Many grids offer regions for $10 a month — or less — and you can get a whole grid for free by running your own

Superlow land prices on commercial grids

If you look at the Hypergrid Business list of OpenSim grids that rent regions, you’ll see that the prices are ridiculously low when compared to Second Life.

A “standard region” — 256 meters by 256 meters, capable of holding up to 15,000 prims — can be had for less than $5 a month, and is perfectly fine if you want a place to do some light building and maybe have a couple of friends over.

More typically, expect to pay around $15 a month. That’s what the largest commercial grid by land area, Kitely, charges. Even OpenSim’s most successful closed commercial grid, Tag Grid, charges just $15 a month for a standard region.

And you typically get much more functionality than you get with a standard Second Life region. Kitely regions, for example, called “worlds” on their website, are two-by-two islands that can hold up to 100,000 prims. On Tag, you can choose the size of your region, either standard size, or a two-by-two, or a four-by-four, at no additional cost.

These kinds of features — more prims, more land, more users — are commonly available throughout the OpenSim grids, sometimes for free, sometimes for a small additional cost.

But you don’t have to settle for land on someone else’s grid. You can have your own.

Get a mini-grid

When I had my own grid, Hyperica, it was a mini-grid, hosted by Dreamland Metaverse.

A mini-grid is an OpenSim grid that fits on a single computer or server. There’s a limit to how big they can get, since all the regions have to fit on that one computer. Mini-grids, technically known as “standalone” grids, are typically four to 16 regions in size, but can get bigger if you have a more powerful computer.

At Dreamland Metaverse, a standalone mini-grid starts at $45 a month.

With a mini-grid, you get your own domain name and hypergrid address, and a stripped down website.

If your hosting provider uses DreamWorld to set up your mini-grid, the website will look something like this:

If your hosting provider uses the Diva Distro version of OpenSim, your home page will be a “wifi” page that looks something like this:

That gives your users the ability to create new accounts and to check grid statistics. Some grids create a nice-looking official home page, then link to the “DreamWorld” or “WiFi” page for the stats and user account functionality.

A mini-grid is a great option for people who want to have a small grid of their own to play on, to hold classes or business meetings, or to hold small events. And you don’t have to deal with any grid politics — as long as you don’t violate any laws, the grid is your own, and you can do on it whatever you want. You decide who gets to be a user, you decide what content is allowed on the grid, and you decide whether to allow hypergrid teleports or turn them off.

But once you start to rent out land, hold a lot of big events, and have more regions than what a single computer can hold, then its time to upgrade to a full grid.

Run your own full-size grid

The difference between a full grid and a mini-grid is that a full grid can be spread over several servers or computers. That means that it can grow almost indefinitely.

You can also put each region on its own server so that if a region goes down, it doesn’t take down any other regions with it. That’s useful if you are renting regions out to people who expect a certain level of stability.

Running your own grid takes quite a bit of technical skill.

So what do you do if you don’t have those technical skills, and don’t want to manage programmers? You use an OpenSim hosting provider.

I already mentioned Dreamland Metaverse. Their prices start at $45 a month for the central grid service, plus $30 each per region. There’s no set up fee, and they’ll have your grid up and running in three days.

Another popular option for commercial grid hosting is DigiWorldz.

The full list of independent OpenSim hosting providers doesn’t include DigiWorldz because they don’t have a webpage up that explains their grid hosting offer. You will need to contact them and negotiate a custom price based on your requirements.

Run your own for free

If you have a spare computer sitting around, and a decent Internet connection, you can run your own OpenSim, for free.

The most popular option is to download the OSgrid OpenSim Installer and you can have as many regions as you want, for free, on OSgrid. Not only does OSgrid let you have regions for free, but they’re also the biggest testing ground of new OpenSim features, so please donate. The donations help cover the costs of the servers they need to handle all the central grid services, such as the map, messages, user inventories, and the asset database.

Metropolis has a similar system, but you have to pay 1.50 Euros a month for the connection.

If you don’t want to be part of any grid, but have your own little grid for fun and friends, then a mini-grid might be the best option. A mini-grid — technically called a standalone — is a grid where all the regions can fit on a single computer. So the more powerful your computer, the bigger your mini-grid. Typically, mini-grids start at four regions, then go up to 16, and then up from there.

Currently, the single best way to set one up is with DreamWorld.

You can do it either on a spare computer, or a server you rent from an online hosting provider.

“I have a 2016 Server with 8 GB and 2 cores somewhere overseas, I forget where, just for testing,” said dreamWorld creator Fred Beckhusen. “It runs about $25 for a grid — 8 regions or so, a couple of gigabytes of prims.”

But most people just get a cheap PC, or use an old PC at home and save the money, he said.

“A used $300 PC from Ebay is more than enough for most,” he said. “Like an I3 or I5 with lots of RAM, and a router that works.  A small SSD is nice — 128 GB is dirt cheap and large enough to run my 100 region grid –) but not really necessary.  I would look for 16 GB of RAM which is a decent amount that will run anything you want.”

Another option is the DivaDistro version of OpenSim, from hypergrid inventor and OpenSim core developer and all-around superhero Crista Lopes.

Finally, there’s a full grid. Most commercial grids are full grids, with centralized grid services such as Robust.

The regions don’t have to all be on the same computer. The central grid server organizes everything so you can have as many regions as you want — just add more computers, or more online servers, and you can grow the grid indefinitely.

A full grid also offers additional management capabilities that a mini-grid doesn’t have, and, if you want, you can let people attach their own, self-hosted regions.

Beckhusen has a version of OpenSim that lets people easily create a full grid. It’s called DreamGrid, and you can download it for free as well.

“As for capabilities, it has more than most grids,” he said. “Unlike major grids, it has a Icecast server, Tides, Partners, Birds, Crash detect, auto restart on Interval, auto backup, auto update, and it takes just one click to set up a working grid, if your router is any good.  One DreamGrid can run many region servers, just like OSgrid or Metropolis,  and many hundreds to thousands of regions.”

It requires more computing capacity than a mini-grid, but Beckhusen is working to change that.

“One day soon, hopefully by year end, there will a DreamGrid update so you can run any size grid you want in just 8 GB, even on a Craptop,” he said.

If you’d rather handle all the technical setup details yourself, you can also download OpenSim from the main OpenSimulator website.

Did you just get a Cardboard-compatible virtual reality headset?

You can tell if you have a mobile headset by the fact that it weighs very little, costs very little, and does not plug in to your computer. Instead, it has a place where you put in your smartphone. Then, if the package does not say “Gear VR” on it, you have a Cardboard-compatible viewer.

Before you do anything else, download the Google Cardboard app from the Google Play store for Android or from the iTunes store for the iPhone.

Configuring your viewer

Now you have to tell your phone what kind of headset you have. This is important, because different lenses distort the picture differently, and the phone has to know the curvature of the lenses, and how far they are from the phone, and so on. To do this, you need a Google Cardboard QR Code.

It looks like a regular QR Code, except that there’s a Cardboard outline in the middle. For example, here’s the Google Cardboard QR Code for the Mattel View-Master:

You might find one printed on the headset itself, in its instructions, or on the box it came in. If you can’t find it, check to see if it’s on our QR Codes page. Keep in mind that some headsets are sold under multiple brand names, so make sure that the picture matches your particular headset. If you still can’t find your QR Code — there are hundreds of manufacturers and I don’t have the codes for all of them — then I recommend that, first, you contact the seller and complain. Then, email me and ask for help, at maria@hypergridbusiness.com. You can also try the QR Codes for other sets until you find one that is close enough, or create your own — it only takes a few minutes.

Okay, you now have a Google Cardboard QR Code.

Now open the Google Cardboard app and click on the three dots in the top right corner of the screen.

That brings up the settings menu.

Click on the first option, “Switch viewer.”

This activates your phone’s camera. Point the camera at a picture of your QR Code. If you use our QR Code page, click on the QR Code first to open up the image, so that it’s the only QR Code on your computer screen.

You should then get a confirmation message.

Where to get VR apps

You can run any of the apps that are recommended in the Google Cardboard app.

There is also a list of VR apps that Google recommends on its featured Cardboard Apps page.

There is also a large catalog of VR apps for both Android and iPhone, as well as other VR platform, at WeArVR.com. They also have ratings and lists of recommended apps in various categories.

AppZoom also offers a complete list of all Google Cardboard applications for Android and iOS, which you can sort by popularity, user rating, price, and other features.

Finally, you can search for the keyword “VR” on either app store.

The most popular app for Cardboard users is YouTube. Here is how to watch YouTube videos in VR.

Just open up the app on your smartphone, and pull up any video.

Take, for example, this  Cirque du Soleil virtual reality video.

Notice the little Cardboard outline at bottom right? It’s circled in the image above.

Hit play and then click on Cardboard icon to switch to VR mode.

Now you should see the side-by-side virtual reality view where you feel in the middle of the action.

Now put the smartphone into your Cardboard-compatible viewer and enter the video.

But what if you want to watch a regular video, one that wasn’t filmed in 360-degrees?

You can still watch it with your headset. It will feel a bit like you’re sitting in an extremely dark movie theater, watching the video on a giant movie screen.

Again, open the video on your smartphone.

Start the video, then click on the three-dot settings button at the top right.

A menu will pop up.

Click on the Cardboard icon.

Now the screen will switch to side-by-side view, and you can put the phone into your headset.

Want to find more 360-degree and VR videos? YouTube has a VR channel.

The OpenSim software comes in two major parts. The viewers allow you to explore OpenSim worlds, while the server software allows you to create your own world.

I want to explore OpenSim worlds

The current recommended viewer for OpenSim is Firestorm.

You will also need to create a user account on an OpenSim grid.

If you are interested in an account on a grid that allows you to travel throughout the metaverse, try Kitely.

Follow the instructions to create a new account and log into Kitely for the first time. To travel to other OpenSim virtual worlds — more than 150 at last count — pull up the Map window (CTRL-M) and past the destination’s hypergrid address into the search field, hit the “Search” button and then press “Teleport.” The Hyperica directory lists hundreds of hypergrid destinations. Also check out the Hypergrid Destinations Google Plus community.

I want to create a small, free virtual world for myself or my friends

If you are looking for a small world — up to 256 virtual acres of land– set up a mini-grid with Sim-on-a-Stick.

This installer sets up the virtual world servers, its associated MySQL database and the Apache Web server. Then use the Firestorm viewer from above to enter your world.

You will be able to use your new avatar to travel to other grids as well, and have residents of other grids visit your world, if your home network is properly configured. More details here.

I want to create a big world where I can rent out land

You will need the full grid version of OpenSim, which you can download from OpenSimulator.org.

The mini-grid version of OpenSim runs all regions and central grid services inside a single server — more exactly, within a single instance of OpenSim. As a result, it can only get as big as that one server can handle.

The full version of OpenSim uses separate servers for the central grid services and for the regions, allowing a grid to scale indefinitely. However, configuration can be tricky. Read the instructions here.

I changed my mind and would rather pay someone to do that for me

OpenSim regions equivalent in size and performance to standard Second Life regions start at just $5 a month (compared to $300 a month on Second Life). With no setup fees. (Compared to the $1,000 setup fee on Second Life.)

If you want someone to run a whole grid for you, prices start at $25 a month for central grid services, and then regular rates would apply for the regions you want to have on the grid.

Renting regions instead of running them at home means that you can have more visitors on a region, and someone else takes care of backups and maintenance. Outsourcing full grid management allows grid owners to focus on creating content, building the community, and marketing their grids instead of dealing with the technology.

Check out the full list of OpenSim hosting providers here. Or just browse through the bargain-priced vendors or the editors’ picks.

Staying on top of metaverse news and developments is hard. And getting help when you need it can be even harder. Fortunately, there are several online communities where OpenSim users share information and advice. Join in, ask away, and help out when you can.

OpenSim Virtual and other communities on Google Plus

OpenSim Virtual has rapidly become the go-to place for discussions about OpenSim, with more than 1,100 members.

Lots of discussions going on here. People post links to useful articles, share content, post event announcements and special offers, and ask for advice.

It’s a friendly, open and welcoming community.

Other useful OpenSim and hypergrid-related Google Plus communities include:

1DerWorld	Hypergrid Roleplay	OpenSim Working Radio Streams
3rd Rock Grid	Hypergrid Safari	Opensimulator
Alexander City	Inworldz	OpenSimulator Community Conference
Arts in Virtual Worlds	Island Oasis	OpenSimulators Gridcache
AuroraSim/WhiteCoreSim	Kitely Virtual	Opinion Outpost
Avatar Repertory Theater	Littlefield Grid	OSgrid.org
Avatar Safe Haven	Lost World Grid	Sanctuary
AviLabs Virtual World	LSL scripting	Second Life and other Virtual Worlds
Avination	Metaverse Tours	Secondlife & Opensim Hypergrid Role Players
AviWorlds Grid	Metaverse Week in Review	Seleaâ€s World
Axis Grid	Metropolis Metaversum	The Adult Metaverse
Baroque Roleplay in Opensim	New Opensim	The Next Reality Grid
Content creators of the virtual worlds	New World Studio	Toy Inc.
Craft World	Open Virtual	UFSGrid
Firestorm on Opensimulator	OpenSim Advertise	Virtual Highway
Francogrid	OpenSim Bloggers	Virtual Identity
Friends of Arcadia Asylum	OpenSim Creations	Virtual Pedagogy
Gamification of Opensim Community Development	OpenSim Destinations For Educators	Virtual Worlds News and Gossip
Hypergrid Destinations	OpenSim Medieval Roleplay	Virtual Worlds Stats
Hypergrid Directory	Opensim Resources	VirtualmintaKa
Hypergrid Entrerpeneur Group	OpenSim Vehicles
Hypergrid Events	OpenSim Virtual

You can also follow the Google Plus Hypergrid Business page.

Community websites

A few sites have come and gone, trying to become the central meeting place for OpenSim users.

Avatar Social Network has become a popular place last year, with a big marketing push. SL Universe is an online discussion board that occasionally goes beyond Second Life issues to OpenSim. Similar online social networks include  Second Friends, SLX Connect, Moolto,  SL Space, and 2ndhub.

For content sharing, OpenSim Creations used to be the number one destination, with a wide variety of content, a large number of contributors, and an instant chat function, but closed down a couple of months ago due to technical difficulties.

OpenSim City is still active, with a forum, a place to share content, personal blogs, and a multi-grid events calendar.

And other social media platforms are used by avatars as well, including Flickr, Pinterest, Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn.

Grid forums

Many of the larger grids, both commercial and non-profit, have forums or discussion boards on their websites. These forums are often excellent resources for events, content, and advice.

The OSgrid forums are the most comprehensive, and a great resource for any OpenSim user, including those on other grids and running private grids and regions. It’s very active, with event announcements, technical discussions, building and scripting help, tutorials, viewers, and more.

Other grids with active forums include InWorldz, Kitely, Avination, Metropolis, Littlefield, FrancoGrid, GermanGrid, Virtual Highway, and Dorena’s World’s GridTalk.

Mailing lists, Twitter and IRC groups

OpenSim Users is a great mailing list to subscribe to, and very active, with 357 members. You can sign up for the list here.

And, for educators, the SLED mailing list is a must, and people discuss both Second Life and OpenSim. You can sign up for SLED here. A more OpenSim-focused list is the Opensim Educators Mailing List, with 26 members. You can sign up for it here.

And when I first tried to set up my own mini-grid, the IRC chat rooms wesere a great, fast place to find help — if people are around. You might need to check in a few times, however, to find a time when there are people on who can help. The OpenSim IRC channel is here. The OSgrid IRC channel is here.

Many grids and individual OpenSim users also have Twitter accounts — too many to list them all! However, for your convenience, you can check out my Virtual Worlds Twitter list which follows 453 people and companies. You can follow individual accounts on this list, or just follow the entire list — it currently has 104 subscribers. A slightly more narrowly-focused list, of just OpenSim grid accounts, is my OpenSim Grids Twitter list, which covers 77 grids and has 15 subscribers.

Facebook groups

There are several large groups on Facebook where people discuss virtual environments and related issues.

Singularity Network, with 10,247 members, is a closed group that you have to ask to join.

Virtual Worlds, with 5,126 members, is an open group, that covers Second Life and beyond. Virtual Worlds Association covers Second Life, OpenSim and the hypergrid, with 824 members. And there’s another group also called Virtual Worlds, with 444 members.

More OpenSim-specific, there’s New OpenSim, with 593 members, Open Simulator, with 185 members, Opensim Standalone & Co., with 162 members, and OpenSim News is also pretty active, with several recent announcements and 125 members.

Other groups include Virtual Worlds – Best Practices in Education, with 1,525 members, Virtual Worlds Education Roundtable, with 1,081 members, Immersive Worlds Plus, with 1,280 members, and Virtual Reality, with 482 members, which seems to have started out as just a group for Virtual Reality Grid members but has grown to encompass a wider array of people. There’s also Immersive World Education Outreach, with 468 members, Virtual World Educators, with 310 members, and Federal Virtual Worlds Challenge, with 114 members,

Facebook is also a popular place for grids to post news and event announcements, since more people check their Facebook feed than visit a grid’s home page.

Grids either have groups with members or pages that people can like — including InWorldz Creators & Builders, with 1,840 members, Avination, with 450 members, Another World, with 389 likes, Logicamp, with 367 likes, Kitely, with 252 likes, Everything about InWorldz, with 215 members, Craft Grid, with 182 members, OSGrid, with 166 members, InWorldz.com, with 164 members, the Unofficial InWorldz Advertising Group, with 151 members, Island Oasis LLC, with 136 likes, 3rd Rock Grid, with 109 members, VIBE, with 92 members, AviWorlds - Brasil, with 91 members, GermanGrid, with 90 members, Metropolis Opensimgrid, with 65 likes, FrancoGrid, with 61 members, Virtual Worlds Grid, with 50 members, Avination Live Music, with 33 members, and Littlefield Grid, with 16 likes.

LinkedIn groups

For the more professionally inclined, LinkedIn also offers some resources and professional networking opportunities for OpenSim users.

You should also check out the LinkedIn pages for Virtual Worlds, with 4,134 members, Virtual World Professional Networkers, with 1,595 members, Virtual Worlds Roadmap, with 915 members, Virtual Currency, with 872 members, Serious Games and Virtual Worlds, with 802 members, 3D Serious Games and Simulations For Training, with 730 members, OpenSimulator, with 506 members, the OpenMetaverse Foundation, with 147 members, Kitely, with 42 followers, the MOSES grid, with 68 members, and OpenSIM – Virtual Worlds, with 9 members.

There’s also the Hypergrid Business LinkedIn page, with 177 followers.

Are any communities missing? Please add them in the comments!

Start with the following list of vendors, all of which have a successful history of serving enterprise customers.

Browser-based platforms

Running a virtual world in a browser does impose some limitations on the environment. But, on the other hand, your users don’t have to install and learn complex virtual world viewer software. They will have to install Java, Unity, or another plugin, however. HTML 5-based viewers are on their way, but not yet ready for prime time.

Some of these environments will even run on a mobile device — this changes rapidly, so check with the vendor.

• Venuegen: Easiest to gets started with, but has the fewest customization options.
• AvayaLive Engage: Biggest vendor in this category. Full set of customization features, including uploads of custom mesh environments.
• 3Dxplorer: Uses Java, so no plugin required if users already have Java installed.
• ReactionGrid’s Jibe : Strong experience with the education market, requires Unity plugin.
• Second Places’ Unifier: Also strong in the educational market, requires Unity plugin.
• TPLD’s Host A Virtual Event: A Unity-based virtual meetings and events platform, used by The Kiski Virtual School for Boys.

Browser-based virtual environments are great for quick meetings, sales training, facility tours, and marketing games and simulations.

These environments are hosted by the vendors, and pricing typically starts at around $50 per month and increases with the number of users.

Traditional proprietary platforms

In the old days, companies had to download and install server software, hire 3D modelers and simulation designers to create the environments, and install special viewer software so that users could access the worlds.

For some vendors, those days are still here.

The benefit of doing it this way is that you get maximum security, since everything is behind the enterprise firewall. You also get a battle-tested, solid environment and the most robust feature sets.

• Protosphere: Best known for life sciences simulations.
• VastPark: Popular with government customers. Open source version of VastPark is also available.
• SAIC’s Olive: Popular with the defense industry. 
• 3D ICC’s Terf: Built on top of the open source Open Qwaq platform, which was formerly Teleplace. Newest vendor in this space.
• vAcademia: Created by a Russian company specifically to serve educators. Includes ability to record 3D events and play them back.

These environments are well suited to high-end corporate training programs, disaster simulations, and 3D modeling, but require professional developers with expertise in 3D graphics, animation, training, and scripting. Expect deployment costs in the five to six figures.

OpenSim enterprise vendors

There are other open source immersive environment platforms — we mentioned Open Qwaq and VastPark above, and there is also Open Wonderland, Open Cobalt, and Sirikata.

OpenSim stands apart, however, by the fact that it is already used in hundreds of virtual worlds — both private and public — and is supported by dozens of different vendors offering hosting, consulting, and design and development. In addition, because it uses viewers compatible with Second Life, there are already millions of people familiar with the user interface and the in-world building tools. OpenSim also has a vast array of low-cost or free pre-made content available for organizations setting up new grids.

• Dreamland Metaverse:  Hosts hundreds of private grids for companies and educational institutions. Run by an OpenSim core developer. Reputation for excellent customer service, easy Web-based management tools, 
• SimHost: Founded by an OpenSim core developer. Partner runs OSgrid, the largest OpenSim-based grid and main testing platform for OpenSim development. Vendor is known for customer service and custom development.
• 3D Hosting: Offers private grid hosting, with support in English and German. Founder is an OpenSim core developer. Best known for managing the Avination grid.
• Virtyou: Offers private grid hosting, with support in English and German.
• Talent Raspel: Offers private grid hosting, with support in English and German.
• Kitely: Kitely is actually a single large OpenSim grid, but the easy-to-use management and access tools make it popular with enterprises and educators. Kitely is also unique in that it uses the Amazon cloud to run its regions, and puts them to sleep when they’re not used, allowing the company to offer extremely high capacity regions for extremely low prices.
• Zetamex: The newest vendor on this list, offering private grids on both shared and dedicated servers.

Also see our full list of OpenSim hosting vendors, including those offering land on commercial social grids.

With the exception of Kitely, all these vendors offer private, managed OpenSim grids, and also provide support for behind-the-firewall OpenSim deployments.

Virtual currencies also carry significant risks, both for grid owners and residents. The least risky are the purely fictional currencies.

Closed loop currencies — which are non-redeemable — have regulatory, tax and fraud implications. And redeemable open loop currencies are even more complicated from a legal perspective.

Fictional currencies

If you’ve ever played a single-player video game or a family board game, you’ve come across fully fictional currencies. These are the gold coins you earn by slaying monsters or by collecting rent from other players who land on your properties. These currencies have no value outside the game and can’t be bought or sold.

Well, you can go to a store and buy Monopoly money refills, poker chips, and play coins for your toy lemonade stand, but nobody is going to confuse this for real money.

Advantages:

• There’s no limit on how much of this money your players can have. They can be virtual billionaires in the game or trillionaires — it doesn’t matter.
• There are no legal implications to fully fictional currencies. The issuer doesn’t need a banking license, there’s no risk of fraud or money laundering, no chance of embezzlement.
• If the players lose all their money, they can’t complain. If, say, another player or character in the game steals all their money, or their character dies, they’re not going to sue the game company to get their money back.

Closed loop currencies

If you’ve been playing Farmville lately or many other smartphone or Facebook games, you might have noticed a trend — the game companies try to sell you their virtual currencies so you can advance in the game faster.

Many games, in fact, have both fictional currencies and closed loop currencies in the same game. When you play FarmVille, for example, the FarmVille Coins are fictional — you can only get them by planting and harvesting crops and doing other in-game tasks. FarmVille Bucks, on the other hand, can be bought for real money.

Closed loop currencies fall under the most of the same regulations as closed loop payment cards — these are the prepaid cards you get from, say, your favorite restaurant or retail chain that can only be redeemed at that chain.

In fact, a lot of things are, in effect, closed loop virtual currencies, such as video arcade tokens, airline miles and prepaid phone minutes.

Closed loop currencies are not redeemable. Like those prepaid cards, you must spend them at the company that issued them. Some people do sell those cards on eBay, however, and this is similar to the way that Second Life’s Linden Dollars are traded between players on exchanges.

Advantages:

• The company issuing the currency gets to sell it to its users for real money — and then keep the money. Since players can only spend the money in-world and can’t redeem it, currency sales are pure profit.
• By putting real money on the line, players can get much more deeply invested in a game.
• If players can trade with one another, a secondary market for the currency can allow some players to actually make money from playing a game, which can provide additional motivation to become deeper engaged, or to create in-world content and activities. This is, in fact, what happens in Second Life.

Open loop currencies

An open loop currency can be used in multiple locations, and can be redeemed for cash.

The OMC currency from Virwox, for example, can currently be used on more than 30 different OpenSim grids, and can also be redeemed for cash or traded for other virtual currencies, including the Linden Dollar.

Advantages:

• If your grid is issuing its own redeemable, open loop currency, then the grid owners get to collect money from residents in return for currency purchases, and collect interest on the money until the currency is redeemed.
• If your grid is using a third-party currency like the OMC from Virwox, then Virwox is responsible for all legal issues, redemptions, taxes, and regulatory compliance. In addition, if your grid closes, or players lose their accounts, they can still cash out their currency holdings from Virwox, or spend them on other grids.
• By putting real money on the line, players can get much more deeply invested in a game.
• As with currencies that can be sold to other players, users can make real money from their in-world activities.

One of the common complaints people and organizations have about OpenSim is that if they set up a private grid, they’ll have to create all the content from scratch. Employees will have to create their own hair, fashionistas will have to make their own shoes, teachers will have to create their own blackboards, and presenters will have to build their own PowerPoint projectors.  That was, in fact, the case a few years ago, when OpenSim was still new. But times have changed. Today, schools and companies can transfer content from Second Life, buy it online, or go shopping on other grids and bring stuff back to their own grid via hypergrid teleport. Or they can get entire regions — also known as OAR files — and upload them to their grids.

For more resource lists, check out Isis Ophelia’s OpenSim Free Resources.

Online shopping

Several Websites are now offering content for OpenSim grids — some of it free.

Kitely Market

The largest and most technologically advanced online marketplace for OpenSim content, with instant delivery to all hypergrid-enabled worlds and several closed OpenSim grids.

Payment either via PayPal or through Kitely Credits. Thousands of items in a well organized category tree, with the ability to filter by color, theme, maturity, payment options, permission settings, special occasion and more. Includes customer reviews, private and public wish lists, featured products, and sales. Demos available for many items.

Excellent reputation for customer support. Fast account creation via Facebook or Twitter login, or through email registration.

Grids that are not hypergrid-enabled can follow these instructions to change their configuration files to allow Kitely Market deliveries.

The full collection of all the Linda Kellie content — full regions in the form of OAR files, inventory folders in the form of IAR files, and individual content items in the form of XML files. The XML files are ready to be uploaded item by item with the Imprudence viewer to any grid, including closed commercial grids and to Second Life. There’s a great starting collection of free skins, hair and textures. All items are her original creations and licensed with the right to copy and distribute the work, to modify it, and even to resell it, no attribution required (except where noted). This is the best site to find starting content for business and commercial grids, or to use as the basis of your own creations for commercial resale, not just because it’s all free, but because of the simple and clear license terms. There are also sculptmaps, clothing kits, buildings, and a very wide variety of animations.

Outworldz Content Collection

More than 2,000 different free items — OAR region backup files, IAR inventory files, sculpts, meshes, and more. All distributed under the Creative Commons license.

Also check out their collection of thousands of free, seamless textures, also Creative Commons licensed. And this page of free animations, building tools and avatar and skin templates. The second page of free tools includes open source breedables scripts, and a lot more scripting and animating tools.

Finally, the site is home to Ferd Frederix’ entire free script library. The site is sponsored by the Outworldz grid.

Ener Hax OpenSim Freebies

A collection of free items by educational designer Ener Hax, best known for her I Live in Science Land blog. She is also known for the Sim-on-a-Stick distribution of OpenSim, a pre-configured, easy to set up version of OpenSim that can run on a USB stick. The site includes some OAR files, a collection of vehicles, and miscellaneous odds and ends. The content is distributed under the user-friendly “Full Enerific” license, which allows for any use, including commercial, with no need for attribution. All content is original creations, with no third-party components.

KatiJack Studio

KatiJack Studio is a virtual design firm specializing in landscaping and building. The company has a website up to share some of their creations.

Currently, the site offers a selection of free terrains in the form of OAR files, and some texture sets. All items on the site are distributed under a Creative Commons license, and are free to modify and customize.

Free sources for regions

Prebuilt OpenSim regions are called OARs, which stands for OpenSim Archive. It’s a backup file which includes the region terrain and all the objects, textures and scripts that are located on that region. OAR files are a great way to get a large amount of content up to your grid all at once. Many make great ready-to-go welcome regions or classroom settings. Similarly, an IAR is a complete inventory archive, a backup which includes all the objects, shapes, textures, scripts and other content in an avatar inventory.

Free OAR files:

• Zadaroo page of Linda Kellie OARS — Start your search for OARs here. Very large selection of starting regions (more than twenty at current count), including excellent freebie stores with all-original content licensed as free to use in any way, for any purpose, including commercial. Clothing, hair, furniture, buildings, textures, animations, landscaping, scripts, and scupts and templates of all kinds — everything you need to get a new grid going. Can be used to jump-start both private and commercial worlds. Individual items also available as XML files, for Imprudence uploads to any closed grid including Second Life. Content also available from freebie stores on most popular grids. Amazing resource, a must-see site for anyone considering OpenSim.
• Italian OpenSim Portal — A collection of rustic city, village and island-themed regions, distributed under the GPL open source license.
• US Army’s Military Metaverse — A collection of regions created for U.S. Army training programs and other federal agencies, distributed under a Creative Commons license.
• KatiJack Studio — Collection of free starting island regions.
• Outworldz OAR collection — Copies of the Linda Kellie OARS, in case Zadaroo is down, as well as a handful of OARs by other designers, all Creative Commons licensed.
• Some more OAR files:

Free Mars simulator from Greenbush Labs’ Rich White. It is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. Download Mars OAR.	Maya Pyramid build by Dave Pentecost. Includes large houses with courtyards, small thatched palapas, and a model of the Temple of the Inscriptions Maya pyramid from Palenque, Mexico. Download Maya Pyramid OAR here.
Condensation Land Club build by Zonja Capalini, includes the club building, trees, plants and torches. Distributed by Nebadon2025. Download Condensation Land Club OAR.	EducaSim by Odomia’s Jean-Marie Louche, distributed free for non-commercial use. Includes classroom, video room, marked tutorial trail and an info house. Textures are not included.Download EducaSim OAR here.
Nice starting collection of avatars, shapes, hair, and clothing from ReactionGrid’s Chris Hart, available under a Creative Commons license. Download ReactionGrid OAR here.	A Klein bottle generator, and a Klein bottle by Zonja Capalini, distributed by Nebadon2025. Download Klein Bottle OAR here.Â
OpenVCE, a group of conference buildings and associated materials from design firm Clever Zebra. Distributed under the GNU Lesser General Public License. Download OpenVCE OAR here.	Nu Athens city build by Lordfly Digeridoo. Licensed as Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0. Distributed by Rexxed.com. Download Nu Athens OAR here.Â
BioZone educational build by Peter Miller, distributed under a Creative Commons license. Download BioZone OAR here.	Gone City by 3D artist Ruben Haan is a floating city in the sky. Garry Beaumont updated the OAR to add some missing floors, walls, and railings. Download original Gone City OAR here. Download updated Gone City OAR here.Â
An educational game spanning several regions, designed to teach Philippine history. By Roel Cantada, distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. Download Philippine History OARs here.	Universal Campus on a four-region island, by Michael Cerquoni (Nebadon Izumi), distributed under the CC-BY-SA license. Includes meeting rooms, laboratories, avatars, and more. Download Universal Campus OARs here. More OARs available here.
A strange little green region by ff rustigaan. Check out the giant circular racetrack. All sim content distributed full-perm. Download GreenSim OAR here.	Kliederaar is a surreal build by the free culture artist Ruben Haan. Distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license. Download Kliederaar OAR here.
A 1,390-prim Basilica build with bell tower by Roel Cantada, distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. Download PrimBasilica OAR here.	Multi-region scripted plane and train game from Tokyo University of Information Sciences. Train station by Roel Cantada, distributed under a CC BY_SA License. Download Plane&Train OAR here.
The Undersea Observatory is a lab located at the bottom of the ocean, complete with observation rooms, a classroom, and student-created exhibits about marine life. Download Undersea Observatory OAR here.	The first OAR file from educational content designer Ener Hax, the Haxor Outpost 78-369. Distributed under the “Full Enerific” license which allows any use, including commercial. Download the Haxor Outpost OAR and other content here.	Â
The Medieval Village OAR file by Avia Bonne is free for personal and non-commercial use. Much of the content is mesh. The download page also includes other free terrains and OARs by Minethere Always. Download the Medieval Village OAR here.	The Tomb Raider OAR file by Avia Bonne is free for personal and non-commercial use. Much of the content is mesh. The download page also includes other free terrains and OARs by Minethere Always. Download the Tomb Raider OAR here.	Â

Free inventory files

A popular method of uploading dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of items to a grid at once is through the use of IAR inventory files. Be very careful about accepting IARs since different items may have different license terms and restrictions.

• Zadaroo page of Linda Kellie IARs — Much of the same content as her OAR files, but in easy-to-upload inventory form. Everything is original content, licensed for any use on any grid for any purpose, including commercial.
• Nebadon’s OpenSimulator Archives
• Diva Distro’s Object Library — Not recommended for use in public or commercial projects due to a lack of clear provenance or license terms.
• MyOpenSim IAR files download page — Just a couple of items, including a hypergate and a small store front.

Terrain files

Linda Kellie has made some terrains available as well. You can turn them into megaregion terrains by opening them up in a photo editing program like Photoshop or GIMP, resizing the file, then cutting it up into pieces. For example, if you want to turn a single region terrain into a terrain for a 16-region Kitely megaregion, resize the original terrain by 400 percent, then cut it into a four-by-four grid and save each square separately. The way I did it was by rotating and cropping, but there might be another way to do it to make sure it all comes out even. Otherwise, you might have to do some in-world smoothing at the edges.

MB Estates has hundreds of free terrains in RAW format, both for individual regions and megaregions or varregions up to 100 regions in size. The terrains are also available in-world on the Metropolis grid. Teleport via hypergrid to hypergrid.org:8002:terrains.

KatiJack Studio also has more than a dozen different single-region terrains for free download. These are in the form of OAR files, however, so you’ll have to import them into, say, a local copy of OpenSim (Sim-on-a-Stick or New World Studio are super easy to use on a local computer) and import the OARs, then save the terrain using the region-estate tools menu and the “download RAW terrain” option. Then you can edit the terrain in an image processing file, stretch it out and edit if needed, and import it back again.

Minethere Always has a nice selection of terrains on this Payloadz page.

Free Scripts

Almost all Second Life scripts work as-is in OpenSim, though there are some vehicle physics commands that haven’t been implemented yet. In addition, OpenSim has added some new commands, called OSSL functions. Start with Ferd Frederix’ free script library on Outworldz. You can also find some great scripts on the OSgrid forum script page. For more resources, visit our Free Scripts resources page.

Other content sources

Meshes Can be imported into any OpenSim grid running a recent version of OpenSim.

• TurboSquid: The Internet’s leading marketplace for high-end 3D content in a variety of formats. Check license terms carefully, as use on open-upload virtual worlds many be prohibited.
• CGTrader: The royalty-free models can be uploaded freely, spokesman Vaidotas Silgalis tells Hypergrid Business. For premium models, ask creators for permission before uploading to OpenSim or Second Life.
• Renderosity: A large marketplace for low-cost 3D objects and some photographs, mostly in the Poser format. Read more about exporting from Poser to Second Life here (same principles apply for export to OpenSim). Site has a collection of free objects, as well.
• Google 3D Warehouse: Big collection of buildings and other 3D objects that you may “modify, distribute, and create derivative works of,” according to the license terms. Objects are in the OpenSim-friendly Collada format.
• Advanced Distributed Learning 3D Depository: Run by the Department of Defense. Includes both military-specific items like airplanes and tanks and general-use objects like furniture.
• MakeHuman: Free downloable software for creating avatars.
• Blend Swap: Large collection of 3D objects distributed under Creative Commons licenses.
• ShareCG 3D Models: license terms vary by file
• OpenGame Art 3D Art: license terms vary by file
• Smithsonian X 3D: Collection from the Smithsonian Institution, licensed only for personal, educational and non-commercial use

In-world shopping

Even if your grid is a collection of empty islands, you can still log in and go shopping — if you’re hypergrid enabled. Most OpenSim hosting companies will hypergrid-enable your grid if asked, or hypergrid-enable individual regions. If you’re running the grid yourself, on your own servers, the Diva Distro comes pre-configured with hypergrid. Read more about hypergrid configuration here. There are downsides to being on the hypergrid, however. If your grid is behind a corporate firewall, you will have to punch holes in that firewall so avatars can fly in and out. You do this by opening ports, which many corporate IT departments are hesitant to do. If you plan to do a lot of hypergrid traveling, consider hosting your grid with an outside provider. A list of OpenSim hosting companies is here, and prices start at around $25 a month for a standard region. Another downside to hypergrid is that if you can get out, other people can get in. If your grid contains sensitive information, you may want to set up access controls on individual regions and set aside a public area for visitors to come and learn about your company and school. Here’s a list of places you can go for shopping.  Samsara and Snoopies on OSGrid have been around the longest, with a great collection of free furniture, landscaping supplies, clothing and avatar accessories — but OSgrid is currently down.

Transferring from Second Life

If you have content in Second Life that you created yourself — including all the constituent pieces of every object — you can use a paid product like Second Inventory or free tools like the Imprudence, Meerkat and Hippo viewers. Videos for how to use the Meerkat and Hippo viewers to do this are here and here (the process is similar for both viewers).

The most popular viewer for this, however, is Imprudence — and all the individual objects available on LindaKellie.com and OpenSim Creations were exported using Imprudence. Instructions for how to export content with Imprudence are here. Watch a video about it here. The Emerald Viewer also allows exports of items, not only those that you have created, but also those for which you have full permissions. Instructions for how to do this are here.

If you have content in Second Life that was bought from third-party designers, you will need to contact those designers and get permission to move the objects to your OpenSim grid. You may need to pay extra for the additional license, and you will also need to ask the designer to provide you with export files or deliver the objects to your private grid. In addition, if the objects include scripts, you may need to ask them to check that the scripts will work in OpenSim — there are some minor differences in the way scripts work in the two platforms, and some tweaking may be required.

By default, unless the creator specifically tells you otherwise, all content available on a particular grid is licensed for use on that grid only. And yes, that includes freebies and full-perm items.

Copyright issues

To avoid potential copyright infringement problems, do not accept free items from strangers — or from well-meaning acquaintances. It is possible in OpenSim to force owner permissions and perms for items on your own grid if you have administrator access. This is useful if you are the grid administrator for a corporate or school grid — you need to be able to move items around, modify them, or delete them whether you are the one who initially created them, or whether other company employees did. Once an item has been modified, the owner can easily forget what the original permission settings were, and start giving the item out to others. That opens up your organization to potential legal liability, so get your items from official distribution channels — established freebie stores or retail outlets.

Today, most grid owners in OpenSim are aware of copyright issues, and the large public grids have policies in place to enforce creator rights. As a result, content owners have recourse if their items turn up in freebie stores without their permission. You will need to be careful, however, not to change the permission settings on the items you obtain. For example, if an item is set to “No Transfer,” and multiple employees need to have the same item, then the employees should get or buy their own copies of the object from the original store. There is a reason for this. Some content designers use freebies in order to attract traffic to their stores. Others may make certain items available for free only for a certain time period. In addition, a copyright violation may have been filed on the item, and it’s been taken off the shelves.

If you absolutely must have additional permissions for an item, contact the designer directly. You may need to pay an additional fee to have a site license that allows you to distribute the item to all employees on your private grid. You may also be asked to pay an additional fee if you want modification rights to an object — for example, to change its colors to match your branding, or to add a corporate logo.

Finally, it should go without saying that if you plan to sell or distribute an item you must get permission, in writing, from the original copyright holders for every object and its scripts and textures. In Second Life, the Linden Lab user agreement covers these issues, and you don’t need to have written agreements from every content producer. Outside Second Life, however, you don’t have that safety net.

Insist on a copyright assignment contract that spells out exactly what you can and cannot do with the content, signed by the legal copyright owner. Remember that an agreement signed by an avatar is not enough — even if the avatar has been trademarked or incorporated. If you were making a deal with McDonald’s, for example, you would not accept a contract signed by Ronald McDonald, but only by a legally empowered representative of the McDonald’s Corporation. Most companies already have such agreements in place for other content creators, such as Website designers, outside writers and editors, photographers, freelance programmers, and other third-party creative types. Here are some typical items you may wish to include in a contract:

• Work for hire: In a “work for hire” agreement in the United States, U.K. and a few other countries, all the rights of the work belong to the customer, as if the customers had created the work themselves. For example, when employees work on a project, all rights to the project belong to the employer. Many organizations now routinely require “work for hire” contracts from their freelancers and outside contractors so that the results of the work can be reused or adapted as needed, without having to go back to the original creator to purchase these additional rights. Companies may sometimes pay extra for a “work for hire” agreement. In a “work for hire” agreement, the original author never has copyright ownership of the work. Companies can use, modify, distribute or resell the work as they see fit.
  

  Sample text: CONTENT PROVIDER agrees that all work produced under the terms of this agreement is a “work for hire” in all jurisdictions where this provision is allowed by copyright law.

• All rights: If you’re dealing with international contracts in jurisdictions where a “work for hire” clause may not be enforceable, add an “all rights” provision to your contract. Companies can use, modify, distribute or resell the work as they see fit.
  

  Sample text: In all other jurisdictions, CONTENT PROVIDER agrees to assign all rights to the work produced under the terms of this agreement to COMPANY.

• Individual rights: If the content provider is not willing to sign over all rights, you may be able to negotiate individual, limited rights. The possibilities here are unlimited, but the basic rights are the following:
  

  Site license: This allows the content to be used on multiple grids and computers, and by multiple employees as long as its under the control of the company. The license may include limitations on the total number of grids, employees, or total copies of the object. The content may include embedded code that reports back how an object is used, and where it is being used, and the buyer may have to agree not to modify this code. Grid license: This allows the content to be used throughout a single grid — for example, a private company grid or school grid. The license may include a limitation on the total number of copies, or the total number of users.  The content may include embedded code that reports back how an object is used, and where it is being used, and the buyer may have to agree not to modify this code. Individual user license: This allows the content to be used by a single user, but in multiple locations. The license can be further limited to include a single grid. The Second Life “no transfer” permission setting, is, in effect, a single user license that allows the object to be used only on the Second Life grid. Modify license: Content creators have the right to specify that their work be used as is, with no modifications, or they may choose to allow the buyer to modify the content. Credit rights: Original creators of content may stipulate that their name or corporate brand be preserved somewhere in the object, either in the name, description, or in an attached notecard, or they may give up the right to be credited for their work.

• Rights to constituent parts: In any contract that you send out for signature, insist that the content creators confirm that they have the rights to all the underlying materials used in the production of their content, such as textures, scripts, sculpies, and other items that go into making an object. This is not something you should be willing to negotiate away. In addition, if you have suspicions that the content provider may not be acting in good faith, you can ask to see their rights contract with the creators of the textures and scripts that they use in their objects, contact information for these original content creators, or sourcing information for all items in the public domain. If the content provider is reliable and responsible, they should have no problem coming up with the required documentation since they keep everything in an organized way for their own records, in case a problem should arise. If they aren’t able to come up with this documentation in a prompt and complete manner, it can be a warning flag that the content is in violation of copyright law. Some content creators may complain that they can’t track down the original owners of the content, and that re-creating the textures or scripts from scratch would take too much work, but that they “know” it’s okay to use the content. Unfortunately, memories are fallible and you might wind up with infringing content embedded in objects throughout your corporate grid, as future employees and designers build upon these works. Even if your grid is not open to the public, and the likelihood of theft being discovered is low, it would be highly embarrassing — and expensive — if a future visitor to your grid discovers infringing content embedded through your builds.
  

  Sample text: CONTENT PROVIDER affirms that the use of the CONTENT will not violate the rights of any third party. CONTENT PROVIDER shall indemnify the COMPANY, its successors, assigns and licensees, and the respective officers, directors, agents and employees, from and against any and all claims, damages, liabilities, costs and expenses — including reasonable legal fees — arising out of any claim that the CONTENT infringes the rights of any third party.

Staff oversight

Outside contractors aren’t the only ones who might be tempted to cut corners — and save time and money — by using content of uncertain legal provenance. Make sure that your company’s internal policies require employees to respect copyrights, not only for software, images, and written work but for virtual content as well. And enforce these policies. If violations are ignored while content thieves are rewarded for saving costs, this will create a culture of content piracy in a company or school that will be hard to weed out later, and could set up your organization for legal problems down the line. A few things to remember:

• Open source does not equal free. Open source means that you are able to look a the source code of software. Some open source software is free. OpenSim is free to download, for example. But individual custom distributions of OpenSim — such as debugged and stabilized versions, or versions modified to work with corporate back-end systems — can cost money. The Diva Distro is free. But IBM’s Lotus Sametime 3D version of OpenSim costs $50,000.
• Free does not equal open source. Free means you don’t have to pay any money — not that you can open something up and look inside. For example, Microsoft distributes free trial versions of software with Windows. That doesn’t mean you can hack into that software and see how it works. Similarly, an item from a freebie store may allow you to modify the item, or it may restrict modification rights. Just because it’s free, doesn’t mean you can hack it and modify it.
• If you are technically capable of doing something, that doesn’t mean you’re allowed to do it. Yes, you can give yourself administrator rights and strip protections from items. But that doesn’t mean you have the right to do it. Similarly, if you buy content from a provider with a restricted grid license, the permission setting on an item may allow you to take it off-grid — there is currently no way to flag items as only for a single grid. If the copyright agreement is grid-specific, the agreement wins out. In another example, if you have a region on an OpenSim, you are technically able to save a copy of the entire region and distribute it to anyone else, but you don’t have the legal right to do this unless you have the distribution rights for all the objects in that region.
• If the technology is more restrictive than the copyright agreement, you can change the technology — but only on your own grid. For example, if your employees create content on your grid under “work for hire” laws, your company owns all the rights to these objects, but the “creator” settings will show the names of the individual employees. You have the right, under copyright law, to go into the asset database for your grid and change these creator names to the company name, or perform any other modifications on these objects that the company requires. However, if these objects reside on a third party grid, such as Second Life, then the agreements you have with these grid owners may supersede your copyright agreements with the content creators. Some grids may allow you to reassign ownership rights on objects, if you have the copyright agreements in place, but that would require individual negotiations with the grid management.
• Just because it’s on the Internet, doesn’t mean it’s free. This should go without saying, But sometimes people forget, and think that they can copy content to use, say, in a presentation or an internal document. There are limits to fair use. Just because you can copy-and-paste a graphic or text from the Web, doesn’t mean you have the right to use it to create a virtual object on your grid. Check to see what licenses are being offered, if any. Fortunately, the Internet is full of places to get royalty-free or low-cost images and other content to use in your builds, if price is a factor.

Finally, a disclaimer: the above information is for general information only, and is not intended as a substitute for professional legal advice.

Enterprises rolling out new OpenSim grids are often concerned about security issues of running OpenSim, and justifiably so. OpenSim is alpha software and still poses some security challenges. However, the security level of a particular OpenSim deployment depends quite a bit on how it is configured.

Here are the most common options, ranked in order from most to least secure.

PRIVATE WORLD ON A PC

The most secure configuration of OpenSim is running the entire world on a single computer. If the computer is not connected to a network, then outsiders won’t be able to access the grid — unless they break in and steal the computer itself.

How to do it

• The Diva Distro is the easiest deployment, with a four-region border regions — a total of 64 virtual acres, with no border crossings. It’s a free download, and there’s an upgrade utility for when a new version of OpenSim comes out.
• For the more technically inclined, there’s the standard OpenSimulator.org distribution. Expect to edit configuration files, and upgrades need to be handled manually.
• For those looking for a plug-and-play solution, the ReactionGrid Harmony distribution starts at $875. Upgrades are included in the price, and ReactionGrid has a good reputation for customer service. You can see ReactionGrid’s customer list here. However, ReactionGrid tends to use older versions of OpenSim, stabilized, hardened, and adapted for enterprise use. While stable, these versions may lack the features and benefits of more recent releases, such as better hypergrid security, media-on-a-prim, and mesh support.

Why do it

• Virtual world designers, builders, machinimators and other creative professionals may appreciate having a personal, off-line sandbox for development work. Finished regions can later be saved as OAR files and uploaded to a live grid. In addition, individual objects can be saved and uploaded to other OpenSim-based grids or SecondLife.
• Architects are using private OpenSim worlds on their computers to demonstrate houses to the clients. The clients sit next to the architect during the walk-through, and can see how the house will look like from all angles, check out the views through the windows — even make on-the-spot changes to the house. OpenSim allows architects to instantly change wall colors, move walls, rearrange furniture, even rotate the entire house to catch the morning sun — all right in front of the client.
• In training or testing situations, the student can sit at an individual computer to go through a simulated scenario.

PRIVATE WORLD BEHIND A FIREWALL

A behind-the-firewall deployment is the next most secure option for OpenSim. Only people with access to the internal network are able to visit the grid. However, trusted employees might still be able to download regions files or individual objects and mail them out of the company — or carry themn out on USB drives. Standards network security measures will help protect corporate content, but no system is completely secure.

Companies should also be aware that they might need to set up separate grids for sensitive functions, like human resources or finance, in order to protect critical information. In addition, private areas can be set up within grids limited to particular individuals or groups of employees.

A secondary benefit of running a grid over internal networks is that network speeds are normally significantly higher than over the public Internet, making for a more responsible virtual world.

How to do it

• The Diva Distro, the standard OpenSimulator.org distribution, and the ReactionGrid Harmony distribution can all be run in behind-the-firewall mode.
• For a more robust deployment with integration with enterprise systems, corporate directories, IBM offers a hardened, stabilized version of OpenSim in its Virtual Collaboration for Lotus Sametime product. Pricing starts at $50,000 and includes several pre-configured regions for meeting and collaboration spaces.
• OpenSim hosting vendors are starting to offer centralized grid management services for self-hosted grids. PioneerX Estates is currently the leading vendor, with centralized grid management software that allows for easy region restarts, software upgrades, user management, and even in-world economies.

Why do it

• This is the right deployment for enterprises that need to restrict access to virtual worlds to just their employees.
• Educational institutions — especially elementary schools — should run behind-the-firewall grids to ensure that outsiders can not enter their virtual campus.

PRIVATE HOSTED WORLD

Enterprises and institutions without the internal resources to operate their own virtual worlds can have their worlds hosted by an OpenSim vendor.

With hypergrid turned off, access is limited to registered account holders. User accounts can be managed centrally, and registrations limited to current employees, or to a school’s students and faculty.

However, security depends on the skills and systems of the hosting provider. Companies putting highly sensitive information on a grid hosted by an outside service should perform the same security audit as for any software-as-a-service vendor or cloud provider.

How to do it

• Prices for OpenSim regions start at under $10 a month, and companies can choose from any of a number of OpenSim hosting providers. Expect to pay extra for high-traffic regions, custom configuration, grid infrastructure, voice support, currency, or other services. Regular backups and maintenance are normally part of the standard service.
• Additional security can be obtained by requiring users to use custom browsers to access the world.
• The newest option is to use cloud hosting from Kitely, where access to be restricted to members of a particular Facebook group.

Why do it

• Schools and enterprises running pilot virtual world projects can use hosted grids to experiment with the platforms without high initial investment.
• A hosted world allows enterprises to grand access to employees who are not connected to the company network, to outside contractors, to business partners, and to customers by simply creating new user accounts for them.
• Many public grids currently run in private hosted mode, but allow anyone to create a user account through a Web interface. Grid administrators may review the account requests, or shut down the accounts if grid rules are violated.

PUBLIC WORLD BEHIND THE FIREWALL

Schools and companies who want to create virtual worlds that can be accessed from the outside can still set up virtual worlds on their in-house servers. However, this requires opening non-standard ports in the enterprise firewall and may expose the network to additional risks. Existing security platforms and intrusion detection systems may not be prepared to handle the new holes in the firewall.

How to do it

• Network routers need to be configured to direct grid traffic to the appropriate server
• Firewalls need to be adjusted to allow these messages to pass through
• For hypergrid access, both the grid and individual regions need to be hypergrid enabled, though this is preconfigured in the Diva Distro.

Why do it

• If a particular network is isolated from the main enterprise or school network, using servers on that network to host virtual worlds can provide more control at a lower cost.
• A public world will allow access by company employees or school students and staff, but also allow visitors to log in or teleport in from other worlds.

PUBLIC HOSTED WORLDS

Public worlds serve much the same function as a public Website. Companies, non-profits and educational institutions can use them for marketing, promotion, or to educate the public. A public world can also serve as the virtual lobby of the enterprise, a place where people can come to ask questions, try out products or services, or participate in a community of users.

How to do it

• Most OpenSim hosting providers can set up custom public virtual worlds for clients, on the company’s own domain name.
• Visitors teleporting in need to know the hypergrid address of the destination region. Alternatively, visitors can teleport in via in-bound gates located on other worlds. This is similar to the way that Website visitors can either type the site’s URL into the address bar, or arrive by clicking on a link on another site.
• For additional security, grid operators can mark certain areas as private, accessible only to particular individuals or groups.
• Grids can restrict traffic from particular sources. For example, a school might decide to not allow in-bound traffic from grids oriented towards adult activities — and may prohibit outbound traffic to those grids as well.

Why do it

• A hypergrid-enabled world means that the grid operators have little or no control over visitors. But it also means that there are no obstacles — other than occasional technical hiccups or the usual marketing challenges — to people coming in. Museums, retailers, entertainment venues, social gathering places, and corporate marketing divisions can benefit from a public virtual presence, and this benefit will increase as the population of the virtual worlds grows.
• In addition, “security by obscurity” will apply during the first few years of virtual world development. This is similar to the way that when the Internet was first created, the only people who would visit a Website would be those who were personally invited by the site owners. Later, search engines would find sites even if the owners made no attempt to publicize them. Today, there are no usable search engines for OpenSim-based worlds. Grid operators who put up a world don’t need to worry about random strangers stumbling into their builds — for a little while, at least.

REGIONS ON PUBLIC GRIDS

Many public grids allow companies and schools to rent land anywhere in size from entire 16-acre regions down to one-acre parcels or smaller. Prices vary significantly, and depend on the grid, and on the parcel’s location on that grid. For example, a furnished store front in a popular virtual mall will probably be much more expensive than an empty plot of land of equivalent size in a remote region of the grid.

If you’re on a public grid, however, you should expect the public to wander through. This may include unsavory individuals who harass your legitimate visitors, or even deface your virtual property. Standard precautions include setting private areas as off-limits to unapproved guests, and prohibiting unapproved visitors from changing anything on your land or putting down new objects.

Harassment can be curtailed by banning offenders from a particular region, but the offenders can simply create a new account and come back under another name.

How to do it

• The most popular grid on which to rent land for marketing, promotion, outreach or retail is Second Life. It has the highest traffic of any existing grid, and the single biggest in-world economy. Land can be rented directly from Linden Lab or from virtual real estate developers who buy large areas, and subdivide them. The price for an entire regions is $295 per month, with a $1,000 initial setup fee. There is a discount for educational and non-profit institutions –  $147.50 per month, with a $700 setup fee.
• Creators looking for alternatives first go to InWorldz and Avination grids, which have security policies in place similar to that of Second Life. Users aren’t allowed God powers, can’t hypergrid in and out to other grids, and can’t export content in the form of OAR or IAR files.
• Enterprises and schools looking for lower-cost land in a community that’s more oriented towards business and education have been migrating to JokaydiaGrid, where entire regions start at just $25 a month with a $50 initial setup fee.
• More grid choices are here: An OpenSim grid primer and OpenSim Grid Info.

Why do it

• Retailers of virtual goods need to go to where their customers are and, today, that means a large public grid.
• Companies looking for training or collaboration space that rent it on a large public grid can enjoy the technical support that comes from being a customer of the grid, as well as the ability to participate in a larger community of users.

INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY

OpenSim and Second Life actually offer more security when it comes to protecting intellectual property than the Web itself. For example, if you go to a Website, you can easily copy-and-paste any text or photo that you see on a typical page. If you’re curious about how a page was designed, the option to see the source HTML code is built into the browser (under View-Page Source in Firefox). The only defensible intellectual property is that which never shows up on page itself, like Google’s search algorithms or Amazon’s ranking system. These are software and databases that run on back end servers, separate from the site itself.

Second Life and OpenSim, by comparison, allow content creators to set permissions on objects that prevent users from modifying, copying or transferring them to other people. Determined hackers can bypass these permissions, but their tools are not easily available to the average user.

For many enterprises, this is a non-issue. If someone visits a corporate facility and steals copies of buildings or furniture, it will not materially affect the company’s operations.

In fact, the company may even choose to allow branded goods to be copied, as a way of promoting the company’s image.

If the copying is blatant — say, a competitor rips off a company’s entire virtual world — then the company has the same legal recourse as it would if the competitor copied its Website. This includes DMCA filings with the hosting service, or copyright or trademark lawsuits.

For enterprises that produce or distribute virtual content, copying can, and often does, materially impact the business.

Virtual content companies can take the following steps to deter theft:

• Make the content easier to buy legally than to steal. The Apple iTunes store has shown that people are willing to pay for content if it the platform is convenient and attractive enough.
• Add server-side software to the content. Anyone can copy a page of Google search results, but it doesn’t mean that they can go into business as a new search engine — most of the value of Google is in the code that runs behind the scenes. Similarly, objects in Second Life and OpenSim can be designed so that they depend on server-side software for their functionality. Stealing the object and passing it to an unregistered user would break this functionality, rendering the object worthless.
• Prohibit outside access to virtual content by keeping it locked up in a private grid, and allow customers to log in and experience the content but not take it home with them.
• Offer value-added services like after-sale support, customization, training and upgrades.
• Force customers to use custom viewers incompatible with other worlds and use proprietary encoding for the content itself, so that customers can not copy it, use it elsewhere, or distribute it to anyone else.

As with all copyright protection mechanisms, however, there is an optimum balance between protection and customer convenience. Too little security, and the content walks out the door. Too much, and nobody can use the product.

(This is an updated version of a post that first appeared a year ago: OpenSim security 101.)

There are plenty of reasons to run OpenSim on your own computers.

If you’re a content creator, you can have as many regions as you want, for free, and load them up when you need to work on them. There’s no lag due to connectivity issues, because the users and the servers are both on the same computer — yours. And you can work on your builds if you don’t have the Internet connected, like on an airplane.

If you’re on a school or corporate campus, you can run OpenSim completely behind the firewall, for maximum security. You can even integrate it with your employee or student directories, for single sign-ons and centralized user provisioning. If you need outsiders to access your world, you can enable outside logins, or turn on hypergrid teleports.

With a typical home bandwidth connection, you might be able to get a handful of visitors onto your region. With an enterprise network, you can have as many visitors as your Internet pipe will bear. If you want your sim to be part of a larger grid, you can connect it to OSgrid, FrancoGrid, MyOpenGrid, Metropolis, New World Grid, or another open grid.

Does it take a lot of technical expertise? No. In fact, there’s a version of OpenSim that comes with an installer, so all you have to do is click “OK” a few times, and you’re inside your own virtual world. It’s called New World Studio, and you can have a virtual world up in running in five mouse clicks.

The quick and easy way to your own virtual world

Go to the New World Studio downloads page and click on the Community Edition version you need — it’s available for Windows, for the Mac, and for Linux. Go have coffee — the download will take a while, since it includes every single component you need to run OpenSim. Unzip the file, open the unzipped folder, and click on NewWorldStudio.exe. Click on the first button, labelled Start 3D world.

Now sit back and wait as New World Studio does all the hard stuff. It configures your Apache server, your MySQL database, your OpenSim server, loads a starter region, and creates an avatar for you. In a couple of minutes, the first button will flash red, and become Stop 3D world, and the second button — Login to 3D world — will turn blue. Click that second button to enter your world.

New World Studio now loads up a viewer, and logs you into your very own, private virtual world. If you know how to use Second Life, think of it this way — you are now the owner of a region, and are saving yourself $300 a month plus a $1,000 setup fee. You can now do anything you want here. You can build, your can change the terrain, you can change your avatar.

If you don’t mind having just one region to work on and having “NewWorld Studio” as your avatar name you’re done. You can stop reading. Go have fun building!

But say you want a different starting region, different avatar, or more than one region? What do you do? And can you do it without becoming a network engineer?

One option is to upgrade to the licensed version of New World Studio, which, in addition to offering all the configuration option listed below in a very nice, easy interface also adds backups, upgrades, firewall configuration, and other nice features.

But if you can edit one text file with Notepad, there’s also some things that you can do without upgrading.

Do you still have that zipped file of the New World Studio you downloaded? Unzip it again. You can either delete the first unzip, or unzip the second one to a new folder.

But this time, hold on before you launch the installer and take a look at the NewWorldStudio.ini file.

You can open it with any text editor, such as Notepad. It’s a small file, and pretty understandable, but I’ll walk you through it.

First, look at the [World] section. This is where you can change some things about your OpenSim installation.

First, you can change the name of the world. Where it says Name = New World Studio just replace New World Studio with something else. Such as Name = Monkey Planet.

Then look at the InitialRegion = OpenVCE line. OpenVCE is the conference center that you start it by default. You can change it.

To see the available option, go back to your New World Studio unzipped folder and open the regions folder.

As of this writing, the other options are Flat 21, Business District (LindaKellie.com), Mountain Retreat (LindaKellie.com), and Undersea Observatory (blog.wsd.netjreeve). Copy those names, and put them into the NewWorldStudio.ini file like this: InitialRegion = Flat 21 or InitialRegion = Mountain Retreat (LindaKellie.com) making sure you get the names exactly right. Copy-and-paste, to be totally sure.

If you want to use a region that doesn’t come provided, such as an older region you’ve saved before, or one you downloaded from Kitely, or one your friend gave you, or one you got from LindaKellie.com or OpenSim Creations, create a new folder for that region and name the folder with the region’s name. Put your region’s OAR file into this folder, and rename it to just region.oar. Put the name of the folder into the NewWorldStudio.ini file.

Moving on. We’ll skip the port number — that’s for when you have multiple copies of New World Studio running on the same computer. I don’t want to get into a discussion of port forwarding here.

The next option is SizeX and SizeY. These refer to the size of your world. Do you want to keep it at one region? Leave both values at 1. Do you want a four-region world? Set both values to 2. Now you’ll have a 2×2 world, with the four regions arranged in a square. You can also put them all in a line — just set SizeX = 4 and SizeY = 1.

How big can you go? It depends on the power of your computer, and how much stuff you plan to have on each region. Intel was able to run more than 1,000 regions on a single computer. On an average home computer, though, you should easily be able to do four regions, or push it as high as 16.  If you need more, just create duplicate copies of New World Studio.

The next line is IsMegaregion = False. If you’re going to have more than one region running, you might want to set it to True so that you don’t have to deal with border crossings. Keep it False if you plan to save your regions as individual OAR files in the future.

PosX and PosY refer to your region’s position on a giant map. You can ignore this if you have a private world, but if you’re going to be hypergrid teleporting to other grids, keep in mind that you can’t jump more than 4,096 regions in any direction, and you can’t jump between regions with the same coordinates. So if you want to be able to travel to the OpenSim Creations grid, you’ll need to be within jumping distance of 1000,1000, which is where they’re centered. I recommend coordinates like 4076, 4019 — unusual numbers, so that other folks aren’t likely to put their grids on the same spot. But OSgrid is centered on 10000,10000. So if you want to jump there, the 7000-neighborhood is a good place to be.

The last item in this section I want to point out is the line that says ShowOsWindow = False. Change it to ShowOsWindow = True if you want to see the server console window while OpenSim is running. The server console is where you would type in advanced commands, such as saving regions as OAR files, exporting inventories as IAR files, moving and renaming regions, and other advanced functions.

The last item in this section I want to point out is the line that says IpAddress = Localhost.  In order for me to be able to travel to other grids, I had to look up my computer’s IP address and replace Localhost with the actual number. So, in my case, it became IpAddress = 24.181.235.84 — if you can’t get your hypergrid jumps to work, try changing this setting.

Moving on to the [Owner] section, this is where you change your avatar name and initial appearance. New World Studio comes with four starter avatars — just pick the one you want. Note that you need to spell the names correctly, and if using Benjiro 2 or Cara 2, remember the space before the 2.

Finally, one more thing you might want to change is your choice of default viewer. The standard installation launches Imprudence. But what if you wanted to use a different viewer — like, say, Firestorm?

The answer is in the [Software] section of the file.

First, change UseCustomViewer = False to UseCustomViewer = True.

Then look up the address of your viewer. In my case, on Windows, I right-clicked on the viewer icon and selected Properties. The address was in the Target: box: “C:\Program Files (x86)\Firestorm-Release\Firestorm-Release.exe” –channel “Firestorm-Release”  –settings settings_firestorm-release_v4.xml –set InstallLanguage en

You don’t need all of that. Just the first part that’s in the quotation marks — in my case, C:\Program Files (x86)\Firestorm-Release\Firestorm-Release.exe — your address might be different, if you installed the viewer to a different folder, or you want to use a different viewer.

Copy that, and change CustomViewerPath = to CustomViewerPath = C:\Program Files (x86)\Firestorm-Release\Firestorm-Release.exe — you don’t need the quotation marks. Now when you click on Enter world, New World Studio will automatically log you in with your preferred viewer.

The rest of the settings have to do with the MySQL database and other stuff you shouldn’t fiddle with unless you know what you’re doing After you’ve made all the changes, start NewWorldStudio.exe. But if you do know your way around a command line interface and your router’s port forwarding tables — or are willing to learn — then you can do a lot more. Just as with the starter regions, you can also add different starter avatars by opening the avatars folder and adding new ones via IAR files.

Now start New World Studio up as you did before, by double-clicking on NewWorldStudio.exe.

It took me a few tries to get it configured right, with just the right number of regions, the right avatar name, the right IP address, the right viewer, the right starting avatar, and the right starting region. If you’re like me, working through trial and error, I recommend making copies of things along the way — copies of the NewWorldStudio.ini file, for example, once you’ve got the settings right. Or if you use your own OAR files for starting regions, making copies of those region folders.

Single Region

You can download and install OpenSim from its source at OpenSimulator.org. Get the the OpenSim download files here. Read the instructions here.

For additional help, log into the OpenSim Live Chat channel on IRC. However, you may have to check back in a few times before you find someone who’s on and can help with your particular problem.

Another source of help is the OpenSim Users discussion list. You can join the list here, and view the list archives here.

You can also download and install a version of OpenSim pre-configured to work with OSGrid. The download is here. OSGrid typically uses the latest stable version of OpenSim, tests it throughly, and pre-configures the settings to work with OSGrid. To connect to the grid itself, however, you will need to have either a direct access from your computer to the Internet, or configure your router to forward OpenSim traffic correctly. If you need help, OSGrid has its own IRC chat channel, which is one of the busiest discussion forums for OpenSim. Additional help is available through the OSGrid Forums.

An even easier way to set up and run one region of OpenSim on your computer is to download the “single sim set up” from Sim-on-a-Stick. And yes, as the name suggests, you can run this from a USB stick — you can carry your virtual world around with you in your pocket and use it on any computer.

If a region is run in standalone mode, then it handles its own avatar registrations and asset inventories. If a region is run connected to a larger grid, then the grid handles the avatar registrations and inventories. You can read about how I set up my first-ever OpenSim region here.

Minigrid

A minigrid is a group of regions that are running on a single computer — or, to be more precise, within a single instance of OpenSim.

Minigrids are typically configured as megaregions, so that there are no border crossings between regions, in large squares composed of four, nine, or 16 regions each.

A minigrid, like a standalone region, handles its own avatars and inventory assets. It can be set up to run privately behind a firewall, or be hypergrid enabled and allow visitors to teleport in and out from other grids.

If you read my New World Studio instructions above, you can turn a one-region world into a minigrid by editing the  the NewWorldStudio.ini file or upgrading to the licensed version of the software. Sim-on-a-Stick also comes in a mini-grid option, with four, nine, or 16 regions.

Another way to set up a minigrid is to use the Diva Distro, created by hypergrid inventor and UC Irvine professor Crista Lopes. You can download the Diva Distro here — select the most recent “Preconfigured hypergridded standalone.” The same download page also offers a selection of starter terrains, and a large inventory archive filled with clothing, accessories, and other items useful for a new minigrid.

Instructions are included with the Diva Distro — read the “Install” text file. Lopes takes you through installing Mono if you’re running on Linux, setting up the MySQL database, setting up your DNS and forwarding ports, and creating your avatar and regions.

The Diva Distro comes with an update utility. OpenSim on its own is not an easy system to upgrade, as configuration files can change from one version to the next, and databases need to be migrated. Many OpenSim users who manage to get their first region up and running will give up after their first upgrade and switch to paid hosting to avoid having to go through that again. The Diva Distro eliminates much of the pain involved in upgrades, and makes self-hosted sims more accessible to a wider range of people.

The Diva Distro is, by default, hypergrid enabled. This means that schools and companies, even if they run these minigrids privately, behind their firewalls, can link multiple minigrids together into a large virtual grid. However, each individual minigrid will maintain its own user accounts and asset inventories.

You can read about how I set up my Diva Distro and port forwarding here.

Full grid

When a minigrid doesn’t offer sufficient virtual space, and chaining multiple minigrids together is just too unwieldy, it’s time to deploy a full grid.

A full grid differs from minigrids and standalones in that multiple servers can be used to host different parts of the grid and there’s no limit to how many regions you can have.

To keep them all organized, a central server, called Robust, handles all the users, inventory assets, groups, and region map locations. Robust also allows avatars to send messages to one another when they are on different regions.

A full grid can be run in private mode, behind a firewall, or it can be hypergrid-enabled to allow teleports in and out to other grids. Instructions on how to configure OpenSim in grid mode are here.

With every upgrade, the main release of OpenSim becomes more complete and functional. However, since it is a work in progress, the specific functionality you need might not be available. OpenSim addresses this issue by allowing grid operators to install third-party modules with additional functionality.

Modules can be used to create an in-world currency, to connect to corporate directories, to use a different voice server or physics engine, to integrate PayPal payments, and for many other purposes. There’s a long list of OpenSim modules on this page. You can get a PayPal module here. Instructions for creating your own modules are here.

As always, you can log into the OpenSim Live Chat channel on IRC for additional help, or check in on the OpenSim Dev channel. You can’t read about how I set up my first full grid because I didn’t. I used a hosting provider to do it all for me, for a tiny extra fee.

I recommend Dreamland Metaverse for folks looking for fully-featured commercial grid setups — groups, voice, currency, land rentals, instant restarts of crashed regions, regular backups, upgrades, OAR and IAR exports and imports, and other functionality. You can use them to host your whole grid, or just get central grid services from them and host everything yourself.  SimHost and Zetamex are two other well-known vendors who can set up a full grid. (Full list of vendors here.)

OpenSim in the cloud

Running OpenSim with a cloud-based hosting provider like Amazon EC2 involves all the difficulty of running OpenSim itself, plus the added complexity of dealing with the cloud service provider. Cloud-based hosting can save money when a sim is needed for only a short period of time, but can get pricey if a region is used a lot. Read about one such project at OpenSim-in-a-Box, by Dirk Krause. He also has a YouTube video up explaining the process here.

This is a primer for folks considering moving into OpenSim who have never used OpenSim before and who don’t have much of a technical background.

First look at OpenSim

If you want to get into OpenSim in the quickest, easiest way possible, just follow this link: http://www.kitely.com/virtual-world/Maria-Korolov/Linda-Kellie-Freebie-Mall

You will need a Facebook or Twitter account to sign up — or just an email address — and if you’ve never used Kitely before, it will install a small configuration tool on your desktop. Then it will log you in and take you right into my region, which is a shopping mall filled with content licensed to use in any way you want, including commercial.

Kitely runs the latest stable version of OpenSim, so you’ll have sculpties, media-on-a-prim, and mesh. Wander around and see how it works.

Like it? Go back to your Kitely screen and click on your name at the top right of the screen. Now hit the “Create world” button. Choose from an empty region, an OpenVCE conference center, or upload your own OAR file. (Where do you get OAR files? Here.)

Now choose who can access your world — just you, everyone, or only members of a particular Facebook group.

And you’ve got your own OpenSim region up and running. Click on the region name to enter it.

The region is completely free. You can have up to 100 simultaneous avatars on it. And up to 100,000 prims. The catch? You can only access it for six hours the first month, and two hours a month each month after that.

If that’s not enough time for you, you can upgrade to one of Kitely’s paid options. For $40 a month, for example, you and anyone you allow access to can spend as much time on the region as you want. Kitely can afford to do this because when the region is empty, it automatically goes to sleep, and wakes up again whenever anyone teleports or logs in.

And if you want to save some money, you can switch to one of the time-based billing plans. For example, if you spend less than 30 hours a month on your land and expect no visitors — or are willing to have your visitors pay their own way — you can sign up for the $5 plan, which comes with two regions at no additional cost. If you spend up to 120 hours a month on your land — that’s an average of four hours a day — $20 per month will also get you 10 regions. And for $35 a month, you get unlimited use of 20 regions. That’s 20 regions, each holding up to 100,000 prims.

If you need to add more time, or more regions, to any plan, Kitely also has a-la-carte options. Each additional region is around $1 month. Each additional hour of usage is around 20 cents.

By comparison, Second Life will charge you around $300 a month with a $1,000 setup fee for a single region that can hold up to 15,000 prims.

The downside is that Kitely doesn’t have the community that Second Life does. But its low land costs and high prim allowances makes it perfect for builders looking for a place to have a warehouse of objects that they upload to Second Life for sale, for educators and businesses looking for private space for meetings, training, and simulations, and for roleplaying groups looking to create their own kingdoms at low prices, and without needing any technical skills.

Kitely is currently building a marketplace, and is expected to have hypergrid teleport connectivity to other OpenSim grids later on this year. In addition, Kitely also offers megaregions of up to 16 regions in size, and on-demand region backups that include everything on a region that you’re allowed to copy and download. These backups are standard OpenSim OAR files and can be moved to any other hosting provider and most other grids, shared with friends or colleagues, or just used as permanent personal backups.

Home, home on the grid

Your little Kitely island — or dozen Kitely islands — might be enough for you and your Facebook friends, colleagues, or students. But if you want to be part of a larger world, you’ll want a region on a big social grid.

The largest public grid is OSgrid.

Many people connect regions that they run on their own servers or home computers, but if you’re not technically inclined, you can also rent land from any of several different hosting companies.

The most reputable of these is Dreamland Metaverse, which is one of the oldest hosting providers out there, and also the one with the best reputation for customer service. A Second Life-style region capable of holding 15,000 prims will run you $30 a month with no setup fee.

The lowest-cost provider is Oliveira Virtual Lands, where 15,000-prim regions go for $12 a month with one week free trial.

The newest provider in this space is Zetamex, where a 15,000-prim region goes for $20 a month with an option to turn it into a nine-region megaregion at no extra charge.

To compare hosting providers, visit our OpenSim Hosting Providers page. Most of those in the left-hand column, under “Multi Grid,” will be able to provide a region on OSGrid or any other public, open grid.

Other popular open grids include FrancoGrid, Metropolis, and Craft.

But while OSgrid is the largest grid running OpenSim, and the most popular open grid, it is not the most popular grid overall — that honor goes to InWorldz.  In addition, because OSgrid and other open grids allow anyone to connect regions or hypergrid teleport to other grids, it’s easy for content to leave these grids.

If you need a grid where content is more secure, or one with strong, professionally-managed communities, you might consider renting land from a commercial grid instead.

In addition to InWorldz, other popular closed, commercial grids Avination, Island Oasis, 3rd Rock Grid, and AviWorlds. Each commercial grid sells its own regions and sets its own prices. The prices for the commercial grids are listed on the right-hand column of the OpenSim Hosting Providers page, under “Single grid.” Closed commercial grids focus on providing a high-quality experience for their merchants and residents, and restrict content from moving off-grid, but can also be more expensive than open grids, with typical region prices around $60 a month.

In addition, because of content protection measures, users have limited options for making backups of their regions and inventories, and are typically prohibited from teleporting out to other grids.

For more information about public grids, check out the OpenSim Grid List, which lists all the public grids, their maturity levels, voice options, hypergrid, currency, and other info. For more information about grid types, read: An OpenSim grid primer.

There’s no grid like your own grid

Ready to move up to your own grid? It’s as easy to have a whole grid as it is to have a single region, at little or no additional cost. You get to decide who gets an account on your grid and control all access. You decide what content goes where, and you can turn hypergrid on or off.

If you’re only going to need a few regions, go for a mini-grid. Since the whole grid can fit on one server, no additional grid infrastructure is needed to manage it, so there’s usually no additional cost. In fact, you might get a discount for ordering several regions at once. Plus, you can have the whole grid be one mega-region — no border crossings! Ask your hosting provider for a Diva Distro-style minigrid. Dreamland Metaverse, SimHost, and Zetamex are our recommended providers for mini-grids, but you may want to pick another provider because of geographic proximity or support for your language. Talent Raspel, for example, is in Germany. SecondPlaces is based in the U.K.

A mini-grid is a good option for a school or small company. And if you ever need it, your hosting provider can upgrade you to a full grid. Moving regions is as simple as downloading the OAR file from the old grid, and uploading it to the new one. And to move an avatar, download the IAR file — inventory archive — and upload it to new grid. Today, this process is typically done manually, so if you expect to be getting a lot of users, you might want to start right out with a full grid.

A full grid differs from a mini-grid is that it can spread across multiple machines. As a result, it requires a centralized grid management server to keep track of where all the regions are, and to store the user accounts and their inventories. The price for this, including a grid management panel, is $45 a month from Dreamland Metaverse.

By using one of these services, you can run anything from a medium-sized school or company grid, to a social grid with hundreds of regions and thousands of users.

The hosting provider handles all the technical issues — setting up and maintaining the servers, keeping the software current, continually adding new features, even providing tech support.

All you have to do is take care of the people and the content.

Where to get content for your region

If you have content that you have created elsewhere, such as in Second Life, you can use Imprudence to export individual objects and upload them again to your destination grid. You can only export objects that you yourself have created, and where you are the creator of all constituent parts, as well, including all textures. To export scripts, you will have to save each script individually to your hard drive or cut-and-paste them. More information on using Imprudence to move content between grids is here.

If you are renting your region from a commercial grid like InWorldz or Avination, you will have a variety of in-world shopping destinations to choose from.

If you have a region on a hypergrid-enabled grid like OSgrid or FrancoGrid then, in addition to the in-world markets and freebie stores, you can also teleport to those on other grids. Samsara, Snoopies, and Wright Plaza have large collections of freebies on OSgrid. Get to know the shop keeper, and be ready to ask for a refund — or an alternate delivery mechanism — if you’re not able to take your purchase home with you.

If you are renting land from Kitely, Dreamland Metaverse, Zetamex, Oliveira or another hosting provider who allows you to upload OAR and IAR files, your options are even bigger — and growing quickly.

An OAR is a complete region archive, a backup file which includes the region terrain and all the objects, textures and scripts that are located on that region. An IAR is a complete inventory archive, a backup which includes all the objects, shapes, textures, scripts and other content in an avatar inventory.

Most commercial grids will not allow you to export an OAR or an IAR file from their grid, to keep content from leaving their world. But they might be more amenable to allowing you to import an OAR or IAR file, especially if it’s from a reputable source like Linda Kellie.

OpenSim Creations also has a nice selection of free OAR files, as well as other types of free, Creative Commons-licensed content. Read more about finding content here:  Where to get content for OpenSim.

There are four main payment options in OpenSim, each with a different degree of convenience and security.

Grid-based payments

If you are on a closed grid like InWorldz, SpotOn3D, 3rd Rock Grid, or, say, Second Life, then the most convenient payment option available to you is the local currency on your grid. It’s not usually the only option, however, and there are times when another payment system may be more appropriate.

Grid-based payments are normally limited to a single grid or, as with the case of SpotOn3D, a group of affiliated grids.

Convenience: Since closed grids usually control all the grid’s servers and limit access to the underlying infrastructure of the grid, transactions can often take place on the grid itself. In Second Life, for example, and many closed, commercial OpenSim grids, you click on an item, and you buy it. Quick and easy. The individual region owners can’t hack in and steal your money because they don’t have access to the underlying server — only the grid’s owners do. As a result, shoppers may not need to confirm their transactions on a pop-up webpage, as is the case with other OpenSim payment options.

Security: You’re at the mercy of grid operators. If they go out of business, you stand to lose all your money. Most grids have a Terms of Service agreement that specifies that they don’t have to give you a refund. In addition, start-up grids may not have the most thorough employee vetting procedures in place, and a bad hire might abscond with all your money. Grids with anonymous registration systems may also breed con artists and cheats.

Legality: Depending on the jurisdiction, grid owners may or may not be able to convert your virtual money into cold, hard cash. In many areas, the laws are vague on this point. Be prepared to see your virtual currency transform overnight into fictional “game tokens” that you cannot redeem for real money. At some point, virtual currency operators may need to acquire banking licenses or take other steps to become legitimate, regulated outfits. This will probably require regulatory action or new legislation, so it’s not likely to happen overnight, but is something to watch out for in the future.

Auditability: Sopme grid owners might not provide you with an auditable trail of your in-world purchases. The best you’re likely to be able to do is to keep track of when you make deposits into your virtual account, and when you make withdrawals.

Bottom line: Don’t keep more money in a grid-based currency account than you can afford to lose. If you’re a merchant, cash out whenever your balance exceeds that threshold. If you start having problems cashing out, switch immediately to an alternate payment process. Even on closed grids, there are options.

Web-based payments

You’re used to using PayPal or Google Checkout on your website — but you can also use them on your grid. Just set up a payments page on the Web and send your customers to that page when they click on an object. Other popular options include PayPal Micropayments and Amazon Payments. PayPal Micropayments is particularly well-suited to grid commerce, with lower fees for small purchases. PayPal is currently in the process of improving this service to make it even more attractive to virtual world platforms.

There are a couple of complications, however.

The first is that Web-based payments, which are designed for medium-sized transactions, may be expensive. Grid-based payment systems, and the G$ and OMC multi-grid currencies don’t charge any fees at all for in-world transactions, and usually make their profits when the currency is bought or sold.

The second is that integrating these platforms with OpenSim can take a little extra work.

PayPal and Google Checkout will normally send you an email when you’ve received a payment. So if you simply send your customers to an online payment page, expect to have to spend time in your store manually giving your customers their purchases after you’ve received your payment confirmation. You can also hire a clerk, and have payment confirmations automatically forwarded to them, for those times when you’re asleep or otherwise engaged.

If you’re delivering physical goods, or offering Web-based downloads of MP3 files or e-books then you don’t need to worry about a payment confirmation making its way back into your OpenSim grid — your Web-based e-commerce platform will take care of the delivery.

If you’re delivering services instead of products, or using PayPal for large business-to-business transactions, then you might nott need an automated in-world delivery mechanism at all.

However, if you want instant, automated in-world delivery of virtual goods, then you will need to install a PayPal module to handle the payment confirmation and delivery part for you. Check with your hosting provider — many already offer this as part of their hosting services.

If you’re renting a region on someone else’s grid, check with the grid owners to make sure they have no problems with you using a Web-based payment system on their grid. Some grids try to discourage all commercial activities, and others may be trying to promote their own in-grid currencies. If you set up a PayPal payment system in violation of the grid’s Terms of Service, you may lose your regions, all your builds and objects, and your local grid currency balance as well.

Convenience: OpenSim doesn’t currently offer an encrypted messaging channel similar to the SSL encryption in your Web browser. As a result, for maximum security, payments made through services such as PayPal or Google Checkout normally require an extra step — confirmation of the payment on the payment service’s website. This may be inconvenient for some customers and may discourage shopping. Other customers, however, may be reassured by the extra security.

Security: As secure as it gets. In fact, PayPal is incorporated as a bank in many jurisdictions, so your balances are federally insured. Web-based payment services have years of history of successful operation. No payment system is 100 percent safe, and occasionally there are customer disputes or difficulties withdrawing cash in some countries but, for the most part, the biggest risk in keeping a large balance is that you’re not earning interest on that balance.

Legality: When PayPal first started out, they operated in a legal gray area. After they became successful, however, regulators stepped in to protect customers. Today, these services are fully legal, though the increased regulatory oversight is reflected in higher fees than available through some other payment systems.

Auditability: Most Web-based payment services are designed for the benefit of online merchants and offer excellent audit mechanisms. They let you track every single transaction, and some may integrate with your back-office accounting systems.

CyberCoinBank’s G$ currency

The G$ currency from CyberCoinBank is OpenSim’s oldest virtual currency, and is the most popular cross-grid currency in terms of total money in circulation. We’ve written about them before in several articles, but the main idea is that you sign up for a G$ account on their website, and then you can use the currency to buy things from any vendor that accepts it.

There’s an extra Web-based confirmation step, as there is with PayPal, to ensure security. You can access your G$ account from anywhere on the hypergrid — just teleport to another grid, and you can shop there. Merchants can sign up for a merchant account, get a free vendor, and install them anywhere they want. There is no fee on individual transactions. The big downside is that the currency is not convertible — it is a fictional currency. You can’t go back to CyberCoinBank and get your G$ exchanged for real money, though there may be third-party resellers available to take G$ off your hands.

In addition, individual grid owners may not want to have G$ on their grids if they already offer their own in-grid currency.

Convenience: Buyers have an extra confirmation step for every transaction. However, the G$ is very convenient for merchants, and the set up of the point of sale terminals, or vendors, is quick and easy. Free vendors are available on the Alpha Towne grid.

Security: CyberCoinBank is owned by Global Virtual Holdings, Inc. , a real company with real people behind it. However, it is not incorporated as a bank, and the company clearly states that the G$ is a “fictional currency.” There is no guarantee that any money in a G$ account can be converted to cash. As a result, it’s best for small purchases and casual shopping. Merchants should thoroughly investigate the third-party services that offer to trade G$, and be prepared to switch to an alternate payment mechanism if third-party conversions become unavailable.

Legality: By positioning itself as fictional currency, CyberCoinBank may be able to avoid legal liability. However, the case law on virtual currencies isn’t well developed yet.

Auditability: CyberCoinBank lists recent transactions on their website. However, the transactions are listed under avatar names, and not under company or customer names, which may pose problems for audits.

VirWoX’s OMC currency

The OMC currency from Austrian Linden dollar exchange operator VirWoX is the most popular option with OpenSim grid owners, and is currently accepted on 22 grids. The services has grown quickly since it was launched this past spring, as we’ve written about before.

The currency is fully convertible to the US dollar, the Euro, and to the Linden Dollar.

Like G$, OMC requires an extra Web-based step to confirm transactions, to ensure security. Like G$, the OMC works with the hypergrid — you can teleport from one grid to another, buying items at every stop, and bring everything home to your own grid.

Unlike the G$, however, the OMC is more tightly integrated with OpenSim. When you’re on an OMC-enabled region, your OMC balance shows up in the upper right-hand corner of your viewer screen. In addition, all standard Second Life payment scripts work as normal with the OMC.

The extra integration requires a special OMC currency module to be installed on the server running the individual regions where OMC payments will be accepted. And VirWoX manually approves grids before allowing OMC payments to be used there. If you’re on one of the grid already OMC-enabled, then using OMC is easy and convenient. If not, you will have to contact VirWoX to get your grid approved, and get and install the OMC payment module — or ask your hosting provider to do it for you.

The G$ and the OMC use two different systems and play well together — a grid can support both payment systems, and a merchant can offer buyers a choice of payment mechanisms.

Convenience: Using OMC is as convenient to shoppers as G$ or PayPal, in that an extra confirmation step is required, and the buyer must have an OMC account and some money in their balance. For merchants, it requires an extra installation step which may delay the rollout of the currency.

Security: The OMC is backed by a real company with real people behind it, and a history of successfully handling millions of dollars in currency trading.

Legality: The legality of this currency has not yet been tested. If the currency becomes popular, it may come under scrutiny from regulators, and VirWoX may have to get a banking license or take other steps to come into compliance with Austrian regulations.

Auditability: Like the G$, the VirWoX website shows a payment history with transactions listed under avatar names.

The first question they usually ask themselves is, “Which grid should we join?”

But the more important question should be: “Should we join a grid? Or start our own?”

It may seem daunting to think about starting up your grid. But, in fact, it’s actually as easy — if not easier — than getting regions on an existing grid. Your OpenSim hosting provider will take care of all the setup and administration, usually at a lower price. Some, including ReactionGrid, will even set up a grid behind your firewall and manage it for you.

Here are the pros and cons of the two paths.

Community

If you join a grid: If you join a grid, you join their community. If the grid you’re considering joining has hypergrid turned off, then the only way you can access that community is by joining that grid. Some popular social grids, like InWorldz and SpotOn3D and 3rd Rock have hypergrid turned off.

If you go it alone: If you have your own community — a community of employees, or of students, or clients, or group members — then you should do well on a private grid. But even if you have no friends, you can turn on hypergrid and visit other grids. More than half of all grids have hypergrid turned on, including the largest, OSGrid, and the most popular education grid, ReactionGrid. There are also Italian, French, and German grids on the hypergrid if you want to do some virtual international travel. Many of these grids offer shopping opportunities and hold public events. The latest release of OpenSim tightened up hypergrid security, so expect more grids to open up their doors.

Content protection

If you go it alone: The best way to protect your content is to make sure that nobody else can see it.  If you’re a corporation using a grid for sensitive internal meetings, or a health care provider serving patients, you need to have a private grid, with hypergrid turned off. If you have hypergrid turned on, however, you should expect that some people may come visiting and try to steal your stuff — the same way they would if you were running a public region in Second Life. In addition, if you sell products to hypergrid visitors, they will be able to take those virtual goods back to their private grids, hack into the asset database, and change the permissions. The value of additional hypergrid sales may — or may not — offset the potential losses to hackers.

If you join a grid: If you join a social grid, then your content is exposed to the other grid residents, and also to the owners of that grid. Some grids, like InWorldz and SpotOn3D, bend over backwards to protect their content creators. For example, these two grids limit their residents’ ability to make region backups — which would enable people to create instant duplicates of their belongings. They also have hypergrid turned off, so people can’t take goods to other grids with fewer controls.

Support

If you go it alone:The top OpenSim hosting providers — ReactionGrid, SimHost, and Dreamland Metaverse — have good reputations for support. But there’s only so much support they will provide. They will help you get your grid going, upgrade the software, restart regions, create user accounts, run the backups, balance the loads — all that back-office technical stuff. But they aren’t necessarily going to take time with every single one of your users and help them get their hair on straight and teach them how to talk. You’re going to have to do that yourself.

If you join a grid: The most popular social grids, like InWorldz, SpotOn3D, and OSGrid, are known for helping newcomers get comfortable. There are people at welcome centers, mentors, orientation islands, training events, and get-to-know-people parties. Some social grids do extend their welcome to hypergrid visitors, however. ReactionGrid has a welcome center and freebie store on its main grid open to all, as does JokaydiaGrid. OSGrid has a number of shopping destinations, as well as public events, and its welcome area is often visited by hypergrid travelers.

Extra features

If you join a grid: Many grids, in order to distinguish themselves from their competitors, offer features not available elsewhere. These may be online shopping portals, grid-only currencies, special group or land-management tools, atmospheric settings, or other improvements. Most of these features are aimed at creating a more satisfying social experience for residents.

If you go it alone: You can also get extra features beyond what’s available in standard OpenSim if you run your own grid, if you’re willing to pay for them. In addition to all of the above, you can also get integration with employee or student directories, integration with educational software like Moodle, integration with your corporate workflow systems or document repositories, and similar features of interest to enterprises.

Price

If you go it alone: If you’re deploying a standard version of OpenSim, without corporate integration features, then you will pay less, on average, per region, if you go it alone than if you have a region on someone else’s grid. The larger your grid, the more you save, as you will be able to get entire dedicated servers. Expect to pay $90 a region for a high-end, high-traffic region if your mini-grid is one region in size. Expect to pay around $50 if you have a four-region minigrid. If you’re running 16 or more regions, expect the price to drop to under $20 a region for a high-end, high-prim, high-traffic, stable and reliable region.

If you join a grid: If you’re renting a region on an existing grid, you’re paying for more than just bare metal. You’re paying for the community, for the shopping platform, for the in-grid currency, for the events, for the public areas, for the grid website and the forums and for the kindly, personal support. In addition, if a grid has invested a substantial amount in proprietary technology, this will also be reflected in the price — there’s a reason that Second Life charges $300 a region. The more bells and whistles a grid offers, the higher, on average, your monthly rent will be. Non-profit grids like OSGrid do offer some services, by using volunteers, and have the lowest rents — you can get a region on OSGrid for as little as $10 a month from third-party vendors, or connect a home-hosted region for free..

Long-term prospects

If you join a grid: There are no old, established grids in the OpenSim universe. OSGrid and some other early entrants are three years old, but the early years weren’t exactly hopping. And grid operators come and go. A lot of folks are getting into the grid business — then getting out again when they find out how hard it is. Even going with a big, established player like Second Life is no guarantee of stability, as they just closed down the Teen Grid. If a grid closes down you may — or you may not — be able to get your stuff out.

If you go it alone: If you run a private grid, you’re much less dependent on any vendor. You own your grid assets, you own your own domain name, you own all the scripts and everything else that makes your grid what it is. Even if your service provider goes out of business, you can be up and running with a new host the next day or two. This is very similar to how you would host a website — if a particular provider turns out to be unhelpful, or unreliable, or too pricey, you download the whole thing and upload it somewhere else. Just make sure that the provider you choose makes it easy for you to get backups of your entire grid at any time. The top ones all do a good job at this — they know that if you leave, the competitors won’t be as good, and you’ll come back.

Know yourself

In the end, it’s all about knowing yourself and who you are.

The smaller you are, the more you’ll get out of being on a social grid.

The bigger you are, the more you’ll benefit from having your own virtual platform.

One way to think of it is this: do you want a page on Facebook, or do you want your own website? If you’re a large company, you might have a presence on Facebook for the sake of marketing and outreach — but your main business will be happening on your own site. But if you’re an individual, a separate website may be more trouble than it’s worth, and Facebook provides the community, the games, the events, and the connections that you wouldn’t be able to build on your own.

If you have your own grid, there’s nothing stopping you from getting land on some of the more popular social grids and putting up hypergates to bring travelers to your private grid — or to promote your private grid in other ways, such as billboards or events. Some grid owners might not feel too happy if you advertise a competing grid — check first before investing heavily, if this is your plan.

There is also nothing stopping individuals from setting up their own grids. You can even run a mini-grid on a home computer for free, if you don’t expect to have massive numbers of visitors coming in at once. Just remember to make plenty of backups. You never know when your hard drive is going to crash.

• Full list of OpenSim hosting providers and their prices is here.
• How to choose an OpenSim hosting company

Yes, you can run OpenSim for free on your own computer -  you can even run it on a USB stick. But do you want to?

Here’s a question — would you run your own Apache Web server for your website, or would you use a third-party hosting service?

If you’re the kind of person who runs Apache at home, you’ll probably do just fine with running your own OpenSim server.

You’ll probably already know that servers are temperamental creatures. You should be backing up your databases regularly, monitor your load and traffic, be ready to restart when needed — or go into the database and kill a misbehaving script when one pops up.

Oh, and if you want to travel in and out of your little sim and visit the other grids out there, or connect your sim to a bigger grid, you’ll need to punch a hole through your firewall. There’s no recipe for doing this — everybody’s router and firewall combinations are  different.

Now, I’m not saying this is impossible. I’m running a little four-region mini-grid on a home computer. But I had to have my kid set it up. If you go this route, instructions for running your own OpenSim are here.

If you want to have someone else run OpenSim for you, you have two major choices. You can rent land on an existing grid, or you can have a hosting company set up a grid for you.

If you want to be part of an existing community, or have easy access to a population base, pick an existing grid. If you want maximum control and privacy, create your own grid.

Remember that even if you have your own grid, you can still interact with people on other grids, if you like, by turning on hypergrid and teleporting to other hypergrid-enabled grids for events, shopping, and to visit friends.

Residential and merchant land

If you’ve decided to join a grid in order to be part of a supportive, warm environment that helps you develop as an artist or builder, or to have a safe, secure place to run your shop, you’ve got more choices than ever before. Check out our list of active public grids here.

If you’re looking for the biggest grid, that’s OSgrid. The most popular is InWorldz, a closed commercial grid, with Avination and Island Oasis being the two other most popular commercial grids. The easiest — and cheapest — grid to get a region on is Kitely.

If you live in Europe — or like Europeans — check out Metropolis, GermanGrid, FrancoGrid, Craft World,  and Logicamp. We publish regular monthly statistics, and you can read the monthly reports to find out which grids are most popular that month.

If you want a place where content is kept under lock and key, choose a grid that has hypergrid turned off, and doesn’t allow people to export their regions or inventories (these are known as OAR and IAR files). These are called closed commercial grids. InWorldz, Avination, Island Oasis, and 3rd Rock Grid are some examples of popular closed commercial grids.

If you want a place that’s open to the hypergrid, check out OSgrid, Metropolis, FrancoGrid, Craft World, GermanGrid and other hypergrid-enabled worlds.

Accounts on all these grids are free. There’s nothing stopping you from creating an account on several of grids — or teleporting in with an existing avatar if the grid is hypergrid-enabled — and hanging out, meeting people, and getting a feel for the place before deciding whether to buy land or not.

Don’t let price be a major factor for you. First of all, OpenSim prices are falling quickly. By the time you’re ready to expand your virtual domain, you might be paying a fraction of today’s rates. Second, OpenSim prices are roughly based on how much it costs to rent the server. Expect to pay $10 to $25 for a basic, low-use region, and $25 to $60 for a moderate use region. And if you want a high-performance region that looks and feels like a region in Second Life or better, expect to pay around $90 a month or more. These prices are, in general terms, consistent across the grids.

There are two major exceptions to this general rule, however. First, Kitely regions can cost significantly less than those on other grids, even though they are high performance, because they are shut down when not in use — you’re not paying for an empty region with nobody on it.

And closed commercial grids tend to charge a little more, on average, because you’re paying for the additional security, community management, and support. In addition, some commercial grids do additional development work to add custom features to their grids to set themselves apart. Meanwhile, open grids like OSgrid benefit from having multiple vendors competing on price and service for region rentals, whereas regions on closed commercial grids typically are hosted by the grid itself.

One word of caution: if you pick a closed grid that prohibits region and inventory exports, and you decide to leave at some point in the future, you might have a hard time moving your land and avatar. If this might be an issue for you, check the grid’s policies on this before making a big commitment of time or money.

Education and Non-profits

If you’re a school, university, museum, hospital, research lab or other non-profit then you will have very different considerations than a casual user.

If you’re looking to get a region on a grid where you can socialize with other educators or researchers, or share content with them, check out  JokaydiaGrid, iSynergy3D, Virtyou, Curiosity Grid, New Genres Grid, and ScienceSim. OSgrid is also home to many educators, as is Craft World, Metropolis, and New World Grid.

However, you may also want to consider running a private grid. It’s not much more expensive. In fact, if you’re renting several sims, having a private server running a mini-grid may actually be cheaper than renting regions individually. Many hosting providers do not charge extra to set up a mini-grid for you, and you get a private-label grid — your own domain, grid address, avatar names, everything.

You can turn on hypergrid to bring in builders and content from other grids and for public events, and turn off hypergrid when classes are in session.

Commercial organizations

If you’re a company using OpenSim as a platform for collaboration, training, simulations, team building or other internal functions, then you’ll want to run a private grid. If you have 16 regions or less you can do it as a mini-grid, also known as a standalone. A mini-grid runs on a single server, so it doesn’t need centralized grid management software.

Many hosting providers will set up a mini-grid at no additional charge. Dreamland Metaverse has the best reputation for setting up private grids, and the best management panel. Other vendors that do this include SimHost, Zetamex, TalentRaspel and 3D Hosting. Full list of OpenSim hosting providers is here.

Here are some questions you should ask — first, of yourself and your organization and, second, of your hosting provider.

Hosted or behind the firewall?

Some providers will manage your grid for you that is running on servers that you own. However, you are responsible for the hardware.

Some hosting providers will also set you up with simple installation files configured to your specifications, so you can install and run the grid software yourself. This results in increased security for you, and lower costs, especially if you have, say, grad students willing to put in the hours to maintain the grid and answer user questions.

But if you don’t want the hassle, opt for a hosted solution. This is similar to hosting a website — the hosting provider sets up the server, installs and manages the software, and all you have to do is log in and enjoy your brand-new virtual world.

Custom coding

Do you need your version of OpenSim to be customized to meet your specific needs? Then consider picking a hosting provider with OpenSim development expertise. SimHost, for example, was founded by OpenSim core developer Adam Frisby. 3D Hosting is run by OpenSim core developer Melanie Thiekler.

Management panel

Whether you’re running a single region or a giant grid, at some point, you’ll want to create new user accounts, move your region, restart it if it gets sluggish, make an OAR backup, or upload an OAR file.

Dreamland Metaverse currently has the management panel in place, allowing self-service region restarts, OAR downloads, and IAR inventory archive downloads. Other vendors are working on management panels as well.

Ask for a demonstration of the panel, but remember that it will probably evolve quickly. Expect vendors to copy the best elements from one another, and for standardized tools to be released soon by the OpenSim community.

Other things you may want to see in a management panel may include the ability to turn hypergrid on or off (may require a restart of the region), the ability to rotate a region, a bulk new user creation tool, the ability to quickly add new regions or sleep existing ones, and cloud-based regions for when you need space for a big event for a short period of time.

Starting avatars and inventories

We all hate Ruth, and for good reason. Fortunately, we don’t have to start life out looking like her. Many hosting providers offer a choice of avatars when new accounts are created, and a starting inventory filled with basic, useful items like textures and clothing.

Some hosting providers will allow you to create default starting avatars for your users. So, for example, if you’re running a school grid, you can offer a choice of student and teacher avatars. If you’re a company, you can offer your users business-appropriate avatar choices.

Backups

For best security, you want to have three kinds of backups.

First, you want your OpenSim provider to do frequent local backups so that if a server goes down they can bring up your region so quickly you won’t even notice it was ever down.

Second, you want your hosting provider to have off-site backups. That way, if something happens to the data facility — for example, if it’s hit by a hacker, as happened last summer to Web hosting companies and OpenSim hosting companies around the world — your provider will just restore on another server from the off-site backups. It will take a little longer, but at least you won’t have lost any work.

Both of these backups should be easily accessible to you in some way. So, for example, if you accidentally delete everything in your region, you should be able to call up your hosting provider and have them restore it from the last backup.

Find out what the process is. The more you know, the less likely you are to need it. Do a trial run of the restore process to make sure that it works and you know how to use it.

Finally, you want to be able to take a backup of your entire region or grid and save it locally. For example, you might want to save a copy of an entire build as an OAR file before tearing it down and starting with a new learning environment, museum exhibit, or simulation. Or you may want to swap OARs in and out — a historic simulation one week, a Mars landing the next, and a CSI crime lab the week after that.

Many hosting providers provide self-serve tools to help you do that, so you don’t have to wait for customer support staff to make an OAR backup for you.

And if you do have backup functionality, take advantage of it. Take regular OAR backups of your regions and save them. You never know when you’ll need them later.

You will also want to have OAR files if you want to switch from one OpenSim hosting provider to another. (Remember to respect copyrights when you make OAR and IAR backups, especially if you plan to distribute them to others.)

Most hosting providers will also create a fully copy of your grid for you, if you want to switch to running it in-house on your own servers, or if you want to move it to another hosting provider. They know there’s a good chance you’ll come back once you find out how difficult it is to run your own grid, so it pays for them to be friendly.

Hypergrid

Hypergrid is how you can teleport from one grid to another without having to log out and in again on the new grid.

You can have an office on one grid, and visit a business partner on another grid for a meeting — with your existing avatar. It’s also a great way to find content for your new grid — just teleport to OSgrid, FrancoGrid, Craft or GermanGrid and visit all their freebie shops.

Not every grid requires hypergrid capability, however. If you’re running a grid just for your students or employees, you may not want them gallivanting around the entire metaverse.

However, you may still want the option to turn on hypergrid during, say, the construction phase. Allowing your outside contractors to teleport in means that they can use their regular work avatars and easily bring with them any tools or textures that they might need. A hypergrid teleport works much like a regular teleport — they’ll be able to hop in, pull their favorite tools out of their inventories, even pull out finished objects or buildings or scripts, install everything, then go home again.

In addition, you may want to have hypergrid enabled during an open house or marketing event. Some grids even enable hypergrid on just some of their regions — a welcome area, for example.

Voice, groups and currency

Even grids that don’t expect to have an in-world economy may want to set up a PayPal donation box, or sell grid-branded T-shirts to visitors. Your hosting provider will be able to set you up with a PayPal module, or the OMC multi-grid currency system.

In addition, many hosting providers can also help you set up a grid-only, private-label fictional currency. You can use this to reward students, for example, or run an economic simulation. Or to run a company store. You will also need a currency if you plan to run a commercial social grid.

Expect to pay extra for currency support, and even more if you want a Web-based storefront integrated with your in-grid merchants.

For voice, ask for Vivox. It’s the gold standard of voice, and is used in Second Life and many other big games. Best part is its free for small and non-profit customers. If you’re running a large commercial grid, however, you might want to trade up to a commercial license, with support and service agreements. Any hosting vendor will be able to easily set it up for you.

You should also be able to get groups, profiles, and search and other advanced functionality from your hosting provider, but there may be an additional charge for some features.

Custom viewers

The latest version of OpenSim supports media-on-a-prim and mesh, as long as users have up- to-date viewer like Firestorm.

To ensure that all visitors have the same experience, you may want to have a recommended viewer for your grid. Ask your hosting company if they can create a customized viewer for you.

There may be extra costs associated with it, but a custom viewer, pre-configured to log into your grid, will make it easier for your users to login and will help you provide a more consistent experience and better support.

Support

Today, Dreamland Metaverse has the best reputation for support, but as they expand, they might start having trouble keeping up with support tickets.

Ask to talk to existing customers before making a big purchase decision, or start small and see how well the vendor works out for you.

In particular, check whether support is available during the hours you need it most, and in your preferred language.

Price

Yes, OpenSim is much, much less expensive than Second Life. Many hosting providers have no set up fees — some will even give you the first week or two for free, or throw in a free water region with every full sim.

For $10 a month for a single region, expect to have a low-use region — you’re not going to have 50 avatars on it all the time, with a million scripts running and your prims at full capacity. But a region in the $10 to $25 price range could work for parks and landscaping, homesteads, sandboxes, low-traffic areas, or pilot projects.

My company office, for example, rarely has more than five people on it at once — we use it for small team meetings. If I was running a popular venue, however, I would want the most powerful server I could find.

For $25 to $60 a month, expect to have a moderate-use region. If you’re running multiple regions at once and don’t expect to see each region fully used all the time, then you might share a server between several regions.

For maximum performance, however, you want to have a dedicated core for each region. So on a four-core server like the $190 one from SimHost, you can run four Second Life-quality regions, for a per-region price of just under $50 per region.

If you just have a single region and want to get the maximum performance out of it, expect to pay $90 and up for a dedicated core.

The main exception here is Kitely, which some companies are using in lieu of private grids. Kitely offers a great deal of fine-grained access control — such as limiting access to members of a particular Facebook group — as well as fast and easy OAR exports and imports. Metered Kitely regions — where you pay around 20 cents for each hour of use — start at $1 a month. Unmetered, unlimited use regions start at $40 a month. All Kitely regions can hold up to 100,000 prims and up to 100 simultaneous avatars.

As a result, the price differential between Second Life land and OpenSim becomes even more significant.

You can pay as little as $10 for a single region, but for the highest performance and a dedicated core, expect to pay around $90 a region. If you buy several regions at once, and don’t expect to have full traffic on every region at once, then expect that price to drop dramatically.

Educators running mini-grids of around 16 regions are paying around $10 a region a month if they don’t normally expect to see maximum traffic on each region simultaneously.

Full list of OpenSim hosting providers here.

Check out ReactionGrid, SimHost and Dreamland Metaverse — these are the three providers with the best track records and reputations for customer service and support.

ReactionGrid is a full grid dedicated to the education community, with events and resources. They will also set up private grids for schools and universities — both with and without hypergrid teleports. (You can also turn hypergrid on or off at any time, as needed.)

As part of the price, expect to get a Web management panel so you can create and delete your own users, move your regions around, get full backups of your regions, full backups of your inventories, and restart regions if they get sluggish.

The best voice option in OpenSim right now is the Whisper/Mumble combo, but they’re still working out the bugs. Expect to have that up and running by the end of the year. It sounds, and works, as well as Vivox in Second Life. The folks at Dreamland Metaverse have been working with the vendors to test and deploy it.

Whisper/Mumble is free — like OpenSim, it’s open source — but you might have to pay a little extra for the server hosting. However, many providers are throwing it in for free.

The best bet for universities and schools is a private grid. It’s as easy to set up and manage as a region on someone else’s grid, and doesn’t usually cost anything extra, unless the grid gets more than 16 regions in size and you need centralized grid servers — but at that point, you’ll be getting savings from running regions in bulk, anyway. With your own grid, you get to decide when maintenance is schedule and whether you’re ready to upgrade the software, or if you’d rather wait before all the bugs are worked out. You determine who gets user accounts. You set your own terms of service.

The second best bet is to have regions on ReactionGrid, ScienceSim, JokaydiaGrid, or another education-friendly grid.

The third best bet is to have regions on free-to-connect grids like OSGrid or NewWorldGrid. With other grids, keep in mind that you’re now subject to their upgrade cycles, they control your downtime, they own your user accounts, and your users will have full access to the content on those grids, and, since they’re hypergrid-enabled, will be able to travel to most of the other grids out there.

In addition, private grids like InWorldz and SpotOn3D are nice places for merchants because of the high level of protection of content. But those protections are a double-edge sword for educators, since they make it difficult, or impossible, to get backups of regions and inventories. And, again, the grid owners control your upgrade cycles and downtimes, not you.

When you deal with a hosting provider, you should be able to negotiate up front when they will be taking the grid down for maintenance, and which individuals will be specifically working on your account to help if there are any problems. ReactionGrid, SimHost and Dreamland Metaverse all have great reports from customers about their service.

Some customers are telling me that they’ve had better stability and uptime in OpenSim than in Second Life, so its very possible to have a good experience with OpenSim, especially with the latest version of the software, and if you pay enough to have dedicated cores or dedicated servers for your regions.

Getting stuff

Region backups are important because you want to have local copies of your builds in case something goes wrong with the provider’s servers (it happens), if you decide to switch providers, or if you simply want to have a choice of regions to use at any given time. For example, you might use a historic recreation one semester, and a mathematics simulation the next.

Once you create a region, and save it as a local export — also known as an OAR archive — you can then share it with your colleagues, sell it, or donate it to the wider educational community.

An IAR inventory export is much like a region OAR export, except that instead of saving everything located on a region, it saves everything in a particular user’s inventory.

With both of these exports, be sure that you’re complying with the licensing terms of your content, as it is easy to inadvertently make copies of objects this way for which you do not have copy permission.

Some free (and commercial) content resources, including sites that distribute free OAR files, are listed here.

If you are transfering content from Second Life that was created under a “work for hire” or “all rights” contract, and you have signed documents from the creators, Second Life should allow you to take exports even if you aren’t the creator of all the objects. Check with the Lindens.

There are also consulting companies that will move content, negotiate with content creators, and, if necessary, recreate objects from scratch. FireSabre, for example, says they will help schools move content.

Hypergrid travel

With hypergrid, you can teleport from grid to grid. Your users, for example, can attend events on other grids — they can visit grids owned by other universities and museums, attend training classes, or just go shopping. There are cross-grid currencies that work on multiple grids. You don’t have to relog, or create new avatars. Clothing and attachments travel just fine. And the new, more secure, Hypergrid 1.5 keeps rogue grid owners from hacking into your inventory when you travel.

However, some schools might not want to have strangers teleporting in and out. In these cases, hypergrid can only be enabled for part of a grid — say, for a Visitors’ Center region — this allows local users to travel out unimpeded, but foreign visitors are limited to just that one location on your grid. In addition, hypergrid can be turned on during specific time periods. Say, during construction, to allow contractors to teleport in and out with their inventories full of building supplies and tools. Or during a promotional open house or students’ work exhibition.

Turning hypergrid on or off is usually free, but does require a region restart.

Diva Distro

If even $10 a region is too much, then consider the free, open-source Diva Distro. This is published by the woman who invented the hypergrid, UC Irvine professor Crista Lopes. The Diva Distro is a pre-packaged mini-grid with four regions arranged into a single “megaregion” — no border crossings. It runs on a single server and can be expanded to be as large as your server can hold – usually up to nine or 16 regions if your machine is powerful enough.

Multiple Diva Distros can be linked together into a distributed virtual grid and with a little planning and the use of “link regions” you can have all the regions of all the Diva Distros all show up on a single map.

The Diva Distro has a Web front end for user registrations, and a built-in upgrade utility for when new versions of OpenSim are released. Lopes also conveniently packages it with starting avatars and a basic inventory of textures, clothing, and building supplies, all distributed under a Creative Commons license.

By default, it comes with hypergrid turned on.

To travel the hypergrid, simply go to Map-Search, and type in the hypergrid address of your destination. If the destination is within jumping distance, and is running a reasonably compatible version of OpenSim, the destination will appear on the screen and you’ll be able to teleport to it by hitting “teleport” or double-clicking on its name. Hypergrid teleports look and feel just like regular teleports and take about the same amount of time.

You can also create stargates that teleport users when they walk through them, or teleport boards that teleport when they’re clicked. The scripts use the same map teleport and OSTeleport commands as regular in-grid teleports, except you give the full hypergrid address instead of the region name.

The Hyperica directory currently lists around 300 hypergrid destinations, and this number is expected to grow dramatically as the new, more secure Hypergrid 1.5 version is rolled out through the OpenSim grids. More than half of all public grids are currently hypergrid-enabled.

If you’re setting up the Diva Distro to run behind the firewall — say, for local access by students over the local area network — then no particular skills are required, just careful following of the directions provided with the Diva Distro. If you want to have hypergrid access across your firewall, to other grids out there, then you will have to open up ports in your firewall, and may need the help of your network administrator. At that point, it might be easier, cheaper, and faster to get your Diva Distro hosted with an OpenSim service provider instead.

The latest version of OpenSim also supports media-on-a-prim, though it currently requires Second Life Viewer 2 to take advantage of it. However, Imprudence and other viewers are expected to come out with their media-on-a-prim support shortly

Looking to add some jazz to your virtual world? Say, by having doors that swing open when you touch them, fish that swim in your lakes, or cannons that actually fire?

Sure, you can buy all this stuff, but if you’re a do-it-yourselfer kind of guy or gal, pick up a free script instead. To create scripts in OpenSim, open your inventory (tab on bottom left if you’re using an older viewer, or the suitcase tab if you’re using a newer viewer such as Firestorm) and select Create-New Script. Then just paste in the script, save it, rename it, and drop it on top of the object you want to animate. A rotating door script, for example, would be added to the door itself, or to its hinge (depending on the script and shape of door).

Almost all Second Life scripts work as-is in OpenSim, though there are some vehicle physics commands that haven’t been implemented yet. In addition, OpenSim has added some new commands, called OSSL, and can also run scripts written in C#. (List of OSSL functions is here.)

LSL isn’t the easiest language to just sit down and start writing code in if you’ve never programmed before. But by playing with these scripts, you can soon get the hang of it.

OSGrid’s Script List: This is a list of scripts that have been posted to the OSGrid forum, the go-to-place for OpenSim discussions of all kinds. As the largest grid on the hypergrid, OSGrid is the crossroad of the metaverse, and even folks who live on other grids frequently pop in for help or to just to chat.

Second Life Script Library: This is a repository of scripts on Second Life’s official Wiki. There’s also a very active Second Life scripting forum here. And there’s the LSL Wiki Script Library., with a smaller collection of useful scripts.

Internet LSL Script Database & Library: More than 700 scripts, nicely arranged by category. This site gets lots of traffic, and Ferd Frederix, the guy who runs it, responds to questions and comments.

Fred Gandt’s Free Scripts: Dozens of useful, and free, scripts on the Second Life Wiki. Don’t forget to click on “More Free Scripts” and “Even More Free Scripts” — he’s got several pages of scripts here, in no particular order.

FoxSan’s LSL Script Repository: Just over 150 scripts available. Use the search box — or the tags — on the right to find what you’re looking for.

The Script Shack: A low-traffic forum, with a small selection of scripts for doors, menus, and for helping merchants.

Benja Keplerâ€s SL Blog: A small collection of scripts, last updated in 2008.

Digigrids: A collection of free game-related scripts for OpenSim

None of these have what you need?

Instantly generate a new script with the Script Me! LSL script generator.

A super easy-to-use Web-based scripting tool that uses visual building blocks is Greenbush Lab’s ScripTastic, which we recommend highly, especially for kids. (But adults can try it out to, particularly those just learning how to script.)

For more advanced users, MiceOnABeam offers a downloadable application that helps scripts build with a visual interface, available in both free and paid pro versions.

You can also instantly create a new particle generator script with the Free LSL Particles System from Zeja Pyle.

There is also a program called Scratch for Second Life that you can download and run to generate more complex scripts with an easy graphical interface.

Or work your way through Second Life’s excellent collection of scripting tutorials.