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.

Or maybe there’s another reason why active user numbers went up. Who knows? Whatever the cause, the public OpenSim grids gained more than 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 301 were active this month and 233 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.

Hypergrid Business newsletter is now available

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.

Top 25 most popular grids this month:

1. Wolf Territories Grid: 7,122 active users
2. OSgrid: 4,910 active users
3. GBG World: 2,435 active users
4. Darkheart’s Playground: 2,206 active users
5. DigiWorldz: 2,186 active users
6. Alternate Metaverse: 1,980 active users
7. WaterSplash: 1,593 active users
8. AviWorlds: 1,081 active users
9. AviVerse AlterEgo: 1,020 active users
10. Neverworld: 965 active users
11. Trianon World: 963 active users
12. Astralia: 943 active users
13. Moonrose: 916 active users
14. Littlefield: 862 active users
15. Party Destination Grid: 807 active users
16. AvatarLife: 735 active users
17. SunEden Resort: 692 active users
18. Great Canadian Grid: 675 active users
19. Craft World: 673 active users
20. Groovy Verse: 597 active users
21. Herederos Grid: 566 active users
22. Kitely: 523 active users
23. Gentle Fire Grid: 499 active users
24. OpenSim Fest: 432 active users
25. Eureka World: 427 active users

Online marketplaces for OpenSim content

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.

New grids

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.

Suspended grids

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.

Top 40 grids by land area

All region counts on this list are, whenever available, in terms of standard region equivalents. Active user counts include hypergrid visitors whenever possible.

Many school, company, or personal grids do not publish their numbers.

The 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: 34,973 regions
• Wolf Territories Grid: 29,566 regions
• Kitely: 18,165 regions
• ZetaWorlds: 13,023 regions
• Alternate Metaverse: 10,513 regions
• Groovy Verse: 8,459 regions
• DigiWorldz: 3,501 regions
• Virtual Vista Metaverse: 3,259 regions
• CandM World: 2,094 regions
• Discovery Grid: 2,056 regions
• Tag Grid: 1,465 regions
• Shoalwater Bay: 1,104 regions
• Friends Grid: 1,040 regions
• Simation Grid: 1,024 regions
• ArtDestiny: 961 regions
• GBG World: 960 regions
• Virtual Worlds Grid: 914 regions
• AviWorlds: 838 regions
• Craft World: 696 regions
• Kinky Haven: 677 regions
• AvatarLife: 597 regions
• Littlefield: 514 regions
• GorGrid: 429 regions
• Furry World: 373 regions
• Virtual Worlds Zone: 364 regions
• Neverworld: 336 regions
• Darkheart’s Playground: 312 regions
• Nemesis 3D: 305 regions
• EdMondo: 300 regions
• WestWorld Grid: 270 regions
• Open Virtual Worlds: 229 regions
• MisFitz Grid: 213 regions
• Japan Open Grid: 196 regions
• Counter Earth: 196 regions
• Kater and Friends: 185 regions
• Adreans-World: 161 regions
• Utopia Skye: 145 regions
• GerGrid: 141 regions
• XTalent: 140 regions
• Outworldz: 127 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 maria@hypergridbusiness.com.

I am not always what one would call the perfect state of calm. I have a lot of anxiety about the present and the future.

Also, my family, like anyone’s family, can be hectic. I could go for a walk, but I don’t often get around to it, instead getting stuck in my day-to-day routine. Being that I live in such a small place, there isn’t really anywhere all that quiet. And even if I were in a quiet place, then that wouldn’t stop the anxieties and ruminations in my head.

Listening to music and whale sounds has helped me calm down a little in the past, but what I need is to be able to keep myself from spiraling too far into my thoughts.

Thankfully, with advancements in technology, many tools are available to help me retain my sanity, even when an actual therapist is not within reach.

A couple tools that have supported me are Tripp’s virtual reality meditation program and their free mobile app. Tripp’s VR app made sense for me, being that I have found video games to be a sanctuary to tune out the anxieties in my head and get lost in another realm. This has also been the case for Tripp’s co-founder and CEO, Nanea Reeves.

“I realized throughout my journey that video games have been kind of a retreat for me at times in my life,” said Reeves. “Even the casual ones on my phone, if I am kind of just ruminating on a lot of negative internal talk, I can play something and it sort of clears my head.”

I tried out the free VR app demo a handful of occasions, when I have felt particularly at a loss. It gave me a private space, even if it was a virtual space, where I could ease my tension a little, and just be. This was thanks to an immersive, multi-sensory experience, with a serene audio track and vibrant visuals, like something out of a kaleidoscope.

The immersive nature of virtual reality is another aspect of what inspired the genesis of Tripp as a concept.

“I was an investor in the Oculus early stage of their company, and that gave me access to devices,” said Reeves. “And a lot of the early experiences were designed to make you feel afraid, you know, you felt like you were on a cliff . . . And that was really interesting to me. I thought, if you could make someone feel fear that easily what else could you make them feel?

I got treated to a surreal fireworks display on launch, then the Tripp hummingbird, who is coincidentally also named Terrence, came and visited. I then performed a short exercise where, by tilting my head, I navigated a spherical object through a path of obstacles where I had to collect coins as they went by. The voice of the application suggested seeing the gaps between obstacles as the gaps between thoughts, which is “where the joy lies,” as the narrator puts it.

The best way to explain this, as author Pema Chödrön puts it, is seeing rays of sunshine that peek through the clouds. Having this kind of visual metaphor for my mental activity was something novel to me, imagining my thoughts as physical objects, and looking between them to see the sunshine. Especially for those who tend to think in terms of images, this can be a powerful metaphor.

Another of Tripp’s tools that I have relied on is its AI assistant, Kōkua, which has recently hit the VR application.

Kokua is fairly straightforward: I type my current mood in the prompt, and the AI voice assistant, based on CEO Nanea Reeves’ voice, offers words of comfort. It then creates a short reflection – some words to guide me through dealing with the stressors I am experiencing, lasting just over two minutes. At the end, I am welcome to provide feedback on whether the meditation helped at all.

I found that, the majority of the time, the app was quite helpful. There was one occasion where the app mistakenly thought I had children, but most of the time it could understand what I was trying to say. I think that is what I needed most, to know that it was okay to feel what I felt, and to have that legitimized.

One of the reasons that Kōkua was released to mobile initially, according to Reeves, was to receive feedback from users before releasing the app through Tripp’s subscription-based VR app.

“We have a smaller audience on mobile,” continued Reeves. “We wanted to learn and see where we might have gotten certain things wrong, based on how people are interacting with it for support.”

While Tripp’s VR and mobile applications are helpful, Reeves hopes to avoid the tools being used in the place of trained professional therapists.

“We do have some connections to different support lines,” she added.

If the AI detects that someone might need real support, if they’re in a crisis, there’s a connection to real professional support.

Tripp’s tools are not therapy in themselves, but from my experience, they have helped in times of distress. If I can’t change what is happening around me, the VR app and mobile app at least help me to feel like I can deal with the challenges, that there is a calm within the middle of the storm. Life has its share of conflicts and arguments. Even if things aren’t okay, Tripp allowed me, even for a moment, to be okay.

Tripp VR is a colorful, calming experience, and while Kōkua is not a licensed counselor, it does make a big difference to at least have the feeling that someone was hearing my struggles and being empathetic, even if that empathy was coming from a computer program.

VR and AI have immense potential for improving people’s psychological well-being, and the advances in the technology could become useful as another tool set for mental health professionals.

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.

So it’s no surprise that the total number of active users on the public OpenSim grids is going up.

According to their published stats report, there were 44,129 actives this up, up by 1,128 from this time a month ago.

However, the total land area went down, by the equivalent of 738 standard regions. All of that drop — and then some — is accounted for by the fact that a single grid, CandM World, didn’t report its stats this month. Last month, it had over 1,800 regions. Today, the website just shows a security error message, so it could just be a configuration error.

We are now tracking a total of 2,675 public grids, of which 311 are active and 244 published their statistics this month. If you have a stats page that we’re not tracking, please email me at maria@hypergridbusiness.com — that way, your grid will be mentioned in this report every month, for additional visibility with both search engines and users.

This month, OSgrid was the largest grid by land area, with 34,103 standard region equivalents, while Wolf Territories Grid was the most active, with 6,950 unique logins over the past 30 days.

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.

Hypergrid Business newsletter is now available

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.

Top 25 most popular grids this month:

1. Wolf Territories Grid: 6,950 active users
2. OSgrid: 4,894 active users
3. GBG World: 2,422 active users
4. DigiWorldz: 2,143 active users
5. Darkheart’s Playground: 2,018 active users
6. Alternate Metaverse: 1,789 active users
7. WaterSplash: 1,491 active users
8. AviWorlds: 1,101 active users
9. AviVerse AlterEgo: 1,024 active users
10. Trianon World: 1,004 active users
11. Neverworld: 953 active users
12. Moonrose: 861 active users
13. Littlefield: 858 active users
14. Party Destination Grid: 792 active users
15. Craft World: 790 active users
16. Astralia: 717 active users
17. AvatarLife: 638 active users
18. Herederos Grid: 566 active users
19. Groovy Verse: 564 active users
20. SunEden Resort: 552 active users
21. Great Canadian Grid: 550 active users
22. Gentle Fire Grid: 496 active users
23. Kitely: 495 active users
24. Virtual Vista Metaverse: 456 active users
25. ZetaWorlds: 437 active users

Online marketplaces for OpenSim content

There are currently 21,019 product listings in Kitely Market containing 41,133 product variations, 35,892 of which are exportable.

Kitely Market has delivered orders to 630 OpenSim grids to date.

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.

New grids

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.

Suspended grids

The following 12 grids were suspended this month: BachmansWorld One, CatGrid, DigiGrids, German Grid, Legacy, Mathesis, Matrix, NewOffworld, Oczko, SFgrid, Steg, and Trinity’s DreamGrid/

If they don’t reappear online again soon, they will be marked as closed in future reports.

Sometimes, a grid changes its login URI or website address — if that’s the case, email me and let me know and I’ll update my database.

Top 40 grids by land area

All region counts on this list are, whenever available, in terms of standard region equivalents. Active user counts include hypergrid visitors whenever possible.

Many school, company, or personal grids do not publish their numbers.

The 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: 34,103 regions
• Wolf Territories Grid: 29,277 regions
• Simation Grid: 25,408 regions
• Kitely: 18,320 regions
• ZetaWorlds: 13,010 regions
• Alternate Metaverse: 10,605 regions
• Groovy Verse: 8,380 regions
• Discovery Grid: 4,919 regions
• DigiWorldz: 3,526 regions
• Virtual Vista Metaverse: 3,284 regions
• Tag Grid: 1,464 regions
• Shoalwater Bay: 1,088 regions
• Friends Grid: 1,040 regions
• ArtDestiny: 961 regions
• GBG World: 960 regions
• Virtual Worlds Grid: 914 regions
• AviWorlds: 839 regions
• Craft World: 688 regions
• Kinky Haven: 677 regions
• AvatarLife: 587 regions
• Littlefield: 513 regions
• GorGrid: 428 regions
• Furry World: 373 regions
• Virtual Worlds Zone: 364 regions
• Neverworld: 332 regions
• Nemesis 3D: 305 regions
• EdMondo: 300 regions
• Darkheart’s Playground: 276 regions
• WestWorld Grid: 270 regions
• DreamNation: 264 regions
• Open Virtual Worlds: 229 regions
• MisFitz Grid: 206 regions
• Japan Open Grid: 196 regions
• Kater and Friends: 193 regions
• Counter Earth: 190 regions
• Adreans-World: 170 regions
• GerGrid: 141 regions
• XTalent: 140 regions
• Outworldz: 132 regions
• Arcadia Asylum: 123 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 maria@hypergridbusiness.com.

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.

“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.

For more information, check out the event’s home page, or the FAQ page.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Hypergrid Business newsletter is now available

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.

Top 25 most popular grids this month:

1. Wolf Territories Grid: 6,733 active users
2. OSgrid: 4,844 active users
3. GBG World: 2,295 active users
4. Vida Dupla: 1,987 active users
5. Alternate Metaverse: 1,885 active users
6. Darkheart’s Playground: 1,723 active users
7. WaterSplash: 1,447 active users
8. AviWorlds: 1,068 active users
9. AviVerse AlterEgo: 1,002 active users
10. DigiWorldz: 943 active users
11. Trianon World: 937 active users
12. Neverworld: 897 active users
13. Littlefield: 822 active users
14. Party Destination Grid: 796 active users
15. Moonrose: 774 active users
16. Astralia: 763 active users
17. Craft World: 723 active users
18. AvatarLife: 717 active users
19. Herederos Grid: 578 active users
20. Groovy Verse: 547 active users
21. Virtual Vista Metaverse: 494 active users
22. ZetaWorlds: 476 active users
23. Kitely: 460 active users
24. Gentle Fire Grid: 448 active users
25. DreamNation: 342 active users

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.

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 has recently upgraded its version of OpenSim to allow for faster start-up times and better compatibility with scripts imported from Second Life.

Kitely is also continuing its $90 sale on Mega Worlds.

New grids

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.

Suspended grids

The following 11 grids were marked suspended this month: Butschiland, Butschiland, Destiny Grid, Fire and Ice Grid, Galactic Virtual, IMA Metaverse Depot, KoolPheller Estates, The Public World, Tropical Isle, UCI Mondego vLab, and Virtual RBM.

If they don’t reappear online again soon, they will be marked as closed in future reports.

Sometimes, a grid changes its login URI or website address — if that’s the case, email me and let me know and I’ll update my database.

Top 40 grids by land area

All region counts on this list are, whenever available, in terms of standard region equivalents. Active user counts include hypergrid visitors whenever possible.

Many school, company, or personal grids do not publish their numbers.

The 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: 33,203 regions
• Wolf Territories Grid: 29,276 regions
• Simation Grid: 25,408 regions
• Kitely: 18,246 regions
• ZetaWorlds: 12,980 regions
• Alternate Metaverse: 10,605 regions
• Groovy Verse: 8,334 regions
• Discovery Grid: 4,945 regions
• DigiWorldz: 3,506 regions
• Virtual Vista Metaverse: 3,269 regions
• CandM World: 1,849 regions
• Tag Grid: 1,464 regions
• Shoalwater Bay: 1,072 regions
• Friends Grid: 1,040 regions
• ArtDestiny: 961 regions
• GBG World: 957 regions
• Virtual Worlds Grid: 914 regions
• AviWorlds: 809 regions
• Kinky Haven: 669 regions
• Craft World: 630 regions
• AvatarLife: 586 regions
• Littlefield: 513 regions
• GorGrid: 430 regions
• Furry World: 373 regions
• Virtual Worlds Zone: 364 regions
• Neverworld: 318 regions
• Nemesis 3D: 305 regions
• EdMondo: 300 regions
• DreamNation: 284 regions
• WestWorld Grid: 274 regions
• Darkheart’s Playground: 244 regions
• Open Virtual Worlds: 229 regions
• Japan Open Grid: 197 regions
• Kater and Friends: 191 regions
• Counter Earth: 183 regions
• MisFitz Grid: 175 regions
• Adreans-World: 172 regions
• GerGrid: 141 regions
• XTalent: 138 regions
• Outworldz: 127 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 maria@hypergridbusiness.com.

Update (Sep 1, 2024): Several educators have asked to be able to order after the school year has started. To accommodate their request, Kitely decided to extended the offer until September 15. Only 10 more people will be able to take advantage of this deal, and there will be no more extensions after this.

For a limited time, Kitely‘s “Mega Worlds” region packages are on sale again, for $90 a month, the company announced today.

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 about $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.

The deal comes shortly after Kitely’s recent performance upgrades that sped up world startup times. And, in May, Kitely rolled out an upgrade that doubled region performance.

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.

For examples of publicly-accessible Mega Worlds, check out Coopersville, Signature Safety LLC, and the International Spaceflight Museum.

Coopersville hypergrid address: grid.kitely.com:8002:Coopersville

Signature Safety LLC hypergrid address: grid.kitely.com:8002:Signature Safety LLC

International Spaceflight Museum hypergrid address: grid.kitely.com:8002:ISMuseum

Kitely, which opened to the public in March 2011, is one of the longest-running and most innovative OpenSim grids. With its unique on-demand region system and the popular Kitely Market, the grid is a significant player in the virtual world ecosystem.

The big new grid was Simation Grid, with a reported 25,408 region equivalents. OpenSim’s architecture makes it easy for grid owners to launch with plenty of space. Or it could be a stats mistake — the grid’s website says “Standard Region Equivalents: 25408 Km2” — and if it is actually giving the area in square kilometers, than it has 387,693 total regions, which would make it larger than all the other OpenSim grids put together. I couldn’t find any contact information on the grid’s website, and some of the pages seem to be placeholders, so if you’re the owner of Simation Grid and are reading this, and if I got your numbers wrong — please email me at maria@hypergridbusiness.com and I’ll update this article!

We are now tracking a total of 2,675 public grids, of which 318 are active and 258 published their statistics this month. If you have a stats page that we’re not tracking, please email me at maria@hypergridbusiness.com — that way, your grid will be mentioned in this report every month, for additional visibility with both search engines and users.

This month, OSgrid was the largest grid by land area, with 33,554 standard region equivalents, while Wolf Territories Grid was the most active, with 6,540 unique logins over the past 30 days.

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.

Hypergrid Business newsletter is now available

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.

Top 25 most popular grids this month:

1. Wolf Territories Grid: 6,540 active users
2. OSgrid: 5,168 active users
3. GBG World: 2,333 active users
4. DigiWorldz: 2,163 active users
5. Alternate Metaverse: 1,967 active users
6. Vida Dupla: 1,838 active users
7. Darkheart’s Playground: 1,718 active users
8. WaterSplash: 1,521 active users
9. Trianon World: 1,108 active users
10. AviWorlds: 1,028 active users
11. AviVerse AlterEgo: 987 active users
12. Neverworld: 962 active users
13. Littlefield: 935 active users
14. Party Destination Grid: 840 active users
15. AvatarLife: 837 active users
16. Moonrose: 825 active users
17. Astralia: 771 active users
18. Craft World: 744 active users
19. Herederos Grid: 582 active users
20. Virtual Vista Metaverse: 545 active users
21. Gentle Fire Grid: 537 active users
22. ZetaWorlds: 524 active users
23. Groovy Verse: 522 active users
24. Kitely: 462 active users
25. Barefoot Dreamers: 438 active users

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.

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 has recently upgraded its version of OpenSim to allow for faster start-up times and better compatibility with scripts imported from Second Life.

New grids

The following grids were added to our database this month: Agartha, AmaziWorld, Casperia Prime, Gridworld, HG Safari Grid, Nosso Lar, Sciattisi Grid, Simation Grid, Steg, and Tenth Dimension.

If you know of any public grid that we’re missing, please email me at maria@hypergridbusiness.com.

Suspended grids

The following nine grids were marked suspended this month: Eenhgrid, Hermopolis Chimera, Kantarobasta Grid, Kindred Spirits World, Pseudospace, Rocket World, Royal Grid, Starfleet, and  Tropicana 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.

Top 40 grids by land area

All region counts on this list are, whenever available, in terms of standard region equivalents. Active user counts include hypergrid visitors whenever possible.

Many school, company, or personal grids do not publish their numbers.

The 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: 33,554 regions
• Wolf Territories Grid: 29,276 regions
• Simation Grid: 25,408 regions
• Kitely: 18,108 regions
• ZetaWorlds: 12,932 regions
• Alternate Metaverse: 10,437 regions
• Groovy Verse: 8,201 regions
• Discovery Grid: 4,945 regions
• DigiWorldz: 3,527 regions
• Virtual Vista Metaverse: 3,260 regions
• Tag Grid: 1,464 regions
• Shoalwater Bay: 1,072 regions
• Friends Grid: 1,040 regions
• GBG World: 957 regions
• Virtual Worlds Grid: 915 regions
• ArtDestiny: 900 regions
• AviWorlds: 841 regions
• Craft World: 673 regions
• Kinky Haven: 669 regions
• AvatarLife: 594 regions
• Littlefield: 513 regions
• GorGrid: 430 regions
• Furry World: 373 regions
• Virtual Worlds Zone: 364 regions
• Neverworld: 348 regions
• DreamNation: 308 regions
• Nemesis 3D: 305 regions
• EdMondo: 300 regions
• Insight Concepts: 240 regions
• Open Virtual Worlds: 229 regions
• Darkheart’s Playground: 218 regions
• Japan Open Grid: 188 regions
• Counter Earth: 186 regions
• Kater and Friends: 185 regions
• MisFitz Grid: 183 regions
• Adreans-World: 173 regions
• OpenSim Fest: 140 regions
• WestWorld Grid: 135 regions
• XTalent: 133 regions
• GerGrid: 132 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 maria@hypergridbusiness.com.

I’ve been interacting with OpenSim bots — or NPCs — for nearly as long as I’ve been covering OpenSim. Which is about 15 years. (Oh my God, has it really been that long?)

I’ve been hoping that OpenSim writing would become by day job, but, unfortunately, OpenSim never really took off. Instead, I covered cybersecurity and, more recently, generative AI.

But then I saw some reporting about a new studies about AI, and immediately thought — this could really be something in OpenSim.

The study was published this past April in the journal Neuroscience of Consciousness, and it showed that a majority of people – 67% to be exact – attribute some degree of consciousness to ChatGPT. And the more people use these AI systems, the more likely they are to see them as conscious entities.

Then, in May, another study showed that 54% of people, after a conversation with ChatGPT, thought it was a real person.

Now, I’m not saying that OpenSim grid owners should run out and install a bunch of bots on their grids that pretend to be real people, in order to lure in more users. That would be dumb, expensive, a waste of resources, possibly illegal and definitely unethical.

But if users knew that these bots were powered by AI and understood that they’re not real people, they might still enjoy interacting with them and develop attachments to them — just like we get attached to brands, or cartoon animals, or characters in a novel. Or, yes, virtual girlfriends or boyfriends.

In the video below, you can see OpenAI’s recent GPT-4o presentation. Yup, the one where ChatGPT sounds suspiciously like Scarlett Johansson in “Her.” I’ve set it to start at the point in the video where they’re talking to her.

I can see why ScarJo got upset — and why that particular voice is no longer available as an option.

Now, as I write this, the voice chatbot they’re demonstrating isn’t widely available yet. But the text version is — and its the text interface that’s most common in OpenSim anyway.

GPT-4o does cost money. It costs money to send it a question and to get a response. A million tokens worth of questions — or 750,000 words — costs $5, and a million token’s worth of response costs $15.

A page of text is roughly 250 words, so a million tokens is about 3,000 pages. So, for $20, you can get a lot of back-and-forth. But there are also cheaper platforms.

Anthropic’s Claude, for example, which has tested better than ChatGPT in some benchmarks, costs a bit less — $3 for a million input tokens, and $15 for a million output tokens.

But there are also free, open-source platforms that you run on your own servers with comparable performance levels. For example, on the LMSYS Chatbot Arena Leaderboard, OpenAI’s GPT-4o in in first place with a score of 1287, Claude 3.5 Sonnet is close behind with 1272, and the (mostly) open source Llama 3 from Meta is not too far distant, with a score of 1207 — and there are several other open source AI platforms at the top of the charts, including Google’s Gemma, NVIDIA’s Nemotron, Cohere’s Command R+, Alibaba’s Qwen2, and Mistral.

I can easily see an OpenSim hosting provider adding an AI service to their package deals.

Imagine the potential for creating truly immersive experiences in OpenSim and other virtual environments. If users are predisposed to see AI entities as conscious, we could create non-player characters that feel incredibly real and responsive.

This could revolutionize storytelling, education, and social interactions in virtual spaces.

We could have bots that users can form meaningful relationships with, AI-driven characters that can adapt to individual user preferences, and virtual environments that feel alive and dynamic.

And then there’s the potential for interactive storytelling and games, with quests and narratives that are more engaging than ever before, create virtual assistants that feel like true companions, or even build communities that blur the lines between AI and human participants.

For those using OpenSim for work, there are also applications here for business and education, in the form of AI tutors, AI executive assistants, AI sales agents, and more.

However, as much as I’m thrilled by these possibilities, I can’t help but feel a twinge of concern.

As the study authors point out, there are some risks to AIs that feel real.

First, there’s the risk of emotional attachment. If users start to view AI entities as conscious beings, they might form deep, potentially unhealthy bonds with these virtual characters. This could lead to a range of issues, from social isolation in the real world to emotional distress if these AI entities are altered or removed.

We’re already seeing that, with people feeling real distress when their virtual girlfriends are turned off.

Then there’s the question of blurred reality. As the line between AI and human interactions becomes less clear, users might struggle to distinguish between the two.

Personally, I’m not too concerned about this one. We’ve had people complaining that other people couldn’t tell fantasy from reality since the days of Don Quixote. Probably even earlier. There were probably cave people sitting around, saying, “Look at the young people with all their cave paintings. They could be out actually hunting, and instead they sit around the cave looking at the paintings.”

Or even earlier, when language was invented. “Look at those young people, sitting around talking about hunting, instead of going out there into the jungle and catching something.”

When movies were first invented, when people started getting “addicted” to television, or video games… we’ve always had moral panics about new media.

The thing is, those moral panics were also, to some extent, justified. Maybe the pulp novels that the printing press gave us didn’t rot our brains. But Mao’s Little Red Book, the Communist Manifesto, that thing that Hitler wrote that I don’t even was aided and abetted by the books they wrote.

So that’s what I’m most worried about — the potential for exploitation. Bad actors could misuse our tendency to anthropomorphize AI, creating deceptive or manipulative experiences that take advantage of users’ emotional connections and lead them to be more tolerant of evil.

But I don’t think that’s something that we, in OpenSim, have to worry about. Our platform doesn’t have the kind of reach it would take to create a new dictator!

I think the worst that would happen is that people might get so engaged that they spend a few dollars more than they planned to spend.

Kitely, a leading OpenSim grid, has announced a significant upgrade to its virtual world hosting service, implementing an enhanced version of OpenSim 0.9.2.2. This update comes on the heels of a recent system-wide upgrade that doubled world performance.

According to an announcement earlier this week, the new version of OpenSim includes hundreds of proprietary stability and performance improvements developed by the company over the years. One of the most notable enhancements is faster world startup times, which should improve user experience across the grid, and better compatibility with scripts imported from Second Life.

The most significant feature in OpenSim 0.9.2.2 is the transition from XEngine to YEngine for the scripting system. This change brings both benefits and challenges.

“YEngine is designed to more closely follow the LSL script syntax,” said Oren Hurvitz, Kitely’s co-founder and VP R&D, in the announcement. “This makes it easier to port scripts that were designed for Second Life into OpenSim.” However, he warned that this change may cause some scripts that worked on XEngine to break, requiring users to fix, replace, or remove affected scripts from their Kitely worlds.

The switch to YEngine has also reset all scripts to their initial state.

“That’s because the state files where OpenSim stores script state have changed their format, and YEngine can’t use state files that were created by XEngine,” Hurvitz said.  As a result, users who have scripts needing configuration after being rezzed will need to reconfigure them.

It’s important to note that the transition to the new script engine requires the system to recompile all scripts in each world. According to Hurvitz, “This happens the first time each world is entered following today’s update. This means that each world will take longer than usual to start the first time anyone enters it after this update.”

However, Hurvitz said that this is a one-time delay, and subsequent entries to the world will be faster due to the scripts already being compiled.

This latest upgrade follows Kitely’s recent system-wide enhancement that doubled world performance, demonstrating the company’s ongoing commitment to improving its service without increasing costs to users.

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.

For more information about the script changes and how they might affect users’ worlds, Kitely recommends checking the OpenSimulator wiki entry on YEngine.

However, the total number of registered users on all the public OpenSim grids fell by more than 10,000 since May. The biggest reason for the drop? 3rd Rock Grid is now officially closed, with some of its communities moved to ZetaWorlds. Last month, 3rd Rock Grid reported 13,615 registered users, though it had only 250 actives. 3rd Rock was one of the oldest OpenSim grounds, founded back in 2008, and accumulated a lot of user registrations over the past decade and a half.

Several other grids did not report their stats this month, including CandM World, which was active this month but showed no stats on its stats page. The grid had over 500 actives in May.

We are now tracking a total of 2,663 public grids, of which 309 are active and 253 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 32,547 standard region equivalents, while Wolf Territories Grid was the most active, with 6,232 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.

Hypergrid Business newsletter is now available

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.

Top 25 most popular grids this month:

1. Wolf Territories Grid: 6,232 active users
2. OSgrid: 5,186 active users
3. GBG World: 2,239 active users
4. DigiWorldz: 2,156 active users
5. Alternate Metaverse: 2,025 active users
6. Vida Dupla: 1,750 active users
7. Darkheart’s Playground: 1,694 active users
8. WaterSplash: 1,650 active users
9. Neverworld: 1,101 active users
10. AviWorlds: 1,068 active users
11. Trianon World: 1,023 active users
12. Moonrose: 936 active users
13. AvatarLife: 930 active users
14. Littlefield: 899 active users
15. Party Destination Grid: 839 active users
16. Astralia: 836 active users
17. Craft World: 791 active users
18. Virtualife: 666 active users
19. Virtualife: 664 active users
20. Kitely: 627 active users
21. ZetaWorlds: 596 active users
22. Eureka World: 583 active users
23. Groovy Verse: 514 active users
24. Herederos Grid: 511 active users
25. Virtual Vista Metaverse: 507 active users

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 20,793 product listings in Kitely Market containing 40,862 product variations, 35,648 of which are exportable.

Kitely Market has delivered orders to 624 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 has recently doubled the performance of its regions while keeping prices the same.

New grids

The following grids were added to our database this month: Lady’s Dreamworld and Virtual Vista Metaverse.

If you know of any public grid that we’re missing, please email me at maria@hypergridbusiness.com.

Suspended grids

The following 18 grids were marked as suspended this month: Admeja, Bernicia, BigOne, Bubble Grid, EducaSim, Eleutherias, Golden Palace Gaming, KittyBlue, Mystic Bermuda, Pleasant Retreat, Resurgence, Royal Grid, Starfleet, The Crying Grid, Tropicana Grid, Twilight, Uzuri Virtual, and VR Playground.

If they don’t reappear online again soon, they will be marked as closed in future reports.

Sometimes, a grid changes its login URI or website address — if that’s the case, email me and let me know and I’ll update my database.

Top 40 grids by land area

All region counts on this list are, whenever available, in terms of standard region equivalents. Active user counts include hypergrid visitors whenever possible.

Many school, company, or personal grids do not publish their numbers.

The 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: 32,547 regions
• Wolf Territories Grid: 29,248 regions
• Kitely: 18,077 regions
• ZetaWorlds: 12,910 regions
• Alternate Metaverse: 10,178 regions
• Groovy Verse: 7,837 regions
• DigiWorldz: 3,544 regions
• Virtual Vista Metaverse: 3,253 regions
• Tag Grid: 1,464 regions
• Shoalwater Bay: 1,072 regions
• GBG World: 956 regions
• Virtual Worlds Grid: 915 regions
• AviWorlds: 842 regions
• Friends Grid: 816 regions
• ArtDestiny: 784 regions
• Kinky Haven: 669 regions
• Craft World: 642 regions
• AvatarLife: 603 regions
• Littlefield: 514 regions
• GorGrid: 430 regions
• Furry World: 373 regions
• Neverworld: 343 regions
• DreamNation: 314 regions
• Nemesis 3D: 305 regions
• EdMondo: 300 regions
• Open Virtual Worlds: 229 regions
• Japan Open Grid: 186 regions
• Counter Earth: 186 regions
• MisFitz Grid: 182 regions
• Kater and Friends: 180 regions
• Adreans-World: 173 regions
• Darkheart’s Playground: 168 regions
• GerGrid: 141 regions
• OpenSim Fest: 140 regions
• WestWorld Grid: 135 regions
• Logicamp: 129 regions
• Galactic Virtual: 127 regions
• Outworldz: 126 regions
• XTalent: 124 regions
• Utopia Skye: 116 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 maria@hypergridbusiness.com.

Kitely, a leading OpenSim grid, has announced a significant upgrade to its virtual world hosting service, doubling the performance of all Kitely regions without increasing prices. The company has achieved this by adopting the latest Amazon server technology, the M7i generation, while maintaining its existing pricing structure.

“This upgrade enables your worlds to handle more scripts and avatar activity without experiencing server lag,” said Kitely CEO Ilan Tochner.

According to our most recent stats report, Kitely is currently the third-largest OpenSim grid by land area and one of the 20 most popular by traffic numbers.

The grid’s prices start at $15 a month for a 15,000-prim region with up to ten simultaneous visitors, and go up to $150 per month for a 64-region land area with up to 180,000 prims and up to 80 simultaneous visitors. But for people just starting out, Hypergrid Business recommends their $ 20-a-month plan, which has four contiguous regions, 60,000 prims, and a capacity of 40 visitors.

Kitely has always been committed to using powerful servers, hosting a limited number of regions on each server, and employing a modified version of OpenSim with proprietary high-performance assets and inventory systems, the company said in its announcement yesterday. The company’s servers are hosted in an Amazon Web Services data center in California, which offers high-speed connectivity to the Internet.

“This latest upgrade reinforces our commitment to providing a premium experience to our OpenSim customers,” Tochner said.

Kitely, which opened its doors to the public in March 2011, is one of the longest-running OpenSim grids. It is unique in that it offers on-demand regions — the regions are only active when people are visiting them, and go to sleep when they are empty, allowing the company to keep costs low while offering high performance on regions when they’re active.

“We have a great reputation for customer support, reliability, and high-performance virtual world hosting,” said Tochner. “Kitely is also the home of Kitely Market, the premier marketplace for buying and selling virtual items across the hypergrid.”

I don’t personally agree with the dystopian visions of the metaverse as presented by sci-fi writers. But if you want to understand where the inspiration for platforms like Second Life — and OpenSim — comes from, these books are a must-read.

Plus, they might give us some tips about what to avoid as we move closer to a fully immersive future. I’ve also got one last bonus book on this list, at the bottom of this post. Not about the metaverse but a must-have sci-fi classic — and as relevant today as it ever was, if not more so.

Neuromancer by William Gibson

The paperback is normally $19 but it’s $9.50 today. The hard cover is also on sale, down from $28 to $21.

This book won all the sci-fi awards and helped create the cyberpunk genre — and paved the way for how we think about the universe.

It’s a bit of a dystopian vision of the future but one well worth revisiting, especially today, when that future seems to be coming ever closer.

From the publisher:

Winner of the Hugo, Nebula, and Philip K. Dick Awards, Neuromancer is a science fiction masterpiece—a classic that ranks as one of the twentieth century’s most potent visions of the future.

Neuromancer was the first fully-realized glimpse of humankind’s digital future—a shocking vision that has challenged our assumptions about technology and ourselves, reinvented the way we speak and think, and forever altered the landscape of our imaginations.

Get the book on sale here.

Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson

And speaking of dystopian metaverse futures, this book started it all. And, today, it’s 44% off — just $10.70 for the paperback. And the deluxe hardcover edition is also 44% off, down to $22.60.

Myself, I prefer his book The Diamond Age. But that one, too, is on sale today — down 36% to $12.79.

But back to Snow Crash.

From the publisher:

Hiro lives in a Los Angeles where franchises line the freeway as far as the eye can see. The only relief from the sea of logos is within the autonomous city-states, where law-abiding citizens don’t dare leave their mansions.

Hiro delivers pizza to the mansions for a living, defending his pies from marauders when necessary with a matched set of samurai swords. His home is a shared 20 X 30 U-Stor-It. He spends most of his time goggled in to the Metaverse, where his avatar is legendary.

But in the club known as The Black Sun, his fellow hackers are being felled by a weird new drug called Snow Crash that reduces them to nothing more than a jittering cloud of bad digital karma (and IRL, a vegetative state).

Investigating the Infocalypse leads Hiro all the way back to the beginning of language itself, with roots in an ancient Sumerian priesthood. He’ll be joined by Y.T., a fearless teenaged skateboard courier. Together, they must race to stop a shadowy virtual villain hell-bent on world domination.

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

This paperback is 59% off, for a total price of just $7.35.

It’s an love poem to 1980s video games crossed with a Willy Wonka-style competition about who gets to run the metaverse.

I’ve got several beefs with this book — and others of the genre. First of all, a lot of stuff happens inside the game that shouldn’t. Just shut down the server, guys. Or terminate the user account.

Second, a scavenger hunt is a very poor way indeed to do corporate succession planning.

Finally, why does one poorly-run company dominate the metaverse? In the real world, competition pops up almost instantly. Yes, Google dominates the search engine space — for now, at least — but it certainly doesn’t have a monopoly on websites in general. And Second Life might be a big elephant in the social gaming area, but it’s got a lot of competitors — both big commercial players like Robox and Minecraft and all the MMOs and all the VR chat games, and open source stuff like OpenSim.

If you read this book, and the other cyberpunk novels on this list, treat them the way they were intended — as cautionary tales — and not as how-to manuals! Please!

Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card

Another classic of my childhood, and that of many other people. It isn’t set so much in a virtual world, but in an immersive game. But how real is that game, exactly?

Now the hardcover edition is available for just $10.49, down from $15.99.

From the publisher:

From New York Times bestselling author Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game―adapted to film in 2013 starring Asa Butterfield and Harrison Ford―is the classic Hugo and Nebula award-winning science fiction novel of a young boy’s recruitment into the midst of an interstellar war.

In order to develop a secure defense against a hostile alien race’s next attack, government agencies breed child geniuses and train them as soldiers.

A brilliant young boy, Andrew “Ender” Wiggin lives with his kind but distant parents, his sadistic brother Peter, and the person he loves more than anyone else, his sister Valentine. Peter and Valentine were candidates for the soldier-training program but didn’t make the cut―young Ender is the Wiggin drafted to the orbiting Battle School for rigorous military training.

Ender’s skills make him a leader in school and respected in the Battle Room, where children play at mock battles in zero gravity. Yet growing up in an artificial community of young soldiers Ender suffers greatly from isolation, rivalry from his peers, pressure from the adult teachers, and an unsettling fear of the alien invaders.

This is the first book of the six-book Ender Sextet series. The other books are all on sale today as well, as is Ender’s Shadow, the first of five books in the Shadow Saga series.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick

This one isn’t so a book about the metaverse specifically — it’s more about AI. Which, these days, is increasingly becoming a closely intertwined topic as AI is used to build the worlds, script interactions, and animate in-world characters.

And, as I watched the OpenAI and Google AI announcements this week, I could see that their chatbots are getting pretty darn realistic.

Philip K. Dick predicted all this back in 1968. That was before I was born. That was before the moon landing. Lyndon B. Johnson was still president and the Beatles were still together. Philip K. Dick predicted a lot of weird things. He was a pretty weird writer. I’m constantly surprised by how many of his stories got made into big-budget films.

Get the book on sale here.

Have you read these books? Do you own them?

Oh, and I almost forgot — I’ve also written books about the metaverse, though not quite as dystopian as these.

And they’re not just on sale — they’re free. I’ve written over a dozen more in the same universe, which I’ll be publishing soon, so this is your chance to catch up on the story so far.

The Krim World series

The region loss was due to the fact that Discovery Grid did not report its region totals this month. In April, the grid reported 5,178 standard region equivalents.

In addition, several grids did not report their stats this month, including Kater and Friends, ProxyNet, Caribou Grid, and Resurgence. Each of these grids has reported hundreds of active users earlier this year. If the grid has moved, please let me know at maria@hypergridbusiness.com.

The numerical losses were not due to 3rd Rock Grid’s closure yesterday, since that grid still showed up as active for the past four weeks and did report its stats. Its loss will show up in next month’s stats report.

The total land area on OpenSim’s public grids reached the equivalent of 135,700 standard regions this month, down from last month’s all-time high — and still several times bigger that the total land area of Second Life.

The biggest gainer in terms of land area was OSgrid, which gained 1,160 new standard region equivalents, maintaining its status as the largest public grid in OpenSim. It was followed in growth numbers by ZetaWorlds with 1,024 new regions and Wolf Territories Grid with 384 new regions.

At the same time, the number of active users dropped to 47,195.

Wolf Territories Grid retained their first-place position by traffic numbers.

I’m now tracking a total of 2,661 OpenSim grids, of which 307 were active, and 249 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.

The following grids were added to our database this month: 3World, BachmansWorld One, Bridger, CyberDataStorm, and Dark Heaven.

Also, I’m no longer sending out a monthly email blast reminding OpenSim grid owners to send me news and updates for this report. If you have news, please email me before the tenth of the month if you want a short item included in this monthly wrap-up. For longer news, feel free to send me press releases at any time.

Our stats do not include many of the grids running on DreamGrid which is a distribution of 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.

Hypergrid Business newsletter is now available

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.

Top 25 most popular grids this month:

1. Wolf Territories Grid: 5,904 active users
2. OSgrid: 5,263 active users
3. GBG World: 2,174 active users
4. DigiWorldz: 2,125 active users
5. Alternate Metaverse: 2,001 active users
6. Darkheart’s Playground: 1,462 active users
7. WaterSplash: 1,419 active users
8. Vida Dupla: 1,222 active users
9. Moonrose: 1,149 active users
10. AviWorlds: 1,105 active users
11. Neverworld: 1,086 active users
12. Trianon World: 1,014 active users
13. Littlefield: 993 active users
14. Craft World: 965 active users
15. AvatarLife: 940 active users
16. Party Destination Grid: 845 active users
17. Astralia: 773 active users
18. Virtualife: 750 active users
19. Kitely: 655 active users
20. German World Grid: 623 active users
21. ZetaWorlds: 618 active users
22. Herederos Grid: 588 active users
23. CandM World: 563 active users
24. Groovy Verse: 505 active users
25. Eureka World: 490 active users

Top 40 grids by land area

All region counts on this list are, whenever available, in terms of standard region equivalents. Active user counts include hypergrid visitors whenever possible.

Many school, company, or personal grids do not publish their numbers.

The 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: 30,960 regions
• Wolf Territories Grid: 28,928 regions
• Kitely: 18,085 regions
• ZetaWorlds: 12,772 regions
• Alternate Metaverse: 9,811 regions
• Groovy Verse: 7,864 regions
• DigiWorldz: 3,546 regions
• German World Grid: 2,476 regions
• CandM World: 1,760 regions
• Tag Grid: 1,464 regions
• Shoalwater Bay: 1,072 regions
• GBG World: 956 regions
• Virtual Worlds Grid: 915 regions
• 3rd Rock Grid: 872 regions
• AviWorlds: 853 regions
• Friends Grid: 816 regions
• ArtDestiny: 784 regions
• Kinky Haven: 669 regions
• AvatarLife: 605 regions
• Littlefield: 514 regions
• Craft World: 471 regions
• GorGrid: 430 regions
• Tomi’s World: 400 regions
• Furry World: 373 regions
• Neverworld: 344 regions
• DreamNation: 318 regions
• Nemesis 3D: 305 regions
• EdMondo: 300 regions
• Open Virtual Worlds: 241 regions
• Japan Open Grid: 194 regions
• Counter Earth: 186 regions
• MisFitz Grid: 181 regions
• Adreans-World: 173 regions
• GerGrid: 141 regions
• OpenSim Fest: 140 regions
• Darkheart’s Playground: 137 regions
• WestWorld Grid: 135 regions
• Outworldz: 127 regions
• Galactic Virtual: 127 regions
• Logicamp: 123 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 maria@hypergridbusiness.com.

The grid announced that it was closing back in March, and, since then, many of the former residents have found their way to other grids, with ZetaWorlds being a popular destination.

Start at Sirocco, which is slated to by the administrative hub of the new 3rd Rock Grid expat community once its done. There is already land available for rent, starting at $2.50 a month for a 10,000-prim Second Life-sized region.

Check out the 3rd Wind Community website for more information, including land prices, an events calendar, and a membership form.

The community rented a dedicated servers from ZetaWorlds and, as a non-profit, can offer very low land prices, said Alia Soulstar, a founder of the 3rd Wind Community.

There are also arts and education areas and other public lands, she told Hypergrid Business, with a total land area of more than 800 standard region equivalents.

“We had a month-long series of community meetings where we invited the owners of a handful of grids to come and talk,” Soulstar said. “Then we had a long discussion and choose this grid. A lot of the choice was based around the flexibility of having a dedicated server to design our own community around. The general feeling was that we wanted to stay together as a family, so we made the collective decision to move here.”

She recommends that people start on the Sirocco region of ZetaWorlds, where they can find out about land ownership and get other administrative information.

Teleport to hg.zetaworlds.com:80:Sirocco.

“We are still under construction so haven’t made a landmark map yet, but will have that up in a few days,” she said.

People also gather on the beach on the Peapod region and Risa on the Anubis region.

Teleport to hg.zetaworlds.com:80:Peapod.

But the most popular location is Infinity region’s Starfleet Infinity area, home to bars, dance places, space stations, and starships.

Teleport to hg.zetaworlds.com:80:Infinity.

Teleport to hg.zetaworlds.com:80:Anubis and hg.zetaworlds.com:80:Infinity.

There are also music venues on the Khamsin region, she said, with live performances four to five times per week.

Teleport to hg.zetaworlds.com:80:Khamsin.

For those who haven’t yet transfered their regions or avatar inventories, there is still time, said Soulstar. ” 3rd Rock Grid created OARs of all the regions there and will hold them in cloud storage for a year so they can be reclaimed, and a number of IARs for active users, too. And we are able to load OARs and IARs for recovery, so all is not lost if you find yourself locked out.”

ZetaWorlds will upload the OAR region export files and IAR inventory files for users, she said, and the 3rd Wind Community will help with the process.

The OARs will be “kept for the foreseable future,” 3rd Rock Grid board member Tara Dockery, also known as Thoria Millgrove in-world, said yesterday. “We will provide those OARs to the registered owners upon request.”

Her own region, Peapod, is already on ZetaWorlds, along with its events, Dockery told Hypergrid Business.

You can read more about the transition to ZetaWorlds at Thirza Ember’s Hypergrid Safari blog.

And there are some really pretty ones out there! And some grids truly use their websites to show off what they’ve got to offer.

But most grids, I’m afraid, miss the mark. If you’re a public grid and want to attract traffic, or a commercial grid looking to rent out land, you’re leaving money on the table by not having these five elements on your home page.

A beautiful picture that shows people enjoying your grid

A picture is worth a thousand words, and when it comes to your OpenSim grid’s website, the right picture can make all the difference. As I browsed through dozens of grid home pages this week, I was struck by how few of them featured images of people enjoying themselves. In fact, I could only find four examples, and two were avatars from other platforms, not actual grid residents.

This is a missed opportunity. Your grid’s home page is the perfect place to showcase the fun and excitement that awaits visitors. Even if your grid is brand new, you can still create engaging images. Pose some alts in dance animations, have them chatting in a cafe, building a house, working in a garden, or raising farm animals. The possibilities are endless.

Too often, grid slideshows and images focus on empty spaces — a deserted dance floor, a vacant cafe, a barren island, or a lonely rock. Sure, sometimes it’s a pretty rock, but it’s still just an empty landscape. The same goes for pictures of museums or shopping areas — if they’re devoid of people, they look like ghost towns.

By featuring images of empty spaces, you’re sending a subconscious message to potential visitors: “Our grid is an empty wasteland.” That’s not the impression you want to make. Instead, show people having a great time on your grid. Capture the excitement of a fashion show, the energy of a rock concert, or the camaraderie of a community event.

If you don’t have a skilled photographer on your grid, consider reaching out to the OpenSim community. There are plenty of talented photographers who would be happy to take some great shots of people enjoying your grid.

One of the grids that featured prominent images of people enjoying themselves in their world was the New Life Italy grid.

I’m not saying that every grid should put a picture of a dance floor on their home page. OpenSim grids would all look pretty much identical if everybody did this. Hopefully, your grid has more to offer than just dancing, or, if there is dancing, maybe it’s in a particularly special location? And when taking pictures of people enjoying themselves, try to have at least one closeup of an avatar’s happy face.

Again, I’m using an illustration from New Life Italy‘s home page here:

My theory is that many grid owners and website managers are technologists at heart. They prefer to work by themselves.

You, as a technologist, might enjoy a home page that is full of dense text, statistics, details of your server configurations, and capacity utilization charts. But you target audience doesn’t. If they did, they would be running their own grids — they wouldn’t need to rent land from you!

Sure, a percentage of your customers will also be loners, or people who might like a little quiet time once in a while. But most people are going to come to a social grid to socialize.

The bottom line is this: Don’t make it hard for potential visitors to imagine themselves having fun on your grid. Show them what they’re missing with vibrant, engaging images of people enjoying all that your world has to offer.

And this picture should be the main focal point of your home page. The first thing people think of when they see your site should be, “This grid is fun. I want to be there.”

How to get there

Okay, so somebody’s come to your website and thought to themselves, “Oh my God, the people in this picture are having so much fun. I want to join them. How do I get there?”

This brings us to the next essential element your OpenSim grid website needs: clear and easy instructions for accessing your grid.

For most existing OpenSim users, the simplest way to get users to come to your grid is via hypergrid. Give them your login URI as plain text that they can copy and paste into their viewer. Make sure this login URI is prominently displayed and easy to find on your homepage.

Like at the top of the DigiWorldz home page here:

Avoid using graphic images for your login URI, as this makes it harder for users to copy the text.

I am always surprised by how often I can’t find the grid’s login URI or hypergrid address at all on the home page and have to hunt around for it.

For people who are new to OpenSim, you’ll want to guide them through the process of creating an avatar and accessing your grid. Consider adding a button or link that says something like “New to OpenSim? Start here!” This should lead to a page with step-by-step instructions for creating an account, downloading a viewer, and logging into your grid.

The goal is to make the process of accessing your grid as simple and intuitive as possible. If you can, try to get someone who’s never been to OpenSim before to follow your instructions.

Remember, every extra click or step you require is an opportunity for potential visitors to get frustrated or distracted and give up.

Rent land

For most commercial grids, renting land is a primary revenue source. The land rental options should be very easy to see on your website. Nobody should hunt around for it. This isn’t something to bury in a sub-menu or hide at the bottom of a long home page.

Unfortunately, many grids make renting land far more complicated than it needs to be. They require users to create new user accounts, or provide technical details like region coordinates and specific server configurations. Unless someone is an experienced OpenSim user or grid owner, they probably won’t know this information off the top of their head. And if they do know exactly how many cores and RAM they need — well, they don’t need you, do they? They can run their own grid, thank you very much.

Each time someone has to make a decision, or look something up, half the time they’re going to say, “I’ll do that later.” And they never do it later. Instead, you will lose about half you potential customers with every additional click, every new page, every form field they have to fill out. Pretend you’re a new customer. How many clicks will it take someone before they can finally send you money? How many decisions do they have to make?

So, if, say, you have 100 visitors who come to your website thinking of getting a region, and six steps to go through before they can buy land — you’ll lose 50 people at the first step, another 25 at the second step, 12 more at the third step, another six at the fourth step, three at the fifth step. And you’ll have just one or two people left, if you’re lucky. You just wasted 99 potential customers. Sure, some of them might come back. Eventually. When they remember. Or they might forget that they wanted to get a region. Or get a region somewhere else. Or they’ll go to Second Life, because at least they know how to buy land there. Though even Second Life makes you click around a lot before you finally get to… $209 a month for a 20,000 prim region??? With a $349 setup fee???

Oh, for God’s sake. Don’t make your potential customers suffer like that! And pay so, so much for so little!

Make things easy for them. And take their money first, then figure out everything else.

Put a big, bold “Rent Land Now” button right on your homepage. When a user clicks this button, they should be taken directly to a simple, streamlined land rental page.

Or you can put a form right on the home page with your three top-selling options.

Darkheart’s Playground was the only grid I found that had a land rental box right on the home page. You do have to scroll down to find it, and the options could be simpler, but they’ve got something! Unfortunately, as of this writing, none of the buttons work. In theory, however, they could bring up a PayPal popup where all a user would have to do is click the “Pay Now” button and be in business. They can create their user accounts and decide on region names later, after they’ve given you the money.

Offer a few pre-configured land packages based on your most popular options. For example, you might have a “Starter Region” with 15,000 prims and 20 avatar capacity, a “Community Region” with 45,000 prims and 50 avatar capacity, and a “Commercial Region” with 100,000 prims and 100 avatar capacity. Each option should have a clear price and a “Rent Now” button that takes the user directly to a payment page. Or you might organize them based on who the customer is — a homesteader, a builder, an events venue, a merchant — and create default region packages that fit their needs best.

If a user wants a more customized land configuration, take them to a simple form where they can enter their desired land size, prim count, and avatar capacity. Avoid requiring technical details like server names or region coordinates — handle these on the back-end after the user has completed their purchase, or give them a default configuration that they can simply agree to.

The key is to minimize the number of decisions and technical details the user has to deal with.

Pretend you’re a newcomer from, say, Second Life, attracted by your grid’s low prices. How many clicks would it take for them to actually make a purchase?

Try to get someone who hates you to go through the process — a teenage child, for example, or a coworker whose lunch you’ve stolen. Will they be able to navigate through to the end without your help?

If your grid doesn’t rent land, replace this item with whatever else a top priority for your visitors would be.

For example, if you’re a free-to-connect grid, you can feature an at-home region-installer download.

If you’re a non-profit, use this space for a donation button. You can use one simple donation button, or have tiers for different levels of support. Explain what the donation will be used for — to buy developers coffee? To pay for backup servers? To reduce lag?

If you have a content marketplace, feature a bestselling item or a new arrival.

If you offer paid memberships, put that in this prominent location.

Latest events

The next thing you’ll want to feature on your home page is an ad for an upcoming event, to give people a good reason to come to your grid. Or you might feature a write-up of an event that just happened, to make people feel sorry that they missed out on something cool.

If you don’t have any events, offer a promo deal, or a how-to article, or showcase a freebie — something new and fresh that will reward people for coming to your website, and make them more likely to share the link with friends.

The goal is to give potential visitors a sense of the vibrant, active community on your grid and to entice them to come and check out what’s happening. This is your chance to show off the variety and creativity of your grid’s residents and events.

Discovery Grid does a great job here, by embedding their calendar right on the home page, with attractive visuals for each event.

Some ideas for types of events to highlight include:

• Live music performances
• Art exhibitions and gallery openings
• Fashion shows and contests
• Role-playing events and adventures
• Educational workshops and classes
• Community gatherings and parties
• Charity events and fundraisers

For each event, provide a brief description, the date and time, and a high-quality image that captures the excitement and energy of the event. If possible, include a direct link to the event location on your grid, so visitors can easily teleport there.

In addition to featuring specific events, consider showcasing user-generated content and activities on your grid. This could include:

• New and notable builds or regions
• User-created games and attractions
• Popular social spots and hangouts
• Featured merchants and creators

By regularly updating your events and activities section, you’ll give visitors a reason to keep coming back to your website and your grid. They’ll see that there’s always something new and exciting happening, and they won’t want to miss out.

Remember, the goal is to make your grid irresistible to potential visitors. By showcasing the vibrant, active community on your grid and highlighting all the amazing events and activities happening there, you’ll give people a compelling reason to come and experience it for themselves.

Having fresh content on your home page will also help your grid rank higher in search engines. You can also cheat, and embed your social media feed. For example, if you regularly post stuff on Facebook or another social media platform, embed the feed to get fresh new stuff for your home page all the time. Well, as long as you keep your social media fresh.

Littlefield Grid, for example, embeds their Twitter feed on their home page. OSgrid and AviWorlds embed Discord pages. GroovyVerse embeds their Mastodon feed and shared snapshots from residents. ZetaWorlds features their latest blog posts.

ZetaWorlds, by the way, also makes it super easy to grab the hypergrid address with that nice red “Copy” button, the green “Join Now!” button takes you to a signup page with a nice choice of membership levels, and the images on the home page feature people!

Login button

This is one item that nearly every grid has, and it’s where it should be — at the top right of the page.

That’s because they know that a top reason that people come to their website is to do stuff with their accounts, like submit support requests.

Good job, OpenSim grids.

Keep it simple

That might seem like a lot of stuff to put on a single page: a picture of people, a hypergrid address, a land rental box, a new event or announcement, and a login button at the top right.

But if you look through grid home pages, you’ll often find that they’ve got a lot of stuff crammed in there, most of it which isn’t a top priority for either users or grid owners.

Some grids put their mission statements on the home page. In my opinion, these are all identical and a waste of space that takes focus away from the things that you actually want people to pay attention to. Some grids post detailed technical details about their configurations. Some grids post random graphics unrelated to OpenSim.

Many grids post stats boxes. I’m all in favor of grids publishing their stats, but this is one thing you can safely put in a drop-down menu or at the bottom of the page. Stats are a nice-to-have — for me, anyway — but if they take away real estate that can be used to promote an event or a land sale — go with the event or land sale.

There’s only so many things a person can absorb when they look at a website. Too much clutter will drive people away.

You can put everything else in drop-down menus or further down on the home page, where people can scroll to see it.

A note about grid stats

Now, I know that grids don’t have to publish their stats. And some grids probably shouldn’t — there’s no reason for a school grid or a company grid only used by its employees to tell the world how many visitors it has.

But public and commercial grids should publish their stats, because it’s a free inbound link from Hypergrid Business every month. Our monthly stats report is one of our best-read regular posts, and people check the lists we publish to find new grids to visit.

If you have a grid, you can check that it’s on our active grids list, and if you want to know if we’re collecting your grid’s stats, check out our April 2024 raw stats report.

If you don’t have a stats page, or want to make sure that your stats page is as easy as possible for our database to read, so that there aren’t any mistakes, it should have the following information:

Total number of registered users: 123
Total regions: 4567
Unique 30-day visitors: 890

The way the scraper looks is that it searches for a key phrase, then grabs the numbers immediately after the phrase.

I prefer to see regions counted in the form of standard region equivalents, but my database can also handle square meters and square kilometers. And, for active monthly users or unique 30-day visitors, I prefer to have a single total of both local and hypergrid visitors. You can also have other stats on your stats page, but these three are the ones that I track to have consistency for comparison purposes.

I also prefer it when the stats page is as simple as possible, with no tables, animations, or weird graphics to mess up the parser.

If you want to see examples of stats pages that work well for me, check out the DigiWorldz stats page, or the Alternate Metaverse stats page, or the Wolf Territories Grid stats page. That last one is my favorite because there are no thousands separators in the numbers. The thing with separators is that some countries use commas, some use periods, and some use apostrophes. Arrgh!

If you’ve ever wondered why I’m the only one who collects these stats every month, and why there are so many mistakes in them — this is why. It’s pretty much impossible to write an automated system to collect stats because every grid formats them differently. So there’s a lot of manual labor involved, folks.

Why should anyone care about OpenSim stats? They’re meaningless, right? Who cares how many people a grid has? No, there’s no reason to care except… marketing!

Every grid that reports users is more social proof that people are using and enjoying OpenSim. The more grids report their stats, the better. Even if your grid is small — some people prefer small grids.

And don’t forget: other grids aren’t your competitors. Your biggest enemy is the fact that Second Life users don’t know that OpenSim exists. Once they find out, and learn about the great prices we have here, the superb amount of control people have over their own regions or private mini-grids, and the awesomeness that is the Kitely Market, then they come. And they stay. And they’ll visit multiple grids until they find one that fits them best where they can settle down and make their home. And they’ll go shopping, and attend events, and donate to performers, and do all the things to grow the platform.

Every single grid that brings in people from Second Life helps all the grids. Every single article or post or social media share that tells people that OpenSim exists helps everyone.

One of my interests is the relationship between the real world and the virtual. If the virtual can inspire or inform the real, it then transcends its technical isolation.

Curating an art exhibition is just such an opportunity. In the physical realm, curating is labor intensive, so decisions on placement carry considerable overhead. On the other hand, virtual simulation can be quite rapid and efficient, conditions that support flexible outcomes.

In real life, my profession is that of photographer. Photographers typically aren’t involved in the planning of an exhibition. We basically record what is, not what’s yet to come. But is there a practical way to use photography of the artwork to then rapidly create a virtual gallery and curate an exhibition that will exist in physical reality?

When Rafael Perea de La Cabada came to me for archival quality photography of his art in advance of an upcoming exhibition, our conversation turned to the challenges for him to curate the show. He wanted to explore various ideas but was feeling restricted by the physicality of moving artwork from his studio to the distant exhibition location, and then into various trial-and-error positions in the gallery. I proposed the creation of a virtual environment for rapid creation of a space that we could walk through, virtually, in which to curate his show quickly and creatively. The application for doing this was OpenSim.

In OpenSim, a simple box can be quickly stretched and resized to make a floor, wall, picture frame or a ‘canvas’ on which to apply the JPEG photographic image of an artwork. Photographic images of sculpture can be post-processed to have transparency around the art, preserved by saving to the PNG format (sculptural art photographed against a solid color background or black is fairly easy to separate from the background).

Lights are also available to simulate general illumination. Build times vary with the size of an exhibition, but a virtual gallery with all the essential details can be created in a handful hours, and curating the show can begin immediately as artwork images are uploaded.

Perea had previously engaged me to photograph his artwork with archival protocols. This meant high-resolution captures, flat, even lighting with suppression of ambient light contamination, and the inclusion of captures that included a color chart for setting white balance in post-production. While these are ideal images for all purposes, a virtual gallery could just as well be populated with basic clean phone photography. After all, the virtual gallery is created to facilitate curating a show, not making the final presentation.

Note: Depending on the number of artwork images and their native resolution, you may be able to handle file transfers via email, but if not, then a free account with Dropbox will have plenty of capacity to handle all the transfers.

To make virtual curating work, every artwork photo needs to be documented with real-world measurements. This is because the virtual gallery and contents will be built to scale, which is actually easier than it sounds. Artists typically already know the dimensions of their work. I put those dimensions into the filenames of the artwork images when I prepared them. This kept the dimensions intrinsically associated with each artwork. The artwork sizes were provided to me with the dimensions as inches. Since the viewer for OpenSim used metric I made conversions.

To build any gallery, it’s first necessary to acquire some reference material. For the Perea project, I knew the gallery would be the Ann Foxworthy Gallery at Allan Hancock College. Google searching produced a number of images, and the gallery director also supplied digital images and overall dimensions.

This gallery has a number of wall angles, but as with the art, I built the gallery to scale so all the components readily fit together. I also added some optional details (such as the track lighting). Note that the ceiling is best if it’s a single object (linked multiple objects if necessary) that can be moved aside, to provide easy placement access for the art.

There is, of course, a learning curve to working in a virtual 3D environment, and this deters many people, including artists, from using software like OpenSim. Yet of all the 3D tools I’ve used, including Maya, Modo, SketchUp, ZBrush and 3D Studio, OpenSim is the fastest and most user friendly.

The trade-off is the ultimate visual quality. High-end applications like Maya are used for cinema quality CGI. OpenSim is not, by itself, capable of that level of visual realism.

ut our purpose was to curate an art exhibition virtually, which only the artist and a handful of other people would see. For that kind of project, OpenSim fills the bill, as you can see below in sample images.

For the Perea exhibition, he had a preliminary set of ideas as to how the art would be arranged. Once the virtual gallery was assembled, and the photos of his artwork were uploaded and attached to “canvases” sized to the dimensions of each piece, I moved each artwork into the initially proposed locations on the walls. Then we could begin to try various ideas. This process was so fast, we could often sit on the phone while I made the changes and forwarded screenshots via email.

Alternatively, Perea could have run his own OpenSim viewer and seen the changes I made, or make his own changes. There’s a lot of flexibility here, but in this case he focused more on direction and had me running the controls.

Perea commented more than once that this process was a great relief.

To give the virtual project an added sense of completion, I exported 360-degree panoramic views, making it possible to create a virtual tour. Recent Firestorm and Second Life viewers have a 360-degree snapshot feature.

Nine key positions were effective in providing a walk-through experience. The 360-degree panoramic views were also valuable for sharing and collaborating with other stakeholders, such as the gallery director. And to move back into the realm of the physical world, a photographic 360-degree virtual tour was made on-site. This preserves the exhibition, immersively and in perpetuity.

Tours were made with 3DVista, a commercial application for virtual tour production.

Curating an art exhibition takes careful planning. Much of that process is conceptual, but the actual installation of art requires considerable physical work. Using a 3D environment like OpenSim presents the opportunity for a gallery director, curator, or the artist to previsualize an exhibition immersively, at scale and relatively quickly. This then makes possible the highly effective exploration of curating options, before labor intensive and essentially permanent installation decisions are implemented.

Link to the 360-degree OpenSim virtual tour. Click on art to open info panel.

Link to the 360-degree photographic virtual tour. Again, click on art to open info panel.

Alternate Metaverse Grid celebrated its first annual International Day on Thursday, March 7: Celebrating International Diversity on OpenSim.

Grid co-owner Cataplexia Numbers said she was looking of a way to bring together the residents of various countries that are members of the Alternate Metaverse Grid and have them not only get to know each other better but to also interact on a united level, celebrating the music of various countries together. To celebrate the various differences within a multi-cultural grid as opposed to having those differences as a means of dividing.

“It is my hope that this catches on to the other grids as well and that it is celebrated yearly on all grids,” Numbers said in a statement. “I have noticed a significant amount of change in the open-ness of ALL musical events lately, becoming more populated by a more mixed international crowd, and this makes me feel we are making a beautiful change here!”

Invitations went out translated into nine languages. A very large and inclusive food court and personalized stages for each performer were built by the incredible Ted Junior and Doc Mercury of AMV Special Projects build team.

The event was extremely well attended with people from grids all over OpenSim — and countries all over the world. There was an average of 48 people in attendance at any given time and as some left, others came.

A new international singer from all over the world performed every 30 minutes. There was also a large international food court, and freebies showcasing many flavors and gifts from around the world.

The gifts and food court will remain open for some time as people just keep coming in for the gifts, Numbers said.

The hypergrid address is alternatemetaverse.com:8002:AMV International.

You can watch a video of the event here.

Performers included Portugal’s Joao Frazao, Brazil’s Khiron Ametza, Scotland’s Clan Escotia, Indonesia’s Putri and Icky & Sum from the U.K, Nikita Andersen and Zeno Stark from Italy. US performers included Dave King and Cataplexia Numbers. Zoree Jupiter represented Portugal and the U.S., Mavenn Live represented Canada and the U.S., and Ian Kitsilano represented Canada and the UK.

The biggest gainer in terms of land area was OSgrid, which gained 2,655 new regions, taking the top slot back from Wolf Territories Grid.

At the same time, the number of active users hit 47,620, another record, and an increase of more than 2,000 actives compared to the previous month. Here, Wolf Territories maintained its leadership position after gaining 307 new active users.

Meanwhile, the total number of locally registered users in OpenSim went up by more than 2,000, led by AvatarLife with 521 new registrations.

I’m now tracking a total of 2,657 public grids, of which 313 were active, and 247 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.

The following grids were added to our database this month: Nordlicht Grid and Royal Grid.

Also, I’m no longer sending out a monthly email blast reminding OpenSim grid owners to send me news and updates for this report. If you have news, please email me before the tenth of the month if you want a short item included in this monthly wrap-up. For longer news, feel free to send me press releases at any time.

Our stats do not include many of the grids running on DreamGrid which is a distribution of 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.

Hypergrid Business newsletter is now available

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.

Top 25 most popular grids this month:

1. Wolf Territories Grid: 5,578 active users
2. OSgrid: 5,250 active users
3. DigiWorldz: 2,168 active users
4. GBG World: 2,112 active users
5. Alternate Metaverse: 1,996 active users
6. Darkheart’s Playground: 1,680 active users
7. WaterSplash: 1,384 active users
8. Moonrose: 1,202 active users
9. AvatarLife: 1,133 active users
10. Trianon World: 1,088 active users
11. Vida Dupla: 1,062 active users
12. Neverworld: 1,011 active users
13. Littlefield: 996 active users
14. AviWorlds: 987 active users
15. Party Destination Grid: 861 active users
16. Craft World: 780 active users
17. Astralia: 703 active users
18. Eureka World: 654 active users
19. Virtualife: 636 active users
20. Kitely: 612 active users
21. Herederos Grid: 600 active users
22. Resurgence: 590 active users
23. Friends Grid: 583 active users
24. German World Grid: 567 active users
25. ZetaWorlds: 547 active users

Top 40 grids by land area

All region counts on this list are, whenever available, in terms of standard region equivalents. Active user counts include hypergrid visitors whenever possible.

Many school, company, or personal grids do not publish their numbers.

The 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: 29,800 regions
• Wolf Territories Grid: 28,544 regions
• Kitely: 18,151 regions
• ZetaWorlds: 11,748 regions
• Alternate Metaverse: 10,208 regions
• Groovy Verse: 8,121 regions
• Discovery Grid: 5,178 regions
• DigiWorldz: 3,572 regions
• German World Grid: 2,476 regions
• CandM World: 1,595 regions
• Tag Grid: 1,464 regions
• Shoalwater Bay: 1,072 regions
• GBG World: 953 regions
• Virtual Worlds Grid: 916 regions
• 3rd Rock Grid: 872 regions
• AviWorlds: 859 regions
• Friends Grid: 816 regions
• ArtDestiny: 784 regions
• Kinky Haven: 669 regions
• AvatarLife: 589 regions
• Littlefield: 516 regions
• GorGrid: 430 regions
• Tomi’s World: 400 regions
• Craft World: 390 regions
• Furry World: 373 regions
• DreamNation: 318 regions
• Nemesis 3D: 305 regions
• EdMondo: 300 regions
• Neverworld: 291 regions
• Open Virtual Worlds: 241 regions
• Kater and Friends: 187 regions
• Counter Earth: 187 regions
• Japan Open Grid: 184 regions
• Adreans-World: 173 regions
• MisFitz Grid: 172 regions
• WestWorld Grid: 149 regions
• GerGrid: 141 regions
• OpenSim Fest: 140 regions
• Outworldz: 127 regions
• Galactic Virtual: 127 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 maria@hypergridbusiness.com.

In a move to make the virtual realm more inclusive, Wolf Territories Grid, announced the launch of its new speech-to-text function today, in order to improve the in-world experience for hard-of-hearing and deaf community members.

With the commitment to ensure equal participation for all users, Wolf Territories Grid’s new speech-to-text feature will convert spoken words into written text in real time, breaking down communication barriers that have long posed challenges for individuals with hearing impairments.

“This is a pivotal moment for Wolf Territories Grid,” said grid owner Paul Clevett, also known Lone Wolf in-world. “Our new speech-to-text function is more than just an upgrade – it’s a statement that our community is for everyone. By providing tools that facilitate ease of communication, we are taking active steps to embrace diversity and foster a more inclusive virtual society.”

The speech-to-text function seamlessly integrates with the grid’s existing communication system and will be available across all regions, he said in an announcement. Residents can use this feature during various events, meetings, and everyday interactions, ensuring they never miss out on the vibrant social tapestry Wolf Territories Grid offers.

“We’re delighted to roll out this feature that aligns with our vision of a grid without limitations,” said Wolf Territories co-administrator DJ Illusions. “Accessibility is at the heart of our ethos and with this advancement, we’re excited to see our community grow even more connected.”

Residents can find detailed instructions on how to enable the speech-to-text function here and in the video tutorial below:

Users looking to explore the grid’s vast array of regions, including the tranquil Breathe Resort or the futuristic Europa, can sign up by visiting the main website and can purchase lands to construct their personalized space. Prices start at US $25.40 a month for a four-by-four region with 20,000 prims.

Founded in 2020, Wolf Territories Grid is an OpenSim-based world, known for being the largest grid in terms of land area. It offers users an expansive virtual world experience, consisting of a total land mass equivalent to 28,544 Second Life regions, numerous social venues, and the freedom to create and explore without bounds.

3rd Rock Grid, the second-oldest grid in OpenSim, will be shutting down soon.

“We have to shut down the grid due to a few circumstances that have technical consequences, making it impossible to further manage the grid,” said 3rd Rock Grid board member Florin Spanachi, who is also known as Eldovar Lamilton in-world.

According to grid residents, the grid had lost a key member of its technical staff when he left suddenly. Then another key member, Kira Tiponi, passed away, leaving the grid without access to a key resource.

3rd Rock Grid is a non-profit, owned by the Netherlands-based Cultural Harbour foundation. According to Hypergrid Business records, it was founded in February of 2008, making it the second-oldest OpenSim grid after OSgrid.

“Technical help is not possible, nor will a fundraiser help,” Spanachi added.

He said that the grid is in contact with its active users to manage the exit as smoothly as possible.

As of this writing, 3rd Rock Grid has 196 active users, making it the 41st-largest by active user count.

It is also reporting a total land area of 872 standard region equivalents making it the 14th-largest grid by land area. It also has 13,615 registered users, making it the grid with the fifth-largest registered user base.

According to 3rd Rock Grid board member Tara Dockery, also known as Thoria Millgrove in-world, saving the grid would require a complete re-build.

“Due to a series of unfortunate events that had technical impact, an inaccessible server, and well over a decade of technical debt in the asset database, we are faced with an unmanageable grid,” she told Hypergrid Business. “There are people investigating ways to move forward and salvage has much as possible, but no firm decisions have been made, other than that we are shutting the existing grid down on May 15.”

OpenSim community dismayed and saddened

The OpenSim community was saddened to hear the news.

“The 3rd Rock Grid holds such special memories for me,” said Marianna Monentes. “I visited as often as possible, and I’m deeply saddened to hear about the passing of one of its key techs. Please accept my sincere condolences to the grid owners and the entire community.”

Monentes is an in-world jewelry designer.

“I am deeply sorry about what happened to them,” said Andrew Simpson, owner of AnSky Grid.

“It goes without saying that it is always sad to see a grid go, regardless of the reason,” said Ansjela Amat, owner of Ansjelagrid, which, like 3rd Rock, is also based in the Netherlands.

“This is sad news,” said Myron Curtis, who said he can make resources available for grid or web hosting. Curtis is the owner of A Dimension Beyond, an OpenSim hosting company, and the founder of Virtual Worlds Grid.

Offers of help

In fact, many grid owners are offering their help.

One of those grid owners is Terry Ford, the original founder 3rd Rock Grid. Ford now runs DigiWorldz, a commercial grid and OpenSim hosting company, but has continued to provide technical support to 3rd Rock even after leaving.

“I would not like to see 3rd Rock Grid gone as it is a very important part of the OpenSim history,” he said.

3rd Rock was the first grid with a working permissions system and the first grid with a working economy, he said. It has also held a number of great events and fundraisers over the years, including several for Doctors Without Borders.

“There are many current and past members of 3rd Rock Grid, including myself, and some who have now passed away, who put in much effort to ensure it was a great grid to call home,” he said. “I have offered to help in any way I can and have reached out to many of the 3rd Rock Grid members voicing the same.”

Several grid owners suggested that it may be possible to reconstitute the grid by exporting and re-uploading the region files, also known as OARs, of the individual regions. OpenSim also has support for exporting individual user inventories.

If the grid is not rescued, then residents will have to find new homes.

3rd Rock Grid residents who are able to get copies or their OAR region export files, or their IAR inventory export files, will also have many grids ready to welcome them.

“If any of the residents have the ability to extract their OARs and need a temporary home I am willing to set them up on a temporary basis with a four-by-four region,” said CatGrid owner Mike Cataldo, also known as Michael Timeless in-world. “Most of my residents are older military veterans but we are always willing to help those in need.”

He said that people are welcome to contact him directly at timeless.owltiger@gmail.com.

“While my grid is not as large as 3rd Rock Grid, I have spent time there in the past,” he said.

AvatarLife is also offering free land to 3rd Rock Grid residents.

“If they have OAR files of their lands we can get them to AvatarLife without any cost, as lands in AvatarLife are free,” said Sushant KC, CEO of AvatarLife, who said that he was said to hear that 3rd Rock Grid was closing down.

“I offer my technical support 24-7 if they want to start 3rd Rock Grid again from new servers,” said GBG World CEO Nick Mit, also known as Anytos Atlas in-world, who said he was so sorry to hear the news about 3rd Rock Grid.

GBG World also has free home plots available and is offers discounted region hosting to former 3rd Rock residents, he added.

“We are really saddened by the shut down of 3rd Rock and are happy to see how we can assist both the 3rd Rock team and any users in anyway we can,” said Paul Clevett, also known as Lone Wolf in-world. He is the director of Wolf Software Systems Ltd., the company that owns OpenSim’s largest and most popular world, Wolf Territories Grid.

He has previously told Hypergrid Business that he’s happy to help other grids with technical issues.

He said that he’s already been approached by some 3rd Rock residents. “We’re keen to help,” he said. “If they rent regions we are going to give them some bonus prims and also keep them together in the same area so they can keep their community.”

As a grid that dates all the way back to the earliest days of OpenSim, though, those technical issues can be significant.

Keeping grids active over many years requires a lot more work than people realize, said Kitely co-founder and CEO Ilan Tochner. “The longer grids are active the more technical expertise is required to overcome all the issues that accumulate over time.”

And the loss is even more devastating to the community when those grids close.

“It’s tragic when grids close and their residents lose their home and all the content they’ve collected in their inventories,” he said. “It’s especially saddening when those grids are ones that have been an important part of the OpenSim ecosystem for as long as 3rd Rock Grid has.”

Kitely, in addition to being one of the biggest commercial grids in OpenSim, also runs the largest online marketplace for OpenSim, the Kitely Market.

Tochner said that for customers who bought content and had it delivered to 3rd Rock Grid, there’s a tool that can help merchants easily re-deliver content to all those customers.

“This Kitely Market feature is designed to enable merchants to easily and reliably help people recover the items they lost when their grid shuts down,” he said.

Update: Several grid owners contacted me after this article posted to express their regrets about 3rd Rock Grid’s closing, and offering help to residents. They include the owners of WaterSplash, Neverworld, and others. In particular, Neverworld owner Govega Sachertorte offered free regions to any group from 3rd Rock with more than five members.

Could Mark Zuckerberg’s lust-driven quest to own VR, AR and mixed reality end up costing Meta at the end of the day?

That’s a question being posed after The Information reported recently that Google had approached Meta partner with its new software platform — Google Android XR — that is being developed for virtual reality. While rumors have Meta talking to hardware companies like LG Electronics about building new devices using Quest’s software, there’s nothing to indicate Zuckerberg’s vision of shifting from using an open-sourced version of Google’s Android OS.

In fact, you could argue there’s even a little bit of bad blood in what is otherwise a solid working relationship.

“Zuckerberg believes he still has a significant market advantage, which he does,” said Rolf Illenberger, CEO of VRdirect, who has been instrumental in deploying VR and AI solutions for major enterprise clients like Nestle, Siemens, and Lufthansa. “Not only that, but Meta and Google both launched platforms back in 2018 — and while Google abandoned theirs, Zuckerburg has taken a lot of heat, and put a lot of dollars into developing Oculus and its audience over the last six years.”

“So, while there’s give and take, there’s far more to Meta wanting to plant its flag in VR,” he added.

That give and take is simple. Despite what would be described as a cordial and friendly working relationship, Google doesn’t let Meta offer the full range of apps on its headsets and working together. If they partnered more formally on Android XR, Google would be willing to offer greater access to those apps.

Meta addressed this in a statement blaming Google’s restrictive terms.

“After years of not focusing on VR or doing anything to support our work in the space, Google has been pitching AndroidXR to partners and suggesting, incredibly, that we are the ones threatening to fragment the ecosystem when they are the ones who plan to do exactly that,” said CTO Andrew Bosworth in a post on Threads earlier this month. “We would love to partner with them. They could bring their apps to Quest today!”

It would be a win for their developers and all consumers, he added, and said that Meta plans to keep pushing for it.

“Instead, they want us to agree to restrictive terms that require us to give up our freedom to innovate and build better experiences for people and developers,” he continued. “We’ve seen this play out before and we think we can do better this time around.”

It appears that Samsung will be the first hardware maker to use the Android XR and, according to The Information, Google has been pitching it to other hardware makers.

“One of Apple’s biggest go-to-market advantages with VR was its integrated ecosystem around the OS,” says Illenberger. “They have made the OS and development of apps around the VisionOS part of their priority, even with a first-generation Vision Pro that has a price point designed not to captivate a consumer market just yet.”

And if that weren’t enough, bickering between Meta and Google over software with Apple looming in the background brings up another thing — how something as simple as an app can move markets with these three involved, like iMessage.

“If you write someone a text, photo, or video on the Apple Vision Pro and it’s going to someone else in that ecosystem, whether on a phone, Watch or iPad, the bubble is still going to be blue,” Illenberger said. “Not that we’ve found the device to be particularly useful for it. But it’s amazing how something as simple as the color of a text bubble on a messaging app can move consumer interest between these three tech mega giants.”

So. You have some thoughts about where OpenSim is going. Or there’s a cool new fashion designer in OpenSim you want to tell people about. Or there’s a feature you’d really like to see implemented.

You’ve been thinking for a while about writing it up and sending it to Hypergrid Business to be published, but writing is just so much work!

Wouldn’t it be great if you could get an AI to read your mind and just write the article for you?

But you can’t. And if you just tell ChatGPT or Claude to “write an article about how great OpenSim is” you’ll get something generic and unreadable. Plus, it won’t have any of your unique insights or information that only you know, which is why you wanted to write the article in the first place.

Here’s what you do.

If you’re like me, and think best while talking, then get a transcription app — I use the free Otter AI app and love it — and dictate your thoughts. Now, Otter only supports English, but there are other apps for other languages. Just Google for it.

Or, if you think in bullet point lists, create a list with the points you’d like to make. Don’t worry about grammar or spelling, or organization. Just do a brain dump.

Then open your favorite AI app — I recommend Claude AI because it doesn’t use your info for training data — and follow the following steps:

Cut-and-paste the following prompt:

I’d like to turn the following notes into an opinion column. The first thing I’d like you to do is read the notes and ask me questions. Is there anything that needs clarification or should be expanded on? Is there anything that doesn’t make sense? Are there any points that could use personal anecdotes or concrete examples? Thanks!

Then cut-and-paste your notes and hit the button to ask the question.

The AI should now ask you some follow-up questions. You can provide more information, or you can tell the AI to just skip that question, or ask the AI for what it would suggest.

Once you’re happy that everything has been pulled out of your head, you can go ahead and ask the AI to write the article.

Cut-and-paste the following prompt:

Please write a column based on my notes and our conversation. It should be in the first person, using Associated Press format, in a casual, blog writing style. Paragraphs should be short. Quotes should begin paragraphs. No conclusion needed. Use the inverted pyramid structure. Stick carefully just to the information that I provided.

Now it should provide you with a first draft of the column.

Now you can ask it to, say, rearrange sections, or add more information. And if it got anything wrong, tell it, and  Once you’re generally happy with how the column looks, ask the following questions:

• Please review the story for accuracy. Are there any places where it contracts the information I gave you?
• Please review the story’s organization and structure. Is the order the best possible order for this topic? Is anything repeated? Are any significant points not given enough time?
• Please review the story for writing style. It should be casual and conversational, written at a fifth-grade level, and paragraphs should be short. Are there any areas that can be simplified or rewritten to be more personal?
• Please review the story for grammar. Remember it should use American spelling and grammar and Associated Press style.

Then say:

Please rewrite the article per your recommendations.

Take one last look at the result. After all, this is going to go out under your name. Make sure that the AI isn’t putting words in your mouth that you wouldn’t say!

Now copy the final results into a separate document and make any edits you want to make. For example, you might change some wording to be more like something you’d say.

Also, add any relevant links. For example, if you’re talking about your OpenSim grid, add a link to the grid.

Then email it to me — in the body of the email is fine — at maria@hypergridbusiness.com. If you have snapshots or illustrations that you want to use, just attach them as JPG or PNG files to the email.

If you’d like to have AI generate an illustration to go with your column, I recommend that you use Adobe Firefly. Adobe only uses fully-licensed images for its training data — no lawsuits from artists here! — and pays artists when their work is used. In fact, the first payments to artists went out last September.

Use the “Widescreen (16:9)” aspect ratio for at least one image that you submit to Hypergrid Business, since we use wide images for the featured images on our site. You can also upload a reference image to give Firefly an idea of the kind of style you’re going for, or select a particular art or photography style from the lists provided.

Of course, you don’t have to submit your column to us! You can post it on your own blog or social media. And you can use the same approach to write any other kind of content — just adjust the prompt to fit. You can use this approach to write emails or to write marketing copy for your website.

And yes, being polite helps. The AIs seems to return better results when you’re nice to them.

In a move that promises a faster, smoother, and more responsive virtual world experience, Wolf Territories Grid has migrated to a new server cluster at a data center in Frankfurt, Germany.

The upgrade is expected to significantly enhance performance and reliability for the grid’s thousands of users, who can now enjoy lightning-fast teleports, quicker rezzing of objects, and an overall more responsive environment.

The switchover incurred minimal downtime for the grid — just 14 minutes.

Paul Clevett, also known as Lone Wolf in-world, is the director of Wolf Software Systems Ltd., the company that owns the grid. It was hosted at the Myloc Data Centre in Dusseldorf for the past three years.

“We had a hodge-podge of servers from Ryzen 5’s to Ryzen 9’s in the old cluster that we built up over the years,” he told Hypergrid Business. “Plus that data center had all our servers split over different networks. What this effectively meant was that the traffic between the servers would have to route around the data center. Plus, there was no high availability.”

The new server cluster boasts an impressive array of hardware, including AMD Ryzen 9 processors with 32 cores, at least 128GB RAM, and 2TB Server Grade NVMEs in RAID one configuration. There was no price increase for people who rent land on the grid.

“We were a pretty much lag free grid before, but this takes us to the next level,” Clevett said.

Users have already noticed the difference, with comments like, “It’s much more wizzy!,” he said. The improvements go beyond just reduced lag, with teleports now being nearly instantaneous and objects rezzing at a much faster rate, he added.

The grid’s large map, which previously took some time to load despite fast-loading tiles, has also seen a significant improvement.

“Because we have a huge map it used to take a while to load it in,” Clevett said. “You’d click on a region and it would take some time to bring up the region name. That is completely fixed by this upgrade.”

The migration process, while complex, was made possible through the efforts of the Wolf Territories Grid team, including grid administrators DJ Illusions and Luna Stormfeather, as well as the tech team comprised of Clevett himself, Busty, and Daja.

“From a technical perspective, it was not easy and without the help of Busty and Daja we definitely wouldn’t be where we are,” said Clevett. “The key really was making sure the cluster design was right and that it met our needs. What we had in our old cluster was something we kind of built as we learned.”

The grid also now has its own network in the data center, he added.

“Everything is faster because we’re not having to route our data round the data center,” he said. “There are noticeable speed differences, especially in heavier regions. This means the whole grid is way faster and ready for the future.”

I was there to give a keynote speech about AI. The whole flight over I was worried that Nvidia or OpenAI or someone else would announce news of such major importance that I’d have to scrap my entire presentation and start over — fortunately, while there was, in fact, some news, I didn’t have to do any major revisions. No CEOs were fired. No lawsuits shut down all generative AI training. Whew.

You can’t really see me in the photo above, so here’s a close-up:

For those of you who only know me from Hypergrid Business, I’m actually a tech journalist during the day. I’ve been covering enterprise technology for over twenty years, ran a business news bureau in China for five, and have seen my fair share of major transformations. During the last few years I’ve been focusing on enterprise uses of artificial intelligence and, since late 2022, much of my reporting has focused on generative AI.

You can see all my stories at MariaKorolov.com, but here are some recent highlights:

• CIO magazine: 3 areas where gen AI improves productivity — until its limits are exceeded
• CIO magazine: For IT leaders, operationalized gen AI is still a moving target
• CIO magazine: Weighing risk and reward with gen AI vendor selection
• CIO magazine: Upskilling ramps up as gen AI forces enterprises to transform
• CIO magazine: 5 ways to deploy your own large language model
• CIO magazine: The year’s top 10 enterprise AI trends — so far
• CSO magazine: Generative AI poised to make substantial impact on DevSecOps
• CSO magazine: How gen AI helps entry-level SOC analysts improve their skills
• CSO magazine: Assessing and quantifying AI risk: A challenge for enterprises
• CSO magazine: Data loss prevention vendors tackle gen AI data risks

I guess, overall, I must have talked to hundreds of people — corporate executives deploying the technology, analysts, consultants, experts, and, of course, vendors.

Anyway, I distilled everything I learned into a single one-hour presentation, flew down to Peru, and gave the talk. It was awesome. I love being in front of a live audience again after several years, now, of online webinars and virtual conferences.

Then, after I got home, I recorded a version of the same presentation for YouTube. It doesn’t have the call-backs to previous speakers, nor post-speech Q&A that the conference moderator did with me, nor people coming up to me afterwards to ask questions.

But that’s the great thing about an in-person conference — you get to experience all those things.

If you’re interested in checking it out, here it is:

And if you want to let me know how you’re using AI on your OpenSim grid — or about anything else happening in OpenSim, for that matter — drop me a line at maria@hypergridbusiness.com.

There was an increase of 1,196 standard region equivalents compared to last month. Meanwhile, the total number of registered users went up by nearly 2,000. The number of active users fell by just over 500, partly due to grid outages. ProxyNet, for example, which reported over 400 active users last month, was down this month. And another grid that reported a drop of more than 500 active may have had database issues — Vivo Sim. 

I’m now tracking a total of 2,655 public grids, of which 309 were active, and 245 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.

Also, I’m no longer sending out a monthly email blast reminding OpenSim grid owners to send me news and updates for this report. If you have news, please email me before the tenth of the month if you want a short item included in this monthly wrap-up. For longer news, feel free to send me press releases at any time.

Our stats do not include many of the grids running on DreamGrid which is a distribution of 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.

Hypergrid Business newsletter is now available

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.

Top 25 most popular grids this month:

1. OSgrid: 5,276 active users
2. Wolf Territories Grid: 5,271 active users
3. GBG World: 2,221 active users
4. DigiWorldz: 2,138 active users
5. Alternate Metaverse: 1,971 active users
6. Darkheart’s Playground: 1,634 active users
7. WaterSplash: 1,342 active users
8. AvatarLife: 1,196 active users
9. Moonrose: 1,111 active users
10. Littlefield: 1,000 active users
11. Neverworld: 989 active users
12. AviWorlds: 972 active users
13. Party Destination Grid: 879 active users
14. Vida Dupla: 864 active users
15. Trianon World: 848 active users
16. Craft World: 750 active users
17. Astralia: 678 active users
18. Eureka World: 658 active users
19. Kitely: 650 active users
20. Virtualife: 618 active users
21. The City: 553 active users
22. Little Big City: 553 active users
23. Resurgence: 550 active users
24. Jungle Friends Grid: 518 active users
25. Herederos Grid: 511 active users

Top 40 grids by land area

All region counts on this list are, whenever available, in terms of standard region equivalents. Active user counts include hypergrid visitors whenever possible.

Many school, company, or personal grids do not publish their numbers.

The 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.

• Wolf Territories Grid: 28,496 regions
• OSgrid: 27,145 regions
• Kitely: 18,216 regions
• ZetaWorlds: 11,687 regions
• Alternate Metaverse: 9,995 regions
• Groovy Verse: 7,896 regions
• Discovery Grid: 5,094 regions
• DigiWorldz: 3,543 regions
• CandM World: 1,579 regions
• Tag Grid: 1,464 regions
• Shoalwater Bay: 1,072 regions
• GBG World: 952 regions
• Virtual Worlds Grid: 916 regions
• 3rd Rock Grid: 872 regions
• AviWorlds: 854 regions
• Friends Grid: 816 regions
• ArtDestiny: 784 regions
• Kinky Haven: 653 regions
• AvatarLife: 577 regions
• Littlefield: 515 regions
• GorGrid: 430 regions
• Tomi’s World: 400 regions
• Craft World: 387 regions
• DreamNation: 378 regions
• Furry World: 373 regions
• Neverworld: 311 regions
• Nemesis 3D: 305 regions
• EdMondo: 298 regions
• Open Virtual Worlds: 241 regions
• Japan Open Grid: 196 regions
• Counter Earth: 183 regions
• Kater and Friends: 173 regions
• Adreans-World: 167 regions
• MisFitz Grid: 164 regions
• WestWorld Grid: 148 regions
• German World: 144 regions
• GerGrid: 141 regions
• OpenSim Fest: 140 regions
• Galactic Virtual: 127 regions
• Outworldz: 126 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 maria@hypergridbusiness.com.

The seventeenth annual Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education Conference, beginning on Thursday, March 14, 2024, will be an online distributed conference happening in multiple virtual spaces. This conference focuses on the use of immersive virtual environments for educational purposes including virtual and augmented reality.

This year we are returning to our Earth build. Each region represents a different terrestrial biome, including wetlands, desert, badlands, grasslands, and forests. Conference attendees will be among the first to be able to explore!

To the best ability possible, VWBPE provides educational and networking opportunities that are relevant to educational curriculum development utilizing virtual environments and “best practices.” These include

• helping to build community through extension of learning best practices to practical application of those ideas and techniques;
• providing networking opportunities for educators and the communities that help support education; and
• providing access to current innovations, trends, ideas, case studies, and other best practices for educators and the communities that help support education

One of the key challenges faced by the educational community is how to make the best use of new immersive technologies in a way that is sustainable and accessible based on limited budgets available to both instructors and students. Platforms that are free or open source, or that can be shared across a broad audience are showcased, including methods and research around best practices in their use and applicability.

Our theme for this year is Mythic Origins.

Mythic stories can provide a way to engage students in critical thinking and analysis, as well as developing their creativity and imagination. Mythic origins can provide students with a deeper understanding of their own cultural heritage and how it has evolved over time. It allows us to explore the origins of our socially constructed myths and legends that have inspired educators and their various works.

Join us as we all share experiences and successes in how virtual technologies used in the classroom have helped shape education for the better.

This year’s keynote speakers are Wagner James Au and Dr. Nellie Deutsch. Invited speakers include representatives from Linden Lab, and the 2020 Thinkerer – Renne Emiko Brock.

The VWBPE conference keynote speakers and their respective presentations are featured on the conference website, along with a program of exciting presentations, social activities, and networking events that will set extraordinary discussions in motion.

The VWBPE Immersive Experiences showcase unique and interesting work being conducted across the metaverse. We invite you to join us as we explore eleven interactive and engaging locations across five virtual environments. The Immersive Experiences are scheduled from March 9th through 31st (exclusive of the conference dates). Details and access instructions for the experiences are found on our program page.

Additionally, this open and free conference would not be possible without the generous contributions of our VWBPE sponsors.

The Rockcliffe Registration Portal is open for people to register new Second Life® avatars and find out more about the VWBPE conference in-world. Go to https://www.enroll.onl/secondlife.php . The instructions are there to get you and your friends started at this educator-friendly newcomers’ region in Second Life.

The full conference program is online.

You can also view presentations live on YouTube.

All of the conference events will be in Second Life this year, and the locations are included in the listings. When you click on a conference event and click Add to Calendar, you can add the event to your own calendar.

Direct SLURL links to VWBPE locations:

• VWBPE 2024 GATEWAY
• VWBPE 2024 SOCIAL VISITOR CENTER
• KEYNOTES

You can also follow VWBPE on social media: Second Life group, Facebook, Flickr, LinkedIn, Twitter, and YouTube.

Keynote: “Mythic Origins of Metaverse Myths”

Speaker: Wagner James Au, also known as Hamlet, Author

Time and Location: 4 p.m. SLT on Thursday, March 14 in the VWBPE Auditorium.

Keynote: “The Hero’s Journey of Learning Transformation in the Digital Age”

Speaker: Nellie Deutsch, also known as Nellie Homewood, Co-Chair of TESOL CALL-IS and instructor at the International Hellenic University

Time and Location: 9 a.m. SLT on Friday, March 15 in the VWBPE Auditorium.

The full list of speakers is here.

The major sponsors of this week’s VWBPE event are Linden Lab, Rockcliffe University Consortium, Hire A Helper, Porch.com, Knomaze Corporation, Virtual Ability, Agile Dimensions, Journal of Virtual Studies, and Whole Brain Health.

I cover artificial intelligence at my day job. Every week, I talk to the experts building the technology and deploying it, and to companies already finding value in it. The AI-powered transformation is bigger than anything I’ve ever covered before, in my two-plus decades of technology journalism. And it’s moving faster than anything I’ve covered before. And, unlike some other tech trends, companies are almost universally already seeing value in it.

I’m not going to argue here about whether it’s good or bad — I’m going to save that for another essay. Neither am I going to talk, today at least, about the copyright issues and the job displacements and the potential destruction of civilization. Those are all real concerns, but let’s put a pin in them right now and come back to those later.

Today, I’m going to talk about AI and world building. If you build worlds — or want to get into the world-building business, either as a game designer, artist, or writer, or OpenSim creator — here are three ways generative AI will change everything.

Can AI build worlds?

Generative AI is bad. Often laughably bad. It can’t do hands. It’s attempts at writing code fail most of the time. We all know this, we laugh at it, we roll our eyes at people saying that AI is going to change anything except dupe dumb people into falling for even more stupid political spam.

Except — and this is super important — except that AI is learning continuously and evolving fast.

Let me remind you again how far image-generators came in just one year:

That was in 2022. AI was soon winning art competitions, and, most recently, the world’s most prestigious photography award.

In 2023, the same thing happened with text. We went from silly little poems written by ChatGPT to AI writing part of an award-winning sci-fi novel. We point to something bad that AI has generated and pat ourselves on the back for being able to spot it so easily. Yes, we can spot bad AI. But we can’t spot good AI.

This year, we’re seeing the same progression happening with video. Remember Will Smith eating spaghetti?

Here’s today’s state-of-the-art, from OpenAI’s Sora model:

So what’s going to happen next?

First, AI is getting consistent. It’s getting a long-term memory. Early versions of AI couldn’t remember what they did before, so text and images and videos were inconsistent. Characters and backgrounds morphed. Stories went in crazy and contradictory directions. Today’s cutting-edge AIs have context windows of up to 10 million tokens. Yup, Google’s Gemini 1.5 model has been tested to accurately handle up to 10 hours of video or enough text for all of the Harry Potter books, seven times over.

Second, generative AI is going multi-modal. That means it’s combining video, audio, text and code into a single model. So, for example, it can write the text for a story, create a scene list for it, create a story book for it, create a video for it, and create audio for it, with the result being an entire coherent movie. Yeah, that’s going to happen. The tech companies already have preliminary models that can do most of this, including that Google AI I just mentioned.

Third — and this is the key part of it — the next generation of generative AIs will be able to simulate the world. OpenAI, said just as much in a research paper released shortly after its Sora announcement: “Our results suggest that scaling video generation models is a promising path towards building general purpose simulators of the physical world.”

Now, today’s models don’t fully understand physics. They don’t know how glass breaks, the direction of time, or that, say, mass is conserved. We can point at this and laugh and think that these models will never understand these things — just like they don’t understand the concept of human hands.

Well, some of the AIs have become really good at making human hands.

You might think that physics would be a bigger challenge. But Google, the company making Gemini, has all of YouTube to train it on. Plus, all our physics textbooks. And all the rest of human knowledge.

According to the OpenAI paper, developing accurate world simulators is mostly a question of making the models big enough.

From the researchers:

We believe the capabilities Sora has today demonstrate that continued scaling of video models is a promising path towards the development of capable simulators of the physical and digital world, and the objects, animals and people that live within them… We find that video models exhibit a number of interesting emergent capabilities when trained at scale. These capabilities enable Sora to simulate some aspects of people, animals and environments from the physical world. These properties emerge without any explicit inductive biases for 3D, objects, etc.—they are purely phenomena of scale.

The authors call this “emerging simulation capabilities” meaning that they appear on their own, without any specific training or interventions. And they list several emerging capabilities, including 3D consistency, long-range coherence and object permanence, and accurate physical interactions.

And it gets better. The authors say that its model is already able to create digital worlds.

Sora is also able to simulate artificial processes–one example is video games. Sora can simultaneously control the player in Minecraft with a basic policy while also rendering the world and its dynamics in high fidelity. These capabilities can be elicited zero-shot by prompting Sora with captions mentioning “Minecraft.”

What does this mean for creators?

Generative AI, like other technologies before it, is a force multiplier. If you can do something, you will be able to do more of it, faster, and, possibly, better.

If you can’t do something, it will give you the ability to do it.

For example, most of us can’t chop down a tree with our bare hands. Give us a knife, and it might take us a while, but we’ll eventually get there. With an axe — we’ll get there faster. With a chainsaw, we can chop down lots of trees. With a swing boom feller buncher you can cut down an entire forest.

I’m not saying that cutting down entire forests is a good thing. Or that you’d want a forest-clearing bulldozer accidentally rolling through your backyard. I’m saying that the technology gives you power to do things that you couldn’t do before.

Yes, we need laws and regulations about cutting down forests, and not letting bulldozers accidentally drive into people’s houses. And yes, these machines did reduce the number of people needed to cut down each tree. I’m not disputing that. All I’m saying is that these machines exist. And if you work in the timber industry, there’s a good chance the company you work with will be using them. And if you’re an individual, you’ll probably still be using your bare hands to pull up tiny saplings in your back yard, or gardening shears to trim bushes, or a chainsaw to cut down full-grown trees.

Similarly, generative AI will dramatically expand the tools available to people who create world for a living. You will still be able to do things the old way, if you want, but the companies you work for — and their customers — will increasingly start demanding them. And, if customers right now are saying things like, “no, never!” tomorrow they’ll be flocking to AI-generated landscapes, AI-powered interactive characters, storylines more intricate than anything possible today.

Future Tools tracks 38 different AI-powered tools for creating video games. TopAI has 70.

Google has released a preview of its own thing, an AI called Genie that automatically generates playable platform games.

Here are just some of the generative AI tools that are on their way, or are already here:

• Terrain Generation: AI algorithms can procedurally generate realistic and diverse landscapes, including mountains, rivers, forests, and cities. This can save world builders countless hours of manual terrain sculpting and enable the creation of vast, detailed environments.
• 3D Asset Creation: Generative AI models can create 3D models, textures, and animations for objects, characters, and creatures. This could greatly expedite the process of populating worlds with diverse and unique assets, from furniture and vehicles to flora and fauna.
• NPC Generation: AI can help create non-player characters (NPCs) with unique appearances, personalities, and behaviors. This includes generating realistic dialogue, responsive interactions, and adaptive quest lines. AI-driven NPCs could make worlds feel more alive and immersive. For OpenSim grids, NPCs could provide tours, answer questions, and help populate interactive stories.
• Dynamic World Events: AI systems could be used to generate and manage dynamic events within the world, such as weather patterns, natural disasters, economic fluctuations, and political upheavals. This would create a more unpredictable and evolving world that responds to player actions. This could be especially useful for educational grids running simulations.
• Procedural Architecture: AI could generate buildings, cities, and entire civilizations procedurally, complete with unique architectural styles, layouts, and decorations. This would enable the rapid creation of diverse and detailed urban environments. I think this could also be useful for building automatic themes for new grid owners. Today, many hosting companies offer starting regions. With generative AI, these regions can be redesigned quickly in different styles. At first, I don’t think this should be done in real-time — the environments will still need human tweaking to be livable. But, over time, the AI-generated stuff will be better and will increasingly be used as-is.
• Localization and Accessibility: AI-powered tools could help automate the localization process, translating text, speech, and cultural references to make worlds accessible to a wider audience. AI could also be used to generate subtitles, audio descriptions, and other accessibility features. OpenSim grids have already been using automating translators, for example, with multi-lingual audiences. With generative AI, these tools just keep getting better and faster.

I personally don’t believe that these tools will hurt the video game and virtual world industries. Instead, they will put more power in the hands of designers — making games and worlds more interesting, more immersive, more detailed, more surprising. And bigger. Much, much, much bigger. And it will open up the industry more for indie designers, who’ll be able to produce increasingly more interesting games.

In the long term, at least.

In the short term, there will be disruption. Probably a lot of it. And during these tech disruptions in the past, the jobs lost aren’t the same as the jobs gained — creative jobs, in particular, take time to start paying off.

For example, when newspapers and magazines started laying journalists off after the Internet came along, most journalists found new jobs. Some moved to traditional outlets that were still hiring. Some went into marketing and public relations. A few found new media jobs. And some launched their own publications — they used this Internet thing and launched blogs and podcasts and YouTube channels. A few of them made money at it. But it took years for the new media to gain any respect and credibility and for people working in it to make any money.

In fact, many of the people who made it big in new media were not traditional journalists at all, but new to the field.

Sometimes, people who do things the old way don’t want to change. They don’t think it’s fair that their hard-won skills are no longer as useful. They think that they new ways are lazy or low quality. They might even think that it’s unethical or immoral to do things the new way. That people who, say, cancel their newspaper subscription and get their news online are morally bankrupt and that journalists who enable this are helping to destroy the industry. There are still journalists who feel this way.

We’re probably going to see something similar happening in the age of AI. New tools will pop up putting more power in the hands of more people — power to create art, music, software, video games, even entire books. And you won’t need to spend years learning these skills. Sure, the stuff they create will be bad at first, but will quickly get better as the technology improves, and the skills of people using the tools improve as well. Some of these people will make money at it. Most won’t. But, eventually, best practices will emerge. The sector will gain credibility — money helps. And, eventually, with the exception of a few curmudgeons, we’ll adapt and move on. It will become a non-issue — like, say, using a word processor, or using the Internet, or doing a Zoom call instead of a face-to-face meeting.

Don’t forget that this mix of excitement and apprehension is nothing new. Whenever groundbreaking technologies emerge, they’re met with both enthusiasm and anxiety.

I’m sure there used to be people sitting around a fire saying, “Kids these days. All they want to do is look at cave paintings instead of going out and hunting. Mark my words, these cave paintings will destroy civilization.” Or, “Kids these days. Writing stuff down. In my day, we used to have to memorize odes and sagas. You had to actually use your brain. Mark my words, this writing thing will destroy civilization.” Or, “Kids these days with their fires. Back in my day, we ate our meat raw and were happy about it. Mark my words…”

Yes, there’s a small but non-zero chance that AI will destroy civilization, as was the case with nuclear power, electricity, and even fire.

But I think we’ll get past it, and look back at the curmudgeons fondly, from the safe perspective of a future where we were mostly able to deal with AI’s downsides, and mostly benefit from its upsides.

Things to watch out for

Speaking of downsides, in addition to job losses, there are other potential risks of using generative AI for games and virtual worlds.

They include:

• Homogenization of Worlds: If many world builders rely on the same AI tools and datasets, there’s a risk that worlds could start to feel generic or samey. The distinct style and creative fingerprint of individual artists and designers might be lost, leading to a homogenization of virtual environments. On the other hand, we’re already seeing this in OpenSim with the same free starter regions popping up on all the grids, and the same Creative Commons-licensed content showing up in all the grid freebie stores.
• Unintended Biases: AI models can inherit biases from their training data, which could lead to the perpetuation of stereotypes or the underrepresentation of certain groups in generated content. This could result in virtual worlds that inadvertently reinforce real-world inequalities and lack diverse representation. On the other hand, AI could also help create greater variations in, say, starter avatars and skins. It all depends on how you use it — but is definitely something to watch out for.
• Privacy Issues: In a virtual world, a user’s every interaction with the environment can be recorded and analyzed. Then AI can be used to tailor experiences specifically for each user, creating a more immersive, captivating world. But also — creepy invasion of privacy alert! OpenSim grid owners should be very transparent about what information they collect and how they use it.

OpenSim grids and AI: a plan for action

First, start experimenting with generative AI for the low-hanging fruit: non-vital marketing images, marketing text, social media content, that kind of thing.

Don’t use AI to generate images of what your world looks like in order to deceive people. That will backfire in a big way. Use it to generate logos, icons, generic background illustrations — things that don’t matter to your customers but make your content a little nicer to consume.

Don’t use AI to generate filler text. Use it to turn information into readable content. For example, if you have an announcement, you can take your list of bullet points and turn it into a readable press release.  If you’re a non-native-English speaker, turn your ungrammatical scribbles into an engaging, properly written blog post. If you have a video tutorial, turn the transcript into a how-to article for your website — or turn your how-to article into a video script.

Then use AI to turn those useful, informative blog posts, press releases and videos into social media content.

One piece of advice: when creating this content, don’t be generic and impersonal. Add in your personal experience. Show your real face, give your real name, explain how your personal background has led you to this topic. Even as you use AI to improve the quantity and quality of your content, also lean into your human side to ensure that this content actually connects with your audience.

You can also ask ChatGPT, Claude, or your preferred large language model of choice for business and marketing advice. Remember to give it as much information as possible. Tell it what role you want it to play — experienced financial advisor? small business coach? marketing expert? — and provide it with background on yourself and your company, and tell it to ask you questions to get any additional information it needs before giving your advice. Otherwise, it will just make assumptions based on what’s most likely. As the old saying goes, if you assume, you make… and garbage in, garbage out.

Many OpenSim grids have plenty of room for improvement when it comes to business management, marketing, and community building. The AI can help.

Next, start looking for ways that generative AI can improve your core product. Can it help you write scripts and code? Create 3D objects? Create terrains? Generate interactive games? Suggest community-building activities and events? Create in-world interactive avatars?

These capabilities are changing very quickly. I personally stay on top of these things by following a few YouTube channels. My favorites are Matt Wolfe, The AI Advantage, and Matthew Berman.

If you know of any other good sources for up-to-date generative AI news useful for virtual world owners, please let us know in the comments! And are there any specific AI-powered tools that OpenSim grids are using? Inquiring minds want to know!