Augmented & Virtual Reality Confabulation
What Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality developers are talking about
Second Life founder Philip Rosedale is coming to OpenSim tomorrow, Sunday Dec. 8, at 4 p.m. Pacific Time for a fireside chat at the OpenSimulator Community Conference.
Rosedale founded Linden Lab in 1999 and continues innovating in virtual worlds.
Watch the conversation in person at the OSCC conference grid, hypergrid address cc.opensimulator.org:8002.
You can also watch the event live on YouTube.
View the full conference schedule here.
The OpenSimulator Community Conference, starts today with music and celebrations, then gets off to its full start tomorrow morning with a welcome panel with OpenSim core developers at 7 a.m. Pacific time tomorrow morning.
You can see the full schedule here.
You can also watch the presentations live streamed at AvaCon’s YouTube channel.
The conference is free to attend in person on the Open Simulator Conference grid, and you can register here or hypergrid to attend.
The hypergrid address is cc.opensimulator.org:8002.
Follow @opensimcc on X or on BlueSky and use the hashtags #OSCC24 or #oscc, and post your conference pictures and snapshots on our Flickr and Facebook group, or join the Discord server where you can also chat with other attendees during and after the event.
This year’s conference features over 55 speakers sharing innovative content, dynamic short presentations, and panels that all take place on Saturday, December 7, and Sunday, December 8, within the grid’s OSCC Keynote regions.
The schedule also includes live music, community and social events, and plenty of Expo regions to explore over the weekend. Don’t miss OSCC presenter booths located in OSCC Expo Zone 3 and the special hypergrid resources located in the OSCC Expo Zone 2 region with many how-to’s and scavenger hunt landmarks to interesting destinations where you can learn to hypergrid visit throughout the OpenSimulator metaverse.
There is also the chance to attend live music during Friday afternoon and Saturday evening #OSCC24 Music Showcase and on Sunday at the virtual venue of Maritime Club Belfast, as well as many post-conference community events and simulation tours.
The weather’s been getting cooler here in the US where I live — some days, at least. The weather’s been a little wonky lately. And there have been other things happening in the country that make me want to spend less time in the real world and more time in a virtual one. So it makes sense that registered users and land area both went up in the public OpenSim grids.
What’s more surprising is that the total active numbers went down — by more than 2,700 users.
Sure, Moonrose, which reported over 900 active users last month, seems to be having website issues and did not publish its stats this month. In addition, Vida Dupla, which had 375 actives last month, did not report its active user numbers this month. And Great Canadian Grid, which had over 600 actives last month, is now closed.
But several grids also reported significant drops in active user numbers. OSgrid reported a drop of more than 800 actives compared to last month, Craft World saw a drop of over 200, and five grids lost more than 100 actives each.
So there’s something going on beyond just a grid closure and some reporting issues.
Maybe everyone went out partying for Halloween and spent less time in-world? Or maybe other people like the cooler weather and are enjoying the fall leaves and brisk walks while wearing cozy sweaters?
Nope! According to reader Paul Clevett, from Wolf Territories, OSgrid is down for maintenance. And I found the announcement. Thanks, Paul, for the heads up!
Apparently, OSgrid is currently offline, and has been since November 7, because it’s storage cluster was running out of space.
“OSgrid has 17 years of data which is approx several hundred million assets,” the announcement said. And it gets worse. The grid stores both the asset data and a redundant copy, but they’re not stored at the actual size — every asset looks bigger than it actually is.
To fix the problem, the grid’s storage needs to reconfigured, which involves moving millions of assets and scrubbing out the phantom extra space to free it up again. Doing this while people are using the grid would create a bad user experience, so they put it into maintenance mode during the bulk of the work.
The bad news is that they don’t know how long it’s going to take. The good news is that they don’t expect any assets to get lost.
Anyway, I am now tracking a total of 2,677 public grids, of which 295 were active this month and 232 published their statistics. If you have a stats page that we’re not tracking, please email me at maria@hypergridbusiness.com — that way, your grid will be mentioned in this report every month, for additional visibility with both search engines and users.
This month, OSgrid was the largest grid by land area, with 32,867 standard region equivalents, even though it lost more than 2,000 regions, while Wolf Territories Grid was the most active, with 7,379 unique logins over the past 30 days.
Our stats do not include most of the grids running on DreamGrid, a free easy-to-use version OpenSim, since these tend to be private grids.
OpenSim is a free, open-source, virtual world platform, that’s similar to Second Life and allows people with no technical skills to quickly and cheaply create virtual worlds and teleport to other virtual worlds. Those with technical skills can run OpenSim worlds on their servers for free using either DreamGrid, the official OpenSim installer for those who are more technically inclined, or any other distribution, while commercial hosting starts at less than $5 a region.
A list of OpenSim hosting providers is here. Download the recommended Firestorm viewer here and find out where to get content for your OpenSim world or region here.
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.
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:
There are currently 20,973 product listings in Kitely Market containing 41,105 product variations, 35,866 of which are exportable.
Kitely Market has delivered orders to 632 OpenSim grids to date.
As you can see in the above chart, nearly all the growth in Kitely Market has been in content that can be exported to other grids — that is the green area on the graph. The red area, of non-exportable content, has stayed level for the past eight years.
The Kitely Market is the largest collection of legal content available in OpenSim. It is accessible to both hypergrid-enabled and closed, private grids. The instructions for how to configure the Kitely Market for closed grids are here.
Kitely also announced support for PBR materials and larger textures earlier this month.
I added one new grid to my database this month: NakedWorldz.
If you know of any public grid that we’re missing, please email me at maria@hypergridbusiness.com.
The following nine grids were suspended this month: Angel Grid, Ares World, Binders World, Cajun Grid, DreamNation, Ghost Area, Homeland, KubwasWelt, and Nosso Lar.
If they don’t reappear online again soon, they will be marked as closed in future reports.
Sometimes, a grid changes its login URI or website address — if that’s the case, email me and let me know and I’ll update my database.
All region counts on this list are, whenever available, in terms of standard region equivalents. Active user counts include hypergrid visitors whenever possible.
Many school, company, or personal grids do not publish their numbers.
The raw data for this month’s report is here. A list of all active grids is here. And here is a list of all the hypergrid-enabled grids and their hypergrid addresses, sorted by popularity. This is very useful if you are creating a hyperport.
You can see all the historical OpenSim statistics here, including polls and surveys, dating all the way back to 2009.
Do you know of any other grids that are open to the public but that we don’t have in our database? Email me at maria@hypergridbusiness.com.
The Opensimulator Community Conference is the annual conference that focuses on the user community and developers of the OpenSimulator virtual world software.
This year’s conference will run from December 6 to December 8, 2024.
Registration is now open, and is free.
OSCC 2024 kicks off with a Friday pre-conference launch event featuring meetups, art, live music, and DJ sets, and then two days of fast-paced presentations, panels, performances, and immersive tours spotlighting the technical, scholarly, artistic, commercial, and community-produced works across diverse sectors of the OpenSimulator user base.
There will also be the opportunity to explore community events, tours, and workshops leading up to and following the conference weekend.
OpenSimulator is an open-source, multi-platform, multi-user 3D application server. It can be used to create a virtual environment (or world) that is accessible through a variety of clients on multiple protocols. Users can also visit other OpenSimulator virtual worlds across the web by using the Hypergrid protocols. In this way, it is the basis of an open-distributed Metaverse.
Find more info, including the schedule, once released at conference.opensimulator.org.
The conference is hosted on an OpenSimulator grid specifically designed for the conference.
We hope to be able to accommodate over 400 users in total, which includes speakers, sponsors, and staff.
Since virtual seats are limited, registration is open on a first-come-first-served basis until the maximum number of virtual conference center tickets is reached. At that point, community members will still be able to register for the live-streamed version of the conference that will be available.
The expo area will not be ticketed and can be accessed by any avatar, subject to constraints on the number of avatars that the exhibition regions can hold at any particular time.
The OpenSim Worlds Fair is set to launch on March 1, 2025, and will celebrate innovation, creativity, art, technology, fashion, and education in OpenSim.
This event, a year in the making, will unite the OpenSim community under one roof, showcasing the talents and achievements that define our world.
With nearly two decades of immersive experience in virtual worlds, the organizers, Cooper Swizzle, Koshari Mahana, Kimm Starr, and entertainment coordinator Rosa Alekseev, are passionate about elevating events throughout the hypergrid. Their dedication to fostering creativity and innovation ensures that this fair will be a memorable experience for all attendees, showcasing the best of what the hypergrid has to offer.
While the organizers are affiliated with the Kitely grid, owned by Ilan Tochner, they actively participate in numerous events throughout the hypergrid. The fair will unfold in Wolf Territories, owned by Lone Wolf, and is designed to bring together individuals from diverse backgrounds and interests within the virtual community.
The OpenSim Worlds Fair will feature at least 17 themed stages, showcasing a variety of genres including rock and roll, Motown, Latin, and retro. This diverse selection of stages is designed to keep attendees entertained while they party and connect with others, with each theme curated to align with the performers and DJs. A special acknowledgment goes to Rosa Alekseev for her tireless dedication and exceptional efforts in organizing the entertainment for the fair.
Offering 72 parcels for exhibitors, we still have a few spaces available for those eager to showcase their work, talents, and creativity at this event. While full region-sized parcels are now gone, we have smaller parcels ready for participants looking to make their mark.
A handful of free exhibition spaces remain, providing a platform to share your vision and innovation. This is your chance to be part of a celebration that champions progress and fosters cultural exchange across the hypergrid.
“On October 23, 2024, Thirza Ember’s Hypergrid Safari tour made a stop at the Worlds Fair, drawing attendees eager to experience the energy and creativity taking shape. Participants were treated to an exclusive sneak peek of the fairgrounds, exploring exhibits and immersive installations.
Attendees shared their thoughts.
“Looks amazing and the grid seems rock solid,” said James Atlloud.
“It has Second Life quality,” said Forest Azure.
“You’ve all done a fantastic job. I’m looking forward to March,” said Lavia LLavine.
In a Hypergrid Safari Facebook Post, Star Ravenhurst wrote: “While some builds are still in progress, many are already completed, and the preview we received left us truly excited for what’s to come. This event promises to be a must-see, filled with fun, innovation, and excitement—mark your calendars because you won’t want to miss it.”
For more information, contact one of our hosts, dive into the fun on our Discord community, visit our website, or email the organizers at OpenSimWorldsFair@gmail.com
Kitely has added support for physically based rendering (PBR) materials in both its virtual worlds and on the Kitely Market, the company announced this week. The update also includes support for textures up to 2,048 by 2,048 pixels in size.
PBR materials allow for more realistic textures by simulating how light interacts with different surfaces, such as mud or metal, creating the appearance of raised and lowered areas with realistic light reflection.
The feature requires Firestorm 7.1.11 or newer to use.
Kitely is one of the first grids to support PBR materials, having ported the features from the upcoming OpenSim 0.9.3 release into their current OpenSim 0.9.2.2-based system.
“PBR isn’t yet supported in all OpenSim grids,” said Oren Hurvitz, Kitely co-founder and VP of R&D, in the announcement. “This is a feature that will be part of OpenSim 0.9.3, but that version of OpenSim isn’t finished yet so many grids — including Kitely — are still using the latest stable release, which is OpenSim 0.9.2.2. The reason that Kitely can support PBR now is that we ported the PBR features from OpenSim 0.9.3 into our version of OpenSim.”
The Kitely Market has been updated to accommodate the new feature, with the “Textures” category renamed to “Textures and Materials.” Merchants are advised to mention PBR usage in their product descriptions since items using PBR materials may not display correctly on grids that don’t support the feature. Alternatively, merchants can include regular textures as a fallback to ensure their products look okay on all grids.
“Kitely Market is the main marketplace serving the hypergrid so we decided to support the latest graphics options from OpenSim 0.9.3 even before they have been officially released,” Kitely CEO Ilan Tochner told Hypergrid Business.
The update also brings support for reflection probes through LSL scripting, with new PRIM_REFLECTION_PROBE parameters added to GetPrimParams and SetPrimParams functions.
While PBR materials can technically be used for terrain textures, Kitely reports encountering several issues during testing. World maps will show objects using PBR materials but display only the basic color texture, not other PBR properties like normal maps or roughness. PBR terrain textures are not currently displayed in world maps.
For content creators, Kitely has added a new “Materials” folder to user inventories for storing PBR materials.
Creators interested in learning more about creating PBR materials refer to Second Life’s documentation on the subject.
The clock is ticking for virtual world enthusiasts and creators looking to share their innovations at this year’s OpenSimulator Community Conference. Potential presenters have until October 29, 2024 to submit their proposals for the twelfth annual gathering of the OpenSim community.
“We hope that you can join us for our twelfth year celebrating the current and future use of open source virtual worlds through creativity, technology, artistry, and education,” said conference co-chair Cynthia Calongne, also known as “Lyr Lobo” in-world.
The two-day event will take place on December 7 and 8, featuring presentations about creative, educational, technical, and experiential topics related to OpenSimulator and the open metaverse.
“We’re interested in your wonderful content, insights, and accomplishments,” Calongne told Hypergrid Business.
Organizers are particularly interested in presentations that showcase innovative content, significant accomplishments in the OpenSim ecosystem, future visions for open source virtual worlds, and creative applications of OpenSimulator technology.
Each speaker session will be 20 minutes long. The conference will also feature community-sponsored tours, an Expo, content giveaways, and hypergrid exploration.
Proposal acceptance emails will be sent out on October 31. Accepted speakers must register for the conference by November 7 to secure their spot in the program.
The conference will kick off on December 6 with music and art events, followed by the main program on December 7 and 8.
Visit the OSCC’s Call for Proposals page to submit a presentation idea.
The AvatarLife Viewer now supports video conferencing for up to 5 participants, audio conferencing, screen sharing without video, and six-language support.
“We believe in empowering our users with the tools they need to communicate and collaborate seamlessly. Whether it’s for a small group chat, a business meeting, or sharing work on screen, our new features make AvatarLife the ultimate virtual platform for staying connected,” AvatarLife CEO and co-founder Sushant Chandrasekar told Hypergrid Business.
These new features are available at no additional cost for both Mac and Windows users.
Video conferencing allows real-time video calls with up to five participants directly through the viewer, perfect for small meetings, virtual hangouts, or group discussions.
For those who prefer voice-only communication, the audio conferencing feature enables crystal-clear voice conversations for private chats or group meetings without the need for external apps.
The screen sharing feature allows users to share their screens without video, ensuring those who wish to stay behind the scenes can still actively participate. It’s ideal for presentations or project collaborations while keeping personal visuals private.
Language support has been expanded to include Spanish, German, Italian, French, Portuguese, and Russian. Users can easily switch between supported languages for a smoother experience.
To access these new features, users can download the latest version of the AvatarLife Viewer for Mac or Windows here.
It’s the spooky season here in the United States, with Halloween coming up soon and all sorts of creepy scary stuff happening, and cooler weather outside. Also — we’ve got the elections. So, three reasons for people not to want to leave their house and spend time in OpenSim as well.
Or maybe there’s another reason why active user numbers went up. Who knows? Whatever the cause, the public OpenSim grids gained nearly 3,000 new active users compared to this time last month. However, with grid outages and stats changes, total registered users dropped slightly — and land area went down by the equivalent of 24,000 standard regions.
But the drop in land area is easily explained. Simation Grid, which reported 25,408 regions last month is now down to 1,024. Simation is a tiny grid — well, not in size, but in users — with just 3 actives this month. So the land area was most likely a test of server capacity. That happens. People try to see how many regions they can cram into a server, play around with it for a while, then eventually shut it down. After wall, why keep servers running for regions nobody is using?
We are now tracking a total of 2,675 public grids, of which an even 300 were active this month and 232 published their statistics. If you have a stats page that we’re not tracking, please email me at maria@hypergridbusiness.com — that way, your grid will be mentioned in this report every month, for additional visibility with both search engines and users.
This month, OSgrid was the largest grid by land area, with 34,103 standard region equivalents, while Wolf Territories Grid was the most active, with 6,950 unique logins over the past 30 days.
As you can see from the chart above, the Simation regions created a spike in land area this summer, but the land growth is now back to normal levels.
Our stats do not include most of the grids running on DreamGrid, a free easy-to-use version OpenSim, since these tend to be private grids.
OpenSim is a free, open-source, virtual world platform, that’s similar to Second Life and allows people with no technical skills to quickly and cheaply create virtual worlds and teleport to other virtual worlds. Those with technical skills can run OpenSim worlds on their servers for free using either DreamGrid, the official OpenSim installer for those who are more technically inclined, or any other distribution, while commercial hosting starts at less than $5 a region.
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.
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.
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:
There are currently 21,048 product listings in Kitely Market containing 41,164 product variations, 35,920 of which are exportable.
Kitely Market has delivered orders to 632 OpenSim grids to date.
As you can see in the above chart, nearly all the growth in Kitely Market has been in content that can be exported to other grids — that is the green area on the graph. The red area, of non-exportable content, has stayed level for the past eight years.
The Kitely Market is the largest collection of legal content available in OpenSim. It is accessible to both hypergrid-enabled and closed, private grids. The instructions for how to configure the Kitely Market for closed grids are here.
I didn’t add any new grids to the database this month.
If you know of any public grid that we’re missing, please email me at maria@hypergridbusiness.com.
The following 13 grids were marked as suspended this month: Angel Souls, Free Life, Insight Concepts, New Life Italy, Nordlicht Grid, OB, Phantom Rose, Pineapple, Planet, ProxyNet, TinkerLand, Trans Sidera, and TUIS Open Grid.
If they don’t reappear online again soon, they will be marked as closed in future reports.
Sometimes, a grid changes its login URI or website address — if that’s the case, email me and let me know and I’ll update my database.
All region counts on this list are, whenever available, in terms of standard region equivalents. Active user counts include hypergrid visitors whenever possible.
Many school, company, or personal grids do not publish their numbers.
The raw data for this month’s report is here. A list of all active grids is here. And here is a list of all the hypergrid-enabled grids and their hypergrid addresses, sorted by popularity. This is very useful if you are creating a hyperport.
You can see all the historical OpenSim statistics here, including polls and surveys, dating all the way back to 2009.
Do you know of any other grids that are open to the public but that we don’t have in our database? Email me at maria@hypergridbusiness.com.
This year’s Storylink Radio’s October celebration is more ambitious than ever before, organizers told Hypergrid Business.
There will be live in-world Halloween storytelling all month long and dozens of YouTube exclusive presentations, including short Halloween tales every night on Storylink Radio’s YouTube channel.
All the videos were filmed in virtual worlds.
The live Halloween stories begin on Thursday, Sep. 26 and run through Nov. 2. There are three different stories every night at 6 p.m., 7 p.m., and 9 p.m. Pacific time in-world and on YouTube.
There will also be a special, live, Halloween Trick or Treat story, and a Dia de Los Muertos storytelling.
“We will be presenting simultaneously at the Storylink Radio estate in Kitely and the Seanchai Library in Second Life, with a live intergrids chat connection,” StoryLink Radio owner Shandon Loring told Hypergrid Business.
In addition, there will be exclusive Edgar Allen Poe presentations on YouTube every Monday, a Frightful Classics full-length novel every Friday, and Short-n-Spooky tales on Saturdays.
For more details, check out the full calendar on the Storylink Radio website.