Kitely: Virtual clouds over deep troubled waters

When I first read about Kitely I thought, what a great idea but the more I looked into it the less sure I became.

Kitely is an Israeli based start-up company financed out of the pockets of it's founders. They are leveraging the user ID system of Facebook to offer cloud-based virtual worlds to it's members and setting up your region is actually pretty easy once you download a small application from their web site. Then, after you login, you simply click a button and the apps calls up your viewer (assuming you have one installed) and you are into your very own region. No need to download anything. No set-up headaches. It's all done for you and you can start building and inviting friends right away.

At first I was reluctant because I didn't want to join Facebook but, apart from Maria of Hypergrid Business 's glowing report all I seem to read were somewhat negative comments about Kitely, mainly centred on the un-signed application and lack of a published TOS statement. But the apparent cheapness (which is probably not so cheap for any more than light use. See my breakdown further on) and it's ease of setup my curiosity got the better of me and I thought, what the hell I can always delete FB after I try Kitley out. So I went ahead and signed up with FB and visited the Kitely web site to download the application. My Norton firewall blocked it straight away because it was unsigned and deemed too new to risk. I had read about this so let it pass my anti-virus and set itself up. I will be absolutely honest now. It all went like a dream!

Kitely web site

First I clicked to enter Maria's sim and my  Imprudence viewer sprang to life called up by the Kitely application. It logged me in with my real life name and the sim rezzed super-quick. It really was happening faster than I expected for an Opensim world. There I stood fully dressed as my new avatar fit to begin my adventure. I started to walk expecting to waddle like a duck but not a bit of it! The sim downloaded an animation to my Imprudence viewer automatically and I was walking normal - perhaps a bit girly but it was a female walk. I toddled off to look around and rezzed a prim box to check that out - no problem, it was fast and efficient. Good stuff I thought and took back the prim (I don't like to litter in someone else's sim) then went to appearance and messed with my shape some to try that out. Fine,,, Perfect.

So, after a while I thought I should really leave now because here I stood for the first time ever with an avatar that bears my real name. What if someone comes along? Yeah, I thought. I best leave and so I did. I returned to the kitely site after closing my viewer and clicked something to get some credits. It told me my Facebook profile was not up to much since I didn't have a picture of myself and 20 real FB friends so all I got was 10 credits instead of the 50 I might have got otherwise. Anyway, so much for that, I clicked to create a sim and, my word! it was ready in, like, seconds or so it seemed. Up came my viewer and I was logging into my new Kitely sim.

Gaga at Maria's world pretendng to be a real world person

I was really quite excited even though I was now standing in the middle of a vast sea on a tiny island. But it was mine and I had gained it so quick I was just left dumb-struck. I just felt this whole thing was marvelous! So now I thought I would raise some land and try that out before doing a bit of quick building. I raised the land very quickly. It was not sluggish or jerky. Up it came and I smoothed it off but, before I could drop a prim on it, Bang! The viewer closed and that was that. I returned to the Kitely site and tried to re-open it in case I had just crashed but it told me my region had been suspended for lack of credits. Ten don't go far.

Having lost my credits and no way to buy any I thought to look at the Feedback which would be the start of my troubles. I saw a comment mentioning the same problems I had just come up against, lack of credits, no pic, no friends. And yet, the nice Mr Ilan was saying no problem, sorry about that, here is 600 credits so you can go right back and finish your trial. Let me have some of that, I thought! And posted a request. Now, what happens is Kitely uses a system for comments and feedback called "Get Satisfaction". Up came a box, I typed my request and it gave me choices of user ID. Now, with hindsight I should have click Facebook but usually with comment boxes it picks up my Google ID and I am so used to that I clicked to accept Google without really thinking. Big mistake! The damn thing posted my comment in my avatar name - Gaga Gracious!

I realized my mistake immediately and deleted the comment then went into a bit of a panic because I knew I might have connected my avatar name to my Facebook real ID, and so I had because when I checked my Google profile it suddenly showed my home location. I removed that and took my real picture off any profile I had it on in a flurry of activity trying desperately to cover my tracks, and all the while cursing Facebook.

Next I returned to Get Satisfaction to be sure that comment had been deleted and it immediately recognized me as Gaga. So I went off to dig around on the Get Satisfaction site to try an close the account. I got up the profile created for me and found I was due to receive daily emails from them. I clicked that off then thought to myself, this is outrageous! Get satisfaction had taken my Google ID, my email address and created an account with spam emails set on by default. So then I found a comment thread where some 90 people were asking to have their account closed. In fact, you can't close the account, you have to post a request and hope an admin dose it manually for you.

To cut the story short I am pleased to say the nice Mr Ilan got in touch and promised they would make updates to address the problems I encountered. He also said they would work on other ways to access Kitely that didn't involve Facebook so I have to thank Kitely for that and, well, as they said, it's a pre-beta test release and they value the feedback. Perhaps they should have foreseen the kind of problems I faced rather than giving themselves the task of damage limitation addressing these issues after the event answering a host of blog and forum complaints.

I can not fault the Kitely product in itself from what I have seen though. Few times have I ever entered an Opensim world and not experience problems or varying degrees of lag, as well as things taken for granted in SecondLife that just don't work on Opensim worlds but given that Opensim is still officially alpha code we have become use to it's failings while it continues to improve. Kitely manages to deliver a sim in super quick time and it runs very well. However, I don't personally think it will come that cheap if put to regular use on a daily basis. The way it works is that your region is called from the Amazon cloud and activated anytime you or a visitor wishes to access it and then it starts to cost you money. It costs you $0.20 for every user hour which doesn't sound a lot but adds up if you spend as much time as I do in my Opensim region or SecondLife (virtual worlds for people like me are very addictive!). I mean around 30 to 40 hours a week just for me! Even this though is not too bad on my own since it adds up to just $8 at most per week which is $32 a month and yet, if I am just working on content, I can still get a sim connected to OSgrid for as little as $10 a month. So now add a little traffic, say as many user hours again for casual visitors, and the cost has doubled. but, it's still not a lot of people.

Now, lets get serious and try to use a region to run a club or mall. Or maybe a role play game with players dropping in for averages of four hours every day. Multiply that by ten which makes a smallish game and the cost would quickly spiral upward. For example, in SL there is a general practice for role play sims to associate where one will send a raiding party to attack another sim (all done in the spirit of role play of course) and the raided sim returns the raid at a later time. This, typically, can involve as many as ten or more players fighting it out for some time but it may even end up involving captures and return negotiations to free prisoners. You think that doesn't happen? Well, I am involved in role play and I promise it dose, and, what's more, it can get even more involved on busy successful regions.

Charting the costs...

• Small store or home: 5 users clocking 50 hrs per week = $40 a month.

• Medium store or venue: 20 users clocking 200 hrs per week = $160 a month.

• Large store or club/RPG: 40 users clocking 400 hrs per week = $320 a month.

• Busy large store, club/RPG: 60 users clocking 600 hrs per week = $480 per month.

On the large store figure you are close to the monthly tier charge of  SecondLife  regions but I can't deny the fact that Linden Labs will charge that fee regardless if your sim sits empty or not. With Kitely you pay for what you use and that's it. Moreover, you don't have to find the $1000 setup fee LL charges so it's added value. Of course it could get more expensive than SL which doesn't seem likely but imagine regular spikes in traffic if you are running a music and dance venue. 60, 70 and 80 users, if Kitely can actually handle that sort of load, could start to clock a lot more hours and one would hope you are making serious money from the traffic to make it worth while.

On all the charges down to the Medium store figure you are still going to be better off in one of the established Opensim grids.  InWorldz will charge $75 a month and  Avination, $60. Even  Meta7 at $105 is still cheaper than Kitely on those user numbers and you wont be paying any setup fees in most Opensim grids either so Kitely looses that as a bonus to it's customers. And, in the short term at least, Opensim grids can offer more support since they have established customer services already and considerable content available not to mention established communities and well built sims and venues to visit.

For light use I definately think Kitely can offer a cost effective and valuable service given the speed and ease with which it is delivered. Typically, I think Facebook people might enjoy having the benefit of a virtual home they can fix up to their taste and have friends visit on occasion rather than relying on forums and text-based chat rooms, or even video conferencing, voice and web cam. Being able to walk  about virtually and emote realistic actions such has hugging, kissing and, well yes, even simulated sex too. I am not convinced though the vast majority of people can visualize themselves in the virtual setting let alone having any form of sexual encounter that way, or even manage the learning curve or embrace virtual worlds as anything more than a novelty. SecondLife has been around for near on ten years. It is perhaps the best known virtual world and yet it has never gained the kind of user base that Facebook has in half the time. Even now, SecondLife gets up to 10,000 hits a day on their web site and many do try it briefly so they are getting the people through. My view is that if the masses really wanted to use virtual worlds then SecondLife has been high profile enough for long enough to have attracted them and it hasn't so why should Kitely succeed where Linden Labs have so far failed?

Perhaps the short answer is that Facebook is basically a web site that offers a useful service. It doesn't require a viewer download or present any technical difficulty to the average person. Facebook provides a service to people engaged in real world activity. The vast majority are just that; real-world people happily net-working in that mind set. Now that is not to say some can't or wont try virtual worlds but the fact is the vast majority know about them but haven't bothered to any great extent. Perhaps it all comes down to mind set anyway. The majority want to socialize and make contacts in the real world while a significant number will happily play in challenge-based virtual worlds such as World of Warcraft purely in a gaming mind set just as others will prance about in front of their Kinect or Wii screen at home. In contrast virtual worlds like SecondLife probably only really appeal to people that live in their minds anyway. Call them actors or the true avatars if you like. I don't think the masses could or would ever want to see themselves as anything other than a real person in a real world.

For those real world people who might venture into virtual worlds given the ease of Kitely they probably wont have the intense interest or dedicated a serious user might have but I am sure they might have more modest needs so I guess the cost might not be so bad for them. Perhaps an occasional business meeting or for schools and collages it might be cost-effective too but I don't go with the argument a Kitely sim would be great for content makers to use as a secure workshop since people with that level of knowledge and dedication to virtual worlds are probably already using sim on a stick or have Opensim on their computer to use securely and at no cost at all. For others Opensim is already cheap enough since you can get a hosted region connected to OSgrid for as little as $10 a month and it's always up and can even be a cheap to run showcase for your work or even a store selling your stuff. In any event I think most would rather know what their bill is going to be from one month to the next and, since Kitely charges for time and user numbers, there is no way to be certain what your bill could be but that's not to say it wont appeal to vendors selling clean PG-rated stuff. Kitely, you see, is tied into the user TOS of the registration processes they leverage and, in Facebook, that excludes Adult content. But, lets face it, mature and adult content is a major part of virtual worlds and their trade.

We have seen Kitely has already nailed it's policy position to the mast while not yet producing a full TOS statement. Currently, like Blue Mars that has largely failed, Kitely has banned mature content. On the other hand, SecondLife is more advanced and has market lead including a degree of tolerance for mature content and a huge content base in place. It is already well known Linden Labs has it's eye on the Facebook minions. It would take very little for Linden Labs to upstage Kitely since all they need is a similar plug in to launch the viewer and LL is in a good position to strike while the iron is hot too. SecondLife has existing traffic, a large user group on Facebook and a viewer that has been re-worked (much to the annoyance of the majority of existing residents) to appeal to Facebook people. And, lets face it, what Kitely boils down to is a cloud server farm and a plug in to launch a viewer which still has to be downloaded anyway!

Would Linden Labs serve sims from a cloud? Hell yes, I'm sure they would if the potential revenue generated looked like it was worth it. I mean, how long would it take LL to develop a plug in given their huge financial resources? I doubt for one minute that LL has not taken a look at Kitely's methods and business model. Nor do I think other Opensim hosting business' are blind to Kitely's operation either. SpotOn3D and Sim-OnDemand have been serving sims from a cloud for some time as well.

I think Kitely has a lot of work to do - and learn even - so perhaps I am judging them harshly but I think they are demonstrating a degree of naivety if they think their policy of shutting out mature content and forcing disclosure of identity will work for them. Kitely is another walled garden that just happens to use Facebook member identity and boldly imposes their own values on potential customers. In that sense they have gone one step further than Linden Labs who still allow alias names in place of real names and thereby actively guards people's privacy. Anyone that is aware of the furore generated by the Red Zone controversy in SecondLife will know right away that many people in virtual worlds have more than one alt name and, for the most part, do so for legitimate reasons - often simply differing role play characters. It's actually a common thing in virtual worlds and it's taken as an assault on privacy if anyone attempts to link alts to a single IP address or a real world name.

SecondLife was not built on any notion of social networking. It was built on the art of making virtual content for money that served all comers with both passive and mature content. This included also a lot of escort venues, red light clubs, BDSM, etc, etc, and some seriously aggressive role play thrown in while making it possible to create a degree of realism that made it interesting and enjoyable. That's why there is a viewer called Restrained Life and the Emerald viewer was so successful with it's bouncing boobs feature. A lot of what SecondLife is about is pure unashamed erotic escapism and even Linden Labs has tried to curtail it some after they started letting kids on the main grid and putting feelers out to the FaceBook community but, while it might be making some headway into FaceBook territory, it is loosing people to Opensim grids which, to put it frankly, are leaving SL because they are sick of LL's ever more restrictive Terms & Conditions. That is to say, paying high prices to Linden Labs and being controlled by the perceived values that suit their current business model.

People want freedom. Not to abuse it although a tiny minority always will regardless of your TOS policy. People can have more freedom by running their own server and sims and, with hypergrid, they can still be connected and not isolated behind garden walls paying good money and lip service to someone elses values. This is what Kitely is going to come up against and it wont be limited to that either. They will need content sellers and the best still resist leaving SecondLife while those that have, well, yes, many sell mature content!

Opensim is still not out of alpha and yet Kitely appears to be selling it as beta software fit for use on a par with SecondLife and established Opensim grids, most of which are advancing the software to improve stability. Teleports are, as yet, impossible and so too are border crossings because their apps is forcing a by-pass of the viewer login process which means there is no grid as such, just a collection of standalones called from the Amazon cloud. Presently they demand fall identity disclosure through FaceBook, picture of self and 20 real friends. And they don't allow mature content. Add to all that the possibility of running up a huge bill while your not looking and I have to say I don't think it will work out that well for more than light use. But, in all honesty, it is too early to tell and I think the jury is still out.

Traffic: Opensim Grids Up. Second Life Down!

Trying to get an accurate picture of traffic to Opensim-based grids is pretty hard so I always look forward to the statistics published each month on the  Hypergrid Business. Maria publishes metrics for the top forty grids indicating how well they are doing at the end of each month charting loses and gains in regions as well as the gains in user registrations. It's by no means certain if the metrics are 100% reliable but there is no doubt that the trend is upward over all.

I have collected my own figures too taking a daily sample of peek and off peek traffic for about six months and before that on occasion during the previous year. Back in September 2010 I counted traffic for a sample of round twenty grids and got a daily average of about 600. Back in January of this year that figure had risen to just over 1200 for the same sample. It's still not a big number and Second Life remains significantly more with approximately peek traffic of 60,000 and off peek at 30,000 but what is important in these figures is that Second Life is static while Opensim has doubled.

Second Life enjoyed peek traffic of around 80,000 back in 2008 so the current figures show a big fall in regular users. A few days ago I checked SL again at an off-peek time and got a figure of just 27,751 which just goes to show it isn't looking good for the virtual giant. In contrast, Maria's figures show Opensim grids consistently making gains, that is, more regions than Second Life which has actually lost over 500 over all in the past year although many of those are probably education and none-profits since Linden Labs doubled the tier from the beginning of January. Most of the Second Life losses seem to be gains for Opensim grids though.

One grid that stands out having the highest growth rate of any Opensim grid ever in a very sort period and that is  Avination which had been hovering along with about 250 regions and no more than 1200 registered residents up till December 2010, then suddenly it took off gaining over a thousand regions from January to March. The number of new registrations has also exploded to over 20,000 to date. I visited Avination back at the beginning of January just before it took off and wrote about it here. At the time the daily traffic was a mere 35 peek and down to 18 off-peek but over the month it just kept rising so by the end of January it stood at around 200 peek rising to 395 mid way through February. It has dropped off some since but still manages up to 350 at peek times.

Gaga at the slot machines in an Avination gambling region

Avination growth is attributed partly to a promotional campaign which ran radio commercials in Oregon, USA that were also aired on Web radio and in-world radio stations in Second Life. Avination puts virtual-goods Merchant's interests first. puts restrictions on making freebies readily available and goes further imposing charges to download inventory. This is partly to protect the merchants but also to help prevent copybotted items finding their way onto the grid, they claim. To this end, Avination is probably the only grid that charges for downloads and groups, an action which has brought plenty of attacks from disgruntled users objecting to these charges when other grids don't. But Avination has come in for a lot more attacks over it's policy allowing gambling in the form of Zyngo and other types of slot machine play. In deed, when I recently visited again I found search awash with gambling and red light sims to visit so, clearly, Avination wants a slice of the second Life Adult market and it comes as no surprise that gambling interests that can no longer do business in Second Life have been quick to set up shop in Avination.

Avination currently charges $60 rent for a sim with 15,000 prims (free set up). So, they must be turning over in excess of $50,000 a month already and this appears to be the bread and butter of Opensim commercial grids and has not gone un-noticed by others which are due to go live soon. However,  InWorldz, another commercial grid, has already been in business for nearly two years and started with a hand full of people that left OpenLife grid - a forked version of Opensim - which started up at the time of the Open spaces fiasco in Second Life around the end of 2007. Apparently, there was some connection between the InWorldz founders and the owner of OpenLife and a falling out which came to a head and caused the departure. InWorldz began as a small grid based on the official Opensim core server code and went live early in 2009. It grew slowly at first then took off last summer gaining around 800 sims which helped them break even and finally make a modest profit enough to pay wages at least.

InWorldz charges $75 rent per month (no setup fee) but offers 30,000 prims for mainland sims and 30,000 to 45,000 prims for pivate islands. The high prim offering has caused a few raised eyebrows from Opensim core developers and those opposed to walled-garden grids who insist no Opensim grid can reliably handle more than 15,000 prims which, incidentally, is the maximum that Second Life offers. What they say is, while it is possible to set a sim to permit more than 15,000 prims, it is not advised since it puts a heavy load on the server. This becomes more critical when people are asked to pay rent for sims on shared resources where a heavy user can impact on the rest causing excessive lag for all. Anyway, that aside, InWorldz has some coders that came with the migration from OpenLife and they promised to improve the core Opensim code and put right all the bugs and missing functions they insisted had not been adequately dealt with by the core developers when they accused them of concentrating on "shinnies" such as media on a prim and Hypergrid rather than cleaning up the core which they described as a mess. InWorldz no longer takes the Opensim core so has become a forked version too which is exactly the same as what happened with OpenLife.

On the plus side InWorldz dose have the reputation of being friendly and welcoming to new comers and they have attracted several role play groups to their fold, including, the Reaglen Shire tiny community and elfclan. The owners appear to go out of their way to be helpful and are quick to show noobs where to find freebies to fix up their basic "ruthed" avatar. Avination by contrast is not so welcoming and some have said their business-like attitude is reflected in their welcome sim which, I can vouch, dose seem bleak and rarely has anyone to greet noobs. But, bleak and un-welcoming as Avination appears they do have their plus side. For one, you get a de-noobed avatar to begin your adventure with so freebies are not your first consideration. For an Opensim grid lag is surprisingly low though and I personally have only ever crashed once when my viewer froze trying to access search. A change of viewer fixed it and all was well again. I had no problem with search after that.

InWorldz dose suffer a great deal of lag and many have noted this which is probably due to the high prim load on the servers and not necessarily to inadequate resources in general.  OSgrid, the official Opensim developers test grid that lets anyone to connect a home standalone sim, also suffers horrendous lag on some of those standalone sims which are most often hosted on home PCs with standard home DSL connection. Sims like these can only handle a low prim environment and two or three avatars at most before lag becomes a problem. As far as concurrency is concerned, OSgrid fairs quite well with peeks of around 150 users online. But this is miss-leading really because the main grid can't account for all the Hypergrid connected regions and there are a lot.

One other grid I should mention is  ScienceSim which has backing from such big names as Intel and IBM. I noticed the grid has dramatic swings in user concurrency, ranging between 100 off-peek to over 1000 peek. This may be due to load testing - I don't know for sure - or their connection with education. I'm not really up on what happens at Sciencesim but I do know Diva Canto, creator of Hypergrid, set an outward bounds permission for them recently which allows Hypergrid teleports into the grid but prevents inventory gained on the grid from leaving it.

New grids are coming on to the free metaverse all the time and each seems to be either catering to a particular niche or, in the case of commercial grids, selling themselves as a particular business model they believe will attract customers. InWorldz focuses on community while Avination focuses on content sellers. Both these grids sim prices are about level pegging though. Meta7 on the other hand is more expensive with charges $105 for a sim but they do focus on technical advances. Another grid aiming to go live soon also has higher sim charges, AvWorlds will charge $120 for a sim but the owner says he will give up to 25% discount to large land owners that rent out parcels at lower prices. They also promise to encourage in-world sales by only showing pictures of virtual goods on their web site and a link back in-world to the store in order to keep buyers patronizing the malls and business sims. No doubt there will be winners and losers but the free metaverse is really starting to take off so the traffic away from SecondLife is set to accelerate.

There are many more grids but most are small or hidden behind fire walls such as those run by colleges, universities and business interests so it is hard to really get a reliable figure on over all concurrency for Opensim grids but it must be in the thousands now. SecondLife can show a figure for the grid because it is all under one roof but Opensim grids can be set up by anyone with a server and a connection and this is what makes it near impossible to build an accurate picture of it's total traffic. However, what is absolutely certain now is that free metaverse based on Opensim grids are posing a serious challenge to SecondLife and it's getting bigger.

Aurora Sim - breaking the mould!

I have been following closely the progress of Aurora sim which is a branch development of Opensim and promises some new and advanced features that will surly break the mould. The list of features is impressive and includes restructuring for greater efficiency, many bug fixes and pretty well all that which is missing from core Opensim. To that they promise to upgrade the physics, add centred gravity and mega regions of a totally new type which promises spaces up to 256 times standard SL regions.

The lead developer, Revolution Smythe felt mega regions were a hack and there had to be a better way. The team has worked out a way to have variable region sizes and even the possibility of none-square border shapes which fits in with the centred gravity possibility to create massive Space-like regions with planets and orbital objects such as asteroids and space craft in a much more realistic environment than the current flat spaces of SL type regions.

The aurora team have their own test grid known as Aurora-sim development grid which I added to my Hippo viewer and visited but there was not much to see at the time. It just amounted to a few standard regions. However, on the Aurora team web site they announced that on the 14th February they tested the first variable region. The test grid is at http://login.aurora-sim.org:8002/ and you need to add that the an Opensim compatible viewer and the web announcement is here Aurora sim variable region sizes

Gaga in Aurora Virtual World grid wondering around. Nothing exciting - yet!

Currently, and surprisingly, there are actually two new grids - one of them commerical - running the pre-alpha Aurora sim branch. Ansky and Aurora Virtual World, the later being owned and run by Enrico Ranucci of the New Voice OpenSim hosting company, better known for their $10 hosted sims attached to OSgrid. I visited AVW too and it really did not work well, apearence was borket and I couldn't keep hair in the right place but it was a fun experience. I did notice they are currently giving Free parcels with a generous 18,000 prims to play around with though.

Maria of  Hypergrid Business  blog has written an in-depth article on Aurora sim and raises some important issues about it regarding software licenses.

Kokua, the projected viewer based on SecondLife 2x from the Imprudence developers announced back in November 2010 they would be supporting Aurora sim and working with the Aurora team but, currently, they have not done anything other than consentrate on getting Imprudence 4 released so they can wrap up their work on SL 1x code and switch their attention to Kokua.

Hypergrid

Back in December I asked if Hypergrid would still be a feature of Aurora sim and was told not until it stops being in-compatible with itself. The developers claim they aim to stay compatible with Opensim core but after reading Maria's article I have my doubts. Anyway, in January I was told that Aurora sim is compatible with HG and that person had successfully hyper-gridded to another grid but now, in Maria's article, Ansky grid owner, Andrew Simpson who converted to Aurora sim server on the 17th February said the current version did not support hypergrid and, where Ansky was formally accessible via HG, it was now shut off. He went on to say there were still problems with HG anyway so he wont miss it at the moment.

Conclusion

I think Aurora sim is an exciting development but it remains to be seen if the team can actually deliver on the impressive list of features. That said, I keep wondering what SecondLife would be like today had Linden Lads shown the foresight and taken in some of these amazingly talented people and given them free reign to advance the server. Alas, I don't think any of these ideas could happen in SL and the open source community will forge ahead and break new ground for the benefit of the free metaverse. I think they are true pioneers.

Full list of features on Aurora Sim

Growth of Opensim & Hypergrid Progresses

I did a rough count of Opensim traffic on the top grids back in September and got a figure of around 600. This month for the same sample I got a figure of around 1200 which is double. I don't claim this very rough count says that much but it dose show considerable growth in recent months. Most remarkable of all has been the rapid rise of Avination, a new grid launched by Melanie Thielker (also known as Melanie Miland), a core Opensim developer.

Avination has come from no where to a peek traffic average of around 220 online in just one month which is unusual when many grids are still struggling and yet have been around for a long time. This has sparked some negativity on the forums however - mostly from supporters of other grids worried they will loose residents - but that has done nothing to dent it's growth.

I noticed that Avination traffic has grown rapidly from around 35 online when I joined and quickly increasing to 165 peek about a week or so ago. At the same time InWorldz had dropped from 233 peek for the same period to 157. Meta7 dropped from a peek of 53 online to a peek of 29. There was not much change to OSgrid during this time so Avination seems to have gained some users from both InWorldz and Meta7 but I think they have probably gained more from SecondLife and the Internet. Over all though I think it shows an increase in traffic for Opensim grids in general since both InWorldz and Meta7 seem to have recovered some ground now even while Avination continues to grow. This is in stark contrast to Second Life which remains static.

Naturally, I had to go visit Avination but first I checked their web site which
proved easy to navigate and informative. I registered a name. Gaga Gridlock (couldn't get gaga gracious *sighs*), added the login URL to my Hippo viewer and arrived. No one was there to meet me but the grid did have 65 people on it. So I looked around and it proved average. It was bit laggy but at least I didn't need freebies to dress up. The avatar I got to chose was actually quite good for my visit (see pic) and I didn't need to race to find freebies to deal with the usual ruthed avatar.

I found some good brand names from SL there so that was a good sign and it was clear enough, the owners of the grid wanted to give maximum protection to them. I still didn't meet the rude person everyone was ranting about above on the forums so I put that issue down to anti-Avination propaganda. I set off to explore and as you see from the pic the builds aren't half bad. Seems lots of people are beavering away constructing and as the sims are relatively cheap at $40 and free setup that was not surprising. I did have a problem with search initially but this was down to Opensim viewer because search worked fine when I returned using Imprudence.

Hypergrid; Important Update!

Diva Canto (Opensim developer, Crista Lopes),added an OutboundPermission configuration setting to the HGInventoryAccessModule in the Git ‘master’ branch of Opensim.  Setting this to false prevents foreign Hypergrid visitors to a local grid from taking assets back to their home grid.

This news was published on Justincc blog.

The most secure grids are walled gardens which prevent content being removed to another grid and mwhere it might be copied. Adding the new setting effectively makes HG grids walled gardens too but still allows avatars to visit with their full appearance and clothes drawn from their home grid. Thus, with the new setting, nothing is exchanged between grids during HG travel.

According to Hypergrid Business blog...

The way it works is that you - or the hosting company running OpenSim for you - have to set the "OutboundPermission" setting to "False" in OpenSim’s HGInventoryAccessModule. The setting applies to all the regions running under that instance of OpenSim. Typically, each instance of OpenSim would handle between one and four regions, but it can go higher.

According to Lopes, this is just the first step towards having asset security on the hypergrid.

"I did it now because ScienceSim is planning a big event," she said."A lot more will be coming regarding these kinds of policies."

Melanie Miland, owner of Avination grid, and Opensim developer working with Deva Canto has said in another topic on SLU, "Avination, is anyone there yet?"

And, to confirm, I work pretty closely with Diva Canto, who I will meet up with on February 24th. That will be our second real life meeting. The first time we put our heads together, Hypergrid 1.5 was the result, this time, I'm hoping for a push towards HG 2.0.
I do promote the secure Hypergrid; Avination is not a walled garden by choice. However, to keep the work of our creators safe, we can't, with the cuRrent state of HG security, safely enable hypergridding in Avination. Rest assured that, once it can be done without inviting wholesale permission exploits, it will come to Avination.

No one can say how this will work out yet and it wont be available until the next general release of Opensim, by which time it is sure to be much more developed, but it is as well for content creators to be aware of the progress and consider how it might help them grow their business on the free metaverse as it becomes more secure.

On the face of it, it may not seem helpful to content vendors if their virtual goods can't leave the grid in which they are sold but the important thing to remember is that someone came from another grid via Hypergrid teleport and was able to buy something and that means a bigger consumer base since you are no longer limited to your own grid's population (I have read elsewhere that HG grid owners are reporting that 50% of their traffic is via HG links). However, the question remains; Why would someone buy something they can't take away with them?

My thoughts are that stores will have access to a much bigger market via Hypergrid and I would want to find out which grids I could trust with the stuff I sell. It's unlikely I would trust a standalone but a reputable grid with a good track record and policy should present no problem. If I already have an outlet on the customer's home grid then that should make it easy but, given that I have some accounting record on my off-world server, or should have, then I should be able to make the goods available provided the grid is on my trusted list.

Kinect. It's all Happening!

In my new Year predictions which I am expecting to get totally wrong I actually got something right already!

Someone has managed to hook up a Kinect to their PC and use it in Second Life to control their avatar movements and gestures.

Those same guys from the University of Southern California, Institute for Creative Technologies, have pulled it off again so it's sure to surface in an Opensim world before long. I understand there is a two second delay though which might make it a bit laggy for combat. Still,those who need exercise might soon have great way to work out while chating to and dancing with their friends in their favourite virtual world.

Two video clips to follow; the first Second Life but in the next video clip a little more magic takes the form of 3D rendering and animation using 3ds Max software. A Chinese hacker has used the OpenNI drivers to get Kinect to translate the motions of the user. This works by detecting the position of body and hands to control the animated avatar on screen. Anyone with 3ds Max will be able, at low cost, to easily generate lifelike gestures to use with their avatar in an Opensim world.

The future is defiantly on the march!

FAAST. Open source control software for Kinect

WOW! No I don't mean World of Warcraft I really mean WOW!

Following Pathfinder's lead, which he gave in my Predictions for 2011 comments I came upon a hack for the Microsoft Kinect sensor from  researcher, Even Suma of the University of South California. Working with his team at the school's Institute of Creative Technologies they have managed to put a middleware program together based on the open source framework tool, OpenNI that exploits Kinect's sensor to recognize the player's skeleton and translate body gestures, movements and voice into keyboard commands. This lets World of Warcraft players plug Kinect into their PC USB and directly interact with the game. The software package is called FAAST (Flexible Action and Articulated Skeleton Toolkit) and released as open source so anyone, they say, can downloaded it and use with WoW or modify to work with other applications.

Given that FAAST is open source anyone working with virtual worlds like Opensim should be able to play with the functions to get an avatar to sit, walk, run, turn about and activate a selection of gestures. I am sure a lot more might be possible too such as bringing up the inventory menu and clicking to wear an item of clothing while at the same time the avatar is seen, apparently, dressing as the result of an appropriate gesture getting activated (I have always wished for this since clothes simply appearing seems to me very un-life like).

Currently, the number of gestures available to WoW players is limited but the researchers aim to add more. In the video the team released (seen here), Suma uses his body to walk, his left hand to move the camera and his right hand to select attack spells. I can imagine in a virtual world a gun or sword can be taken in hand and used in combat too by those users more inclined to action adventure but the possible application for interactive social, medical and education use would benefit tremulously. As Skip Rizzo, said in the video, the system could help get young people out of their chairs doing more exercise. In deed, rehabilitation exercises and the fight against childhood obesity and diabetes could all be helped with this system.

I make no secret that want to see a free and open metaverse of hypergrid-connected virtual worlds come about where we, our avatars, can live some precious moments as extra-sentient beings playing, socializing, working and making money and, above all, being able to marvel at the creativity of others and enjoy the fantastic worlds we create. I think Kinect could open up new and exciting possibilities for virtual worlds and facilitate interaction in ever more life-like ways. I imagine too that a few more years ahead Haptics will come into play too and we will be meeting and shaking hands no matter where on Earth we live.

Imagine being separated by thousands of miles from work colleagues or those you love and yet being able to walk towards their hologram while they walk towards yours. You meet and shake hands or just hold the hand of your wife or husband, and by the miracle of technology you actually feel the touch. How amazing would that be?

Predicting the Metaverse in 2011

Everyone who blogs about virtual worlds seems to make predictions for the year ahead at this time so, not to be out done, I though I too would have a stab at it if only to look back next January and see how much I got wrong.

Gaga arrives at the Museum on Heritage Key grid

First off I want to mention that Justin Clark-Casey, a core Opensim dev, predicted last year that Open Simulator would not come out of Alpha in 2010. That's right it didn't happen but I have to say, despite it's continuing quirkiness it certainly seems a lot better and more stable than a year ago. It's frustrating when you consider how long Opensim has been in Alpha and I think the Chicken & Egg policy for submitting patches may have held it back more than anything else. I say that because the Imprudence viewer devs have decided to team up with Aurora now (a separate development of Opensim) when they had decided to work closer with Opensim in response to the Linden Labs TPV policy. They switched to Aurora and will develop the   Kokua viewer after being frustrated with core Opensim policy so I read.

So I would now guess that Opensim will finally go to Beta in the 3rd or 4th quarter of 2011, maybe (I'm playing it safe!).

Gaga at Stonehenge on Heritage Key grid

My 2nd prediction is that Hypergrid will see more growth than proprietary grids over all especially if HG 2 arrives with a means for content creators to block their creations leaving the grid in which it is sold. I have though about this a lot and it seems to me that if sales are tracked on the sellers own server they could provide outlets on trusted grids for purchasers to receive what they paid for free of charge on their home grid and, since HG 1.5, avatars  appearance is called from their home grid and not downloaded to the grid one visits this to my mind would be the kind of content protection that might just work. Certainly, objects like furniture wont be travelling to outside worlds anyway if the seller dose not allow it.

I have read that many HG-enabled grids claim up to 50% of their traffic is arriving via HG teleports so I predict substantial growth in Hypergrid travel in 2011 generally.

My 3rd prediction is that more developers will pull out of Second Life TPVs and turn their attention to Opensim, either getting involved with the official core developers (especially if they change their 'Chicken & Egg' six month rule of not looking at the code), or new teams setting their own goals and branching off. I think some of the laid-off Linden employees might end up contributing too. The  Aurora team is an example and they have set an impressive list of objectives which I am happy to say includes improving the Opensim physics which, according to one core developer, they never considered it their place to do any better with -  not that I want to knock them, I really don't. I think the whole Open Metaverse community owes a great deal of gratitude to them for their hard unpaid work over the years, without which we might not have Opensim today.

Gaga gets to see the Terracotter army on Heritage Key grid

My 4th prediction is that Second Life will continue to loose market share in the early part of 2011 due in part to the doubling of tier charges to none-profits and education but this will be offset by opening the main grid to Teens - a timely move. However, I suspect Linden Labs will alienate more of their older users by this move especially if the Lab starts bullying them about adult content still lingering in the Mature sector. I suspect many sim owners will find themselves between the devil and the deep blue sea when it comes to handling the visitors to their Sims. There will be fear about age and constant worry about nudity and public cybersex (actually, all sex is public really since one can cam in and listen through walls so LL has kind of made a nonsense of what Mature means). Probably many sim owners will either go to full Adult or shut down and be done with it and, possibly, move to Opensim where they are not subjected to looney Linden's policy.

My 5th prediction is that Second Life will recover considerably in the mid year onwards as Mesh comes to the grid and Viewer 2 and V2 TPVs get wider adoption but I don't think any of this will save Second Life from a very slow long-term decline. Simply because Opensim and other platforms will be advancing and seriously giving Linden Labs a run for their money.

My 6th prediction concerns browser based portals into virtual worlds. I am confident that some serious breakthroughs are on the cards. I have looked at a number of these and visited some of them. KataSpace from  Katalabs  which is built on WebGL and HTML 5. This can run on Firefox without a plugin. It works but still rather primitive. 3Di  was, however, the first to port Opensim through a web page back in 2008 and the company is currently re-designing it to take advantage of Unity3d. Canvas   is the latest to begin testing and based on technology licensed from IBM. Next up is  Rezzable's  Unity3d based portal and the one that impressed me the most (see pictures). I went to the page and opened the portal window. I found it smooth, and though it was merely a waltz down a corridor introducing me to Heritage Key's  Opensim-based virtual museum, I was tempted to register and see the world. I loved it!

Then there was Friends Hangout  yet another Unity3d based portal on a web page which I got to from Evolver  where I made the animated avatar image seen on these pages. Apart from these efforts Blue Mars and Linden Labs are experimenting with Cloud to stream the virtual world to the web page but this is the more expensive route so the end-user is likely to have to pay for it. My prediction then is that anything based on Unity3d are the ones to watch and I think it might be safe to predict that by the second quarter of 2011 there will be a usable Unity3d web-based portal available for Opensim from the open source community.

My 7th prediction concerns Blue Mars from Avatar Reality. This impressive virtual world, with it's bigger regions and Mesh-based objects and avatars really shows what a future virtual environment should look like but I can't say I am convinced it will get mass adoption, not in the short term anyway. The viewer is a heavy download and good graphics card and high-end computer are a must. Then you have to download each city in turn before you can visit. If the owner makes changes then you have to download again. The developers are well aware of the download problem though and, as mentioned above, they are working on a cloud streaming to deliver the experience on a web page. I think BM has a long term future if their capital holds out. I predict major improvements through 2011 if it survives.

My 8th prediction is that Kinect will come to virtual worlds during 2011 although I hesitate to put any firm date on it. What happened was someone created drivers  for a PC that allows devices to interface with the Kinect for Xbox 360. This lead to an Austrian company that makes hardcore porn videos showing how the controller can be used in interactive sex games. There demo shows a female avatar being grouped on screen. It's kind of spooky but it shows the shape of things to come and were we are heading.

Next up will be Haptics! What, you don't know what Haptics means? Think of the Holodeck in Star trek. Yes, using ultra sound to touch and feel virtual holograms. The mind boggles!