Maria published her monthly counts and analysis of OpenSim growth yesterday and she counts a total of 22,651 OpenSim regions and these include OSGrid, and public and private grids that report their numbers. her totals will always be less than all deployed OpenSim regions because not everyone reports their numbers

22,651 regions is a new high for OpenSim and approaches Second Life’s 23,619 private estates and isn’t too shabby compared to SL’s total sims of 30,840

while you can’t compare an OpenSim region to a Second Life sim as exact equals, you also can’t say that OpenSim is small from a land perspective. of course user accounts are still tiny for OpenSim compared to what SL has. they claim 10,000 signups per day but what’s the value in that number? i have 33,000 Twitter followers and what does that prove? maybe that i am OCD but as far as success goes, sims is a meaningful number since they represents the main revenue stream for Linden Lab

OpenSim can no longer be seen as a second-rate alternative to Second Life

people are showing the viability of OpenSim with where they decide to set up home, shops, and clubs. this does not mean Second Life is dead, it just means that equal or better options are available

Second Life lost over 1,000 private sims in the last year which could be as much as 3 to 3.5 million dollars per year (a loss of about 5% of LL’s annual revenue). some of that is flat-out attrition – people leaving that don’t want to do virtual world stuff, but some of that are people choosing something else that meets or exceeds their needs

Maria points out that 391 private sims inSL poofed last month and i’d say a good number of those were from the “no setup fee” special LL did October 21-23  (gee, i’d like the setup fees from my 19 sims refunded! i could buy a car!). the first month’s tier would have started on November 21-23 and that $295 is a big chunk of change to come up with!

so what does this mean?

for OpenSim it means we will likely see the number of regions surpass those in Second Life in 2012

overall, it means that virtual worlds are doing well and becoming more widely adopted. despite the small drop inSL sims, the growth of virtual worlds when you combine Second Life with OpenSim is significant with a total of over 53,000 sims/regions

                          

subQuark wants some way to show what’s been involved in making Enclave Harbour without getting technical. like an “elevator pitch”, when you have that time in an elevator to tell someone about your product or service

you and i know what is involved but

how do you tell a mainstream person who has never even heard of Second Life?

i bet some of you are like me and have had your share of glazed looks after you started sharing your virtual world passion =D

it’s pretty awesome what people build in Second Life and OpenSim and it’s easy to not think of that as hardcore 3D development. but it is 3D dev work, just like doing work in Blender or Maya (used for movies like Shrek)

for OpenSim users, it often moves beyond 3D development work and can involve some level of hardware work. this is far more technical, and artistic, than most people ever do in their professional lives

after some thought, here’s what i came up with – two images with three parts – land, prims, and a person

i’d love any ideas you have or experiences that have worked for you in providing a glimpse to non-avatar people at what OpenSim is

                          

pssst – big secret . . . shh, i love OpenSim! okay, so a few of you may have figured that one out and i loved Second Life when i was in it. i love several aspects of both and some additional ones only OpenSim offers

but . . . i am also myopic and highly biased in my love of OpenSim. mainly because it’s the “tool” i enjoy using so much. i find it relatively easy to use (although my scripting skill is lacking) and really think that it is a pretty easy tool to learn and use. that “easy” part is very subjective and the ease of doing things in OpenSim depends a lot on your desire to use it. if it’s just another software to learn so that you can build immersive 3D graphics then it will be a bit of a chore and less exciting to use and therefore less “easy” to an extent

OpenSim does have a bit of a learning curve and there is no substitute for spending time in it. i suppose if i had spent the number hours in anything else that i have spent in Second Life and then in OpenSim, i’d probably be decent at whatever that thing was. i recognize this bias in me toward OpenSim (and Second Life) and typically cite it as a big caveat to my advice to use OpenSim for this or that (after all, i have never used Open Wonderland or done anything in WebGL so i can’t honestly and sincerely speak to those)

some would consider me an expert in certain aspects of OpenSim (but i’m really just someone that, like most of you, just enjoy using it a lot) and one of the trappings of becoming an “expert” in anything is that the box you were once seen as thinking outside of is now a box with very thick walls. when you really learn the ins and outs of something and develop an expertise of it, you actually think more inside the box and continue to make the walls of that box thicker

what?

sure because you learn what can and can’t be done with that thing. in this case with OpenSim, there are some things that all of us start saying is not possible and that starts to define boundaries in what OpenSim can do. those boundaries are the walls of the proverbial box. while most of us still hold that anything is possible with virtual worlds, we do “see” limitations, even if they are ones we hope to overcome. like being browser-based and able to work on an iPad. both are possible (isn’t anthing possible?) but we also “know” that OpenSim needs a certain level of hardware which bumps anemic tablets out of the equation and that it needs more than what a plugin can deliver

yes we can do Unity but you can’t build in Unity (those darn caveats and box walls) and we could do with less hardware power but would need to sacrifice graphics. you get the gist of my sentiment and this is not anywhere near any kind of manifesto, it’s actually a long-winded preamble to the topic the title is supposed to allude to

i belong to a Virtual Worlds group in LinkedIn and it’s a bit low key and not a source of much new information but a thread was started a few weeks back that relates to the above rambling

the person starting the thread, and who has now emailed me directly with the same question, has a project for his engineering degree at a university in Pakistan - it’s about what to use to build a virtual campus

several people responded to him with various solutions such as Open Wonderland, WebGL, and Unity. it was clear (to me) that the need was for something very inexpensive but that was only said later. Pathfinder responded with the shortest answer saying that Reaction Grid’s Jibe would work and it would if you had a budget, but his answer was more about making a sale than understanding the person’s need. i know i go overboard and probably “help” more than i should (i mean free sim-on-a-stick? what am i, a canadian socialist?). but i am truly interested in helping this person find an enjoyable and suitable solution, not in making a sale

i do think Unity would be good and you’ll see why after i list his requirements:

• VIRTUAL TOUR of my university campus with 4 main blocks as a 3d environment
• immersive virtual collaborative conference meeting environment
• university teachers can attend and address conferences virtually in 3d
• attendees have login with their customized avatar
• voice in realtime 
• text support, multimedia projector for presentations, etc
• implement it as a webpage with no viewer installation or plugin
• no programming
• free
• develop in under a year on a part-time basis

okay - this is a tough list and back to that expertise thing and box walls. i don’t know of anything that can do all of those items (darn walls are closing in when applied to real issues). but some things can do various items. WebGL could be without a plugin but does need a WebGL browser and some serious programming skills. Unity would not need a viewer but in order to have concurrency for a conference and accounts, you’d need something like Pathfinder’s Jibe which is not free. Open Wonderland is Java-based so that involves programming, Second Life costs way more than free, and all i can speak to is OpenSim

for the free part, that may be possible if the university has server space for him and somehow he can get OpenSim installed for free or figure it out (but that seems unlikely due to not wanting any programming – server deployment with voice takes real tech savvy)

something like installing OpenSim on your own box or using sim-on-a-stick could make the development part free but won’t allow local concurrency without additional tech work

so it seems to me that only OpenSim offers any hope of meeting some of these needs but does require a viewer and some way to serve it up to the outside world (but i am biased)

if you have additional ideas, post them and maybe a link so this guy can check them out because he has to delve into this for himself and determine what items in his requirements can be set aside and compromised

                          

while perusing OpenSim videos on YouTube i ran accross one by theghostman8520 and i have no idea who he is but he is kind of cute in a really geeky way. i watched his video below where he walks through doing an OpenSim standalone install on a Windows machine. i have always thought that doing an install was really hard and over a year ago i was messing with setting up stuff that maybe i did not even need to mess with

following his instructions, all i did was dowload the latest OpenSim zip and unzip it onto my pc. then i ran the OpenSim.exe and answered the questions and was up and running in about three minutes!

i don’t have PHP or MySQL setup on this box (it was wiped clean with my XP reinstall from a few months back) but i did use the Imprudence i already had. i just changed it’s grid manager to localhost and was on my new OpenSim install!

is it really that easy to setup? 

i guess so because i logged in with a the avatar name from the setup (Test User) and started building! now it’s not connected to the outside world and is just a solo building setup but with further digging, it can be connected to the OSGrid and have hypergridding enabled

this was far easier than i had ever thought! *derr, on me!* =p

                          

pulling down the zoom as you move forward – this is a trick done in scary movies where a hallway looks like it is stretching away from you. a camera has a high amount of zoom and as it moves forward you steadily decrease the zoom and it makes the hall seem to move farther away from you

when i lived in Texas, i lived in a tiny town that was only a few miles from where that old TV show called Dallas was filmed, the opening shot for that TV show was from a helicopter that made the front yard of that mansion look about three time longer than it really was. it was done with that same zoom technique (who ever did shoot JR?)

i don’t think you can smoothly zoom like that in OpenSim or Second Life but you can use that trick to make things look larger than they appear *resisting making a joke about that* =p

yesterday i finally added sidewalk ramps to my truss bridge and anytime i do detail work i fly up to my “OAR Generation Station” to make a backup of that sim. the OAR dealio is an automated backup device that James of SimHost made for me (he understands how obsessive i am and is gracious enough to indulge me). the device fires off every night around 10 PM and writes an OAR of its region to our server. however, it is also made so that i can touch it anytime to create an OAR right then – it’s peace of mind that i really like (or that feeds into my paranoia?) =D

anyway . . . these OAR stations are way up at 400 metres and i wanted to take some pics (document?) of my finally done walkways for flickr

you can see in the first pic below what it looks like at the normal zoom default. the bridge is between the white water tower and the red and white lighthouse

to make the bridge look larger and still frame the shot in a similar way, you just zoom way in and pull your cam way back. the zooming in “compresses” the entire distance and makes the bridge seem much larger

as an exaggeration, the last shot shows the opposite with being way zoomed out but having the camera in closer. you can imagine how the combination of zooming and moving the camera make what was close seem to be moving away

this is also a way to make silly pics where you have a friend far away past you, zoom way tight and make it look like they are tiny and standing in the palm of your hand  =)

                          

this post is spurred on by comments to a post on Monday (if you want to understand a bit about the resources used by a user, read Tranquility’s comments to that post). Tranquility sheds light on just how much data moves back and forth on the InWoldz grid and how quickly it adds up to HUGE numbers. he explains how textures add up very quickly and tossed out real numbers like 15,000,000 asset requests in a 3 day period (that’s 15 million!) o_O

there is a tendency to equate OpenSim to a website and to frame the evolution of virtual worlds to that of the web’s history. both have URLs (URIs) and both live “out there” in the internet and both use servers to dish content up to computers. way back in the day, website hosting was big bucks – you could spend $300 a month for a small amount of disk space for one domain but, today, hosting can be on the order of $4 a month with GoDaddy. we see prices falling for virtual worlds too, like $1000 setup plus $295 a month for Second Life to $10 a month per sim and even less with cloud hosting or free with sim-on-a-stick! =)

however, the demands on the server are far greater for a virtual world than a web page

the OpenSim developers keep improving OpenSim and keep working on not just bugs and new feathures but also on its architecture  (shout out to our own Micheil who contributed a fix last week! thanks Micheil!) =)

for me, i would love to see OpenSim become easier to install similar to a “one-click” WordPress install. many website hosting companies have one-click installs of various blog platforms, e-commerce solutions, photo albums, content management systems, and so on

these one-click installs can be pretty sophisticated with WordPress installing dozens of PHP pages, setting up databases, and installing hundreds of files

furthermore, server apps like WordPress have very easy (non-techy) upgrade tools. WordPress alerts the user to a new version and so do any plug-ins you may be using with it. a simple button click updates the blog app or plug-in in a matter of seconds

WordPress also has very easy to use tools for exporting backups and importing content, including the entire blog if you move it to another host (think in terms of OARs and IARs and if you are a pirate – maybe ARRRs)  =p

i would anticipate that OpenSim could eventually get to this “one-click” stage and even be offered as part of a website hosting company’s offering just like anything else

BUT . . . an easy install does not mean an inexpensive to run server app. WordPress serves up web pages which don’t need a lot of server muscle and running a blog does not require much resource wise from a server. this blog enjoys a decent level of traffic and runs just fine on a $12 a month HostGator hosting package. our hosting allows unlimited domains and databases and we run about 16 sites from it and our ping reports show 100% uptime for the most part

unfortunately, OpenSim is not a lightweight server app and that makes sense when you think about what OpenSim (and Second Life) is – a real-time shareable, muli-collaborator, instant rendering 3D application

if you have ever used Blender or even Google SketchUp with a ray tracer (like Kerky), then you know that 3D apps need time to render out a scene. OpenSim continually renders “live” and does so for multiple users all at once. that is very sophisticated and it is easy to take OpenSim (and Second Life) for granted and moan about your left shoe attaching to your butt instead of your foot (old timers will remember that from SL) =D

a cheap website host and a one-click OpenSim install (quick! patent that idea before SpotON3D!) does not mean a good OpenSim deployment. it may be okay for a region for yourself and a few visitors, but it will always (/me thinks but my crystal ball is dirty) depend on the hardware available to it. the one sim, one core, and one gig RAM rule will be around for a while (case in point – SL has never changed full sim prim limits and concurrency or reduced tier!)

easier installs will make adoption of OpenSim more widespread, but won’t make a big difference for the hardware needed

more bucks mean more bang – now and probably in the future too

                          

just a short continuation of yesterday’s post because your comments spurred me on to define, for myself, more clearly what virtual worlds are to me

virtual worlds are real and for our endeavor – they are a manner to illustrate science topics

teaching is often done with text books which are mostly text! *ooh, thanks for clearing that up” =p

for concepts needing deeper treatemnet than perhaps words can offer, there are often accompanying illustrations. more expensive textbooks can have photographs and some even come with multimedia material such as video

all of these ways to convey ideas are very real and are pretty effective in getting ideas across

virtual worlds offer another way to illustrate ideas and i think can do so in a cost effective, immersive, engaging, and accessible way

                          

the ego is quite a force in your life – everyone has one and it is a necessary part of your being

being egotistical is seen as bad but it can be good in Western culture because that is often needed to become the CEO of a company, for example. something like 4% of Fortune 500 CEO’s are so egotistical that they are clinically pathological! (from some study i read in the last two months but did not bookmark)

i think Ener has a pretty sizeable avatar ego (coupled with a touch of french canadian snobbery and wow, what a package i am!) =p

that egoism affects my virtual world building as i have prided myself on having done 100% of everything that will be used by students at Enclave Harbour. part of that stems from a defense mechanism to cope with the trauma of moving from SL to OpenSim last year (i was traumatised, waaah, poor Ener) and that “self-reliant pioneer” mantra baloney helped me cope

there was nothing “pioneer” about coming to OpenSim a year and a half ago. it was new to me and OpenSim was rough and bumpy, but “pioneer”? hardly . . .

all I did was create an account, try it out, and compare it to SL! that’s hardly being a pioneer (can you tell that i have a soapbox issue about people having bravado about this) =D

in the last few weeks subQuark has been using one of Enclave Harbour’s “openspace” sims to create temporary stuff for some eLearning courses. as a nosy, err, i mean helpful avatar, i have popped in to see what was up. i even helped film some video, met one of his coworkers (who was so cute when she realised she could make her own animations – she instantly went from serious corporate person to fun loving inner child), and as a result of all of this i had a change of ego (or heart) about using other people’s creations

some things just are outside of what i can, or want to, do. scuplties are an example of that and i am all about “build with prims because everyone can” (see Prok was right - i am clearly a socialistic, yet elitist, communist frog)

subQuark needed a bed for one of his sets and i admit that prims make lousy pillows and sheets (now that i think about my elitism, i do have one sculptie table cloth that i have used for a year at my Enclave Harbour home – oh the hypocrisy!). thus the Transgenia bed by Daniel H. i mentioned here yesterday (there is also one of his plants in the pic below)

people do create things that are licensed for all types of usage and by adding their beautiful work, i can enrich the user’s experience without taking away from my own work

it’s taken a year and a half, but i suppose my avatar is growing, just like OpenSim is =)

the drapes are just cylinders & the TV is a Hax-O-Vision! =)

                          

click for full-size

i am interested in Unity because it can play in a browser, on an iPad, and on Android

apart from that, i have little inclination to start creating in Unity because, in my opinion, it makes it harder to do virtual worlds. easier accessibility is clearly the advantage that Unity has, however, OpenSim is far more approachable

my personal “acid test” for this and to demonstrate what i mean by “more approachable” is to ask how long would it take to get a 12 year old to the point where they can create a house in a 3D space. i know what it takes to learn Blender (great tool but steep learning curve)  and in OpenSim i can teach someone how to make a house in an hour, including textures and scripting a door (cut and paste, but they still get a door)

OpenSim will be my choice for a while as far as having a way for kids to create BUT . . . Unity may be the choice for sharing what i have built in conjunction with subQuark’s book. his project is about virtual field trips and not about teaching anyone how to build. for that purpose, Unity seems to be the only viable browser-based option and a very good one performance-wise

to be fair to Unity and Tipodean, i wanted to post a video showing the quality settings that redsolarmoon, Chris Collins, and Eurominuteman educated me about (the video below was made from Tipodean OpenSim conversion this demo - boys sure do love guns!)

the video shows how the user can set their own quality settings (hit Esc) and the overhead difference on the CPU is minimal – my Task Manager went from 22% on the lowest setting to only 29% on the highest!

the quality of textures, lighting, and shadows do change but i still see some edges not getting anti-aliasing applied – it is a minor thing for being browser-based but still one that i hone in on and is shown in the full size of the static image on the left

overall, i am very impressed with this and with it as a possible means to do the virtual component of subQuark’s field trips for Enclave Harbour

                          

A topic I have discussed in the past is in the use of virtual worlds for creating multimedia assets for eLearning and I have some old tutorials for doing this with Second Life. Creating video from Second Life or OpenSim is fairly easy to do and fairly inexpensive.

However, virtual worlds are also an easy way to create simpler graphics. In the past, I have used Second Life as my stock image library by taking snapshots of whatever I needed – be it a person or two, an office, or campus. Using such images means you have embraced the low detail look of Second Life (or OpenSim) and that can be hard for some to do. The lack of detail is from a low polygon count which is necessary so that virtual worlds can render in real-time. This is only something that you can decide is acceptable or not for use in your eLearning and is a balance is speed, details, and cost. Getty images are expensive and may not be exactly what you need – virtual world images are inexpensive and can be created to exactly what you need (to an extent). With http://simonastick, you have a free studio with which to create any scene you want. Creating content can be time consuming but there is a lot of free content available, including an entire pre-built and free campus.

I have shifted my personal focus from using virtual worlds for eLearning video (although I continue to do this in my day job) to creating a middle school workbook that uses virtual worlds for science field trips. That endeavor can be glimpsed at http://enclaveharbour.com. My “part” of this work is developing activities that go with the builds created by Ener Hax and defining what the final project will be. The Enclave Harbour link is for the virtual world component of this and the workbook has its own website (yes, I am guilty of over complicating things at times). In developing a temporary single page for that site I wanted to tie in the virtual world aspect since that is what, hopefully, makes this an interesting way to learn science.

In creating an image that reflected what Enclave Harbour is, I wanted it to be more iconic than simply an image. By iconic I mean showing features that define what this place is. Think of the Eiffel Tower or the Golden Gate Bridge, both can be represented with simple line drawings that many people will connect with immediately. Some city skylines can be silhouetted and be easily recognized (Toronto and Seattle, for example).

That is the perspective I wanted to create for this graphic and it was very easy to do.

I created large “full bright” backgrounds that I placed behind a dozen selected builds, took anti-aliased images of each, then treated each so that I would end up with a black silhouette. Some needed a little cleaning up and I did add two more images, plus the shape of the land, in which I did not use a white background. You can see that the process was very simple and I ended up with a stylized skyline that represents Enclave Harbour.

If you use virtual worlds, use them as 3D multimedia applications as well. It is easy to only think of them as collaborative and immersive virtual worlds, but in reality they are 3 D software applications and can often be used in the way one would used Autodesk 3ds Max or Blender.

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this post is from the subQuark blog

                          

I have been following a discussion in LinkedIn’s Virtual World group that has taken a shift into an area of interest to me. It will come to no surprise to the reader’s of Ener Hax’s iliveisl blog to learn that this shift was loudly accented by our own Ener.

Linda Rogers (Bread and Roses | Music Island), whom I have a deep respect for and who has a comprehensive knowledge of Second Life, started this shift and brings up a great point in a conversation with Ener.

With heavy editing below, here is part of the thread to set the stage for my two cents.

Linda: I frequently run into educators that are new to Second Life, because one of the places they tend to visit (if they are interested in the Arts) is my music series. It is amazing how frequently I meet educators in their first week who are just blown away by things they have visited, the virtual Dresden Museum, the virtual Sistine Chapel, historical sims, science sims, space and ocean sims. AND they want to bring their Grade 3 class to see something and explore. That’s when they find out with a shock that Second Life is not open to children.

These educators want a world with the quality and depth of content of SL available in a child-friendly environment.

Ener: well the good news is that educators can have that same experience in OpenSim! =)  because everything that was built in Second Life can be built in OpenSim. a teacher could build it themselves, create a consortium of like-minded teachers and do it as a project, or even hire others

Linda: Linden Lab has indicated clearly that they are disinterested in retaining Educators.There’s clearly room for someone else to take that ball and run with it.

Ener: if a group of teachers can organize, then a great number of things can be built. i think if all disparate OpenSim educational efforts could loosely come together, people would be surprised at the tremendous volume of educational material out there. Linda, you hit on a very good point and i believe that it is up to teachers to form this and not some corporate entity =)

Linda and Ener have hit upon a very good point indeed!

Second Life was the first “create anything you want” virtual world that saw mainstream media attention and attracted many people who did come and build fantastic places.

We all know what Linden Lab thinks of education – the layoff of many that dealt with education, such as Pathfinder Linden, the closure of the teen grid, and the cessation of the educational/not-for-profit discount.

Second Life does have a large amount of interesting builds and, unfortunately, many have disappeared due to a number of factors. However, there is no longer the need to pin all hopes on a corporate entity that will make choices to serve itself over that of education.

The advances and stability seen in OpenSimulator make it nearly as viable as Second Life. The one exception, in my opinion, is the physics engine.

The challenges in creating an educational consortium, which could be as simple as a list of Grid URIs and a sentence about each, include some of the following:

• semi-private grids, such as our Enclave Harbor
• grids existing on local servers, in the school or district
• classroom grids on local machines, such as Eric Nauman’s
• grids behind firewalls
• grids on teacher’s personal computers at home

There are further variations but even with hypergrid-enabled regions, not all grids will be able, nor necessarily want, to connect into a large consortium. With Second Life, we were all in this one single “walled garden” which invoked a community feel that made it more natural to want to share your work. Often, sims were paid for from school budgets and did not represent as deep a personal investment as some OpenSim grids do. To compound this, many Second Life builds were heavily comprised of “things” that were bought or found for free.

To use Enclave Harbour as an example, Ener has created every item we have in-world, even trees. This makes for a more personal investment into OpenSim than in Second Life. Buying a chair for fifty cents is easier to share with others than a chair you may have spent a few hours creating. Add to that the more “gritty” feel that running your own server has and its expense and somehow it feels more emotional than it did in Second Life (even though we pay what one educationally discounted sim cost and have 16 sims). This may simply be my own bias, but I am protective of Ener’s work and value it greatly. I confess to not seeing much value in being open to the public. It may sound callous, but I bet my feelings are not that different from others who have gone through the trouble to establish their own grid and have all of their content custom-made.

However, a consortium of educational OpenSim grids could have great value in the larger scheme of K-16 education.

I would like to see this consortium include linkages with community colleges and universities. The educational grids could serve as “feeders” to higher education institutions and this is something that would hold value to me. If students going through Enclave Harbour resulted in a higher number of students pursuing science studies in college (particularly STEM with emphasis on reducing its gender gap), then I would open our grid up because this meant that a real relationship existed between us and a college (or colleges). This would add value to our grid in a way that benefited us and the partnering college, in effect our program would have value to the students and to the college.

If you are interested in being part of a listing of educational grids, even if you are fully private, let me know. I would be glad to start a listing (perhaps even self-registration via public Google Docs). Private grids being listed may help others gauge the size and richness of OpenSim educational work in a way analogous to Second Life and spark new ways to look at OpenSim for education.

reposted from subQuark

                          

what’s the future of OpenSim-based virtual worlds?

there are so many options coming out but also the start of trends as OpenSim goes from “pioneer” and novel to more mainstream. by mainstream, i mean within the fairly small second Life/OpenSim community. OpenSim is not close to the SL concurrency and i have no idea what the real SL number is. counting someone active that logs in once in 30 days does not equate to an active user of virtual worlds in my book. this blog has seen about 50,000 unique visitors in the last year (that means no one is counted twice in the year – well, no same machine) and i would guess that is about the number of truly active virtual world users (i’m not sure there is any logic behind my interpretation!) =D

OpenSim has shaped up to be a viable alternative to Second Life for many purposes and we see a growth in schools, universities, municipal, military, and corporate use. many of those don’t need (and some don’t want) the huge user base that Second Life offers. for art and music, Second Life still reigns supreme but that may see a shift if Kitely ever gets their act together with a paid service. i point that out because having a “free” service that says it will eventually go commercial does not inspire confidence for “real” use. it’s too much of an unknown and, as i have stated before, Kitely needs to charge so that people can make plans to use it (why would i develop something for large scale use when that vital part – money – is yet to be determined). if a cloud-based system can be relied upon, large venues like concerts and clubs could be run more economically than inSL

for those large venues, a private server can also work well (this all assumes hypergridding, and i will get to that eventually) with something like a SimHost set up where for $389 a month (mention me for $370) would get you 8 cores and 24 gigs of RAM. before you spit out your Mountain Dew all over the place, many SL venues have four sims for big events and that’s almost $1,200 a month! taking a massive server like this could mean setting up as few as one region to make a kick butt venue that should perform like four to six SL sims!

a good example of savings by shifting from SL to a private server would be like Dan Park’s Virtualis Center. Dan is a professional meeting planner and has been in that business for 20 years. he has real certified MPI meeting planners set up corporate in-world event. the last i checked, he had 4 sims inSL, so $1,200 a month. but his clientele is from the corporate world, not SL, so moving to OpenSim would seem to make a ton of sense

other “large venue” offerings are starting to come out as well (no pun intended). Gay SanFrancisco (125 OS regions and has a fab beginners guide) is an example of a specialty grid that can host large events and there are others as well. places like the SL City of Edmonton would do very well to become OpenSim-based and host special events as a way to keep interest in what they are doing (they seem kind of dead inSL)

places that can do large events – Kitely, a private group with their own server, and specialty grids – could change the way we view and use virtual worlds

we have a paradigm that is heavily shaped by Second Life that is shifting from being an in-world citizen with a parcel of land on a sim to being an owner of your own region

Maria pointed out a shift in the percentage of regions on the OSGrid which shows more and more independent standalone regions are emerging. most people could easily host their own grid on their own machine for no monthly cost and have a place to call home. a home grid can support two or three dialed in friends depending on your broadband. if you don’t want to do that, you can get regions for as low as $10 USD a month!

will this model, what i call retirement living, be the emerging one?

people will have their homes where they can build and create all they want and have a few close friends drop by, and for large events they’ll use a community centre

                          

okay, so you already know that i think the virtual world community is a cut above the average person. and even if you don’t agree, too bad, i am french canadian and the french part of me is arrogant and a snob – so clearly, anyone reading this must be a superior person! =p

by “a cut above” i mean that you (and me, coincidentally enough) are probably a bit more creative and a bit more persistent than the average folk. that does not actually mean you are better, but these are traits that i admire in others, so in my eyes, you rock! (awww)

a lot of people are pretty overwhelmed with life and rightly so. i know i get pretty stressed out about lots of things (especially since i don’t drink anymore - that really sucks) =/

and maybe you and i do virtual worlds to help deal with real world stresses? i dunno but what i do know is that the majority of avatar peeps that i know are a tolerant and helpful bunch

what brought all of this gushy lovefest on?

or did i become a country western singer and become all “it’s about you”?

well, i don’t have a cowboy hat and my dog did not leave me, but i do think the world (at least the virtual one) of you. i have learned a ton in the last two years from many, many insightful comments and now you gave me a super great reward!

thanks to all of you, the blog has broken through the 2% barrier for web traffic!

it only means as much as you make it out to mean and for me this is a metric i follow (obsess on) as a benchmark and it is a fleeting one at that! tomorrow it might be 5%, but for this moment it’s a big goofy grin on my face =)

okay, talking of numbers, i saw that Hamlet mentioned the Sharespost thing that i follow (he is always gracious and gives a nod out to where he gets stories – thank you Hamlet and maybe one day you can autograph my copy of your book which is well worth the read, it helps give you insight into Linden Lab and an appreciation for them charting out this new path no one has ever been down)

anyway . . . i commented my thoughts on Sharespost and wanted to repeat it here (with edits) to frame my perspective on that index and like the Alexa index above, it is just a number

>>>

hey there, well i have been a bit OCD at looking at the Sharespost index (it makes an easy daily post for me when it changes!) =o

i think what may have happened, in the latest 45% jump, is that they overlooked updating LL for the last two months and that it has been climbing steadily

Rod has to be increasing people’s confidence just with his background. having him at the LL helm must boost the perceived value of LL

Sharespost is one of so many indicators and should be seen as just that – one metric out of 100s

keep in mind that like the “real” stock market, this is all subjective and a best guess by a handful of people and one million percent a perceived value

the more telling thing is that SL is no longer the MySpace of 2005, someone else came along and is giving more options (and stoopid farmville)

will OpenSim ever be the size of SL?

never as a grid, but perhaps in number of regions deployed around the world but it will be a quiet giant, just like the majority of the web is powered by Apache =)

>>>

and again (picture me running in circles with my hands in the air like a little kid excited about something) thank you for making this blog such a big presence in the real world

pffft, and facebook thinks avatars aren’t worth anything! =p

                          

the current build of sim-on-a-stick may need a quick update. Diva Canto, the actual creator of the OpenSim package on the stick sent us a tweet saying there was some minor config issue she has since addressed

this is what probably caused the OpenSim console to poof twice on me and why it takes a bit for the console to fire up (takes like 4 minutes on my XP box)

i’ll update it tonight and re-release it

in the meantime, read more about what OpenSimulator 0.7.1 brings to the table in a nice in-depth article by Maria at Hypergrid Business

as a side Note, Diva is one of the core OpenSimulator developers and i think the actual one who started OpenSimulator. she not only is a passionate and talented scripter, but she pushes OpenSim constantly with things like her USGS terrain dealio mentioned a few weeks back

we (Enclave Harbour) are indebted to Diva and the entire OpenSim team for giving us such a wonderful tool for our educational endeavor. for myself and subQuark, OpenSim gives us a wonderful way to work together on a project we both feel strongly about

for me OpenSim is not just an alternative to SL because i am doing something with it that i never could have inSL

thank you Diva for your tireless work and i hope our project measures up to the creative potential you have created for the entire virtual world community =)

                          

this is a subject i pounded on about a year ago (maybe even 14-16 months back) because that is what i was doing at that time. unfortunately, i did not categorize those very well and they contain a wealth of personal lessons learned (maybe i’ll learn a lesson about blog categories?)  =p

the exodus pace of content creators leaving Second Life seems to be growing more rapidly now – maybe OpenSim is at a point that enough other credible people have made the move (yo yo! avatar cred?) and OpenSim is maybe now smooth enough to not be as big a factor

OpenSim is indeed far smoother than when i made the move. i was using 0.6.7 and it sucked royally! couple that with being under powered on the server side and my several tear-filled posts were well justified (awww, did Ener really cry? yes i did and for a few weeks on and off; it really blew) *ready the tiny violins!*  =p

but anyway, the 0.7.1 real version will be coming out very soon and i can assure you that it works very well. we have been on the dev branch of it and my only complaints are physics. that won’t be changing much (and some of that has to do with licensing) but the rest of it is very solid. so . . . if you were thinking of making the move, then this may be as good a time as any

now i would think that for most people, those who have been inSL for years, it is still a painful thing to do (or at least a pain in the butt) because you spent time getting things just right in Second Life. i tinkered all the time with my builds inSL and the thought of losing all that time really annoyed me, but . . .

i should have moved sooner!

i love, love, love OpenSim (i even <3 it) =D

it runs so well and i have no complaints (i don’t need the physics to be better but i would not mind if they did get better). however, my use of OpenSim is also not dependent on being part of a thriving social scene. that is still small for OpenSim but it’s pretty good in some places

i think the community factor is now a larger one for people making the SL -> OS move than the software is, whereas a year ago the software and tiny social scene made quite an argument for staying inSL – especially for people selling things

but you don’t have to do an all or nothing move either! *ding, ding*

this post is spurred on by a post by the Abbotts Aerodrome guy called Sim-on-a-Stick: Everything is better on a stick! in which he talks about getting sim-on-a-stick up and running and thinking about the possibilities. for him, the physics will suck because he makes planes but he may be able to install his own physics engine if he ever gets his own server (look at licenses and you’ll soon see why some of the “better” physics engines can’t be bundled into OpenSim and then distributed to everybody)

for the time being . . . he can start to rebuild his SL work while remaining inSL by doing so in his sim-on-a-stick world on his own machine. that way if he ever wants to make the move, or simply expand, he can take his OpenSim OAR files and launch them on his future OpenSim grid! (launch? aerodrome? how punny!!) *rolls eyes*

when i moved, i had to mess around with some of my bigger builds like the Enaxia Art Gallery. it was too many prims to bring over as one build and that limit may not even exist today (i was using Meerkat back then)

since the art gallery was 100% made by me, i could export it. all i did was break it apart inSL and then regroup it into two parts. i probably added a root prim to each that shared the same position so that i could line up the two groups exactly. using this technique, i was able to move several large builds with very little hassle

making a transitional move with sim-on-a-stick like Steve Cavers (Aerodrome guy) is contemplating is one way to explore how OpenSim might work for you and act as a segue if you ever do move (plus it’s free! how many people give anything away for free these days?) =)

good luck Steve and to anyone else pondering this

                          

soothsaying is a tough business. you have to have a decent crystal ball and some pretty edgy clothes. and a scarf on your head – always with the scarf on the head. then you need a great name. Ener Hax just won’t cut it – hmm . . . maybe Zelda Hax? the tarot cards i have – that’s covered and i even have some runes somewhere

so what can be next for virtual worlds?

have virtual worlds that are open-ended like Second Life and OpenSim reached their peak of adoption? Second Life seems to be slowly declining and OpenSim is slowly growing but is the current demographic or user profile about the extent of it?

what are the current “big” uses of this type of virtual world?

we have a significant social use of them and i would define that as people who enjoy being avatars and meeting new people along with those who build day-to-day things like clothes, furniture, clubs, vehicles. that’s my definition and certainly is incomplete. grids like Second Life, InWorldz, Avination, and so on are great places to be social. to me, this use of virtual worlds fills an important need – the need to be creative and/or to express yourself. sometimes i see it as an escape and i think that can be a very important thing for people and it has as much validity as any other use of virtual worlds

there is also a small marketing use of virtual worlds where someone like a Dell Computer or Ben & Jerry’s (are they still inSL?) “extends” their branding experience and presence into virtual worlds. this niche seems to be dying out for some sectors – like retail – but growing for others. the US Armed Forces are still doing virtual world stuff and expanding into OpenSim. i lump some of their activity as marketing because it can be used as a recruiting tool, which is basically marketing this as a life option. i’d lump in art receptions and concerts as marketing if it features original artists, otherwise they might be lumped into social

some corporate use occurs for things like meetings and conferences. both of these sectors seem to be very small and quite specific. meeting in virtual worlds just does not work as easily as Webex. those that do use it are often in situations where that “avatar presence” and connection from using VWs as a meeting tool is prized. i personally enjoy that type of bond that occurs in virtual meetings. conferences are very niche as well and while they are marketing, they are also revenue generators for people like Virtualis. conferences seem to do well when they are dealing with virtual worlds (derr Sherlock) like the recent education one about the best educational practices in virtual worlds. apart from that, they are sometimes used as supplementary offerings to real events for those that can’t attend

educational use of virtual worlds seems to be growing (or just my awareness of it) with the nearly free cost of using OpenSim. universities were quick to adopt Second Life and much of that was due to library scientists. they saw it as an additional communication channel and understood its use quickly. now with OpenSim and no lower age limit, secondary education use of virtual worlds is viable and pretty easy to implement. the Armed Forces are also using virtual worlds for training

social, marketing, corporate, and educational are grossly huge buckets to lump us all into and they can each be divided into further categories. some people use virtual worlds as purely a creative art tool and virtual worlds are also used effectively for some forms of therapy

even in the big categories, the number of users is still tiny and anything but mainstream

we talk about what will help make virtual worlds more mainstream. things like better graphics with mesh import, greater accessibility with browser-based access, and easier login with Facebook. however, none of those “things” expand the scope very much of what can be next for virtual worlds

if we had Eve Online quality graphics and low-overhead browser-based access with easy login would the current user base grow on an order of 100 times more?

how much would it need to grow to achieve “mainstream” adoption and to be a part of everyday life like the web is today?

maybe 100 times more is still very niche

the day that i can go to Amazon’s grocery store online as an avatar and walk in aisles and talk real-time with others about some vitamin nutrient and make its purchase with the same ease as i use amazon.com today, that for me will be mainstream adoption and represent what virtual worlds can be

dammit Ener, no weapons at the project meeting! =p

                          

Ener Hax has mentioned that I use OpenSim on a USB drive for “real work” and asked me to write a post about this. I will dovetail into Ener’s post last night and frame this with a similar Blender 3D perspective.

I have been using Blender 3D since it went open source in 2002. It’s a great program and once you move beyond its steep learning curve it can be a fairly rapid tool to use.

My primary task in my day job is to create multimedia assets for eLearning that is distributed to 90,000 annual users in over 110 countries. This varies from software simulations to static graphics to scenario-based video. In addition, and like many corporate eLearning developers, I often am tasked with non-eLearning multimedia work that can range from creating conference videos and product demos to large-scale printed exhibit graphics for clients. For some presentation work I use Blender 3D and it is well received but the downside is in its rendering time. It can take hours to weeks to render out video from Blender 3D.

For our corporate eLearning the rendering time is simply too long to be cost effective and the hardware requirements are sometimes too great (i.e., render farms for large projects).

When Second Life was all the hype in the media a few years ago it seemed like an easy answer to my need to do “3D” animation faster and cheaper. At first it was challenging to accept the “poor” graphics quality of Second Life prims and I confess to a certain elitist attitude I had regarding this. However, stepping back I realised that Second Life could get me 80% of the way there and that it was worth sacrificing the remaining 20% for something that was many orders of magnitude faster. As a bonus, avatars had built in joints and adequate walk cycles and gravity even existed.

After a short time, a freedom to concentrate more on the overall interactions and less on the details developed and was a pleasant benefit. It was liberating and it opened doors to share this with eLearning colleagues. I could teach the use of Second Life as a 3D animation studio to colleagues in a manner of hours and not months!

I left my elitist mindset behind and embraced a tool that ended up being just as well received by learners. People just get it and I often compare my use Second Life (now OpenSim) to YouTube content. YouTube is considered the largest eLearning repository out there and it works because of the content and not the production quality. People understand that they are not going to always have Steven Spielberg quality productions on YouTube but they also know they can find virtually any topic covered in a video tutorial.

Using OpenSim as a 3D animation studio for eLearning is fast and inexpensive. I add the needed interactivity for eLearning by importing the videos into Flash and have been doing this technique for four years now.

I have also been using OpenSim, particularly the USB stick version, for doing space and product visualization. It does not have the polished look of a Blender 3D video but clients don’t have an issue with that because it also means a significantly lower project cost for them and a project delivered in a shorter time. It’s also easy to make edits because there is no rendering time. If I don’t do a camera fly-through in the way the client wants, it is easy to redo it in a matter of minutes.

The images below show an exhibit booth that can be textured with a client’s graphics, placed in an exhibit hall, and have videos showing how it will look to their customers (I don’t need to bring them in-world – I simply shoot video for them). OpenSim on a USB stick has been ideal for doing this and lots of fun as well.

Interested in giving it a try on a shoestring budget? Get yours at Ener’s very handy http://simonastick.com!

this post also appears on the subQuark blog

                          

Crista Lopes (@cristalopes) not only created the OpenSim package that runs on sim-on-a-stick, she also created the “Wifi” admin panel that comes with it

the zipped version of sim-on-a-stick includes a fully functional Wifi that you simply launch after starting MOWES and OpenSim. just click the link (http://127.0.0.1:9000/wifi) and voila!

even on one of my test machines where Apache won’t start (Win Vista 64), her admin interface pulls up just fine (in fact, the screenshots below are from that machine)

if you don’t like the default avatar name and password from the zipped build, just create any others via the Wifi panel. you can even do some inventory work from that panel!

so why would you create other users for your sim-on-a-stick?

i tend to focus on terraforming (probably my favourite thing to do) and building but creating avatars is something clothing designers and grid creators may want to do as well. instead of saving different shapes and sexes, you could create avatars for both the use in sizing your creations as well as using them as product models in photo shoots (my alt feels so cheap and used) =p

i’ll be needing to create some “kid” avatars for our grid and being able to do so on a stick (or a machine without interwebz connection) opens up more options

Wifi admin panel

create accounts

mess with inventory

                          

OpenSim makes for a good, and free, tool for 3D animation work. I have spoken at conferences and webinars on the use of Second Life for creating video for branched scenario-based eLearning because it is a relatively easy tool to use. My focus has shifted to our current endeavor for secondary education but I still use OpenSim for eLearning and more and more as a presentation tool. Especially with OpenSim installed on a USB drive since I no longer need to worry about our corporate firewall or about installing any software on my work station (http://simonastick.com).

As a presentation tool, it works well for doing space visualization by allowing fairly rapid creation of a space, especially when a CAD illustration can be imported in as a tracing element. In this use, the space is “filmed” with Fraps, touched up with Virtual Dub, and deployed as a either a standalone video or as part of a Flash-based project.

OpenSim would also work very well to create static images or video for use in Environmental Assessments and Environmental Impact Statements.

Granted, the finished video from OpenSim is not as polished as that created in Blender 3D, but speaking from my experience, I can create and render out an OpenSim scene in perhaps 20% the time it would take otherwise. That certainly comes into play whenever ROI is an issue (and for my day job, that would be all the time!).

I find OpenSim as a 3D application inching ever more into the top tray of my multimedia toolbox thanks to its stability and ease-of-use. A big thank you and genuine gratitude extend to the OpenSimulator developers and administrators for creating such a useful application.

Here is a test video to see if a popular technique of doing 3D floating text would look okay done with OpenSim. The words are simply transparent PNGs and seem to work okay (if not a bit of a ripoff from the first Spiderman movie’s starting credits).

                          

being a day-to-day user of OpenSim i mainly do my own thing and somewhat build on a whim. i don’t have a schedule and often don’t even have set tasks, i just kind of do what i feel like doing

i have wondered how much work the OpenSim developers do and how they work on one thing while being scattered all over the world

i have been a slacker over the last few weeks and am blaming a nagging cold and family stuff and just have not done much building. but holy cow, i stumbled across the OpenSim developers “shortlog” which shows exactly what they are doing

slacker was too kind a term to describe my current slump! compared to what the OpenSim developers are doing, i am a total slug! =D

it’s pretty cool to see how much they are doing, one byte at a time. the screen shot below is just 6 days of work! (i threw in Micheil Merlin’s work because he is a scripter for Enclave Harbour and it’s cool that he contributed to OpenSim) =)

thank you OpenSim developers for making such a great tool that is seeing some great uses and that is making a real impact in very worthwhile endeavors! =)