The virtual doors of OSFest 2024 have swung open, welcoming creators, builders, merchants, performers, and sponsors to begin crafting their digital spaces. This annual event, hosted on the OpenSim Fest grid, is set to run from October 4 through October 20, 2024, offering a diverse platform for virtual exhibitions, performances, and commerce.
Lisa Laxton
“The grid is open for participants to build or bring in their creations via the hypergrid,” said Lisa Laxton, OSFest director and founder of the Infinite Metaverse Alliance and Laxton Consulting.
Based on the feedback from previous events, OSFest now has a new mainland layout, she told Hypergrid Business. There are also small sponsor parcels available at US$3 each for other grids or region owners looking to increase their visibility in the hypergrid community and promote their grids.
There is also a limited number of free parcels available for exhibitors and merchants, paid for by sponsors.
OSFest is also looking for volunteers to join the OSFest team and help get everything ready for the event, and to help out during the festival itself.
The festival will feature 110 hours of performer events and 84 hours dedicated to exhibits, stores, and interactive activities. In a nod to the broader virtual community, OSFest has also allocated eight hours for satellite events on other grids, encouraging cross-platform participation.
OSFest 2024. (Image courtesy Lisa Laxton.)
Most of the 110 hours of performer slots are already booked, Laxton said, and merchant sales event times have been scheduled. There are non-music events and activities on the schedule as well, she added.
“Some participants have started or will soon bring in their builds, and the content infrastructure is ongoing with expected updates on the website, calendar, and Discord server,” she said. “This is the fun and exciting time leading up to opening day.”
This year’s festival breaks new ground by eschewing a unifying theme, a decision made through community vote. This approach promises an eclectic mix of exhibits, stores, and performances, reflecting the diverse interests of the virtual world community. Adding to the fresh feel, the grid layout has been completely redesigned, offering new experiences for both returning participants and first-time visitors.
Participants can access the grid via hypergrid using the address: grid.opensimfest.com:8022:OSF_HGWelcome.
Organizers are encouraging early setup, with a target completion date set for late September.
OSFest 2024 is Gloebit-enabled, allowing for virtual transactions within the grid.
Various sponsorship levels are available for those wishing to support the event financially.
Summer is generally a slow time for OpenSim, and virtual worlds in general, as people spend more time outside and on vacation and educational projects go on break.
The total number of active users went down by more than 3,700, to 43,001.
DigiWorldz, for example, lost 1,220 actives this month, according to its stats reports, as well as 21 regions.
In addition, several grids did not report any stats this month, including German Grid, which had 235 actives last month, German World Grid, which previously reported 623, and The City, which reported 265 actives in July.
But the total land area of OpenSim’s public grids rose by nearly 1,494 region equivalents this month, and OpenSim grids registered a total of 1,545 new users.
We are now tracking a total of 2,675 public grids, of which 311 are active and 244 published their statistics this month. If you have a stats page that we’re not tracking, please email me at maria@hypergridbusiness.com — that way, your grid will be mentioned in this report every month, for additional visibility with both search engines and users.
This month, OSgrid was the largest grid by land area, with 33,203 standard region equivalents, while Wolf Territories Grid was the most active, with 6,733 unique logins over the past 30 days.
OpenSim land area for Aug 2024. (Hypergrid Business data.).
Our stats do not include most of the grids running on DreamGrid, a free easy-to-use version OpenSim, since these tend to be private grids.
OpenSim is a free, open-source, virtual world platform, that’s similar to Second Life and allows people with no technical skills to quickly and cheaply create virtual worlds and teleport to other virtual worlds. Those with technical skills can run OpenSim worlds on their servers for free using either DreamGrid, the official OpenSim installer for those who are more technically inclined, or any other distribution, while commercial hosting starts at less than $5 a region.
Every month on the 15th — right after the stats report comes out — we will be sending out a newsletter with all the OpenSim news from the previous month. You can subscribe here or fill out the form below.
Top 25 grids by active users
When it comes to general-purpose social grids, especially closed grids, the rule of thumb is the busier the better. People looking to make new friends look for grids that already have the most users. Merchants looking to sell content will go to the grids with the most potential customers. Event organizers looking for the biggest audience — you get the idea.
The biggest change on this list was the addition of Virtual Vista Metaverse, a new grid in our database, which had a strong launch.
Online marketplaces for OpenSim content
There are currently 20,965 product listings in Kitely Market containing 41,073 product variations, 35,835 of which are exportable.
Kitely Market has delivered orders to 628 OpenSim grids to date.
(Data courtesy Kitely.)
As you can see in the above chart, nearly all the growth in Kitely Market has been in content that can be exported to other grids — that is the green area on the graph. The red area, of non-exportable content, has stayed level for the past eight years.
Kitely has recently upgraded its version of OpenSim to allow for faster start-up times and better compatibility with scripts imported from Second Life.
If they don’t reappear online again soon, they will be marked as closed in future reports.
Sometimes, a grid changes its login URI or website address — if that’s the case, email me and let me know and I’ll update my database.
Top 40 grids by land area
All region counts on this list are, whenever available, in terms of standard region equivalents. Active user counts include hypergrid visitors whenever possible.
Many school, company, or personal grids do not publish their numbers.
A “Mega World” is a variable size region the size of 64 standard region that can hold up to 150,000 prims. That works out to just $1.40 per standard region per month.
They also get their own dedicated servers.
The downside? They’re only available for the first 25 customers who order.
Normally, the Mega Worlds cost $120 a month, and the last time the Mega Worlds were on sale was four years ago.
Most OpenSim grids and hosting providers cram a lot of variable-sized regions into each server and run multiple variable-sized regions on each OpenSim instance in order to keep their operational costs manageable and their prices affordable, said Kitely CEO Ilan Tocher.
“This can be problematic because if your region shares server resources with many other regions then it may run slowly due to what happens in those other regions,” he told Hypergrid Business.
Kitely uses a different strategy and instead of placing a lot of variable-sized regions — which it calls “worlds” — on each server it automatically starts worlds when they are entered and shuts them down when they become empty.
This enables Kitely to run each world on its own OpenSim instance and place no more than four such worlds on each server. By doing this Kitely provides each actively used world a lot more server resources than what other OpenSim grids provide, thus giving its customers a better inworld experience while keeping its prices competitive.
What is unique about Mega Worlds is that Mega Worlds don’t share their server. A Mega World is guaranteed to always get a full server of its own when its active, so it can fully use all of the server’s resources without being impacted by other people’s worlds. This means that Mega Worlds can run bigger worlds, with more scripts and more visitors, than other worlds.
You can read more about Kitely Mega Worlds and its limited-time promotion here.
International Spaceflight Museum hypergrid address: grid.kitely.com:8002:ISMuseum
Kitely, which opened to the public in March 2011, is one of the longest-running and most innovative OpenSim grids. With its unique on-demand region system and the popular Kitely Market, the grid is a significant player in the virtual world ecosystem.
Meta is reportedly in talks with Ray-Ban maker EssilorLuxottica to take a minority stake in the company. The move is seen as doubling down on a partnership that created the Meta Ray-Ban smartglasses.
The report, which comes from the Wall Street Journal, alleges Meta is currently considering a stake of about 5% of the Italian-French luxury eyewear group.
Citing people familiar with the matter, the report maintains the investment is not an assured deal, however if it goes through, it could be worth €4.33 billion euros ($4.73 billion) based on EssilorLuxottica’s latest market value of €86.50 billion euros.
Moving forward, Reality Labs has been divided into a central ‘Metaverse’ organization, responsible for Quest, and the new ‘Wearables’ organization to dedicated to other hardware, including its Ray-Ban Meta smartglasses.
The Meta Ray-Ban smartglasses currently on sale is a second-gen follow-up to its Facebook Ray-Ban Stories glasses released in 2021, which includes improved cameras, audio and more design options.
Notably, Meta Ray-Ban smartglasses lack any sort of display, meaning user input is handled by voice assistant or by basic touch on the glasses’ struts for things like taking pictures, videos, and listening to music.
What they do have though is iconic styling backed by a wide consumer appeal, something Meta would have trouble generating on its own. A minority stake in EssilorLuxottica could not only allow the company wider access to a host of sub-brands too, but also its retail locations that span Sunglass Hut, LensCrafters, Vision Express, Pearle Vision and Target Optical.
Neither Meta nor EssilorLuxottica responded to requests for comment.
Corptopia Studios, developer behind VR puzzle-adventure Down the Rabbit Hole (2020), announced the release of a follow-up title that takes you back to the game’s winding chasm of enigmatic dioramas.
Called Escaping Wonderland, the standalone adventure is said to arrive on Quest 2/3/Pro sometime this Fall.
The studio says the follow-up “isn’t a sequel to Down the Rabbit Hole per se,” calling it a standalone adventure that has some familiar faces alongside a new set of characters to meet and locations to explore.
Here’s how Corptopia describes it:
Tumble topsy-turvy down the rabbit hole into the fantastical frolic of Escaping Wonderland, where whimsy waltzes with wonder and riddles run riot! Join the ever-curious Molly on a brand-new adventure through the beloved world of Alice in Wonderland.
Puzzle your way through perplexing challenges and lose yourself in an enchanting landscape where up is down, left is right, and nothing is quite as it seems (except when it is, and even then, it might not be).
Prepare for hours of gameplay, brimming with brain-teasers, enchantment, and just the right dash of delightful nonsense. Will Molly navigate her way out, or will she unearth the curious truth that sometimes the best way out is further in? Step into this whimsical whirlwind and discover what Molly is really escaping from and help her recover her memory—if you dare!
Why a follow-up? Well, it seems Down the Rabbit Hole was a pretty big win for publisher Beyond Frames Entertainment and developer Cortopia Studios.
“Down the Rabbit Hole was a financial success for Cortopia and Beyond Frames, generating over 400% ROI since its launch 4 years ago,” said Ace St. Germain, CEO of Beyond Frames Entertainment. “We’re excited to bring players back to Wonderland and are encouraged by the early positive signals we’ve received from influencers and playtesters.”
You can pre-order the game now at a 10% discount off its regular $20 launch price. The pre-order page mentions the game is launching sometime in Autumn 2024.
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