Meta released a Quest software update via its public test channel (PTC), which lets users opt-in to try new features before they’re pushed out to everyone. Among the v57 PTC update is a feature that’s been notably missing from Meta avatars: legs.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg promised at Connect 2022 that its avatars would eventually be getting legs, putting an end to the platform’s characteristic floating torsos at some point in the not-too-distant future. At the time, Zuckerberg showed off his on-stage avatar jumping and kicking, although it was revealed later this was actually created using some fairly common external motion capture tech.
In short, Quest can’t track legs yet, which means the v57 PTC update is packing a pretty standard implementation of inverse kinematics (IK), resulting in the sort of body positioning guesswork you see in apps like VR Chat. Still, nice to see a full body in Quest Home for once, right?
X (formerly Twitter) user Lunayian shows off the new avatar legs after installing the v57 PTC update.
YouTuber and tech analyst Brad Lynch also tried out the new legs, showing off some of the limitations currently. Notably, you won’t see your avatar’s legs when looking down directly at them—they’re only viewable via the mirror, and ostensibly by other users—and the IK system still doesn’t account for crouching.
According to data mined by X user NyaVR, the v57 PTC update also includes the ability to enable and disable the avatar mirror, a new Horizon Worlds Portal in home, an Airplane Mode, and an Extended Battery Mode.
The comes alongside a wider push to attract more users to Horizon Worlds, as Meta recently took its first steps of endingQuest-exclusivity for the social VR app with the launch of a closed beta on Android mobile devices. It’s also set to arrive on standard PC browsers too at some point.
Additionally, Meta seems to also be investing more in first-party content for Horizon Worlds, having released Super Rumblelate last month, a hero shooter which feels more in line with the sort of sticky content that ought to attract and bring users back more regularly.
We’re sure to learn more about Quest software features and Horizon Worlds stuff at the company’s annual Connect developer conference, which takes place September 27th.
The event, which will be held in the metaverse, will include sessions on marketing, product development, training, and recruiting applications of the metaverse.
Speakers will hail from such companies as NVIDIA, Ernst & Young, Sandbox, Decentraland, and Tata Consultancy.
Highlights of the event will include the following:
Lee Margretts will discuss the UK Atomic Energy Commission’s use of the metaverse in the development of a prototype fusion energy plant.
Joe Ferencz of Gamefam will discuss his company’s role in developing a metaverse for Cirque du Soleil.
Teppo Rantanen of the City of Tampere, Finland, will report on the city’s development of a metaverse that will serve as a laboratory for metaverse services.
Frank Diana of Tata Consultancy will discuss the key role AI will play in the development of the metaverse.
We are now tracking 2,596 OpenSim grids in total, 422 of which were active and 270 of which published their statistics. The rest do not have accessible public stats pages. If you have a new stats page, please do let us know for inclusion.
Change in OpenSim virtual land mass. ( Hypergrid Business Data.).
OSgrid now has an equivalent of 29,281 standard-sized regions in total, followed by Wolf Territories Grid with 25,440 regions, Kitely with 18,294, ZetaWorlds with 10,132, and Alternate Metaverse with 9,369 regions. German World Grid added the most regions or 637 in the past 30 days since we reported these statistics, followed by Alternate Metaverse with 473, Groovy Verse with 387, OSgrid with 351, and Galactic Virtual — a new grid — emerged with 123 regions.
OSgrid offers unlimited free regions to all residents — as long as people run them on their home computers. They have an easy region installer here. No wonder they’re the largest grid in OpenSim.
ZetaWorlds, on the other hand, offers two-by-two regions with 75,000 prims for €18.99 (US $21) per month with other configuration options also available. Groovyverse land prices start at $25 per month for a region that can be configured to be as big as 16 by 16 standard regions. Both grids also offer free land parcels to residents.
Our stats also do not include most of the grids running on DreamGrid since these tend to be private grids.
DreamGrid has so far recorded a total of 3,435 unique DreamGrids that have launched since DreamGrid started, according to Micro Technology Services CEO Fred Beckhusen. Micro Technology Services owns both DreamGrid and OutWorldz.
Fred Beckhusen
The total list of grids for which OutWorldz reports stats is available here.
With the free-to-use DreamGrid software, users can easily create virtual worlds through a graphical interface and one-click install feature. They can also use it to easily and quickly manage their grids, including adding new regions, banning users, deleting regions, auto restarting, tracking usage stats, and shutting down entire grids or unoccupied regions to save computing power.
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 own 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 active list is based on active, unique 30-day user login numbers that grids report on their stats pages. Those grids that don’t report their numbers might be just as popular, but we wouldn’t know. The most popular grids are also not necessarily the most active.
Hartland is this month’s greatest gainer in the number of active users with 489 new active users, followed by Neverworld with 387, Darkheart’s Playground with 362, Alternate Metaverse with 274, and Wolf Territories Grid with an increase of 213 active users.
The active user stats are used to generate the popular hypergrid destinations list, which is useful if you have a hypergrid teleport and want to put up gates to the most popular grids or include the most popular grids in an in-world directory. This list is also a good place to start if you want to open up new stores, hold events, or are just looking for places to visit.
Baller Nation gained the most number of registered users during the last 30 days, followed by OSgrid with 356, AvatarLife with 126, Alternative Metaverse with 74, and Kitely with 69 users.
Here’s some information on how and why you should set up a stats page for your grid. Not all grids need a stats page — especially grids that aren’t open to the public like school grids, private company grids, small family grids, and so on. From prior surveys, this dark metaverse of OpenSim grids is significantly bigger than the one we know about, because those grids don’t need to promote themselves, and we never hear about them.
Online marketplaces for OpenSim content
There are currently 20,056 product listings in Kitely Market containing 39,784 product variations, 34,687 of which are exportable.
As seen from 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 in the chart. The red area, of non-exportable content, has stayed level for the past seven years.
Offering a convenient and low-cost way for OpenSim users to buy legitimate, legal content not only offers creators sales opportunities that they wouldn’t have otherwise but reduces the need for pirated content, similar to the way that Netflix and other streaming services have reduced the amount of illegal video streaming.
In addition, restricting content to closed grids does little to stop piracy. Most stolen content is ripped from Second Life, the original closed grid. The only time that being on a closed grid offers additional security for content creators is when the content involves high-end scripts or proprietary animations.
Speaking of closed grids — where users are not able to teleport to other grids — the biggest such grid, Tag, also has its online marketplace. The marketplace lists 29,950 items both for sale and free.
Some of the items listed for sale on The Adult grid. (image courtesy TAG grid.).
Neverworlds’ Marketplace is another option for OpenSim grids, and does support hypergrid shoppers. The site currently a few dozen items for sale to both residents and hypergridders. It is a place for sourcing free and extremely cheap items since most are priced at under $3.
(Image courtesy Neverworld grid.).
Neverworld also offers free virtual land to residents who can then set up shop and craft or bring in virtual items for sale or give away at the marketplace. The free parcels measure from 3,000 to 16,000 meters in size and can support up to 5,000 prims, grid owner Govega Sachertorte told Hypergrid Business.
OpenSim grid news
Hosting4Opensim waives all grid hosting setup and support fees
Josh Boam.
Hosting4Opensim.com has waived all grid hosting set-up fees and setup-related support fees, meaning the grid hosting company is now offering all support to customers for free. The company is also allowing customers to use personal domains on all server packages, company CEO Josh Boam told Hypergrid Business.
Complete grid setup packages with the company start at $80 per month for a private grid of up to 15 regions, and the package includes a Robust server, two free regions, and a user registration page. Commercial grid packages start at $150 per month. Region hosting packages start at $12.50 per month but one must own a grid to order region packages. The company also provides money server rentals with support for Podex and Gloebits.
AviWorlds to host 5,000th user party
AviWorlds grid will host a two-hour party at 3.00 p.m. Pacific Time on August 27 at the AviWorlds Club to celebrate reaching the 5,000 user milestone. The party will feature live music by Rogue Galaxy.
“There will be a giveaway to people that attend and they can obtain our gift package at the club on that day,” grid CEO Josh Boam told Hypergrid Business. “We will have a box with items inside for free that normally are paid-for items on Kitely or AviWorlds.”
The hypergrid address is login.aviworlds.com:8002:AviWorlds Club.
OSFest seeks volunteers, presenters
(image courtesy OpenSim Fest.)
This year’s OpenSim Fest — a two-week event that includes art exhibitions, merchant expos, music, stores, and various presentations — will run from 1 p.m. on September 15 to 6 p.m. on September 30 at the OpenSimFest Grid, which is now live with 18 regions on which different activities will take place. This year’s theme is Jazz and Blues Era, late 1860’s to early 1970’s.
The event will open with a party from 1 p.m. to 6 p.m. Pacific Time on September 15. There will be performances on Thursdays, Fridays, and all weekends. Other key events include Exhibit Tours scheduled from 1 p.m. to 6 p.m. Pacific Time on Monday, September 18, and Monday, September 25. Store tours will take place on Wednesday, September 20, and Wednesday, September 27, at the same time. The full calendar can be accessed on this page.
The hosts invite merchants, sponsors, exhibit presenters, and entertainment artists for exhibitions, sponsorships, and presentations. Those interested in exhibiting can reserve free parcels and present all kinds of art and items of all kinds from all around OpenSim, including but not limited to the event’s theme. As of this writing, 20 out of 68 total free exhibitor parcels and 8 out of 40 total free merchant parcels are still available.
Please register here for a free ticket and then contact the festival director, exhibitor organizer, or merchant organizer through the OSFest Discord channel or via opensimfest@gmail.com to get merchant and exhibitor parcels. As usual, the event’s exhibitor and merchant parcels will be 100 percent free thanks to the event sponsors shown on this page. The event still requires more sponsors as the full sponsorship amount required is yet to be reached.
OSFest 2023 Sponsors. (Image courtesy OSFest.)
Anyone willing to participate as a volunteer greeter, leader, host, and hostess, or performer can contact the Volunteer Organizer or Performer Organizer via the same Discord page. Enquiries can also be directed to the above-mentioned email address.
The event regions have different features to support different social events. The features include seating spaces, open spaces, dance floors, art installations or booths, stages with lights and particle effects, group meeting areas, open-air spaces for installations and displays, commercial lots, and some can even support event ads.
OpenMic Arts seeks talent
OpenMic Stage is looking for performers from around the hypergrid. Chris Dayellis and Whisper Carfield host live open mic events on Alternate Metaverse on Saturdays from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m. Singers, musicians, poets, storytellers, comedians, and freestyles are invited to participate. It is a great place to showcase a hidden talent.
To participate, visit alternatemetaverse.com:8002:Open Mic Arts.
Open Mic Arts is just one of the events featured on the art regions on the Alternate Metaverse grid. These regions also offer several facilities, including an art gallery, an arts magazine, a theatrical stage, a live performance stage, a party pavilion, and are home to the Inspiration Cafe, and the Annual Festival Of The Art.
Weekly prim-building classes start this September
Prim building classes for beginners will start on September 7 and thereafter take place every Thursday. Meanwhile, the advanced prim building course starts on September 2 and will take place every Saturday at the Koryphon Academy on the Alternate Metaverse grid. The advanced prim building classes will serve those who attended the starter classes in 2022.
The classes will be hosted by Rique Giano.
The hypergrid address is alternatemetaverse.com:8002:Koryphon Academy.
Download, 3D-print, and wear Peace for Ukraine jewelry in real life
Peace for Ukraine jewelry. (Image courtesy Monentes Jewelry.).
The Monentes Jewelry store has released downloadable files of a recently-designed pendant named Peace for Ukraine on the collection’s download page on Three Hills Grid — Marianna Monente’s grid has now been renamed from Virtual-HG to Three Hills Grid to avoid name confusion with the Virtual Grid. The new art can be downloaded and then 3D printed for wearing in real life for anyone who wants to support Ukraine following the war with Russia. The jewelry was designed by the store owner Marianna Monentes.
The store is also offering, on the same page, other new pieces of jewelry for download and 3D printing. All the art works are copyrighted and can therefore not be used elsewhere for commercial purposes.
New Firestorm version out
Firestorm Viewer has a new version 6.6.14.69596 published on August 14, which fixes some issues resulting from Linden Lab’s recent decisions. The new version comes with multiple improvements, including some that will make building and scripting better.
The new version also removes the “View Profile” from the V2 context menu for the resident’s own avatar, prevents profile texts from getting truncated in some cases, fixes multiple log warnings related to profiles, and fixes the profile notes under active editing getting discarded when the profile owner enters or leaves the region at the same time.
Narrated by storyteller and StoryLink Radio owner Shandon Loring, the story will take you back in time when tall ships roamed the oceans and creatures lurked in the dark depths.
The second story, titled Midnight Dreary — Cthulhu Meets Edgar Allan Poe, will stream on the above-mentioned YouTube link and regions in Kitely and Second Life grids from 9 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. Pacific Time on Thursday, August 17.
StoryLink Radio presents literature of many genres in a themed virtual world setting but also, behind this, runs a literacy enhancement initiative, said Loring.
“We have great audiences that come to each of our performances, often dressing in theme for the story, but come-as-you-are is always welcome too,” he told Hypergrid Business.
As part of StoryLink’s Literacy Enhancement initiative for emerging readers and language learners, some story videos also feature in-video texts so listeners can read along.
The audience also can share with each other or with the host storyteller any thoughts they have about a story while it is being told live. The live chat streams alongside the story. StoryLink also archives past story episodes on its YouTube channel for on-demand listening by anyone.
More storytelling sessions are scheduled for September and October — the storytelling peak season.
OpenSim still needs more volunteer testers for the shift to .Net 6
Future releases of OpenSim are likely to support Microsoft .Net instead of the alternative called Mono, and developers and the community at large are focusing on and actively considering the shift. Although there are testers actively working on the changes and implementations, the number is likely inadequate, especially without automated testing of basic functions, Zetamex CEO Vincent Sylvester told Hypergrid Business.
Still needed are unit testers and overall testers, especially those who are familiar with nunit and xunit tests since these are the best options for OpenSim going forward, he said. Extensive testing will ensure changes are not introducing regressions.
Avitron is closing. Or not.
AviTron owner Alexander Pomposelli has a history of abruptly shutting down grids he runs, including AviWorlds when he was the owner and the short-lived Virtual Ville, without warning and causing users to lose content.
Pomposelli announced in a Facebook post that he’s since taken down that he plans to shut down AviTron at the end of August due to declining revenues. Then he said he may keep it running but would need to cut costs.
AviTron has been unstable, changing business models frequently, switching hypergrid status, and experiencing downtime. That’s very typical for Pomposelli, and, if the grid does stay up, users are warned not to invest more time or money into the grid than they can afford to lose.
Sometimes, a grid changes its loginURI or website address — if that’s the case, email us and let us know and we’ll update our database.
Top 40 grids by land area
The list below is a small subset of existing OpenSim grids. We are now tracking a total of 2,584 different publicly-accessible grids, 419 of which were active this month, and 268 of which published their statistics.
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.
AviTron owner Alexander Pomposelli has a long history of closing grids without warning. Back when he ran AviWorlds, I counted more than a dozen times that he closed that grid, often without any warning. Residents complained of losing access to regions, inventories, and in world-currency balances.
At one point, he finally gave up, and turned AviWorlds over to former business partner Josh Boam — then started AviTron. But before he launched AviTron, he briefly ran the Virtual Ville grid, which he shut down without warning in October of 2020.
Well, AviTron may be closing at the end of the month.
“Yes, I am closing AviTron at the end of the month,” Pomposelli told Hypergrid Business. “AviTron is a business and it lost over 80 percent of its revenues… After three years online I couldn’t make it legit. Lost money every month.”
Residents have until August 28 to take their content from AviWorlds and move it to other grids, he said. To enable this process, AviTron will become hypergrid-enabled. The hypergrid address is e avitronlogin.avitron.net:8002.
However, any currency reserves that residents had on the grid will not be exchangeable, he said.
Residents learned about the closure on AviTron’s Facebook page.
“Private region owners, the ones left are now leaving one by one and now premium account holders have also been leaving. Not paying on time, not paying at all,” Pomposelli wrote in a Facebook post yesterday.
Several people sent me copies of that announcement last night.
Then, this afternoon, Pomposelli contacted me again.
“I may just cut costs and keep it online,” he said. “I am studying it. But it cannot be the way it is now.”
The yo-yo grid
Back when I was co-hosting the Inworld Review with Mal Burns, Burns referred to AviWorlds as the “yo-yo grid” because it kept going up and down.
Today, AviWorlds, under new management, has been very stable and has recently passed its 5,000th registered user.
So maybe it’s not so much the grid that’s the yo-yo grid as the owner.
This is just my opinion, but, based on 14 years of covering OpenSim, it doesn’t help when your business model changes month-by-month and residents never know what to expect.
OpenSim grids typically fall into one of two categories. On the one hand, there are commercial grids. They offer reasonably-priced land and good service and are careful about managing their technology and expenses. Several have been up and running for years, with little or no downtime, by providing consistent value and service.
Other grids are run by groups, non-profits and individuals and rely heavily on volunteers. They might break even on costs, or accept donations, or just cover the server expenses themselves because OpenSim is cheaper than renting land on Second Life. Roleplaying groups and educational institutions, for example, can get a lot of inexpensive land in OpenSim and a great deal of control when they run their own grids. These grids often offer free or subsidized land to users, employees, or community members.
Commercial grids rarely offer free land and, when they do, it’s usually smaller parcels designed for residential use or for setting up stores.
Grids also typically pick whether or not they will be hypergrid enabled and then stick with that decision. Schools and private role-playing grids, for example, might choose not to be hypergrid-enabled because they want to ensure the safety of their students or to secure proprietary content.
General-purpose grids tend to hypergrid-enabled, allowing users to teleport in and out. This means that people don’t have to create new accounts in order to visit the grid, and allows people to send messages to friends on other grids. It also makes it easier for residents to get content deliveries from the Kitely Market, or to go shopping on other grids. As of mid-July, more than 98 percent of all public OpenSim users were on hypergrid-enabled grids.
AviTron is an exception. The grid has changed business models several times, with Pomposelli changing his mind on whether to allow hypergrid travel, or whether users can export content — such as their own creations — from the grid. He’s also experimented with NFTs, cryptocurrency, free land, and paying users to spend time on the grid. He’s also changed currency providers. AviTron has also experienced some downtime, including a protracted outage in 2021.
It seems that he can’t decide whether he’s running a personal grid, paid for out of his own pocket, or a commercial grid sustained by a steady revenue stream.
He also claims to have made money from Google Ads. In his Facebook post, he said he was seeing $350 a month in advertising revenues. This is a very odd statement — you’d need to have at least 10,000 pageviews a month, and usually a lot more, to make any significant money from ads. We certainly weren’t getting anywhere near that when we had ads up on Hypergrid Business, and we typically have over 30,000 pageviews a month. OpenSim’s total active user base is only 43,000 a month.
In general, grid websites don’t see much traffic. People come once or twice — to learn about the grid, and to open an account. Then, after that, all their interactions are in-world. Even the most popular grid wouldn’t see more than a few hundred visitors a month unless they had a particularly active forum or blog. AviTron did not.
Warning to future AviTron users
If AviTron does stay alive — or closes and then comes back from the dead — I strongly urge users not to invest more time and money than they can afford to lose.
If AviTron is hypergrid-enabled, I recommend that people base their primary avatar on another, more stable grid — such as OSgrid, Kitely, or DigiWorldz.
And if you need free land, get a free OSgrid region that you run on a home computer, or download the DreamGrid installer. If you own your own region, you can save it as an OAR file at any time. This is what I recommend for content creators, whether in OpenSim or Second Life — do your building and creation on a private, personal region or grid, then upload the creations to the commercial grids where you plan to use or sell them.
AvatarLife is launching its Wild Poker game today, based on Texas Hold’em poker.
But it’s more skill-based, said AvatarLife CEO Sushant Chandrasekar.
There is also a starting jackpot of 1 million AV$, the grid’s local currency — which translates to about US $4,000.
“The launch event will be a three days festival with freeplay poker and contests, other skill games contests and a special disco,” Chandrasekar told Hypergrid Business.
The event begins at 10 a.m. Pacific time on July 21 on the grid’s AvatarLife Games region.
Blue Angels Airshow in 2022. (Image courtesy Blue Angels.).
The Discovery Grid will host its seventh anniversary party on Saturday, July 1 at the Louisville region, featuring a virtual Thunder Over Discovery 2023 aviation event which will coincide with the real-life Thunder Over Louisville aircraft event, showcasing vintage and modern aircraft in action.
Both grid residents and hypergrid visitors are invited to the experience. The hypergrid address is discoverygrid.net:8002:Louisville.
Arrive early for each session because doors close to prevent possible disruptions as people enter the region. You will also need to set your OpenSim viewer to a shared environment, enable advanced lighting for the full effect, and set your viewer camera and music and sound settings as suggested by the hosts here, to enjoy the sessions at best including scenery with fast-flying aircraft.
Planned are two Thunder Over Discovery showing sessions, one starting at 2.00 p.m. Pacific Time to accommodate the grid’s Euro-zone residents and visitors. The other will take place from 6 p.m. Pacific Time and will cater to the grid’s North and South Americas region residents and visitors.
An hour of DJ music will precede each of the aircraft showing sessions, the first music session hosted from 2.00 p.m. to 3.00 p.m. by DJ Calliope Angel at Club Thunder and the second by DJ Jack Stone from 6 p.m to 7.00 p.m. Pacific Time at the same venue. These two music sessions will feature thunderous music, dance, and light show according to Discovery Grid.
After each of the two DJ music sessions, there will be a vintage airplane wing-walking acrobatics and skydiving airshow for 15 minutes by the Puddle Jumpers, followed by F-22 maneuvers for five minutes, followed by a precision acrobatic and formation flying performance by the Blue Angels for 20 minutes — all with surround sound.
The PyroVR company will then conclude each of the two flying sessions with a pyro-musical fireworks performance for 20 minutes. The fireworks synchronize with a music soundtrack and there will be a new custom effect for this year. Please wear headphones or connect to a surround sound system, and pick a sound HUD to enjoy a precise 3D audio mix.
(Image courtesy Discovery Grid.).
Here are videos of similar performances during the Discovery Grid’s 2022 Anniversary.
AvataLife grid will host a virtual Pride Week for residents and visitors from other grids starting at 2 p.m. Pacific Time on Saturday, June 24, with events running through Friday, June 30.
The Pride Week, which coincides with and has events that match those held during the United Nation’s Pride Month but in virtual world settings, will start with a guest speaker session at the Rainbow region and a Color Fiesta art submission contest at 12 a.m. Pacific Time at the AvatarLife Museum.
There also will be an open mic session from 2 p.m. to 5 p.m. on the same day at the Rainbow region where attendants will have an opportunity to win prizes by sharing any stories, poems, songs, and other things they would like. A gaming contest where participants can win prizes in cash will also take place at the Diesel Games region and run for five days starting from June 25.
AvatarLife is not hypergrid-enabled, so users can’t simply teleport to the regions. Instead, visitors who don’t already have accounts on the grid will need to register here, then add the grid URI — grid.avatarlife.com:8002 — to the list of grids in the settings tab on their OpenSim viewer as per these instructions.
“We at AvatarLife would like to do what we can to encourage and celebrate diversity,” AvatarLife spokesman Bob Young told Hypergrid Business. “And we would like to be socially responsible and active that in the future months we will look at hosting events for significant United Nation’s international days such as poverty and environment and others.”
In addition to the Color Fiesta, other AvatarLife events that correspond to those held during Pride Month include the rainbow-themed Virtual Pride parade which will take place on June 30 at the Rainbow region. There also will be a Pride Disco at 1 p.m. Pacific Time on Sunday, June 25 at the Vox City region.
“The Virtual Pride Parade or match is mainly a gathering of people with music and light dancing, and importantly people can socialize and maybe have some fun,” added Young. ”
The Color Fiesta contest and the new Art Museum will be a major focus during the Pride Week. Participants can, starting on June 24, submit up to three art entries each and win prizes for each submission. The Fiesta will mark the launch of the newly-built art museum.
“Each participant will win 500 AV$ for participation,” Young said. “The arts will be shared on our social media platforms and people will come and vote on the art. The art for submission can be digital or hand-drawn, and should not be black and white.”
There also will be a tour of several nominated art submissions in the Art Museum on June 29. “The top 16 artworks will be hosted in our virtual art museum and will be permanent there,” he said.
Voting for the participants’ art submissions will start at 12 a.m. Pacific Time on June 29 and end at 12 p.m. Pacific Time on June 30. The results of the voting will be announced on June 30 after which there will be an awards ceremony.
Anyone at the open mic event to win 500 AV$
Anyone who speaks for a minute during the open mic will win 500 AV$.
“Open mic is a different event where we all meet together, and everyone gets one minute to turn on their mic and speak about anything they want to or show their talent like storytelling, singing, or poetry,” said Young.
Generous rewards at the Skill Gaming Fever Marathon
Gamers at the Skill Gaming Fever Marathon can show off their gaming skills and win prizes in the grid’s in-world currency — which can be changed for real-world money. The grid hosts and supports player-versus-player, player-versus-computer, and play-to-earn types of games. It utilizes an in-game cryptocurrency called Jejudoge.
Although the event is mainly for playing games, game creators are also welcome to attend and meet up. The skill games which will be played are the games hosted at the grid are similar to most of those available at Second Life and some OpenSim grids, said Young.
“For example, we have the famous Zyngo game and other Slingo skill games,” he said. “We have various high scores contests and other contests with generous AV$ prizes. The exchange rate is approximately one USD for 250 AV$.”
Final showdown
The final showdown will take place for 24 hours on June 30 and will involve live music and virtual dance, soulmate search, and speed dating, all at the Music Island region.
Meta announced its latest quarterly results, revealing that the company’s Reality Labs metaverse division is again reporting a loss of nearly $4 billion. The bright side? Meta’s still investing billions into XR, and it’s not showing any signs of stopping.
Meta revealed in its Q1 2023 financial results that its family of apps is now being used by over 3 billion people, an increase of 5% year-over-year, but its metaverse investments are still operating at heavy losses.
Reality Labs is responsible for R&D for its most forward-looking projects, including the Quest virtual reality headset platform, and its work in augmented reality and artificial intelligence. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has warned shareholders in the past that Meta’s XR investments may not flourish until 2030.
Here’s a look at the related income losses and revenue for Reality Labs since it was formed as a distinct entity in Q4 2020:
Image created by Road to VR using data courtesy Meta
Meta reports Reality Labs generated $339 million in revenue during its first quarter of the year, a small fraction of the company’s 28.65 billion quarterly revenue. The bulk of that was generated from its family of apps—Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp.
While the $3.99 billion loss may show the company is tightening its belt in contrast to Q4 2022, which was at an eye-watering $4.28 billion, Meta says we should still expect those losses to continue to increase year-over-year in 2023.
This follows the company’s second big round of layoffs, the most recent of which this month has affected VR teams at Reality Labs, Downpour Interactive (Onward) and Ready at Dawn (Lone Echo, Echo VR). The company says a third round is due to come in May, which will affect the company’s business groups.
Dubbed by Zuckerberg as the company’s “year of efficiency,” the Meta founder and chief said this during the earning call regarding the company’s layoffs:
“This has been a difficult process. But after this is done, I think we’re going to have a much more stable environment for our employees. For the rest of the year, I expect us to focus on improving our distributed work model, delivering AI tools to improve productivity, and removing unnecessary processes across the company.”
Beyond its investment in AI, Zuckerberg says the recent characterization claiming the company has somehow moved away from focusing on the metaverse is “not accurate.”
“We’ve been focusing on both AI and the metaverse for years now, and we will continue to focus on both,” Zuckerberg says, noting that breakthroughs in both areas are essentially shared, such as computer vision, procedurally generated virtual worlds, and its work on AR glasses.
Notably, Zuckerberg says the number of titles in the Quest store with at least $25 million in revenue has doubled since last year, with more than half of Quest daily actives now spend more than an hour using their device.
The company previously confirmed a Quest 3 headset is set to release this year, which is said to be slightly pricier than the $400 Quest 2 headset with features “designed to appeal to VR enthusiasts.”
I used to think that the path to the metaverse started with screen-based virtual worlds then expanded to virtual reality. At some point, I thought, we’d all be doing everything in the metaverse. The same way that the Internet made information instantly accessible to everyone everywhere, the metaverse would do the same with experiences and human interactions.
I spent over a decade of trying to make it happen for myself and my team. We had an in-world office. I started a group for hypergrid entrepreneurs that met in OpenSim. I am on the OpenSim Community Conference organizing team, and our early meetings are in OpenSim. I even figured out a way to get my desktop and many of my apps into OpenSim, so that I could work in my virtual office.
Spoiler: I did not, in fact, ever do any significant amount of work in my virtual office.
Here I am at my desk in my old virtual office.
I still think it’s possible. Well, theoretically possible, at least.
Eventually. But not in the immediate future, and not with the technology we have today.
First, until the resolution of a virtual world is as good as real life, there will be an advantage to working the old-fashioned way, especially when you’re in a graphics-heavy profession. I’m not an artist, but I do create graphics to go with blog articles and social media posts. And I’m the one responsible for web design for several outlets, including Hypergrid Business, MetaStellar, Writer vs AI, and Women in VR. That’s hard to do on a screen in a virtual world.
And don’t even get me started on trying to work in virtual reality. Even typing is hard if you can’t see the keyboard. I touch type, but sometimes I have to type special characters. I never remember where any of them are. In addition, I multi-task. I have several windows open at once and am cutting-and-pasting between them, looking things up, using calculators and other tools, and, of course, checking my phone. I can’t do most of that in virtual reality, even with a pass-through camera. And if I’m just going to be sitting at my computer, typing, why am I in a virtual reality headset, anyway?
But AR — augmented reality — well, that’s something entirely different. Instead of replacing the entire world around you with a virtual one, augmented reality just adds a little bit of the virtual to the actual world around you. Instead of looking out at the world through a distorting pass-through camera, you see the world as it is.
What this means is that, instead of a Zoom call, I can see the person I’m talking to sitting in front of me as a basically a hologram. Well, they’d be projected on my glasses, but to me it would look as if they were actually there. Instead of a screen full of little Zoom faces, I could see people sitting around a conference table. I’d have to rearrange my home office so that my layout would work for this, but I had to rearrange my office anyway, so that it would look good on Zoom.
The thing is, we’re probably going to get to AR through our phones. Instead of wearing a smart watch, we’d wear smart glasses and just keep our phones in our pockets. Until the phones got so small, of course, that they’d fit completely inside the glasses frames.
The home screen of my phone is currently — blessedly! — ad-free, so I don’t expect to see pop-up ads just showing up willy-nilly in augmented reality, either. If they did, nobody would use the platform. Instead, we’d probably see ads the same places we currently see them — when we play free games and scroll through news feeds.
I can see some very interesting things happening when we get AR glasses. We’d use virtual keyboards instead of physical ones, and probably dictate quite a bit more, too.
I do like the physical feel of a tactile keyboard, but we already have Bluetooth-enabled keyboards that sync to our mobile devices, so I can easily see continuing to use one, if I prefer.
But I can also see myself dictating more.
Speech detection is getting more accurate all the time. In fact, I’m already dictating most of my text messages because it’s so convenient. And instead of physical screens, we’d get virtual screens that float at an arm’s length in front of us, and we can position them where we want them, and have as many screens as we want, of any size. I only have a couple of apps that I use that don’t run on a phone — GiMP and Filemaker. Everything else I do, including word processing, is browser-based, so I can already do it on a phone.
An AR phone will make my desktop PC, monitors and keyboards and backup laptop obsolete. Well, I’d still keep my laptop, just in case, but my other hardware will go the way of all the other devices that smartphones relegated to the trash heap of history. And, also, to literal trash heaps. And Windows. I hate Windows, and will be happy to never use it again.
Since these AR smart glasses will be so convenient, everyone will be using them for everything. We’ll be living in a world that has a continuous virtual overlay on it, a magical plane that gives us superpowers.
(Image by Maria Korolov via Midjourney.)
Oh, and our AI-powered virtual assistants who are as smart as we are, or even smarter, will live inside this virtual overlay.
All the pieces are already there — including the intelligent AI. All it will take is for someone to put them together into an actually useful device.
I’m guessing that this will be Apple. When it happens, I’ll be switching back from Android the first chance I get. I originally had an iPhone, but switched to Samsung when Gear VR came out because Apple didn’t support VR. Then I switched to the Pixel because I hated Samsung so much, and because I liked Google’s Daydream VR platform.
Both Gear VR and Daydream are now gone, though Google Cardboard remains. I still see between 3,000 and 4,000 pageviews a month on my Google Cardboard headset QR Codes page. These are the codes that people use to calibrate their Google Cardboard-compatible headsets. They’re ridiculously bad, and have limited motion tracking, but as phone screens get better, the image quality has become pretty good — good enough to watch movies on a virtual screen, and, of course, for VR porn. Ya gotta admit, porn does drive technology adoption. I’ve heard.
But the phone-screen-based approach seems to be hitting a head end, since few people want to have a huge phone screen strapped to the front of their face.
I’ve been waiting for years for Apple to do something in this space.
“If you think about the technology itself with augmented reality, just to take one side of the AR/VR piece, the idea that you could overlay the physical world with things from the digital world could greatly enhance people’s communication, people’s connection,” Cook says. “It could empower people to achieve things they couldn’t achieve before. We might be able to collaborate on something much easier if we were sitting here brainstorming about it and all of a sudden we could pull up something digitally and both see it and begin to collaborate on it and create with it. And so it’s the idea that there is this environment that may be even better than just the real world—to overlay the virtual world on top of it might be an even better world. And so this is exciting. If it could accelerate creativity, if it could just help you do things that you do all day long and you didn’t really think about doing them in a different way.”
He didn’t deny or confirm the release of an Apple AR headset.
But, yesterday, Bloomberg reported that Apple is getting ready to unveil its augmented reality headset this June, and is already working on dedicated apps, including sports, gaming, wellness, and collaboration.
Here’s what an AI thinks that the new Apple headset might look like:
(Image by Maria Korolov via Midjourney.)
I do love my Pixel, and I’d have to replace all my Android apps with new iPhone ones if I switched, but if we’re about to hit an iPhone moment with augmented reality, I want to be first in line.
The public OpenSim grids gained nearly 2,000 regions this past month, and more than 1,300 new registrations, but continued to bleed active users as the weather improves and people spend less time inside at their computers.
However, the total number of active public grids has reached a new record high of 421 grids, despite the fact that we’ve cleaned out our database and set many grids to “private” because they didn’t have public websites or other indicators that they wanted people to stop by. The total number of grids we’re tracking is now 2,543, but many of them are school and company grids closed to outsiders, private grids just for family or friends, or personal grids that someone is running on their home computer and not usually accessible to outsiders. Of the public grids, 283 reported statistics this month.
OSgrid, Wolf Territories Grid, and Kitely, are the three largest grids by total land area, and OSgrid was the fastest-growing, having acquired an additional 732 new regions since this time last month. Alternate Metaverse gained the equivalent of 412 standard regions, Serenity gained 352, Wolf Territories Grid gained 282, and Discovery Grid grew by 86 regions. Scroll to the bottom of the page to find the list of the top 40 grids by land area.
OpenSim total land area chart over the years. (Hypergrid Business Data.).
Our stats also do not include most of the grids running on OutWorldz DreamGrid — a distribution of OpenSim used by many people to create virtual worlds on personal computers, private company grids, or school grids.
DreamGrid has recorded a total of 10,377 DreamGrids that have booted so far. However, when the grid name changes are accounted for, 3,435 Dreamgrids have been installed as shown by a count of unique, random ID’s, said Micro Technology Services CEO Fred Beckhusen. Micro Technology Services owns both DreamGrid and OutWorldz.
Fred Beckhusen
The total list of grids for which OutWorldz reports stats is available here.
With the free-to-use DreamGrid software, users can easily create virtual worlds through a graphical interface and one-click install feature. They can also use it to easily and quickly manage their grids, including adding new regions, banning users, deleting regions, auto restarting, tracking usage stats, and shutting down entire grids or unoccupied regions to save computing power.
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 own 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 active list is based on active, unique 30-day user login numbers that grids report on their stats pages. Those grids that don’t report their numbers might be just as popular, but we wouldn’t know.
Piggy Bank Grid is, for the second month in a row, the fastest growing grid with 260 new active users, followed by Offworld with 197, Moonrose with 176, Trianon World with 148, and Jungle Friends with 145 new actives.
The active user stats are used to generate the popular hypergrid destinations list, which is useful if you have a hypergrid teleport and want to put up gates to the most popular grids or include the most popular grids in an in-world directory. This list is also a good place to start if you want to open up new stores, hold events, or are just looking for places to visit.
Here’s some information on how and why you should set up a stats page for your grid. Not all grids need a stats page — especially grids that aren’t open to the public like school grids, private company grids, small family grids, and so on. From prior surveys, this dark metaverse of OpenSim grids might actually be bigger than the one we know about, because those grids don’t need to promote themselves, and we never hear about them.
Online marketplaces for OpenSim content
There are currently 19,804 product listings in Kitely Market containing 39,001 product variations, 33,926 of which are exportable.
Kitely Market data — total listing, variations, and exportables. (Image courtesy Kitely Market.).
As seen from 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 in the chart. The red area, of non-exportable content, has stayed level for the past seven years.
Offering a convenient and low-cost way for OpenSim users to buy legitimate, legal content not only offers creators sales opportunities that they wouldn’t have otherwise but reduces the need for pirated content, similar to the way that Netflix and other streaming services have reduced the amount of illegal video streaming.
In addition, restricting content to closed grids does little to stop piracy. Most stolen content is ripped from Second Life, the original closed grid. The only time that being on a closed grid offers additional security for content creators is when the content involves high-end scripts or proprietary animations.
Speaking of closed grids — where users are not able to teleport to other grids — the biggest such grid, Tag, also has its online marketplace. The marketplace lists 28,293 items both for sale and those for free.
Products on sale on The Adult Grid. (Image courtesy TAG grid.).
Neverworlds’ Marketplace, which launched last month, is another option for OpenSim grirds, and does support hypergrid shoppers. The site currently lists 33 items for sale to residents and 44 items for hypergridders.
A free Neverworld account also grants access to more free gifts from the marketplace.
The latest OpenSim release will likely be the last one on Mono and OpenSim developers and stakeholders who meet on Tuesday of each week are now discussing the future of OpenSim whose future releases will run on .Net 6.
Mono is the open source alternative to Microsoft’s .Net application platform.
OpenSim on .Net 6 will still require some Mono dependencies like LibGDIPlus for dynamic textures to function. This will eventually need to be resolved through creation of a new graphics rendering system built that runs without those dependencies because the future of Mono and its adjacent dependencies is unclear, said Zetamex Network CEO Vincent Sylvester.
“Primarily we are looking for people to help test the .Net 6 version and for some with development experience to look into writing new unit tests to go along with that as the existing tests no longer work with this runtime version,” he told Hypergrid Business.
Zetamex seeks machine learning volunteer
Zetamex Network has posted a job listing for a volunteer position in the field of machine learning. The person will research and test machine learning language models and data, with a goal to applying them in OpenSim and virtual worlds. The internal project has a prospect to benefit the entire OpenSim metaverse when finished, said Zetamex’s Sylvester.
Vincent Sylvester
“The internal project that posting relates to is currently in the planning and research phase, but if it succeeds would vastly improve the interaction of people in virtual worlds in regards to communicating with each other,” he told Hypergrid Business.
He said although using ChatGPT and similar AI-powered chatbots can be helpful in trying to answer general support questions, finding general answers to research questions, and talking to lonely people, they currently offer very little when it comes to technical matters such as OpenSim coding.
“With the limited data they have and a clear lack of understanding of more complex topics in programming there is little they can do, much less in an environment like OpenSim with a code base scattered across so many functions that unless it parses the entire code base ChatGPT will never be able to properly identify structural deficiencies in the code leaving only optimizing single functions,” he said.
Trianon World to launch fun-filled Funzies World next week
The Welcome area of the Trianon World grid. (Image courtesy Trianon-World.).
A fun-filled region is about to launch on the Trianon-World grid next week at 1 p.m. Pacific Time on Saturday, April 22. It features beautiful scenes that include family picnic areas, cottages, marketplace, a water slide tower, and much more. The region is ready for preview and anyone who wishes to do so before the launch day is welcome, said grid owner Shadow Raven.
Shadow Raven aka MzEssensual.
“Those who can’t wait to experience this special environment, this is an invitation to come and have a preview look,” she told Hypergrid Business. “Although some sites are still in progress there is plenty to see and do.
And don’t hesitate to bring your tall friends on non-dinkie events days. They may bump their heads a bit and have to scrunch into the seats but they can still enjoy everything here.”
Some of the attractions include the Dinkie-scaled cottages available for rent just a few meters past the Welcome area, after which you meet a family picnic area. After this is a dance floor where Dinki Band and DJs will entertain residents and visitors. The latter site is under development, she said, but she promises it will be a winner.
There is also a playing field, which is home to the Dinki Pussball Plate, and a marketplace where you can buy all sorts of items. Clicking a sign on the tall Water Slide tower overlooking the bay takes you to the highest spot in the World where you can admire all the world around you.
(Image courtesy Trianon World.).
“The tranquil bay is open to boating, the beaches that surround the whole area, the magnificent mountains encircling the island, and the stunning Kakabeka Falls with its 1,000-foot sheer drop,” she added. “Perhaps later you will take a boat out to explore, though not too close. Sea dragons have been reported in offshore waters.”
The heart of the Funzies World is the Funzies Emporium which is an all-year-round permanent Midway and hosts a merry-go-round for kids, a roller coaster, and many other rides. The Midway, she said, would not be complete without carnival barkers, soothsayers, and card readers eager to have your business.
(Image courtesy Trianon World.).
GridPlayGrid is back up online
GridPlayGrid has returned online after a long shutdown, which was caused by a lack of time to take care of it and back-end issues, said grid owner Christopher Strachan. He is currently focusing on rolling out more legal content on the grid.
It currently has nine sims online but more will be added later on, spreading across its four servers. It also has its own currency, a custom website, and a focus on the mainland but there will be no selling of private sims. The grid will also soon have Kitely Market enabled.
“We plan to also have our own marketplace website soon, probably similar to the old XStreet that Second Life had, using in-world drop boxes,” he said.
However, hypergrid teleports and asset exports are disabled at the moment, he added.
DreamGrid V5.35 released
The new DreamGrid Version 5.35 features the latest OpenSimulator 0.9.2.2 with Smart Start and many other modules compiled in. This release has a feature that allows anyone to run DreamGrid as a service on Windows, said Micro Technology Services CEO Fred Beckhusen.
“Restarting a PC for any reason such as an update will automatically start DreamGrid,” he told Hypergrid Business. “This includes Robust, all enabled regions, Apache, MySQL, Joomla, WordPress, IceCast, Text-To-Speech, and other services such as the visitor counters and automatic backups. You can log out and DreamGrid will continue to run. You control the service by starting DreamGrid, which will give you control of the regions and access to Robust and region consoles.”
This release also includes a control panel for load testing up to 100 avatars. They can sit, stand, run, and fly, as well as teleport using Smart Start and Smart Boot.
Sometimes, a grid changes its login URI or website address and we don’t notice. If that’s the case, email us and let us know.
Top 40 grids by land area
The list below is a small subset of existing OpenSim grids. We are now tracking a total of 2,543 different publicly-accessible grids, 421 of which were active this month, and 283 of which published their statistics.
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.
