Category: Features

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OSgrid enters immediate long-term maintenance

OSgrid’s LBSA Plaza is the cross-roads of the hypergrid and a popular virtual hangout for developers, region owners, and metaverse travelers.

OSgrid has entered emergency long-term maintenance after discovering that “all IAR files have been corrupted,” the grid announced yesterday.

This is really bad news for residents who hadn’t yet had time to get their inventory backups downloaded ahead of the grid’s previously announced March 21 database reset. OSgrid will now go into immediate and indefinite closure.

“Unfortunately, the current situation has become unsustainable,” the OSgrid team stated in their announcement. “After careful analysis, it has become clear that it is no longer viable to keep OSgrid online under these conditions.”

The corruption of IAR — inventory archive — files is significant as many residents were using these files to back up their inventories ahead of the planned asset wipe. Users who hadn’t already secured their content through alternative methods may now face permanent losses.

Complete rebuild planned

In light of the new problems, the grid’s administrators have decided to completely rebuild the asset system from scratch.

Assets can include objects, clothing, textures, and other items that grid residents store in their avatar inventories. Some assets might have been purchased from OpenSim content creators and can represent a financial investment. Other assets might have been created from scratch by users, representing time, effort, and creativity. As a result, some residents might be hit hard by the loss.

“We have decided to completely rebuild the assets in a new format, in order to resolve ongoing issues and provide a much more robust and sustainable infrastructure,” the announcement stated.

Unlike the previous timeline that promised a March 28 return, the team now describes the reconstruction as “lengthy and meticulous” with no specific reopening date provided.

“We intend to take the necessary time to ensure the result is stable, functional, and, most importantly, secure,” the OSgrid team stated.

Impact on OpenSim users

This sudden closure accelerates the timeline for OSgrid users who had been planning to back up their content. Users who had been creating OARs — OpenSim archive files — of their regions or transferring items to avatars on other grids will no longer be able to access their content.

The situation particularly affects users who:

  • Had scheduled backups in the coming days or weeks
  • Were relying on the grid’s IAR export tool
  • Had placed items in the dedicated storage regions set up for the transition

For the broader OpenSim ecosystem, this emergency closure may increase migration pressure on other grids that had been preparing for a gradual influx of displaced users.

Kitely CEO Ilan Tochner also warns that other grids may suffer from similar data issues as they become popular and may need to revisit their backup policies.

“You have to maintain daily backups of the entire system to enable you to restore it to the last stable state,” he told Hypergrid Business. “If you don’t do this and only rely on data duplication then when a corruption occurs you won’t have uncorrupted copies of the files to restore to.”

Kitely runs daily backups, he said, and offers a self-service tool that allows Kitely customers to restore their regions from those backups.

“If you’re an OSGrid user who has just lost their home, I recommend you consider the data backup policies of the grid you decide to move to,” Tochner said. “The more people use a grid the more likely it will need to make use of those backup systems.”

Kitely, the third-largest grid by land area, also serves as OpenSim’s main content marketplace.

There are currently 20,954 product listings in Kitely Market containing 41,054 product variations, 35,814 of which are exportable to other grids. Kitely Market users can have their purchases automatically delivered to avatars on other grids. Kitely Market has delivered orders to 642 OpenSim grids to date, Tochner said.

Kitely Market also provides merchants with a tool that can help their customers regain items that were bought for avatars that belong to grids that have shut down or suffered inventory loss, he said.

Volunteer support

OSgrid is operated entirely by volunteers and the management asked for community understanding during this difficult period. “It is important to remember that OSgrid is run by volunteers, all of whom are deeply passionate and committed to the platform. However, it’s also important to keep in mind that our team consists of real people, parents, and professionals with lives outside of their roles within OSgrid.”

The team promised to provide regular updates on their progress but gave no indication of how frequently these updates would come or through which channels.

OSgrid’s history of challenges

This isn’t the first major disruption for OSgrid. In 2014 and 2015, the grid experienced an extended outage lasting several months, during which significant amounts of user data were lost.

The current situation appears potentially more serious, as the grid is undergoing a complete rebuild of its asset system rather than attempting to repair existing infrastructure.

OSgrid, founded in 2007, has served as both a social hub and a technical testing ground for OpenSim development. As one of the largest hypergrid-enabled virtual worlds, its extended absence will be felt throughout the OpenSim ecosystem.

For users affected by this closure, other OpenSim grids including Wolf Territories, Kitely, and Alternate Metaverse have previously offered assistance in accommodating displaced residents.

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Meta’s moderation change means more bad stuff will get through

(Image by Lawrence Pierce via Adobe Firefly.)

As a moderator myself, nothing could sound more disturbing than the idea of a revised social media moderation policy presented with the caveat that more bad stuff will get through.

Recently, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Meta, the company that heralded and then fumbled the metaverse, will be dialing back their moderation on their various platforms. He has explicitly claimed that, “…we’re going to catch less bad stuff…”

You can watch his presentation here.

This is especially menacing because Zuckerberg identifies bad stuff as including drugs, terrorism, and child exploitation. He also specifically says Meta is going to get rid of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender. They’re going to dial back filters to reduce censorship. Oh, and he says they’re ending fact-checking.

This is a mess.

Moderation is challenging. That challenge varies in relationship to the zeitgeist, the societal character of the times, which is quite complex these days. It also varies by platform. The scope of the challenge of moderation on Facebook is greater than at Hypergrid Business, yet the core issues are the same. Good moderation preserves online well-being for contributors and readers, while respecting genuine alternative perspectives.

At Hypergrid Business we have discussion guidelines that direct our moderation. Primarily, we apply moderation principles on content that is likely to cause personal harm, such as malicious derision and hate-speech towards specific groups or individuals.

At Hypergrid Business, malicious derision, a kind of bad stuff, was driving away contributors. However, letting in more malicious derision would not have improved the discussions. We know this because once discussion guidelines were instituted that removed malicious derision, more contributors posted more comments. So when Zuckerberg says Meta intends to get rid of moderation restrictions on topics like gender and immigration, we know from experience that the bad stuff will be malicious derision and hate-speech towards vulnerable and controversial groups, and this will not improve discussions.

The unfortunate ploy in Meta’s new moderation policies is the use of the expression, “innocent contributors” in the introductory video presentation. He says that the moderation policies on Meta platforms have blocked “innocent contributors”. Although the word ‘innocent’ typically conveys a neutral purity of positive disposition, intent and action, Zuckerberg, uses ‘innocent’ in reference to contributors whether they are the victims or the perpetrators of malicious commentary. This confounding use of the word “innocent” is a strategic verbal misdirection. Zuckerberg attempts to appear concerned while pandering to any and all sensibilities.

Zuckerberg’s emphasis, however, is not limited to moderation filters. Rather, he is laser focused on how Meta is going to end third party fact-checking entirely. Zuckerberg pins the rationale for his position on the assertion that fact-checking is too biased and makes too many mistakes. He offers no examples of what that alleged shortcoming looks like. Nonetheless, he puts a numerical estimation on his concerns and says that if Meta incorrectly censors just 1 percent of posts, that’s millions of people.

Zuckerberg further asserts that fact-checkers have destroyed more trust than they’ve created. Really? Again there are no real world examples presented. But just as a thought experiment, wouldn’t a 99 percent success rate actually be reassuring to readers and contributors? Of course he’s proposing an arbitrary percentage by writing the 1 percent statement as a misleading hypothetical, so in the end he’s simply being disingenuous about the issue.

Facts are essential for gathering and sharing information. If you haven’t got an assurance you’re getting facts, then you enter the fraught areas of lies, exaggerations, guesses, wishful thinking… there are many ways to distort reality.

It’s fair to say that fact-checking can fall short of expectations. Facts are not always lined up and ready to support an idea or a belief. It takes work to fact-check and that means there’s a cost to the fact-checker. A fact used in a misleading context leads to doubts over credibility. New facts may supplant previous facts. All fair enough, but understanding reality isn’t easy. If it were, civilization would be far more advanced by now.

Zuckerberg, however, has an obvious bias of his own in all of this. Meta doesn’t exist to ensure that we have the best information. Meta exists to monetize our participation in its products, such as Facebook. Compare this to Wikipedia, which depends on donations and provides sources for its information.

Zuckerberg argues against the idea of Meta as an arbiter of truth. Yet Meta products are designed to appeal to the entire planet and have contributors from the entire planet. The content of discussions on Meta platforms impacts the core beliefs and actions of millions of people at a time. To treat fact-checking as a disposable feature is absurd. Individuals cannot readily verify global information. Fact-checking is not only a transparent approach for large-scale verification of news and information, it’s an implicit responsibility for anyone, or any entity, that provides global sharing.

Facts are themselves not biased. So what Zuckerberg is really responding to is that fact-checking has appeared to favor some political positions over others. And this is exactly what we would expect in ethical discourse. All viewpoints are not equally valid in politics or in life. In fact, some viewpoints are simply wish lists of ideological will. If Zuckerberg wants to address bias, he needs to start with himself.

As noted, Zuckerberg clearly seems uncomfortable with Meta in a spotlight on the issue of fact-checking. Well, here’s a thought: Meta shouldn’t be deciding whether something is true or not, that’s what fact-checking services take care of. It places the burden of legitimacy on outside sources. The only thing Meta has to arbitrate are the contracts with fact-checking organizations for their fact-checking work. When Zuckerberg derides and discontinues third-party fact-checking he isn’t just insulating Meta from potential controversies. He uncouples the grounding and responsibilities of Meta contributors. As a consequence, stated in his own words, “…we’re going to catch less bad stuff…”

What Zuckerberg proposes instead of fact-checking is something that completely undermines the intrinsic strength of facts and relies instead on negotiation. Based on the Community Notes system on X, Meta only allows “approved” contributors to post challenges to posts. But the notes they post will only be published if other “approved” contributors vote on whether those notes are helpful… then an algorithm further processes the ideological spectrum of all those voting contributors to decide if the note finally gets published. Unsurprisingly, it has been widely reported that the majority of users never see notes correcting content, regardless of the validity of the contributor findings. Zuckerberg argues for free speech, yet Community Notes is effective censorship for suppressing challenges to misinformation.

Clearly, getting to the facts that support our understanding of the realities of our world is increasingly on us as individuals. But it takes effort and time. If our sources of information aren’t willing to verify the legitimacy of that information, our understanding of the world will absolutely become more, rather than less, biased. So the next time Zuckerberg disingenuously prattles on about his hands-off role supporting the First Amendment and unbiased sharing, what he’s really campaigning for is to allow the sea of misinformation to expand exponentially, at the expense of the inevitable targets of malicious derision. Remember, Zuckerberg’s bias is to encourage more discussions by all means, a goal which, for a platform with global reach, is greatly aided by having less moderation. Moderation that protects you at that scale is being undermined. Remember, Zuckerberg said it himself: “…we’re going to catch less bad stuff…”

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3 Signs We’re In a New Era of XR

Since the current era of XR emerged about a decade ago, there have been a thousand little things that mark its evolution. But a few events jumped out from the past week as defining and symbolic moments to mark the next era of XR.

This post appeared first on AR Insider.

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Will Apple Intelligence Elevate Vision Pro?

Prolific Apple sleuth Mark Gurman revealed that Apple Intelligence will soon make its way to Apple Vision Pro. This is a logical convergence of both products, and one we predicted in our annual predictions exercise. What does it all mean and where could it lead? We revisit the topic.

This post appeared first on AR Insider.

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OSgrid wiping its database on March 21: You have five weeks to save your stuff

OSgrid’s LBSA Plaza is the cross-roads of the hypergrid and a popular virtual hangout for developers, region owners, and metaverse travelers.

OSgrid is planning a complete inventory reset on March 21, 2024.

That means that if you have an OSgrid avatar or region, you will have five weeks to make a backup of your inventory before everything is permanently deleted.

“All avatars that don’t have a backup of their OSgrid assets elsewhere within now and five weeks will irrevocably lose their complete inventory,” OSgrid secretary Foxx Bode told Hypergrid Business.

Not everything will be wiped, however. User avatars, friend lists, groups, and region locations will remain intact. However, all inventory items including photos, notecards, virtual objects, scripts, and landmarks will be erased during a week-long maintenance period.

The grid’s aging asset database had become a critical burden, with repair processes consuming resources meant for normal operations. Recent attempts to fix corrupted data made only 20% progress over four months.

OSgrid is the largest OpenSim grid by land area, according to last month’s statistics, and the oldest grid in the OpenSim ecosystem. It was founded in 2007, meaning that there’s 18 years’ worth of accumulated stuff in the databases.

“The current database is a massive burden to the grid,” OSgrid administrators stated in their announcement. “Sixty percent of it is probably never used, and it kills the performance of our state-of-the-art hardware,”

Impact felt across OpenSim

The announcement triggered immediate migrations across OpenSim. Wolf Territories Grid reported over 100 new regions in recent days, while some smaller grids temporarily blocked incoming transfers to prevent system overload.

Wolf Territories was the most popular OpenSim grid as of last month.

“People have strong opinions and think the metaverse is some competition, but we really appreciate the help for our users,” Bode said, while warning smaller grids against accepting more users than their infrastructure could handle.

Kitely CEO Ilan Tochner highlighted his grid’s stable infrastructure amid the disruption.

“Kitely has been up since March 2011 and has never suffered asset server or inventory loss,” he said, pointing to the grid’s cloud-based system using Amazon S3 and CloudFront services. All content is backed up daily, he added.

Kitely, the third-largest grid by land area, also serves as OpenSim’s main content marketplace.

There are currently 20,954 product listings in Kitely Market containing 41,054 product variations, 35,814 of which are exportable to other grids. Kitely Market users can have their purchases automatically delivered to avatars on other grids. Kitely Market has delivered orders to 642 OpenSim grids to date, Tochner said.
Kitely Market also provides merchants with a tool that can help their customers regain items that were bought for avatars that belong to grids that have shut down or suffered inventory loss, he said.

Backup options

OSgrid users and residents have several options to secure their content.

First, there’s a market on LBSA plaza with instructions on how to export your own avatar inventories as IAR files and entire regions as OAR files.

Second, if you have an avatar on another grid, you can open up two viewers and teleport that second avatar to the same place as your OSgrid avatar and just pass inventory items from one to the other.

Third, OSgrid is putting up some regions where people can create boxes to hold their stuff. These boxes will then go into OAR files.

Finally, as a last resort, the grid has an automated tool for exporting user inventories as an IAR file. This file can be uploaded to avatars on other grids, or re-uploaded back to OSgrid once the database reset is complete. However, OSgrid only has 20 slots a day for these backups, so the tool won’t be made publicly available.

If you need help with any of these, you can find in-world assistance from hosts, including Unadecal, Prince, Paela, and Kristina. There is often someone around to help on the grid’s LBSA Plaza region, also known as the crossroads of the hypergrid.

It’s hypergrid address is hg.osgrid.org:80:Lbsa Plaza.

OSgrid plans to resume operations March 28 with rebuilt database infrastructure. New user registration will remain closed until the process is completed.

Bode asked that users be considerate moving their stuff temporarily to other grids, especially smaller grid or free and open grids.

“Ask the grid owner upfront if its okay to load full regions or large inventories,” he said. “Not all grids have the capacity or means to process an influx of users with large inventories — and the storage consequences — and the very last thing we want is a domino effect of smaller grids suffering asset problems.”

“Personally, I’m very grateful the other big grids — amongst others Wolf and Alternate Metaverse jump to mind — are helping out with OSgrid‘s residents,” he added.

About OSgrid

Founded in 2007, OSgrid is one of the oldest and largest OpenSim virtual worlds. As a non-profit organization, it provides free land and resources to users, serving as a testing ground for OpenSim development and a hub for virtual communities.

The grid operates on open-source software and allows users to connect regions hosted on their own computers. This open architecture contributed to its growth but also led to challenges managing the accumulated data from nearly two decades of operation.

Meanwhile, the grid relies on donations to pay for its infrastructure and is run entirely by volunteers.

OSgrid has had problems before. In 2014 and 2015 the grid was down for several months and a significant number of assets were lost.

On a separate note

I won’t be doing a stats report this month, or in the foreseeable future. After all these years, I still haven’t found a way to fully automate the process and it takes a lot of manual work every month!

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Where Does VR Sit in 2025?

What's the state of the VR today? Where is value being created? And who's leading the way? These are questions our research arm recently tackled in its annual state of spatial report. This week, we excerpt some of the insights around VR's place in the mix.

This post appeared first on AR Insider.

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Storylink Radio Brings Interactive Storytelling to the Opensim World’s Fair

(Image courtesy Storylink Radio.)

Storylink Radio is dedicated to the art of storytelling, keeping literature—both ancient and modern—alive and engaging through entertainment. Our mission extends beyond storytelling into immersive language learning, offering emergent readers and language learners a unique way to experience stories.

With a 40-region estate in Kitely, Storylink Radio hosts live storytelling sessions, simulcast on YouTube and in collaboration with the Seanchai Library in Second Life, allowing audiences to interact in real time. Our extensive catalog includes a podcast and YouTube channel featuring hundreds of hours of free storytelling programming.

Now, visitors can interact with authors and their characters at the Storylink Radio Exhibit at the OpenSim World’s Fair, hosted on Wolf Territories Grid.

Hypergrid link: grid.wolfterritories.org:8002:OpenSim Worlds Fair

An Interactive, AI-Driven Exhibit

The quarter-region exhibit showcases a collection of thematic vignettes, each tied to popular past storytelling sessions. Guests can explore multiple interlinked locations, accessible by walking bridges or a teleport network.

At every location, visitors can experience on-demand storytelling and engage with AI-powered personalities — the Aithereals — who bring characters and literary figures to life. These AI cast members, powered by OpenAI, are designed to embody their unique personas authentically, engaging guests in dynamic, real-time conversations.

Unlike scripted NPCs, Aithereals are autonomous and unscripted, ensuring unpredictable, immersive interactions—whether discussing their own stories, characters, or anything the guest wishes to explore.

How Guests Can Interact

Each location includes two clickable objects to guide engagement:

  • Guide Box– Provides details about the vignette and instructions on how to interact with Aithereals.
  • Random Q’s Box – While guests can chat freely with the AI cast, this box offers conversation starters.

Vignettes & Aithereals

  • Poe’s Parlor (Shadows of Poe): Aithereals Edgar Allan Poe, Lenore, The Raven
  • Wonderland (Alice in Wonderland – Tim Burton inspired): Aithereals Alice, Mad Hatter, White Rabbit, Cheshire Cat, Caterpillar, Red Queen, Talking Mushroom, Teapot
  • Frankenstein’s Lab (Bride of Frankenstein): Aithereals Victor Frankenstein, The Monster, Bride of Frankenstein
  • Dracula’s Castle(Dracula): Aithereals Dracula, Bram Stoker
  • Alice’s Restaurant: Aithereals Arlo Guthrie
  • The OASIS (Ready Player One/Ayn Rand/Rush 2112): Aithereals Parzival, Art3mis
  • Pirate Ship (High Seas Cthulhu): Aithereals Capt. Jack Sparrow
  • The Ice Cave (The Ice Dragon – George R.R. Martin/Game of Thrones): Aithereals The Ice Dragon
  • Griffin’s Nest (Fear of Falling): Aithereals Three Griffin Babies (unhatched)
  • SciFi Island (Blaze of Glory – Robert Silverberg): Aithereals Robert Silverberg, Isaac Asimov, C3PO, R2D2, Marvin (Hitchhiker’s Guide), Rachel Rosen (Blade Runner), Cameron Phillips (Terminatrix), “Ship” (a sentient space freighter)
  • Easter Island (Polynesian Myths & Legends): Aithereals Pele (Fire Goddess), The Moai (Three speaking stone figures)
  • Polynesia (Polynesian Myths & Legends): Aithereals Moana from Disney, Maui from classic mythology
  • Moby Dick (Moby Dick – Herman Melville, Abbreviated): Aithereals Capt. Ahab, Moby Dick (the whale)
  • Lighthouse (Lighthouse Terrors): Aithereals H.P. Lovecraft
  • Grotto: Aithereals The Kraken