Olivetree Ghaelen Elli Buffy Beale Petlove and Marcus Llewellyn. (Image courtesy OpenSim Community Conference.)
The clock is ticking for virtual world enthusiasts and creators looking to share their innovations at this year’s OpenSimulator Community Conference. Potential presenters have until October 29, 2024 to submit their proposals for the twelfth annual gathering of the OpenSim community.
“We hope that you can join us for our twelfth year celebrating the current and future use of open source virtual worlds through creativity, technology, artistry, and education,” said conference co-chair Cynthia Calongne, also known as “Lyr Lobo” in-world.
The two-day event will take place on December 7 and 8, featuring presentations about creative, educational, technical, and experiential topics related to OpenSimulator and the open metaverse.
“We’re interested in your wonderful content, insights, and accomplishments,” Calongne told Hypergrid Business.
Core Developers of OpenSim. (Image courtesy OpenSim Community Conference.)
Organizers are particularly interested in presentations that showcase innovative content, significant accomplishments in the OpenSim ecosystem, future visions for open source virtual worlds, and creative applications of OpenSimulator technology.
Each speaker session will be 20 minutes long. The conference will also feature community-sponsored tours, an Expo, content giveaways, and hypergrid exploration.
Proposal acceptance emails will be sent out on October 31. Accepted speakers must register for the conference by November 7 to secure their spot in the program.
The conference will kick off on December 6 with music and art events, followed by the main program on December 7 and 8.
The AvatarLife Viewer now supports video conferencing for up to 5 participants, audio conferencing, screen sharing without video, and six-language support.
“We believe in empowering our users with the tools they need to communicate and collaborate seamlessly. Whether it’s for a small group chat, a business meeting, or sharing work on screen, our new features make AvatarLife the ultimate virtual platform for staying connected,” AvatarLife CEO and co-founder Sushant Chandrasekar told Hypergrid Business.
These new features are available at no additional cost for both Mac and Windows users.
AvatarLife Viewer. (Image courtesy AvatarLife.)
Video conferencing allows real-time video calls with up to five participants directly through the viewer, perfect for small meetings, virtual hangouts, or group discussions.
For those who prefer voice-only communication, the audio conferencing feature enables crystal-clear voice conversations for private chats or group meetings without the need for external apps.
The screen sharing feature allows users to share their screens without video, ensuring those who wish to stay behind the scenes can still actively participate. It’s ideal for presentations or project collaborations while keeping personal visuals private.
Language support has been expanded to include Spanish, German, Italian, French, Portuguese, and Russian. Users can easily switch between supported languages for a smoother experience.
It’s the spooky season here in the United States, with Halloween coming up soon and all sorts of creepy scary stuff happening, and cooler weather outside. Also — we’ve got the elections. So, three reasons for people not to want to leave their house and spend time in OpenSim as well.
Or maybe there’s another reason why active user numbers went up. Who knows? Whatever the cause, the public OpenSim grids gained nearly 3,000 new active users compared to this time last month. However, with grid outages and stats changes, total registered users dropped slightly — and land area went down by the equivalent of 24,000 standard regions.
But the drop in land area is easily explained. Simation Grid, which reported 25,408 regions last month is now down to 1,024. Simation is a tiny grid — well, not in size, but in users — with just 3 actives this month. So the land area was most likely a test of server capacity. That happens. People try to see how many regions they can cram into a server, play around with it for a while, then eventually shut it down. After wall, why keep servers running for regions nobody is using?
We are now tracking a total of 2,675 public grids, of which an even 300 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 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 Oct. 2024. (Hypergrid Business data.).
As you can see from the chart above, the Simation regions created a spike in land area this summer, but the land growth is now back to normal levels.
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.
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.
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.
There are currently 21,048 product listings in Kitely Market containing 41,164 product variations, 35,920 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.
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.
This year’s Storylink Radio’s October celebration is more ambitious than ever before, organizers told Hypergrid Business.
There will be live in-world Halloween storytelling all month long and dozens of YouTube exclusive presentations, including short Halloween tales every night on Storylink Radio’s YouTube channel.
All the videos were filmed in virtual worlds.
The live Halloween stories begin on Thursday, Sep. 26 and run through Nov. 2. There are three different stories every night at 6 p.m., 7 p.m., and 9 p.m. Pacific time in-world and on YouTube.
There will also be a special, live, Halloween Trick or Treat story, and a Dia de Los Muertos storytelling.
“We will be presenting simultaneously at the Storylink Radio estate in Kitely and the Seanchai Library in Second Life, with a live intergrids chat connection,” StoryLink Radio owner Shandon Loring told Hypergrid Business.
In addition, there will be exclusive Edgar Allen Poe presentations on YouTube every Monday, a Frightful Classics full-length novel every Friday, and Short-n-Spooky tales on Saturdays.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Kitely has recently upgraded its version of OpenSim to allow for faster start-up times and better compatibility with scripts imported from Second Life.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Kitely has recently upgraded its version of OpenSim to allow for faster start-up times and better compatibility with scripts imported from Second Life.
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.
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.
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.
