better. People looking to make new friends look for grids that already have the most users. Merchants looking to sell content will go to the grids with the most potential customers. Event organizers looking for the biggest audience — you get the idea.

Top 25 most popular grids this month:

  1. Wolf Territories Grid: 6,950 active users
  2. OSgrid: 4,894 active users
  3. GBG World: 2,422 active users
  4. DigiWorldz: 2,143 active users
  5. Darkheart’s Playground: 2,018 active users
  6. Alternate Metaverse: 1,789 active users
  7. WaterSplash: 1,491 active users
  8. AviWorlds: 1,101 active users
  9. AviVerse AlterEgo: 1,024 active users
  10. Trianon World: 1,004 active users
  11. Neverworld: 953 active users
  12. Moonrose: 861 active users
  13. Littlefield: 858 active users
  14. Party Destination Grid: 792 active users
  15. Craft World: 790 active users
  16. Astralia: 717 active users
  17. AvatarLife: 638 active users
  18. Herederos Grid: 566 active users
  19. Groovy Verse: 564 active users
  20. SunEden Resort: 552 active users
  21. Great Canadian Grid: 550 active users
  22. Gentle Fire Grid: 496 active users
  23. Kitely: 495 active users
  24. Virtual Vista Metaverse: 456 active users
  25. ZetaWorlds: 437 active users

Online marketplaces for OpenSim content

There are currently 21,019 product listings in Kitely Market containing 41,133 product variations, 35,892 of which are exportable.

Kitely Market has delivered orders to 630 OpenSim grids to date.

(Data courtesy Kitely.)

As you can see in the above chart, nearly all the growth in Kitely Market has been in content that can be exported to other grids — that is the green area on the graph. The red area, of non-exportable content, has stayed level for the past eight years.

The Kitely Market is the largest collection of legal content available in OpenSim. It is accessible to both hypergrid-enabled and closed, private grids. The instructions for how to configure the Kitely Market for closed grids are here.

Kitely is continuing its $90 sale on Mega Worlds, which is currently scheduled to end of Oct. 15.

New grids

I didn’t add any new grids to the database this month.

If you know of any public grid that we’re missing, please email me at maria@hypergridbusiness.com.

Suspended grids

The following 12 grids were suspended this month: BachmansWorld One, CatGrid, DigiGrids, German Grid, Legacy, Mathesis, Matrix, NewOffworld, Oczko, SFgrid, Steg, and Trinity’s DreamGrid/

If they don’t reappear online again soon, they will be marked as closed in future reports.

Sometimes, a grid changes its login URI or website address — if that’s the case, email me and let me know and I’ll update my database.

Top 40 grids by land area

All region counts on this list are, whenever available, in terms of standard region equivalents. Active user counts include hypergrid visitors whenever possible.

Many school, company, or personal grids do not publish their numbers.

The raw data for this month’s report is here. A list of all active grids is here. And here is a list of all the hypergrid-enabled grids and their hypergrid addresses, sorted by popularity. This is very useful if you are creating a hyperport.

You can see all the historical OpenSim statistics here, including polls and surveys, dating all the way back to 2009.

Do you know of any other grids that are open to the public but that we don’t have in our database? Email me at maria@hypergridbusiness.com.

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OSFest 2024 Opens for Builders and Participants

OSFest 2024. (Image courtesy Lisa Laxton.)

The virtual doors of OSFest 2024 have swung open, welcoming creators, builders, merchants, performers, and sponsors to begin crafting their digital spaces. This annual event, hosted on the OpenSim Fest grid, is set to run from October 4 through October 20, 2024, offering a diverse platform for virtual exhibitions, performances, and commerce.

Lisa Laxton

“The grid is open for participants to build or bring in their creations via the hypergrid,” said Lisa Laxton, OSFest director and founder of the Infinite Metaverse Alliance and Laxton Consulting.

Based on the feedback from previous events, OSFest now has a new mainland layout, she told Hypergrid Business. There are also small sponsor parcels available at US$3 each for other grids or region owners looking to increase their visibility in the hypergrid community and promote their grids.

There is also a limited number of free parcels available for exhibitors and merchants, paid for by sponsors.

OSFest is also looking for volunteers to join the OSFest team and help get everything ready for the event, and to help out during the festival itself.

For more information, check out the event’s home page, or the FAQ page.

The festival will feature 110 hours of performer events and 84 hours dedicated to exhibits, stores, and interactive activities. In a nod to the broader virtual community, OSFest has also allocated eight hours for satellite events on other grids, encouraging cross-platform participation.

OSFest 2024. (Image courtesy Lisa Laxton.)

Most of the 110 hours of performer slots are already booked, Laxton said, and merchant sales event times have been scheduled. There are non-music events and activities on the schedule as well, she added.

“Some participants have started or will soon bring in their builds, and the content infrastructure is ongoing with expected updates on the website, calendar, and Discord server,” she said. “This is the fun and exciting time leading up to opening day.”

This year’s festival breaks new ground by eschewing a unifying theme, a decision made through community vote. This approach promises an eclectic mix of exhibits, stores, and performances, reflecting the diverse interests of the virtual world community. Adding to the fresh feel, the grid layout has been completely redesigned, offering new experiences for both returning participants and first-time visitors.

Participants can access the grid via hypergrid using the address: grid.opensimfest.com:8022:OSF_HGWelcome.

Organizers are encouraging early setup, with a target completion date set for late September.

OSFest 2024 is Gloebit-enabled, allowing for virtual transactions within the grid.

Various sponsorship levels are available for those wishing to support the event financially.

Posted on

OpenSim usage stats down as summer comes to a close

Summer is generally a slow time for OpenSim, and virtual worlds in general, as people spend more time outside and on vacation and educational projects go on break.

The total number of active users went down by more than 3,700, to 43,001.

DigiWorldz, for example, lost 1,220 actives this month, according to its stats reports, as well as 21 regions.

In addition, several grids did not report any stats this month, including German Grid, which had 235 actives last month, German World Grid, which previously reported 623, and The City, which reported 265 actives in July.

But the total land area of OpenSim’s public grids rose by nearly 1,494 region equivalents this month, and OpenSim grids registered a total of 1,545 new users.

We are now tracking a total of 2,675 public grids, of which 311 are active and 244 published their statistics this month. If you have a stats page that we’re not tracking, please email me at maria@hypergridbusiness.com — that way, your grid will be mentioned in this report every month, for additional visibility with both search engines and users.

This month, OSgrid was the largest grid by land area, with 33,203 standard region equivalents, while Wolf Territories Grid was the most active, with 6,733 unique logins over the past 30 days.

OpenSim land area for Aug 2024. (Hypergrid Business data.).

Our stats do not include most of the grids running on DreamGrid, a free easy-to-use version OpenSim, since these tend to be private grids.

OpenSim is a free, open-source, virtual world platform, that’s similar to Second Life and allows people with no technical skills to quickly and cheaply create virtual worlds and teleport to other virtual worlds. Those with technical skills can run OpenSim worlds on their servers for free using either DreamGrid, the official OpenSim installer for those who are more technically inclined, or any other distribution, while commercial hosting starts at less than $5 a region.

A list of OpenSim hosting providers is here. Download the recommended Firestorm viewer here and find out where to get content for your OpenSim world or region here.

Hypergrid Business newsletter is now available

Every month on the 15th — right after the stats report comes out — we will be sending out a newsletter with all the OpenSim news from the previous month. You can subscribe here or fill out the form below.

Get our monthly stats and all other OpenSim news delivered right to your mailbox every month.

We don’t spam! Read our privacy policy for more info.

Top 25 grids by active users

When it comes to general-purpose social grids, especially closed grids, the rule of thumb is the busier the better. People looking to make new friends look for grids that already have the most users. Merchants looking to sell content will go to the grids with the most potential customers. Event organizers looking for the biggest audience — you get the idea.

Top 25 most popular grids this month:

  1. Wolf Territories Grid: 6,733 active users
  2. OSgrid: 4,844 active users
  3. GBG World: 2,295 active users
  4. Vida Dupla: 1,987 active users
  5. Alternate Metaverse: 1,885 active users
  6. Darkheart’s Playground: 1,723 active users
  7. WaterSplash: 1,447 active users
  8. AviWorlds: 1,068 active users
  9. AviVerse AlterEgo: 1,002 active users
  10. DigiWorldz: 943 active users
  11. Trianon World: 937 active users
  12. Neverworld: 897 active users
  13. Littlefield: 822 active users
  14. Party Destination Grid: 796 active users
  15. Moonrose: 774 active users
  16. Astralia: 763 active users
  17. Craft World: 723 active users
  18. AvatarLife: 717 active users
  19. Herederos Grid: 578 active users
  20. Groovy Verse: 547 active users
  21. Virtual Vista Metaverse: 494 active users
  22. ZetaWorlds: 476 active users
  23. Kitely: 460 active users
  24. Gentle Fire Grid: 448 active users
  25. DreamNation: 342 active users

The biggest change on this list was the addition of Virtual Vista Metaverse, a new grid in our database, which had a strong launch.

Online marketplaces for OpenSim content

There are currently 20,965 product listings in Kitely Market containing 41,073 product variations, 35,835 of which are exportable.

Kitely Market has delivered orders to 628 OpenSim grids to date.

(Data courtesy Kitely.)

As you can see in the above chart, nearly all the growth in Kitely Market has been in content that can be exported to other grids — that is the green area on the graph. The red area, of non-exportable content, has stayed level for the past eight years.

The Kitely Market is the largest collection of legal content available in OpenSim. It is accessible to both hypergrid-enabled and closed, private grids. The instructions for how to configure the Kitely Market for closed grids are here.

Kitely has recently upgraded its version of OpenSim to allow for faster start-up times and better compatibility with scripts imported from Second Life.

Kitely is also continuing its $90 sale on Mega Worlds.

New grids

I didn’t add any new grids to the database this month.

If you know of any public grid that we’re missing, please email me at maria@hypergridbusiness.com.

Suspended grids

The following 11 grids were marked suspended this month: Butschiland, Butschiland, Destiny Grid, Fire and Ice Grid, Galactic Virtual, IMA Metaverse Depot, KoolPheller Estates, The Public World, Tropical Isle, UCI Mondego vLab, and Virtual RBM.

If they don’t reappear online again soon, they will be marked as closed in future reports.

Sometimes, a grid changes its login URI or website address — if that’s the case, email me and let me know and I’ll update my database.

Top 40 grids by land area

All region counts on this list are, whenever available, in terms of standard region equivalents. Active user counts include hypergrid visitors whenever possible.

Many school, company, or personal grids do not publish their numbers.

The raw data for this month’s report is here. A list of all active grids is here. And here is a list of all the hypergrid-enabled grids and their hypergrid addresses, sorted by popularity. This is very useful if you are creating a hyperport.

You can see all the historical OpenSim statistics here, including polls and surveys, dating all the way back to 2009.

Do you know of any other grids that are open to the public but that we don’t have in our database? Email me at maria@hypergridbusiness.com.

Posted on

Kitely ‘Mega Worlds” on sale for $90 per month

Kitely’s Coopersville region is a Mega World. (Image courtesy Kitely.)

For a limited time, Kitely‘s “Mega Worlds” region packages are on sale again, for $90 a month, the company announced today.

A “Mega World” is a variable size region the size of 64 standard region that can hold up to 150,000 prims. That works out to just $1.40 per standard region per month.

They also get their own dedicated servers.

The downside? They’re only available for the first 25 customers who order.

The deal comes shortly after Kitely’s recent performance upgrades that sped up world startup times. And, in May, Kitely rolled out an upgrade that doubled region performance.

Normally, the Mega Worlds cost $120 a month, and the last time the Mega Worlds were on sale was four years ago.

Most OpenSim grids and hosting providers cram a lot of variable-sized regions into each server and run multiple variable-sized regions on each OpenSim instance in order to keep their operational costs manageable and their prices affordable, said Kitely CEO Ilan Tocher.

“This can be problematic because if your region shares server resources with many other regions then it may run slowly due to what happens in those other regions,” he told Hypergrid Business.

Kitely uses a different strategy and instead of placing a lot of variable-sized regions — which it calls “worlds” — on each server it automatically starts worlds when they are entered and shuts them down when they become empty.

This enables Kitely to run each world on its own OpenSim instance and place no more than four such worlds on each server. By doing this Kitely provides each actively used world a lot more server resources than what other OpenSim grids provide, thus giving its customers a better inworld experience while keeping its prices competitive.

What is unique about Mega Worlds is that Mega Worlds don’t share their server. A Mega World is guaranteed to always get a full server of its own when its active, so it can fully use all of the server’s resources without being impacted by other people’s worlds. This means that Mega Worlds can run bigger worlds, with more scripts and more visitors, than other worlds.

You can read more about Kitely Mega Worlds and its limited-time promotion here.

For examples of publicly-accessible Mega Worlds, check out Coopersville, Signature Safety LLC, and the International Spaceflight Museum.

International Spaceflight Museum on Kitely. (Image courtesy Kitely.)

Coopersville hypergrid address: grid.kitely.com:8002:Coopersville

Signature Safety LLC hypergrid address: grid.kitely.com:8002:Signature Safety LLC

International Spaceflight Museum hypergrid address: grid.kitely.com:8002:ISMuseum

Kitely, which opened to the public in March 2011, is one of the longest-running and most innovative OpenSim grids. With its unique on-demand region system and the popular Kitely Market, the grid is a significant player in the virtual world ecosystem.

Posted on

OpenSim regions up, actives down with summer heat

The total land area of OpenSim’s public grids jumped by more than 33,000 region equivalents this month, with the addition of a large new grid to our list. However, the total number of active users was down by nearly 1,500, due to several grids not reporting stats this month. Missing grids included Fire and Ice, The City, and Little Big City.

The big new grid was Simation Grid, with a reported 25,408 region equivalents. OpenSim’s architecture makes it easy for grid owners to launch with plenty of space. Or it could be a stats mistake — the grid’s website says “Standard Region Equivalents: 25408 Km2” — and if it is actually giving the area in square kilometers, than it has 387,693 total regions, which would make it larger than all the other OpenSim grids put together. I couldn’t find any contact information on the grid’s website, and some of the pages seem to be placeholders, so if you’re the owner of Simation Grid and are reading this, and if I got your numbers wrong — please email me at maria@hypergridbusiness.com and I’ll update this article!

We are now tracking a total of 2,675 public grids, of which 318 are active and 258 published their statistics this month. If you have a stats page that we’re not tracking, please email me at maria@hypergridbusiness.com — that way, your grid will be mentioned in this report every month, for additional visibility with both search engines and users.

This month, OSgrid was the largest grid by land area, with 33,554 standard region equivalents, while Wolf Territories Grid was the most active, with 6,540 unique logins over the past 30 days.

OpenSim land area for July 2024. (Hypergrid Business data.).

Our stats do not include most of the grids running on DreamGrid, a free easy-to-use version OpenSim, since these tend to be private grids.

OpenSim is a free, open-source, virtual world platform, that’s similar to Second Life and allows people with no technical skills to quickly and cheaply create virtual worlds and teleport to other virtual worlds. Those with technical skills can run OpenSim worlds on their servers for free using either DreamGrid, the official OpenSim installer for those who are more technically inclined, or any other distribution, while commercial hosting starts at less than $5 a region.

A list of OpenSim hosting providers is here. Download the recommended Firestorm viewer here and find out where to get content for your OpenSim world or region here.

Hypergrid Business newsletter is now available

Every month on the 15th — right after the stats report comes out — we will be sending out a newsletter with all the OpenSim news from the previous month. You can subscribe here or fill out the form below.

Get our monthly stats and all other OpenSim news delivered right to your mailbox every month.

We don’t spam! Read our privacy policy for more info.

Top 25 grids by active users

When it comes to general-purpose social grids, especially closed grids, the rule of thumb is the busier the better. People looking to make new friends look for grids that already have the most users. Merchants looking to sell content will go to the grids with the most potential customers. Event organizers looking for the biggest audience — you get the idea.

Top 25 most popular grids this month:

  1. Wolf Territories Grid: 6,540 active users
  2. OSgrid: 5,168 active users
  3. GBG World: 2,333 active users
  4. DigiWorldz: 2,163 active users
  5. Alternate Metaverse: 1,967 active users
  6. Vida Dupla: 1,838 active users
  7. Darkheart’s Playground: 1,718 active users
  8. WaterSplash: 1,521 active users
  9. Trianon World: 1,108 active users
  10. AviWorlds: 1,028 active users
  11. AviVerse AlterEgo: 987 active users
  12. Neverworld: 962 active users
  13. Littlefield: 935 active users
  14. Party Destination Grid: 840 active users
  15. AvatarLife: 837 active users
  16. Moonrose: 825 active users
  17. Astralia: 771 active users
  18. Craft World: 744 active users
  19. Herederos Grid: 582 active users
  20. Virtual Vista Metaverse: 545 active users
  21. Gentle Fire Grid: 537 active users
  22. ZetaWorlds: 524 active users
  23. Groovy Verse: 522 active users
  24. Kitely: 462 active users
  25. Barefoot Dreamers: 438 active users

The biggest change on this list was the addition of Virtual Vista Metaverse, a new grid in our database, which had a strong launch.

Online marketplaces for OpenSim content

There are currently 20,965 product listings in Kitely Market containing 41,073 product variations, 35,835 of which are exportable.

Kitely Market has delivered orders to 628 OpenSim grids to date.

(Data courtesy Kitely.)

As you can see in the above chart, nearly all the growth in Kitely Market has been in content that can be exported to other grids — that is the green area on the graph. The red area, of non-exportable content, has stayed level for the past eight years.

The Kitely Market is the largest collection of legal content available in OpenSim. It is accessible to both hypergrid-enabled and closed, private grids. The instructions for how to configure the Kitely Market for closed grids are here.

Kitely has recently upgraded its version of OpenSim to allow for faster start-up times and better compatibility with scripts imported from Second Life.

New grids

The following grids were added to our database this month: Agartha, AmaziWorld, Casperia Prime, Gridworld, HG Safari Grid, Nosso Lar, Sciattisi Grid, Simation Grid, Steg, and Tenth Dimension.

If you know of any public grid that we’re missing, please email me at maria@hypergridbusiness.com.

Suspended grids

The following nine grids were marked suspended this month: Eenhgrid, Hermopolis Chimera, Kantarobasta Grid, Kindred Spirits World, Pseudospace, Rocket World, Royal Grid, Starfleet, and  Tropicana Grid.

If they don’t reappear online again soon, they will be marked as closed in future reports.

Sometimes, a grid changes its login URI or website address — if that’s the case, email me and let me know and I’ll update my database.

Top 40 grids by land area

All region counts on this list are, whenever available, in terms of standard region equivalents. Active user counts include hypergrid visitors whenever possible.

Many school, company, or personal grids do not publish their numbers.

The raw data for this month’s report is here. A list of all active grids is here. And here is a list of all the hypergrid-enabled grids and their hypergrid addresses, sorted by popularity. This is very useful if you are creating a hyperport.

You can see all the historical OpenSim statistics here, including polls and surveys, dating all the way back to 2009.

Do you know of any other grids that are open to the public but that we don’t have in our database? Email me at maria@hypergridbusiness.com.

Posted on

People think AIs are conscious. What could this mean for bots in OpenSim?

(Image by Maria Korolov via Adobe Firefly.)

I’ve been interacting with OpenSim bots — or NPCs — for nearly as long as I’ve been covering OpenSim. Which is about 15 years. (Oh my God, has it really been that long?)

I’ve been hoping that OpenSim writing would become by day job, but, unfortunately, OpenSim never really took off. Instead, I covered cybersecurity and, more recently, generative AI.

But then I saw some reporting about a new studies about AI, and immediately thought — this could really be something in OpenSim.

The study was published this past April in the journal Neuroscience of Consciousness, and it showed that a majority of people – 67% to be exact – attribute some degree of consciousness to ChatGPT. And the more people use these AI systems, the more likely they are to see them as conscious entities.

Then, in May, another study showed that 54% of people, after a conversation with ChatGPT, thought it was a real person.

Now, I’m not saying that OpenSim grid owners should run out and install a bunch of bots on their grids that pretend to be real people, in order to lure in more users. That would be dumb, expensive, a waste of resources, possibly illegal and definitely unethical.

But if users knew that these bots were powered by AI and understood that they’re not real people, they might still enjoy interacting with them and develop attachments to them — just like we get attached to brands, or cartoon animals, or characters in a novel. Or, yes, virtual girlfriends or boyfriends.

In the video below, you can see OpenAI’s recent GPT-4o presentation. Yup, the one where ChatGPT sounds suspiciously like Scarlett Johansson in “Her.” I’ve set it to start at the point in the video where they’re talking to her.

I can see why ScarJo got upset — and why that particular voice is no longer available as an option.

Now, as I write this, the voice chatbot they’re demonstrating isn’t widely available yet. But the text version is — and its the text interface that’s most common in OpenSim anyway.

GPT-4o does cost money. It costs money to send it a question and to get a response. A million tokens worth of questions — or 750,000 words — costs $5, and a million token’s worth of response costs $15.

A page of text is roughly 250 words, so a million tokens is about 3,000 pages. So, for $20, you can get a lot of back-and-forth. But there are also cheaper platforms.

Anthropic’s Claude, for example, which has tested better than ChatGPT in some benchmarks, costs a bit less — $3 for a million input tokens, and $15 for a million output tokens.

But there are also free, open-source platforms that you run on your own servers with comparable performance levels. For example, on the LMSYS Chatbot Arena Leaderboard, OpenAI’s GPT-4o in in first place with a score of 1287, Claude 3.5 Sonnet is close behind with 1272, and the (mostly) open source Llama 3 from Meta is not too far distant, with a score of 1207 — and there are several other open source AI platforms at the top of the charts, including Google’s Gemma, NVIDIA’s Nemotron, Cohere’s Command R+, Alibaba’s Qwen2, and Mistral.

I can easily see an OpenSim hosting provider adding an AI service to their package deals.

(Image by Maria Korolov via Adobe Firefly.)

Imagine the potential for creating truly immersive experiences in OpenSim and other virtual environments. If users are predisposed to see AI entities as conscious, we could create non-player characters that feel incredibly real and responsive.

This could revolutionize storytelling, education, and social interactions in virtual spaces.

We could have bots that users can form meaningful relationships with, AI-driven characters that can adapt to individual user preferences, and virtual environments that feel alive and dynamic.

And then there’s the potential for interactive storytelling and games, with quests and narratives that are more engaging than ever before, create virtual assistants that feel like true companions, or even build communities that blur the lines between AI and human participants.

For those using OpenSim for work, there are also applications here for business and education, in the form of AI tutors, AI executive assistants, AI sales agents, and more.

However, as much as I’m thrilled by these possibilities, I can’t help but feel a twinge of concern.

As the study authors point out, there are some risks to AIs that feel real.

(Image by Maria Korolov via Adobe Firefly.)

First, there’s the risk of emotional attachment. If users start to view AI entities as conscious beings, they might form deep, potentially unhealthy bonds with these virtual characters. This could lead to a range of issues, from social isolation in the real world to emotional distress if these AI entities are altered or removed.

We’re already seeing that, with people feeling real distress when their virtual girlfriends are turned off.

Then there’s the question of blurred reality. As the line between AI and human interactions becomes less clear, users might struggle to distinguish between the two.

Personally, I’m not too concerned about this one. We’ve had people complaining that other people couldn’t tell fantasy from reality since the days of Don Quixote. Probably even earlier. There were probably cave people sitting around, saying, “Look at the young people with all their cave paintings. They could be out actually hunting, and instead they sit around the cave looking at the paintings.”

Or even earlier, when language was invented. “Look at those young people, sitting around talking about hunting, instead of going out there into the jungle and catching something.”

When movies were first invented, when people started getting “addicted” to television, or video games… we’ve always had moral panics about new media.

The thing is, those moral panics were also, to some extent, justified. Maybe the pulp novels that the printing press gave us didn’t rot our brains. But Mao’s Little Red Book, the Communist Manifesto, that thing that Hitler wrote that I don’t even was aided and abetted by the books they wrote.

So that’s what I’m most worried about — the potential for exploitation. Bad actors could misuse our tendency to anthropomorphize AI, creating deceptive or manipulative experiences that take advantage of users’ emotional connections and lead them to be more tolerant of evil.

But I don’t think that’s something that we, in OpenSim, have to worry about. Our platform doesn’t have the kind of reach it would take to create a new dictator!

I think the worst that would happen is that people might get so engaged that they spend a few dollars more than they planned to spend.

Posted on

Kitely upgrades to enhanced version of OpenSim

StorylinkRadio region in Kitely. (Image courtesy David Kariuki)

Kitely, a leading OpenSim grid, has announced a significant upgrade to its virtual world hosting service, implementing an enhanced version of OpenSim 0.9.2.2. This update comes on the heels of a recent system-wide upgrade that doubled world performance.

According to an announcement earlier this week, the new version of OpenSim includes hundreds of proprietary stability and performance improvements developed by the company over the years. One of the most notable enhancements is faster world startup times, which should improve user experience across the grid, and better compatibility with scripts imported from Second Life.

The most significant feature in OpenSim 0.9.2.2 is the transition from XEngine to YEngine for the scripting system. This change brings both benefits and challenges.

Oren Hurvitz

“YEngine is designed to more closely follow the LSL script syntax,” said Oren Hurvitz, Kitely’s co-founder and VP R&D, in the announcement. “This makes it easier to port scripts that were designed for Second Life into OpenSim.” However, he warned that this change may cause some scripts that worked on XEngine to break, requiring users to fix, replace, or remove affected scripts from their Kitely worlds.

The switch to YEngine has also reset all scripts to their initial state.

“That’s because the state files where OpenSim stores script state have changed their format, and YEngine can’t use state files that were created by XEngine,” Hurvitz said.  As a result, users who have scripts needing configuration after being rezzed will need to reconfigure them.

It’s important to note that the transition to the new script engine requires the system to recompile all scripts in each world. According to Hurvitz, “This happens the first time each world is entered following today’s update. This means that each world will take longer than usual to start the first time anyone enters it after this update.”

However, Hurvitz said that this is a one-time delay, and subsequent entries to the world will be faster due to the scripts already being compiled.

This latest upgrade follows Kitely’s recent system-wide enhancement that doubled world performance, demonstrating the company’s ongoing commitment to improving its service without increasing costs to users.

Kitely, which opened to the public in March 2011, is one of the longest-running and most innovative OpenSim grids. With its unique on-demand region system and the popular Kitely Market, the grid is a significant player in the virtual world ecosystem.

For more information about the script changes and how they might affect users’ worlds, Kitely recommends checking the OpenSimulator wiki entry on YEngine.

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OpenSim users hit all-time high despite 3rd Rock closure

OpenSim active users are up by 1,039 this month, reaching a new all-time high of 48,234. The total land area also increased, by 489 standard region equivalents.

However, the total number of registered users on all the public OpenSim grids fell by more than 10,000 since May. The biggest reason for the drop? 3rd Rock Grid is now officially closed, with some of its communities moved to ZetaWorlds. Last month, 3rd Rock Grid reported 13,615 registered users, though it had only 250 actives. 3rd Rock was one of the oldest OpenSim grounds, founded back in 2008, and accumulated a lot of user registrations over the past decade and a half.

Several other grids did not report their stats this month, including CandM World, which was active this month but showed no stats on its stats page. The grid had over 500 actives in May.

We are now tracking a total of 2,663 public grids, of which 309 are active and 253 published their statistics this month. If you have a stats page that we’re not tracking, please email me at maria@hypergridbusiness.com — that way, your grid will be mentioned in this report every month, for additional visibility with both search engines and users.

This month, OSgrid was the largest grid by land area, with 32,547 standard region equivalents, while Wolf Territories Grid was the most active, with 6,232 unique logins over the past 30 days.

OpenSim land area for June 2024. (Hypergrid Business data.).

Our stats do not include most of the grids running on DreamGrid, a free easy-to-use version OpenSim, since these tend to be private grids.

OpenSim is a free, open-source, virtual world platform, that’s similar to Second Life and allows people with no technical skills to quickly and cheaply create virtual worlds and teleport to other virtual worlds. Those with technical skills can run OpenSim worlds on their servers for free using either DreamGrid, the official OpenSim installer for those who are more technically inclined, or any other distribution, while commercial hosting starts at less than $5 a region.

A list of OpenSim hosting providers is here. Download the recommended Firestorm viewer here and find out where to get content for your OpenSim world or region here.

Hypergrid Business newsletter is now available

Every month on the 15th — right after the stats report comes out — we will be sending out a newsletter with all the OpenSim news from the previous month. You can subscribe here or fill out the form below.

Get our monthly stats and all other OpenSim news delivered right to your mailbox every month.

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Top 25 grids by active users

When it comes to general-purpose social grids, especially closed grids, the rule of thumb is the busier the better. People looking to make new friends look for grids that already have the most users. Merchants looking to sell content will go to the grids with the most potential customers. Event organizers looking for the biggest audience — you get the idea.

Top 25 most popular grids this month:

  1. Wolf Territories Grid: 6,232 active users
  2. OSgrid: 5,186 active users
  3. GBG World: 2,239 active users
  4. DigiWorldz: 2,156 active users
  5. Alternate Metaverse: 2,025 active users
  6. Vida Dupla: 1,750 active users
  7. Darkheart’s Playground: 1,694 active users
  8. WaterSplash: 1,650 active users
  9. Neverworld: 1,101 active users
  10. AviWorlds: 1,068 active users
  11. Trianon World: 1,023 active users
  12. Moonrose: 936 active users
  13. AvatarLife: 930 active users
  14. Littlefield: 899 active users
  15. Party Destination Grid: 839 active users
  16. Astralia: 836 active users
  17. Craft World: 791 active users
  18. Virtualife: 666 active users
  19. Virtualife: 664 active users
  20. Kitely: 627 active users
  21. ZetaWorlds: 596 active users
  22. Eureka World: 583 active users
  23. Groovy Verse: 514 active users
  24. Herederos Grid: 511 active users
  25. Virtual Vista Metaverse: 507 active users

The biggest change on this list was the addition of Virtual Vista Metaverse, a new grid in our database, which had a strong launch.

Online marketplaces for OpenSim content

There are currently 20,793 product listings in Kitely Market containing 40,862 product variations, 35,648 of which are exportable.

Kitely Market has delivered orders to 624 OpenSim grids to date.

(Data courtesy Kitely.)

As you can see in the above chart, nearly all the growth in Kitely Market has been in content that can be exported to other grids — that is the green area on the graph. The red area, of non-exportable content, has stayed level for the past eight years.

The Kitely Market is the largest collection of legal content available in OpenSim. It is accessible to both hypergrid-enabled and closed, private grids. The instructions for how to configure the Kitely Market for closed grids are here.

Kitely has recently doubled the performance of its regions while keeping prices the same.

New grids

The following grids were added to our database this month: Lady’s Dreamworld and Virtual Vista Metaverse.

If you know of any public grid that we’re missing, please email me at maria@hypergridbusiness.com.

Suspended grids

The following 18 grids were marked as suspended this month: Admeja, Bernicia, BigOne, Bubble Grid, EducaSim, Eleutherias, Golden Palace Gaming, KittyBlue, Mystic Bermuda, Pleasant Retreat, Resurgence, Royal Grid, Starfleet, The Crying Grid, Tropicana Grid, Twilight, Uzuri Virtual, and VR Playground.

If they don’t reappear online again soon, they will be marked as closed in future reports.

Sometimes, a grid changes its login URI or website address — if that’s the case, email me and let me know and I’ll update my database.

Top 40 grids by land area

All region counts on this list are, whenever available, in terms of standard region equivalents. Active user counts include hypergrid visitors whenever possible.

Many school, company, or personal grids do not publish their numbers.

The raw data for this month’s report is here. A list of all active grids is here. And here is a list of all the hypergrid-enabled grids and their hypergrid addresses, sorted by popularity. This is very useful if you are creating a hyperport.

You can see all the historical OpenSim statistics here, including polls and surveys, dating all the way back to 2009.

Do you know of any other grids that are open to the public but that we don’t have in our database? Email me at maria@hypergridbusiness.com.

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Kitely doubles region performance, keeps prices the same

Kitely Welcome Center. (Snapshot by Maria Korolov.)

Kitely, a leading OpenSim grid, has announced a significant upgrade to its virtual world hosting service, doubling the performance of all Kitely regions without increasing prices. The company has achieved this by adopting the latest Amazon server technology, the M7i generation, while maintaining its existing pricing structure.

Ilan Tochner

“This upgrade enables your worlds to handle more scripts and avatar activity without experiencing server lag,” said Kitely CEO Ilan Tochner.

According to our most recent stats report, Kitely is currently the third-largest OpenSim grid by land area and one of the 20 most popular by traffic numbers.

The grid’s prices start at $15 a month for a 15,000-prim region with up to ten simultaneous visitors, and go up to $150 per month for a 64-region land area with up to 180,000 prims and up to 80 simultaneous visitors. But for people just starting out, Hypergrid Business recommends their $ 20-a-month plan, which has four contiguous regions, 60,000 prims, and a capacity of 40 visitors.

Kitely has always been committed to using powerful servers, hosting a limited number of regions on each server, and employing a modified version of OpenSim with proprietary high-performance assets and inventory systems, the company said in its announcement yesterday. The company’s servers are hosted in an Amazon Web Services data center in California, which offers high-speed connectivity to the Internet.

“This latest upgrade reinforces our commitment to providing a premium experience to our OpenSim customers,” Tochner said.

Kitely, which opened its doors to the public in March 2011, is one of the longest-running OpenSim grids. It is unique in that it offers on-demand regions — the regions are only active when people are visiting them, and go to sleep when they are empty, allowing the company to keep costs low while offering high performance on regions when they’re active.

“We have a great reputation for customer support, reliability, and high-performance virtual world hosting,” said Tochner. “Kitely is also the home of Kitely Market, the premier marketplace for buying and selling virtual items across the hypergrid.”

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Classic metaverse books on sale now at Amazon

I don’t personally agree with the dystopian visions of the metaverse as presented by sci-fi writers. But if you want to understand where the inspiration for platforms like Second Life — and OpenSim — comes from, these books are a must-read.

Plus, they might give us some tips about what to avoid as we move closer to a fully immersive future. I’ve also got one last bonus book on this list, at the bottom of this post. Not about the metaverse but a must-have sci-fi classic — and as relevant today as it ever was, if not more so.

Neuromancer by William Gibson

The paperback is normally $19 but it’s $9.50 today. The hard cover is also on sale, down from $28 to $21.

This book won all the sci-fi awards and helped create the cyberpunk genre — and paved the way for how we think about the universe.

It’s a bit of a dystopian vision of the future but one well worth revisiting, especially today, when that future seems to be coming ever closer.

From the publisher:

Winner of the Hugo, Nebula, and Philip K. Dick Awards, Neuromancer is a science fiction masterpiece—a classic that ranks as one of the twentieth century’s most potent visions of the future.

Neuromancer was the first fully-realized glimpse of humankind’s digital future—a shocking vision that has challenged our assumptions about technology and ourselves, reinvented the way we speak and think, and forever altered the landscape of our imaginations.

Get the book on sale here.

Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson

And speaking of dystopian metaverse futures, this book started it all. And, today, it’s 44% off — just $10.70 for the paperback. And the deluxe hardcover edition is also 44% off, down to $22.60.

Myself, I prefer his book The Diamond Age. But that one, too, is on sale today — down 36% to $12.79.

But back to Snow Crash.

From the publisher:

Hiro lives in a Los Angeles where franchises line the freeway as far as the eye can see. The only relief from the sea of logos is within the autonomous city-states, where law-abiding citizens don’t dare leave their mansions.

Hiro delivers pizza to the mansions for a living, defending his pies from marauders when necessary with a matched set of samurai swords. His home is a shared 20 X 30 U-Stor-It. He spends most of his time goggled in to the Metaverse, where his avatar is legendary.

But in the club known as The Black Sun, his fellow hackers are being felled by a weird new drug called Snow Crash that reduces them to nothing more than a jittering cloud of bad digital karma (and IRL, a vegetative state).

Investigating the Infocalypse leads Hiro all the way back to the beginning of language itself, with roots in an ancient Sumerian priesthood. He’ll be joined by Y.T., a fearless teenaged skateboard courier. Together, they must race to stop a shadowy virtual villain hell-bent on world domination.

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

This paperback is 59% off, for a total price of just $7.35.

It’s an love poem to 1980s video games crossed with a Willy Wonka-style competition about who gets to run the metaverse.

I’ve got several beefs with this book — and others of the genre. First of all, a lot of stuff happens inside the game that shouldn’t. Just shut down the server, guys. Or terminate the user account.

Second, a scavenger hunt is a very poor way indeed to do corporate succession planning.

Finally, why does one poorly-run company dominate the metaverse? In the real world, competition pops up almost instantly. Yes, Google dominates the search engine space — for now, at least — but it certainly doesn’t have a monopoly on websites in general. And Second Life might be a big elephant in the social gaming area, but it’s got a lot of competitors — both big commercial players like Robox and Minecraft and all the MMOs and all the VR chat games, and open source stuff like OpenSim.

If you read this book, and the other cyberpunk novels on this list, treat them the way they were intended — as cautionary tales — and not as how-to manuals! Please!

Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card

Another classic of my childhood, and that of many other people. It isn’t set so much in a virtual world, but in an immersive game. But how real is that game, exactly?

Now the hardcover edition is available for just $10.49, down from $15.99.

From the publisher:

From New York Times bestselling author Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game―adapted to film in 2013 starring Asa Butterfield and Harrison Ford―is the classic Hugo and Nebula award-winning science fiction novel of a young boy’s recruitment into the midst of an interstellar war.

In order to develop a secure defense against a hostile alien race’s next attack, government agencies breed child geniuses and train them as soldiers.

A brilliant young boy, Andrew “Ender” Wiggin lives with his kind but distant parents, his sadistic brother Peter, and the person he loves more than anyone else, his sister Valentine. Peter and Valentine were candidates for the soldier-training program but didn’t make the cut―young Ender is the Wiggin drafted to the orbiting Battle School for rigorous military training.

Ender’s skills make him a leader in school and respected in the Battle Room, where children play at mock battles in zero gravity. Yet growing up in an artificial community of young soldiers Ender suffers greatly from isolation, rivalry from his peers, pressure from the adult teachers, and an unsettling fear of the alien invaders.

This is the first book of the six-book Ender Sextet series. The other books are all on sale today as well, as is Ender’s Shadow, the first of five books in the Shadow Saga series.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick

This one isn’t so a book about the metaverse specifically — it’s more about AI. Which, these days, is increasingly becoming a closely intertwined topic as AI is used to build the worlds, script interactions, and animate in-world characters.

And, as I watched the OpenAI and Google AI announcements this week, I could see that their chatbots are getting pretty darn realistic.

Philip K. Dick predicted all this back in 1968. That was before I was born. That was before the moon landing. Lyndon B. Johnson was still president and the Beatles were still together. Philip K. Dick predicted a lot of weird things. He was a pretty weird writer. I’m constantly surprised by how many of his stories got made into big-budget films.

Get the book on sale here.

Have you read these books? Do you own them?

Oh, and I almost forgot — I’ve also written books about the metaverse, though not quite as dystopian as these.

And they’re not just on sale — they’re free. I’ve written over a dozen more in the same universe, which I’ll be publishing soon, so this is your chance to catch up on the story so far.

The Krim World series