Category: Features

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Survey: Which VR Headsets are Used Most?

Which VR headsets are showing the most traction among consumers? The latest consumWhich VR headsets are showing the most traction among consumers? The latest consumer survey from ARtillery Intelligence and Thrive Analytics tackles this question and we break it down in the latest Behind-the-Numbers.er survey from ARtillery Intelligence and Thrive Analytics tackles this question and we break it down for AR Insider readers

This post appeared first on AR Insider.

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OpenSim user growth cools down with chilly weather

The weather’s been getting cooler here in the US where I live — some days, at least. The weather’s been a little wonky lately. And there have been other things happening in the country that make me want to spend less time in the real world and more time in a virtual one. So it makes sense that registered users and land area both went up in the public OpenSim grids.

What’s more surprising is that the total active numbers went down — by more than 2,700 users.

Sure, Moonrose, which reported over 900 active users last month, seems to be having website issues and did not publish its stats this month. In addition, Vida Dupla, which had 375 actives last month, did not report its active user numbers this month. And Great Canadian Grid, which had over 600 actives last month, is now closed.

But several grids also reported significant drops in active user numbers. OSgrid reported a drop of more than 800 actives compared to last month, Craft World saw a drop of over 200, and five grids lost more than 100 actives each.

So there’s something going on beyond just a grid closure and some reporting issues.

Maybe everyone went out partying for Halloween and spent less time in-world? Or maybe other people like the cooler weather and are enjoying the fall leaves and brisk walks while wearing cozy sweaters?

Nope! According to reader Paul Clevett, from Wolf Territories, OSgrid is down for maintenance. And I found the announcement. Thanks, Paul, for the heads up!

Apparently, OSgrid is currently offline, and has been since November 7, because it’s storage cluster was running out of space.

“OSgrid has 17 years of data which is approx several hundred million assets,” the announcement said. And it gets worse. The grid stores both the asset data and a redundant copy, but they’re not stored at the actual size — every asset looks bigger than it actually is.

To fix the problem, the grid’s storage needs to reconfigured, which involves moving millions of assets and scrubbing out the phantom extra space to free it up again. Doing this while people are using the grid would create a bad user experience, so they put it into maintenance mode during the bulk of the work.

The bad news is that they don’t know how long it’s going to take. The good news is that they don’t expect any assets to get lost.

Anyway, I am now tracking a total of 2,677 public grids, of which 295 were active this month and 232 published their statistics. 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 32,867 standard region equivalents, even though it lost more than 2,000 regions, while Wolf Territories Grid was the most active, with 7,379 unique logins over the past 30 days.

OpenSim land area for Nov. 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: 7,379 active users
  2. OSgrid: 4,046 active users
  3. GBG World: 2,498 active users
  4. DigiWorldz: 2,190 active users
  5. Alternate Metaverse: 2,058 active users
  6. Darkheart’s Playground: 2,011 active users
  7. WaterSplash: 1,497 active users
  8. Trianon World: 1,092 active users
  9. Neverworld: 1,042 active users
  10. AviVerse AlterEgo: 1,020 active users
  11. AviWorlds: 994 active users
  12. Astralia: 867 active users
  13. Littlefield: 861 active users
  14. Party Destination Grid: 822 active users
  15. AvatarLife: 672 active users
  16. Groovy Verse: 605 active users
  17. Eureka World: 595 active users
  18. NakedWorldz: 576 active users
  19. SunEden Resort: 553 active users
  20. Gentle Fire Grid: 514 active users
  21. Herederos Grid: 494 active users
  22. Kitely: 462 active users
  23. ZetaWorlds: 452 active users
  24. Jungle Friends Grid: 434 active users
  25. New Life Italy: 434 active users

Online marketplaces for OpenSim content

There are currently 20,973 product listings in Kitely Market containing 41,105 product variations, 35,866 of which are exportable.

Kitely Market has delivered orders to 632 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 also announced support for PBR materials and larger textures earlier this month.

New grids

I added one new grid to my database this month: NakedWorldz.

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 suspended this month: Angel Grid, Ares World, Binders World, Cajun Grid, DreamNation, Ghost Area, Homeland, KubwasWelt, and Nosso Lar.

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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Registration now open for December’s OpenSim Community Conference

(Image courtesy Avacon.)

The Opensimulator Community Conference is the annual conference that focuses on the user community and developers of the OpenSimulator virtual world software.

This year’s conference will run from December 6 to December 8, 2024.

Registration is now open, and is free.

OSCC 2024 kicks off with a Friday pre-conference launch event featuring meetups, art, live music, and DJ sets, and then two days of fast-paced presentations, panels, performances, and immersive tours spotlighting the technical, scholarly, artistic, commercial, and community-produced works across diverse sectors of the OpenSimulator user base.

There will also be the opportunity to explore community events, tours, and workshops leading up to and following the conference weekend.

OpenSimulator is an open-source, multi-platform, multi-user 3D application server. It can be used to create a virtual environment (or world) that is accessible through a variety of clients on multiple protocols. Users can also visit other OpenSimulator virtual worlds across the web by using the Hypergrid protocols. In this way, it is the basis of an open-distributed Metaverse.

Find more info, including the schedule, once released at conference.opensimulator.org.

(Image courtesy Avacon.)

The conference is hosted on an OpenSimulator grid specifically designed for the conference.

We hope to be able to accommodate over 400 users in total, which includes speakers, sponsors, and staff.

Since virtual seats are limited, registration is open on a first-come-first-served basis until the maximum number of virtual conference center tickets is reached. At that point, community members will still be able to register for the live-streamed version of the conference that will be available.

The expo area will not be ticketed and can be accessed by any avatar, subject to constraints on the number of avatars that the exhibition regions can hold at any particular time.

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2025 Predictions: AR & AI Collide

Where do AR and AI converge? Generative AI will assist AR creation workflows while conversational AI provides natural-language interfaces. We break it down in the first of five big predictions for 2025.

This post appeared first on AR Insider.

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Kitely adds PBR materials support, larger textures

Kitely has added support for physically based rendering (PBR) materials in both its virtual worlds and on the Kitely Market, the company announced this week. The update also includes support for textures up to 2,048 by 2,048 pixels in size.

PBR materials allow for more realistic textures by simulating how light interacts with different surfaces, such as mud or metal, creating the appearance of raised and lowered areas with realistic light reflection.

(Image courtesy Kitely.)

The feature requires Firestorm 7.1.11 or newer to use.

Kitely is one of the first grids to support PBR materials, having ported the features from the upcoming OpenSim 0.9.3 release into their current OpenSim 0.9.2.2-based system.

“PBR isn’t yet supported in all OpenSim grids,” said Oren Hurvitz, Kitely co-founder and VP of R&D, in the announcement. “This is a feature that will be part of OpenSim 0.9.3, but that version of OpenSim isn’t finished yet so many grids — including Kitely — are still using the latest stable release, which is OpenSim 0.9.2.2. The reason that Kitely can support PBR now is that we ported the PBR features from OpenSim 0.9.3 into our version of OpenSim.”

The Kitely Market has been updated to accommodate the new feature, with the “Textures” category renamed to “Textures and Materials.” Merchants are advised to mention PBR usage in their product descriptions since items using PBR materials may not display correctly on grids that don’t support the feature. Alternatively, merchants can include regular textures as a fallback to ensure their products look okay on all grids.

“Kitely Market is the main marketplace serving the hypergrid so we decided to support the latest graphics options from OpenSim 0.9.3 even before they have been officially released,” Kitely CEO Ilan Tochner told Hypergrid Business.

The update also brings support for reflection probes through LSL scripting, with new PRIM_REFLECTION_PROBE parameters added to GetPrimParams and SetPrimParams functions.

PRB makes reflections seem more realistic. (Image courtesy Kitely.)

While PBR materials can technically be used for terrain textures, Kitely reports encountering several issues during testing. World maps will show objects using PBR materials but display only the basic color texture, not other PBR properties like normal maps or roughness. PBR terrain textures are not currently displayed in world maps.

For content creators, Kitely has added a new “Materials” folder to user inventories for storing PBR materials.

Creators interested in learning more about creating PBR materials refer to Second Life’s documentation on the subject.