Tag: Kitely

Fast Company: OpenSim as a Model for a Truly Decentralized Metaverse

The article was published on the Fast Company website on Jan. 5th, 2022 (image source)

Steven Melendez has written an interesting article for the business website Fast Company, about how OpenSimulator (OpenSim for short) could be viewed as a model as to how a truly distributed metaverse, not owned by a single company, would look.

Among the people Steven interviewed for this article are:

I would strongly urge you to click over and read the article in full, but here’s a quote:

One open question, assuming the metaverse proves popular, is whether the technology will be tightly controlled by a handful of companies operating their own incompatible systems—as social media apps and video games basically work today—or whether it will be possible to jump from one metaverse world to another, the way it’s possible to send email from one site to another or follow links across the Web today.

These questions aren’t new, and, to some extent, a vision of a decentralized metaverse already exists today through an open-source project called OpenSimulator, which has been around since 2007 and is still in active use. OpenSim, as fans call it, allows anyone with some technical knowledge to set up a server to host their own virtual world that they and others can connect to (or to pay one of multiple hosting companies to do it for them). The project was designed from the beginning to be compatible with the technologies behind Second Life, the virtual world created by Linden Lab that became an object of media fascination in the 2000s but never quite hit mainstream status…

“I did something that is unique to OpenSim that doesn’t exist in Second Life, which is sort of a federation architecture so you can teleport between virtual worlds,” says Cristina Lopes, who developed the technology —dubbed the hypergrid— and is a professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine, where she has taught some virtual classes using OpenSim. “You can hop around between worlds that are in different places and operated by different people.”

All of which goes to prove my point that companies building the newer metaverse platforms would be well advised to learn about both the successes and failures of Second Life, and its spin-off, OpenSim! A study of both will no doubt inform, illuminate and elucidate you, and you will find learn valuable lessons and perhaps even gain some inspiration for your own projects and products!

As well, I decided that I should finally create a new category on the RyanSchultz.com blog, called OpenSim and Hypergrid, and go back and add it to the many blogposts I have written in the past 4-1/2 years about OpenSim and Hypergrid, to make them easier to find. Again, this will take me a bit of time, so please be patient… 😉

Thank you to Sitearm for the heads up!

Herding Cats: Taking a First Step Towards Developing a Taxonomy of Metaverse Platforms by Looking at Virtual Worlds That Do NOT Support Virtual Reality

What’s the Best Way to Organize Social VR and Virtual Worlds?
(Photo by Edgar Chaparro on Unsplash)

This evening, I thought I would start working on a task I have put off for far, far too long: organizing my comprehensive list of social VR platforms and virtual worlds (almost 150 entries) into some better semblance of order. (And, in some cases, provide an overdue status update. For example, I had forgotten to remove my note that Decentraland was not yet open to the public after their February 2020 launch.)

I hope to be able to come with a classification scheme, a taxonomy where similar platforms are grouped together. But how to do this grouping? Where to start?

Well, we could start by taking a look at the oldest, so-called “first generation” section first: the virtual worlds that can only be accessed via desktop on a flat monitor, the so-called “pancake worlds” that do not support virtual reality.

This list could further be divided by whether the virtual world was sill operating or was dead. Sometimes, you are lucky enough to get an official “Closed” sign when you visit their website, like with The Deep when you visit their website.

Some projects never are officially closed…
(Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash)

But of course, not all virtual world projects are so clear-cut as “closed” or “open”; “dead” or “alive”. Think of all those projects in between, that may be stuck in some sort of software development hell, or slowly circling the drain, or on life support at best. Let’s call those “Questionable Status / Stalled / Moribund” as a catch-all category.

In drawing up this first list, I will be removing any products which are clearly more MMO/MMORPG games instead of open-ended worlds (although the line between those is also frustratingly blurry at times). I’m also not going to bother with primarily adult/sex-oriented worlds such as Utherverse/Red Light Center, although I do know that some people do use this type of virtual world for non-sexual socializing. If it’s marketed as a word primarily for virtual sex, I’m not interested, sorry!

“Pancake Worlds” (Virtual Worlds That Do NOT Support Virtual Reality)

Still Operating

  • Second Life (now almost 17 years old, and still the most commercially successful and popular virtual world to date, with approximately 600,000 regular monthly users)
  • Active Worlds (the granddaddy of all virtual worlds, launched on June 28th, 1995, and now almost 25 years old)
  • Avakin Life (a mobile app)
  • Decentraland (blockchain-based virtual world, which launched in February 2020)
  • Dreams (a game and world-building platform for PlayStation, which currently does not support VR, although future PSVR support is planned)
  • Ever, Jane (latest update was October 2019, so it’s still operating!)
  • IMVU
  • Kitely (an OpenSim grid, which has also announced that they are working on a fork of the open-source High Fidelity software code)
  • Occupy White Walls
  • OpenSim based virtual worlds (e.g. OSGrid); here’s a list of active OpenSim grids (trying to keep track of which ones are open or closed is like herding cats)
  • There.com (their blog was just updated today; they’re still operating!)
  • VirBELA*
  • Virtual Paradise (an older virtual world very similar to Active Worlds; the latest update was in October 2019, so it’s still operating!)

Questionable Status/Stalled/Moribund

Well and Truly Dead (Amen and Hallelujah!)

  • Aether City (a blockchain-based virtual world that never got off the ground)
  • Blue Mars
  • The Deep  (another blockchain-based virtual world that never got off the ground)
  • InWorldz (This grid, which was based on OpenSim, closed on July 27th, 2018.)
  • Islandz Virtual World (the successor to InWorldz; closed in February 2019)
  • NeoWorld (another blockchain-based virtual world…seeing a trend here?)

Looking at this list of virtual worlds that do not support users in VR headsets, several thoughts on other ways to organize it come to mind:

  • We could easily pull out the many blockchain-based virtual worlds into a separate list
  • We could pull out Second Life and all the OpenSim-based virtual worlds (e.g. Avacon, Kitely) into a separate list
  • We could put Active Worlds and Virtual Paradise in their own category, too
  • Some products, like Avakin Life and IMVU, have literally dozens of similar products, all pitched at the teen/tween market (another category I do not wish to cover on this blog)

Another interesting point is that many of these “pancake worlds” are older (and some quite old), with an exception: the brand-new, blockchain-based virtual worlds such as Decentraland and The Sandbox. I find it interesting that many of the companies building blockchain-based platforms decided to avoid virtual reality completely (although, of course, many did include VR support in their products, as we shall see in the next blogpost I make about my progress in constructing a taxonomy).

Anyway, I thought I would publish this work-in-progress to the blog, for my readers to comment on. Which of the products in the Questionable Status category should be declared well and truly dead, and given a decent burial? What products were you surprised to see here, or surprised at how I categorized them? What ideas do you have about to go about the Herculean task of organizing them into categories?

Please feel free to leave a comment, thanks!

*UPDATE May 6th, 2020: A commenter to this blogpost informs me that VirBELA now supports virtual reality. Thank you to reader Alexander Grobe for this update!

OpenSim Virtual World Provider Kitely Plans to Run a Grid Based on High Fidelity’s Open-Source Code, Even as HiFi Pivots Away from the Consumer Market

Maria Korolov of the Hypergrid Business website reports, in an article on High Fidelity’s pivot away from consumers towards the business market, that OpenSim provider Kitely is planning to launch a new grid based on High Fidelity’s open-source software:

Those communities that have already begun planning a migration to High Fidelity may be out of luck. Kitely, for example, has long had a strategy of being a multi-platform company, with High Fidelity part of their long-term road map. How will Rosedale’s news affect their plans?

It won’t, said Ilan Tochner, Kitely’s co-founder and CEO… “Our service doesn’t use High Fidelity’s grid services, we use our own proprietary systems for that,” he told Hypergrid Business. “So, as long as High Fidelity Inc remains committed to continue open sourcing their platform codebase we see no reason to switch to using something else.”

That will change if they decide to stop open development, he added. “Then we’ll evaluate whether High Fidelity remains a viable option moving forward,” he said. “We’re building our proprietary services with that contingency in mind.”

In response to a comment questioning this strategy, Ilan replied:

The High Fidelity open-source project has a lot of potential. We don’t judge it based on the default UI High Fidelity offers or how well High Fidelity Inc. managed a VR-focused consumer service while the demand for such a service was close to non-existent. [The] UI can be improved, we’re pursuing a different target demographic, and our company manages customer relations differently than High Fidelity Inc. does.

We still believe in the High Fidelity open-source project because it handles many of the hard engineering challenges that must be overcome to provide a good distributed multi-user VR experience. OpenSim is a lot more mature and includes many crucial components that are required for providing consumer virtual worlds. Most of those components are still missing from High Fidelity, but High Fidelity already has many VR-related capabilities that OpenSim currently lacks.

That said, most of the proprietary components we’re developing for our High Fidelity-based offering aren’t High Fidelity specific and could be used with our OpenSim-based Organizations offering as well. In other words, most of our R&D is invested in developing differentiating features for our own services and not on building platform-specific functionality for any of the virtual world options we provide.

You might not be aware that Kitely has already contributed a fair bit of code to the open-source High Fidelity project, which anybody can contribute to. There is a possiblity that Kitely may choose to branch off from the existing open-source code at some point in the future, especially if HiFi decides to go in a direction that doesn’t meet their needs.

Kitely is not the only company looking at providing services based on High Fidelity’s code. In March 2019, former High Fidelity staff member Caitlyn Meeks founded Tivoli Cloud VR, a company focused on providing supplemental services for virtual worlds based on the High Fidelity software, in response to High Fidelity’s recent announcements (here and here).

Thank you to Theanine for the news tip!

Kitely: A Brief Introduction

kitely.png

Kitely is another OpenSim-based virtual world that I haven’t visited in quite a while. According to its Company Overview:

Kitely is the biggest commercial provider of OpenSim regions, hosting more than 17,000 regions (as of January 2018). Kitely is considered to have the most user-friendly administration tools in the entire OpenSim hosting industry.

Work on Kitely began in 2008, with the vision of enabling people to use virtual worlds as an on-demand utility. It took the company more than two years of intensive development until it was ready to start its public beta in March 2011. Kitely is now the leading provider of affordable high-performance OpenSim hosting solutions.

As of today (July 4th, 2018), Kitely has 103,725 registered users and 17,549 sims or regions, according to the statistics on their login screen. They seem to have a healthy marketplace, with thousands of items for sale. Kitely has their own currency, called Kitely Credits, which you can use to buy things.

The one thing that drives me crazy about Kitely is that many unvisited sims are stored offline, and you quite often get the following message when you try to teleport from one place to another in-world:

Kitely 4 July 2018.png

Basically, you have to wait until the sim you want to visit is restarted, and then you are teleported to it automatically. The delay is usually less than a minute, though sometimes it takes longer. But I still do find it annoying, especially after years of being able to teleport instantly to other locations on other virtual world platforms like Second Life. The tagline for Kitely is “Virtual Worlds on Demand”. and they aren’t kidding about the “on demand” part!

Kitely is an interesting take on OpenSim, and they have a small but active community. You can find out more about Kitely from their website, their Facebook page, or their Google+ community.

Kitely 2 4 July 2018.png
The Kitely Welcome Center