Dreams live support is ending — and that’s a big misstep for PlayStation
Live support for Media Molecule's Dreams is being discontinued on September 1, highlighting one of Sony's biggest missed opportunities.
Teens slow to adopt VR and more bad news for the metaverse
Virtual reality hasn’t caught on with American teens, according to a new survey from Piper Sandler released on Tuesday.
While 29 percent percent of teens polled owned a VR device — versus 87% who own iPhones — only 4 percent of headset owners used it daily, and just 14 percent used them weekly.
Teenagers also didn’t seem that interested in buying forthcoming VR headsets either. Only 7 percent said they planned to purchase a headset, versus 52 percent of teens polled who were unsure or uninterested.
That’s not the only bad news for VR that’s come out recently.
Bloomberg has reported that Sony’s new PlayStation VR2 Headset is projected to sell 270,000 units as of the end of March, based on data from IDC. It had originally planned to sell 2 million units in the same time period, Bloomberg reported last fall.
In fact, VR headset numbers in general are down.
According to IDC, headset shipments declined 21 percent last year to 8.8 million units.
“This survey only further exemplifies that the current state of VR is very business-focused,” said Rolf Illenberger, managing director of VRdirect, a company that provides enterprise software solutions for the metaverse and virtual reality.
“The pandemic further accelerated progress for VR and AR usability in the office, while the release of new devices will mean more for developers building practical use cases than they will for teenagers seeking entertainment,” he told Hypergrid Business.
But that might be wishful thinking.
According to IDC, both consumer and enterprise interest in virtual reality fell last year.
Earlier this year, I wrote about how Microsoft and other companies have pulled back on their VR and AR plans. And the bad news has continued to come in.
In mid March, Google announced the end of Google Glass Enterprise. And, last week, the Wall Street Journal reported that Disney shut down its metaverse team and the Truth in Advertising nonprofit advocacy group reported that Walmart had shut down its Roblox virtual experience.
Even Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg seems to have soured on the metaverse. In his March letter announcing a “year of efficiency” and layoffs of 10,000 people, Zuckerberg said that the company was now going to focus on AI.
“Our single largest investment is in advancing AI and building it into every one of our products,” he wrote. So much for the metaverse being Meta’s biggest investment. In 2021 and 2022, Reality Labs — its metaverse division — reported a total loss of nearly $24 billion.
Given the explosion of interest in AI since ChatGPT was released late last year, and its clear and obvious business benefits, I have serious doubts that anyone is going to be investing much in enterprise VR this year.
After all, generative AI is clearly poised to solve a multitude of business challenges, starting with improved efficiencies in marketing, customer service, and software development. And virtual reality continues to be a technology in search of a problem to solve.
I’m a huge, huge fan of OpenSim. But, other than giving a presentation at the OpenSim Community Conference in December, I can’t remember the last time I went in-world for a meeting. It’s all Zoom, Zoom, Zoom, and occasionally Microsoft Teams.
Oh, and here’s another downer. I watched the Game Developers Conference presentations from Nvidia, Unreal Engine, and Unity. I don’t play video games much, other than on my phone, so I hadn’t noticed just how amazing graphics, environments and characters have become. I originally watched for the AI announcements, which were insane, but the realism of the visuals just blew me away. I’m feeling the urge to run out and buy a gaming console.
Now, general purpose platforms like OpenSim don’t have to have the same level of graphics to be successful. The early web, for example, had very poor graphics compared to what was available from commercial add-ons like Flash. And look at Minecraft — you can’t get any worse than that, graphics-wise.
So while the graphics were awesome, that’s not why I was most concerned. No, I was looking at the AI-powered environment generation features. And it’s not just Unreal and Unity. There are a bunch of AI-powered startups out there making it super easy to create immersive environments, interactive characters, and everything else needed to populate a virtual world.
With the basic Unreal and Unity plans available for free, is it even worth it for developers to try to add these AI features to OpenSim? It might feel like putting a jet engine on a horse-drawn buggy. I mean, you could try, but the buggy would probably explode into splinters the minute you turned it on.
Am I wrong?
Will we be able to step into OpenSim and say, “I want a forest over there,” and see a forest spring up in front of us? Will we be able to have AI-powered NPCs we can talk to in real time? And will we be able to create interactive and actually playable in-world experience beyond just dance-and-chat and slot machines?
There’s good news, though.
AI tools are helping to accelerate everything, including software development and documentation. With the big players pulling back from enterprise VR, this gives an opportunity for open source platforms like OpenSim to use those tools, grab this window of opportunity, and catch up. Maybe even take the lead in the future hyperlinked, open source, interconnected metaverse.
Littlefield celebrates tenth birthday
Littlefield grid turns ten on Saturday, April 1, and will host a week-long birthday party on its Anniversary region.
There will be a live performance by OpenSim renowned artist Rogue Galaxy at 5 p.m. Pacific time on April 1, followed by a live DJ dance party with Littlefield’s own DJ Walter Balazic, and a host of exhibitions created by the grid’s residents.
The grid is also running a rental promotion for new residents during the entire week of the celebrations, said Littlefield grid co-owner Walter Balazic. A local account is required to get the deal.
“Our premium regions which include 30,000 prims and a free Shoutcast server will be reduced in price from $15 to $10 for the entire month of April,” he told Hypergrid Business. “In addition, we will be doing a buy-one-get-one-free promotion opening week where anyone who rents a region from April 1 through April 8 will get an additional free region with their first rental.”
Contact Balazic in-world on the Littlefield grid or email him at walterbalazic@gmail.com for more details.
The grid’s Anniversary region opens at 6 a.m. Pacific time on April 1 and will remain open for the exhibitions until 6 a.m. on April 8.
The hypergrid address is lfgrid.com:8002:Littlefield Anniversary.
Littlefield prioritizes listening to the user community so as to make the grid a home for all, Balazic told Hypergrid Business. There are monthly grid meetings for the residents where they can ask any questions they might have, make suggestions, or make admins aware of any issues that come up that the admins may not be aware of. There also are six full-time grid admins to take care of any daily issues.
“We have said to the residents many times that the grid is where we admins live, this is our home, so we want it to run its best for all of us,” he said. “We think this concept makes all the difference. If you don’t live on your grid full time, you don’t know how well or poorly it runs day to day, and you aren’t there to speak directly with your residents to find out what they may see that you don’t.”
The grid recently migrated from OpenSim version 8.2 to version 9.2 after spending an entire year in testing and development. This was done slowly, he said, because the residents’ needs were prioritized, to ensure that the residents did not lose what they had spent many years developing.
It currently runs nine production data servers at a US-based data centers, including two mirrored grid servers and one hot backup server.
A “hot” backup is one that can be switched to instantaneously in case of a problem, versus a “cold” backup that needs to be restored first before it can be used.
Littlefield’s journey started in 2011, with about 50 regions OSgrid. It then became a standalone grid in 2013 because the admins and owner wanted to do things differently — including making it an adult-only grid. They also felt it was unfair to overutilize OSgrid’s resources since OSgrid is a volunteer-run, non-profit grid.
Besides Balazic, the two other cofounders were lead developer Ashton Nobilis and engineer Dirk Mathers.
There are also some residents who’ve been around for the full ten years, including Xi Shi who runs the Ruritania region, Windrunner Constantine who is now one of the grid admins, and Muddpuddle Cleanslate who is responsible for several Art regions including Pepperland and All Things Must Pass.
“We have been very blessed over the years to have several incredible builders and content creators as grid residents which helped with Littlefield’s original content,” Balazic said. “Ada Wong and admin Camryn Darkstone were integral in creating clothing for the grid. Toy McBride, also a grid admin, filled the grid with her original furniture for the residents, and last but certainly not least Aine Caoimhe the creator of PMAC and most importantly the Paramour Dance Ball which is the de facto dance system utilized by almost all OpenSimulator grids. Having this talent on the grid certainly assisted in making the grid what it is today.”
Crystal Frost viewer development to continue despite Linden Lab announcing a mobile viewer
Development of Crystal Frost — a mobile-friendly Unity-based Second Life viewer which is now in beta trials — will continue despite Second Life recently announcing its own mobile virtual world viewer.
Crystal Frost is currently a downloadable Windows virtual world viewer like Firestorm, but will also be available on Linux and Macs — and on mobile devices, said project lead and developer Berry Bunny.
“I do however think that due to the fact that the [Second Life] project was suddenly postponed last year that the timing of them announcing it now is not a coincidence,” she told Hypergrid Business. “I think they expect me to be deterred, but no. No, this is happening regardless. They only way they can stop it is if they buy the project from me.”
The viewer uses the LibreMetaverse protocol — a set of commands used by Second Life viewers to communicate with the servers. This is the same mechanism used in OpenSim. What is now remaining for OpenSim to work in beta is exposing the OpenSim loginURI, she said, and that will come.
“It is just not exposed at this time because I don’t test on OpenSim at this time,” she said. “OpenSim loginURI setting will be available long before it is publicly usable.”
The viewer is already being tested on the NGC version of OpenSim. and there will be a plugin module allowing people to “roll their own grid client,” she said.
“For the most part it will be up to the OpenSim community to make a grid client that can be used in their specific grids,” she added. “The reason for this is that there are a myriad of differences between OpenSim grids caused by the OpenSim community’s blatant refusal to maintain compatibility with the reference viewers. I am not the hero OpenSim wants, just the hero OpenSim deserves.”
Here is a video preview of the viewer.
Currently, she is limiting the number of patrons to test the viewer but anyone can choose to support the project by pledging through the project’s Patreon page.
Not initially planned as a web viewer
Unity does work in browsers, but the Crystal Frost viewers is not initially intended to be a web-based way to access virtual worlds.
That might be a mistake, said Hypergrid Business editor Maria Korolov. Current OpenSim and Second Life users don’t mind the desktop-based viewer, but a simple one-click access to a virtual world might bring in brand new visitors.
“If people could just go to a website and enter the world, it would be a lot easier for new users. and everyone wants to bring in new users,” she said.
Berry Bunny said she is not opposed to a web version only that it might take a little bit more time, effort, and resources as it would require a completely different code base.
Worries about support for OpenSim
The fact that the viewer prioritizes Second Life and not OpenSim seems to suggest that it may not work well for OpenSim. Plus supporting OpenSim now days would require more code base changes than merely exposing the loginURI, said Zetamex CEO Vincent Sylvester.
“If you look at the recent tickets on the bug tracker as well as the weekly meetings, there is now a bigger difference in how some things are handled versus Second Life,” he said. “So to support OpenSim absolutely requires code changes to basic functionality.”
The fact that the viewer is based on Unity can also result in performance issues, which has been a problem for past Unity-based viewers. Primitives, for example, may not render well.
Primitives are basic geometric shapes used to create 3D objects in Second Life and OpenSim, and are an older technology compared to mesh.
“Mesh is easy as you can just render as is, but primitives change shape in multiple ways, generate faces where there were not any before and even change their triangle count as you apply more modifiers,” said Sylvester. “On small scales you hardly notice, but if you throw a couple thousand primitives at it things get complicated quickly.”
A new viewer, actively supported and interested in supporting OpenSim, ,would open up new possibilities according to Sylvester. Maintaining compatibility with Second Life aside, he said, protocols can be expanded and additional data processed, which could finally allow things not previously possible. Given that Second Life has started another push to implement things people have been asking for years and OpenSim had ever since the requests came up, he added, it would probably push them to implement major changes if OpenSim were the ones showing off the capabilities. According to him, there is plenty that can be easily upgraded to vastly improve the capabilities, but without viewer support there is no point.
“For that to happen a viewer needs to make the effort to not treat OpenSim like an afterthought or chore,” he said.
What Crystal Frost viewer actually offers
There seems to be a list of several features supported on Second Life viewers which very many developers have spent many years implementing. A new viewer will, therefore, need to support all these features and make them better or add in more to be able to complement, compete effectively with, or completely replace the existing Second Life viewers and that is going to take a lot of time and resources, said Kitely CEO Ilan Tochner.
“That said, creating a new Unity-based viewer that only implements a very limited subset of the features Second Life or OpenSim users have grown accustomed to is definitely doable,” he told Hypergrid Business.
Crystal Frost seems to differentiate itself from Firestorm by offering a more realistic virtual reality support. It currently supports all forms of objects except rigged mesh, fitted, bento, and animesh. It also supports textures, sim sun position tracking, and animates physical objects, while the water levels adjust to the height of the sim. It also features normal camera functionality just as found on Firestorm or other Second Life and OpenSim viewers. There also is object scale, rotation, and movement changes. It also supports most object and color changes.
The viewer currently manages a frame rate of 30 FPS, a third of what Firestorm offers, but it will go up when the team does dynamic occlusion culling as done in Firestorm viewers.
Some functionality will, however, not be available with an open source viewer. The water system, for example, is a proprietary Unity functionality that has to be paid for.
“Unfortunately the open source version will not be able to have the fancy water system in it,” she said. “I will provide a dependency switch in case someone wanting to make their own Crystal Frost wants to buy the fancy water system, but I don’t have a license to distribute the source to the water system in question.”
Even though Unity’s best, proprietary water system won’t be available, the viewer does actually offer some advantages over current viewers, via override tags, for special effects such as underwater tunnels and mirrors.
“The water prims, for example, use an override tag,” she said. “You put a #waterbox hashtag in the description of a prim and the next time a Crystal Frost viewer sees that prim is rezzed, it ends up being a box of water with the same dimensions and rotation as the prim in question, and with the same color, which is how you could make a pool of blood for instance.”
The water prims can be used to make pools of water, pools of blood, and pools of slime, and objects can be interacted to make water waves that emanate from objects moving through the water.
She will also add a water-hole override tag to the viewer. The override tag will make it possible for creators to make boats that can cut into the water so it would be possible to, for instance, go under water with the boat without any water getting into the boat. Looking around through while in boat will provide realistic view of the water.
“This will also make building underwater sims with glass tunnels to be realistic without having to worry about the water fog outside the glass dome, or tunnel, or whatever, but not inside,” she said.
Much improved VR support
She is planning to add what she calls proper VR support after the initial public release of the viewer, and once the textures decoding performance issues are solved. Already, the feature is being worked upon, she said, and it will include such unseen features as pop up menus that a user can virtually hold and move around with their hands, rather than a static viewed menu that is always at the edges of an ordinary VR headset.
“Well, as far as I know, the only VR option available at this time is a modded Firestorm and they have got everything handled entirely wrong, but I don’t blame them,” she said. “Anybody who can code can look at the Linden Lab’s code which Firestorm inherited and tell that it is a giant heaping helping of spaghetti.”
Second Life offers preview of its new mobile viewer
Second Life, the popular virtual world platform that has been around for over two decades, is finally releasing a mobile viewer. The new mobile viewer is currently a work in progress, but the Second Life development team has shared a sneak peek at what users can expect.
Watch the preview in the video below:
The focus of the development team has been on delivering full rendering of avatars and 3D environments, and they have achieved impressive results so far. The mobile viewer is based on Unity and will be available on both Android and iOS platforms, allowing users to access Second Life from their mobile devices.
“We’ve started our development work with some of the most challenging aspects first…the full rendering avatars with all their complex attachments and behaviors as well as the full red ring of 3D environments that are so critical to the Second Life experience,” said Andrew Kertesz, Linden Lab’s VP of engineering, who is also known as Mojo Linden.
It is important to note that there is still no news about a web-based viewer for Second Life, which, in my opinion, is a bit more important since it makes it easier to invite new users to visit you inside the platform. Right now, the existing viewers have steep learning curves and it doesn’t help that the movement and camera controls don’t match those of popular video games.
Still, Second Life continues to be popular with its user base, despite the lack of significant innovation over the past twenty years.
Maybe a mobile viewer will get some former users to come back and revisit the platform, but it remains to be seen what impact it will have on the popularity and growth of Second Life.
“Over the past nearly two decades I have seen Second Life enable people from all corners of the globe to create socialize experiment engage in education business or even develop relationships,” said VP of product operations Eric Nix, also known as Patch Linden in-0world. “Imagine being able to stay connected with your Second Life from anywhere chat with friends visit your favorite in-world hangout spots and later do pretty much anything you can do with the desktop Second Life viewer without being tethered to your computer.”
The Second Life team has promised to keep users updated on the progress of the mobile viewer, but the beta version is expected to launch later this year.
You can learn more in Second Life’s Lab Gab:
Watch AltspaceVR’s Final Moment As Worlds Go Offline
Microsoft’s AltspaceVR went offline on March 10 as users were ripped from their worlds.
You can watch the moment below and see what it was like as Microsoft pulled the plug to shut down the Altspace servers.
Microsoft bought the social VR startup in 2017 after it ran out of money, but the service found a small niche with some creators using its tools for meeting and presentation spaces. Austin “Cause” Caine and Christi Fenison, the duo behind a company called Cause & Christi, have used AltspaceVR for client projects over the years and found it “to be the most ‘professional’ out of the current choices.” The were present for the final moments of AltspaceVR and conveyed the experience in writing and video:
The servers were set to shut down at exactly 1pm ET so we gathered and waited to see exactly what would happen. As the final moment approached, the anticipation grew… and the countdown began. 10… 9… 8… 7… 6… 5… 4… 3… 2… 1… 0… -1… -2… -3… wait a minute… we were all still here? News began to spread that new users could no longer log on. We were essentially the last survivors of a sinking ship, the band that played valiantly until the very end.
For just over five minutes we all reveled in this realization, wondering exactly when the true ending would come, and did our best to enjoy these extra precious moments together. Around 1:07pm ET everyone’s conversations were abruptly cut short as the world froze around us in a Matrix-like fashion. Reports later indicate this was the same experience for everyone. Not long after an official message from the AltspaceVR team popped up, and that was that.
Altspace’s closure was announced in January as executives implemented a wave of cost cutting measures at a number of tech companies. In advance of the shutdown, Microsoft enabled metadata downloads from Altspace worlds but didn’t enable full world downloads.
The closure note reads:
“This is sadly where we say goodbye. We leave you with one wish: take the light we’ve made together and share it with the world.”
Avalon raises $13m to build metaverse of interoperable worlds
Florida-based Avalon Corp. has raised $13 million to build a platform for games capable of taking advantage of the metaverse, featuring a universe of interoperable worlds with various intellectual properties, to be built using technologies including blockchain and game engines.
According to the press release, Avalon Corp is uniquely experienced to solve problems that will face creators and designers in the near future, and is building the tools, framework, and more that will allow them to do so. CEO Sean Pinnock has said that the company is working towards the democratization of game creation using blockchain as a tool.
According to Pinnock, it’s gaming companies that should be building the metaverse, not anyone else.
“We know that engagement is driven through play, creativity, and human connectivity, all critical elements that are severely lacking in most self-proclaimed metaverses, and it’s exactly why the inevitable confluence of tech that will emerge as the metaverse will be built by game developers,” he said in the announcement.
He does have a point. After all, the global video game industry is now bigger than the movie, music and book industries combined. And video games, especially first-person, multi-player video games, have exactly the kind of technology — and engagement — that the metaverse needs. And that companies like Second Life, Facebook and Microsoft have, so far, been unable to tap into.
It’s also a good sign that the company doesn’t expect to build everything on its own.
“Whatever the digital future is, it’s clear that no single company can build it,” said Jeff Butler, chief product officer at Avalon Corp., in the announcement.
The press release notes that the funding for Avalon Corp is led by Bitkraft Ventures, Hashed, Delphi Digital, and Mechanism Capital, with participation from Coinbase Ventures, Yield Guild Games, Merit Circle, Avocado Guild and Morning Star Ventures. Backers also include industry veterans with a visionary view such as Twitch cofounder Kevin Lin, gaming legend Dennis Fong, Charlie Songhurst, previous head of corporate strategy at Microsoft, and Robin Jung, previous CEO of game company Pearl Abyss.
“Connected worlds are evolving at unprecedented velocity, ultimately amounting to a Darwinian game, where the fittest and most useful platforms will thrive and stay alive,” said Jun Park, senior associate at investment company Hashed. “We are excited to back Avalon Corp., led by industry veterans with a visionary view, to help the company realize its potential and pioneer the next wave of interoperable worlds.”
Of course, I’ve always thought that OpenSim was going to pioneer the next wave of interoperable worlds. But maybe they can learn something from OpenSim, about how to move users, content, and messages between different worlds in a fully decentralized way.
Still, it’s nice to see that people are still investing in metaverse projects. For a while there, it looked like everyone was throwing in the towel and rebranding themselves as AI companies.
Report: AI is weapon of ‘mass disruption’
Generative AI is one of the world’s top three geopolitical risks this year — right after Russia and China — according to a report released last month by the Eurasia Group, a US-based risk consultancy.
“This year will be a tipping point for disruptive technology’s role in society,” the report said.
According to the organization, the generative AI technology that was all over the news in 2022 is capable of creating realistic images, videos, and text with just a few sentences of guidance.
“Large language models like GPT-3 and the soon-to-be-released GPT-4 will be able to reliably pass the Turing test,” the report said.
The most famous use of this large language model is in OpenAI’s ChatGPT, but the technology has also been licensed to many other vendors, and Microsoft has already begun adding it to Bing and announced plans to embed it in Office and other Microsoft applications.
The Turing test is an experiment in which a human interacts with another entity via a computer and has to guess whether the entity on the other side is another human or an AI.
Some users are already convinced that ChatGPT is either sentient or is actually manned by an army of humans in the Philippines. And a Google engineer was fired last summer because he became convinced that Google’s version of the technology, LaMDa, had become self-aware.
Now, these tools have become simple enough to use that anyone can harness the power of AI, the report said.
“These advances represent a step-change in AI’s potential to manipulate people and sow political chaos,” the report said. “When barriers to entry for creating content no longer exist, the volume of content rises exponentially, making it impossible for most citizens to reliably distinguish fact from fiction.”
This will have adverse impacts on political discourse. Conspiracy theorists can generate bot armies to support their views, as can dictators.
And companies can also be affected, since key executives can be impersonated by malicious actors, legitimate product reviews drowned in a sea of AI-generated comments, and social media posts can impact stock prices and overwhelm sentiment-driven investment strategies.
Implications for small business owners
If you are a small business owner, it’s time to create a strategy for responding to these threats.
In the OpenSim ecosystem, we’ve occasionally seen instances where individuals were impersonated by someone else in order to harm their reputations — or people created fake personas in order to promote a particular grid or service.
We can expect this kind of activity to accelerate as AI technology allows bad actors to operate on a much more massive scale than before.
At Hypergrid Business, we haven’t — yet — seen a flood of AI-generated comment spam. Hopefully, the Disqus platform we use for comments will be able to filter the worse of it out before we have to deal with it.
Grids that have a social media presence should start thinking about a possible strategy, or a reaction plan, in case something happens. It’s always better to come up with a plan ahead of time instead of reacting in the moment based on emotion, which will usually just make the situation worse.
But there, of course, also opportunities for business to use generative AI for good.
OpenSim grids can use the technology to create AI-powered interactive NPCs to create interesting interactions for visitors to their grids, use ChatGPT to create in-world storylines for users to experience, and use generative art platforms to create textures, images, 3D objects, and even entire scenes.
Grids can also use AI to help create marketing and promotional content such as articles, videos, or podcast episodes.
Marketing is the single biggest challenge that OpenSim grids and service companies have today. If AI can reduce some of the burden, that will be a big win for the whole ecosystem.
OpenSim land area up, number of public grids hits record high
OpenSim land area has this month gone up by a significant 6,622 standard region equivalents thanks to new grids and a significant expansion at other grids. All public OpenSim grids now have a total of 110,458 standard-sized regions in virtual land area.
Speaking of new grids, the total number of public OpenSim grids that we track is now up to 418, a record high. This is even though we’ve recently reclassified many grids as private because they do not have websites or social media pages or other indicators that they’re open to the public.
Please send us a link to your grid’s public page through a direct email or this form in case you find that your grid is marked as private and you want it to be back on our lists.
Active numbers grew slightly, by 444 active monthly users, but the actual growth is probably quite a bit higher. That’s because AviTron stopped reporting their statistics this month, and, last month, they had more than 3,000 actives. If AviTron had reported their stats this month, our active users numbers would have shown significant growth this month.
The AviTron users are probably still there — though their active user numbers have fallen by nearly 1,000 over the past three months. The grid also recently turned off the hypergrid connectivity.
Hypergrid Business editor Maria Korolov has previously recommended that people do not use an AviTron account as their primary hypergrid avatar because the grid owner has been known to shut down the grid completely with no prior warning.
“He’s also repatedly turned hypergrid connectivity on and off on a whim,” she said. “That creates havoc for anyone trying to run a business or organize events.”
For users, this means that people who depend on hypergrid friend lists or landmarks will lose access to those, and if they depend on their avatar inventories, they will lose access to those as well. Korolov recommends that users use an account on OSgrid or Kitely or another stable grid for their primary avatar and not keep any money or objects in their AviTron avatars that they’re afraid to lose.
We are now tracking a total of 2,527 OpenSim grids, 418 are active public grids, out of which 287 made their stats available for this month’s report.
In summary, AvatarLife registered the highest number of users this month or 422, while Piggy Bank Grid World got the highest number of active users or 331, and or 5,184, in a month since we lastly reported these stats. OSgrid, Kitely, and TAG grids still dominate in terms of land area, usage, and online marketplaces.
Wolf Territories Grid was the fastest-growing grid this month by land area, with an increase of 5,184 standard region equivalents. OSgrid was in second place with 1,861 new regions, followed by Virtual Worlds Grid with 748, German World Grid with 282, and ZetaWorlds with 152 standard region equivalents.
OSgrid maintained its lead in terms of total virtual land area with 25,558 regions, followed by Wolf Territories Grid which has overtaken Kitely in second place, having 18,368 regions. Kitely has 18,325 regions, ZetaWorlds has 8,189 regions, and Alternate Metaverse is fifth biggest grid with 7,339 total regions.
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 reports a total of 8,519 grids with a total land area of 65,638 standard regions. Micro Technology Services owns both DreamGrid and OutWorldz. The total list of grids tracked by OutWorldz 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 using graphical interfaces. This includes adding new regions, banning users, deleting regions, auto restarting, tracking usage stats, and shutting down entire grids or unoccupied regions to save computing power.
OutWorldz offers free OARs — complete region files — which you can load to your grid easily and with little effort. The software saved its users a combined total of over $35 million in setup and land rental fees in 2022 when compared to the Second Life price equivalents.
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, or the official OpenSim installer for those who are more technically inclined, or any other distribution, while commercial hosting starts at less than $5 a region.
A list of OpenSim hosting providers is here. Download the recommended Firestorm viewer here and find out where to get content for your OpenSim world or region here.
Top 25 grids by active users
When it comes to general-purpose social grids, especially closed grids, the rule of thumb is the busier the better. People looking to make new friends look for grids that already have the most users. Merchants looking to sell content will go to the grids with the most potential customers. Event organizers looking for the biggest audience — you get the idea.
Top 25 most popular grids this month:
- OSgrid: 5,164 active users
- DigiWorldz: 1,997 active users
- GBG World: 1,738 active users
- Alternate Metaverse: 1,684 active users
- ZetaWorlds: 1,340 active users
- AviWorlds: 1,287 active users
- Neverworld: 1,145 active users
- Eureka World: 1,119 active users
- Soul Grid: 1,081 active users
- WaterSplash: 1,049 active users
- Exo-Life: 993 active users
- Moonrose: 971 active users
- Party Destination Grid: 923 active users
- Kitely: 870 active users
- Craft World: 826 active users
- Wolf Territories Grid: 686 active users
- Barefoot Dreamers: 649 active users
- The City: 623 active users
- Kid Grid: 623 active users
- Piggy Bank Grid World: 621 active users
- Dorena’s World: 586 active users
- Astralia: 575 active users
- Offworld: 548 active users
- One Life Grid: 493 active users
- DreamNation: 490 active users
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 was the fastest growing grid this past month, with 331 new active users, followed by OSgrid with 276, WaterSplash with 268, The City with 239, and Kid Grid with 238 new 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.
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 19,889 product listings in Kitely Market containing 38,834 product variations, 33,764 of which are exportable.
Kitely Market has delivered orders to 576 OpenSim grids to date. The Kitely Market is the largest collection of legal content available in OpenSim. It is accessible to both hypergrid-enabled and closed, private grids. The instructions for how to configure the Kitely Market for closed grids are here.
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 free.
Another online marketplace which we will be reporting stats for is the Neverworlds’ Marketplace, which just launched. The site currently lists 33 items for sale to residents and 41 items for hypergridders, but if the project takes off, we hope to be including its stats in this section in the future.
Neverworlds offers free land and new online marketplace
Neverworlds Grid has started two online marketplaces, one for residents and another for hypergridders. The marketplaces currently offer a small selection of items, including rigged clothing and building supplies.
Unlike the Kitely Market, however, the Neverworlds marketplace also offers freebies.
“All the items offered are made by creators,” Govega Sachertorte told Hypergrid Business. “Members get exclusive items.”
“The members of Neverworld do get premium content, more freebies and reduced prices for anything that costs money,” she added. “The hypergrid area however is still good for free and we believe we have some of the best original content out there and this is also a growing project.”
The grid has also kicked off a continent project which spans across 200 regions. It has integrated road system, water ways, and most of it is made of free parcels. The regions are developed with parcels for residents ranging in size from 12,000 meters to about 45,000 meters, said Sachertorte.
“They are free and the prim limits are 5000 prims per parcel,” he told Hypergrid Business. “We currently have a few dozen parcels and are adding more daily as the need arises. We also do allow self hosted regions to attach to the continent, if they agree to use the same road system and textures.”
Free virtual land on One Life Grid
One Life Grid, which is a new grid, is also offering free land — specifically, 4096-square-meter, 938-prim parcels to any newly registered avatar. A user just needs to sign up and wait for activation, which happens within 24 hours.
The grid also has shopping areas for different meshes including adult ones.
The hypergrid address is onelife-grid.de:8002.
New grids
The following grids were added to our database this month: Casadamici, Darkheart’s Realm, EscapeLands, Hosting4OpenSim Test Grid, Little Whitecat, Lovely Paradise, One Life Grid, SiLi, Solaria, Vivec, and WKDVR.
The following 20 grids were marked as suspended this month: Acearia, Ampleverse, AvatarLife Testing, BritGrid, Encitra Home Grid, HiddenDreams , Jomac Silveras Grid, MajHome, Open Waifu, OzKanga Grid, Planet 3L, Pleasure Grid, PrimGrass, Savannah Grid, Skytec Grid, Tnet Grid, Tnet Grid, Verth, and Wiccan Grid.
After a grid has been inactive for two months, we mark it as closed.
Sometimes, a grid changes its loginURI 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 2,527 different publicly-accessible grids, 418 of which were active this month, and 287 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.
The raw data for this month’s report is here. A list of all active grids is here. And here is a list of all the hypergrid-enabled grids and their hypergrid addresses, sorted by popularity. This is very useful if you are creating a hyperport.
You can see all the historical OpenSim statistics here, including polls and surveys, dating all the way back to 2009.
- OSgrid: 25,558 regions
- Wolf Territories Grid: 18,368 regions
- Kitely: 18,325 regions
- ZetaWorlds: 8,189 regions
- Alternate Metaverse: 7,339 regions
- Discovery Grid: 5,637 regions
- DigiWorldz: 3,625 regions
- Groovy Verse: 3,279 regions
- Tag Grid: 1,464 regions
- 3rd Rock Grid: 1,248 regions
- AviWorlds: 1,070 regions
- Virtual Worlds Grid: 916 regions
- Tomi’s World: 784 regions
- GBG World: 651 regions
- Kinky Haven: 649 regions
- Piggy Bank Grid World: 613 regions
- HD Skin World: 497 regions
- Littlefield: 486 regions
- ArtDestiny: 484 regions
- German World Grid: 479 regions
- Furry World: 473 regions
- GorGrid: 417 regions
- 4Creative: 413 regions
- Craft World: 393 regions
- DreamNation: 371 regions
- Serenity: 324 regions
- Neverworld: 317 regions
- Nemesis 3D: 305 regions
- EdMondo: 285 regions
- Open Virtual Worlds: 232 regions
- Soul Grid: 211 regions
- AvatarLife: 193 regions
- Counter Earth: 184 regions
- Youth Nation: 184 regions
- Adreans-World: 169 regions
- Tangle Grid: 165 regions
- German World: 144 regions
- Japan Open Grid: 143 regions
- Seconds: 143 regions
- GerGrid: 141 regions
Do you know of any other grids that are open to the public but that we don’t have in our database? Email me at david@hypergridbusiness.com.
ChatGPT can teach you LSL and even write code for you — kinda
When I first tried out ChatGPT late last year, I noticed that many people were using it to write code. Python. Javascript. Even machine language. So of course I asked it if knew LSL, the Linden Scripting Language used in Second Life and OpenSim.
It said no. I was disappointed but not too surprised. After all, LSL isn’t one of the big languages. It probably doesn’t have enough training data.
Today, for some random reason, I decided to try again, and it not only knew LSL, but could explain how it worked. Maybe I worded the question wrong last time?
It can even talk about the differences between LSL and OSSL, the OpenSim Scripting Language, and write OSSL-specific scripts.
Warning: It’s not perfect
We’re still in the beta release of ChatGPT.
It makes mistakes.
So test all code carefully. However, if there’s an error, you can ask ChatGPT to fix it.
And if you don’t understand why it did something, or prefer it took a different approach, you can tell it that, too.
The company behind ChatGPT, OpenAI, is working on improving its accuracy — and the billions just invested by Microsoft will definitely help.
From what I’m hearing, developers are finding that ChatGPT can already significantly speed up their workflow, but that it doesn’t completely replace them. Yet.
When I asked it to recreate the Very Simple Greeting Script by Jester Knox, it took quite a bit of prompting. On the first try, it forgot a key step. When I pointed that out, ChatGPT apologized and rewrote the script with the step added. Then I asked it to use different commands than it had chosen.
All in all, it took it four tries to get to the exact script I was looking for.
My verdict?
Right now, ChatGPT is like a very junior programmer who still makes a lot of mistakes, is supremely confident in their abilities, but is at least willing to admit when they’re wrong.
I can definitely see the potential here for creating simple scripts, especially if I need to tweak those scripts a lot.
But the big deal here, of course, isn’t in what it can do right now, but in what it will be able to do tomorrow.
“Today, the scale of the largest AI computations is doubling every six months, far outpacing Moore’s Law,” Google CEO Sunchar Pichal said in a post last week.
So if a big part of your day-to-day workflow involves writing LSL or OSSL scripts, it might be time to look for ways in which ChatGPT can speed things up. For example, you can ask it to add comments to existing code. You can ask it to outline a coding project. You can ask it to write documentation, or to create slightly different versions of scripts. If you don’t understand how something works, you can ask it to explain it to you.
You can even paste in an existing script — maybe something from the Outworldz free scripts collection — and ask ChatGPT what the script does, then ask it to suggest some ways to use this script in an OpenSim grid.