Office Hour canceled today!
Hi there,
Unfortunately we have to cancel the usual office hour tonight (Jan 7th) at 20:00 CET. We are always available on Google Wave and on the contact page, though.
Cheers,
Torrid
Opensource/Free Virtual World Platforms
Awesome collection of Virtual Worlds platforms and engines:
Part1
Part2
… Success
virtyou Opensim is up and running again since 23:00 PST / 05:00 GMT.
Major Update
We will be installing a major update tonight/this evening (Interface Version 6), so the Grid will be down from 15:00 PST / 23:00 GMT, for about 2-3 hours.
Cisco Review of a Virtual Worlds Event
Short article, mostly positive review of a Cisco Virtual Meeting. It seems, Virtual Events attendees are both older and younger than the average (broader spectrum), and are highly interested in later in person meetings. So VW meetings function as a low cost teaser for RL conferences?
Megaregion
Just some photos of our first Megaregion on virtyou. This is a 4×4 Region: 1024x1024m = 1 square km!
What is the MetaGrid?
This particular question popped up on Twitter: jemand eine Idee zu MainGrid und MetaGrid von @virtyou? haben es nicht vestanden. (@StartupScouts) [Someone has an idea to MainGrid and MetaGrid by @virtyou? We haven't understand that]
Beside all Marketing blabla, here’s the answer. The MetaGrid is an engine of Servers, DataBases, FileStorages UserDirectories (we call them Slots) and currently running Instances of the UGAIM/UGRM and Region servers.
The Idea behind it is just that: We have a bunch of Servers, and we want to run the Asset Servers and Sims on them, without getting stuck in configuring them by hand. So I created an abstraction layer and database model to describe what we have, Grids, Sims, SimOwners, ServerSlots and so on.
This engine creates the configuration files for all Regions, Opensim and UGRM instances.
And when we get a new server, or want to put a high load sim on a faster machine, or deploy a certain update, we just type it into the Web frontend, send a stop or restart command to the affected instances and everything behaves nicely.
So that is MetaGrid: A container for Opensim Grids. Btw, I usually don’t call it MetaGrid, my codename for this project is: SimPLE (Sim Persistance Layer Engine). 
Another Perfect World
Another Perfect World is a feature about Virtual Worlds aired on British TV Channel4 on 2009-06-23. It’s an amazing documentation about the current state and perspective social aspects of Virtual Worlds and MMORPG. Unfortunately it was taken off the net only one day after I found it.(Or, If I understand it right, it’s only visible for UK residents.)
Here’s at least a good half of the documentary on youtube, in great quality and resolution, although the most important part of it, the dawn of lawsuits within VW and Raph Kosters approach of giving the Avatars in his world Metaplace as much freedom as possible, instead of restricting their rights with complicated Terms of Service, is unfortunately missing. Nontheless: Have fun&insight!
Rezzable leave Second Life
… and choose Opensim.
Rezzable, arguably one of the most creative companies in the Virtual Worlds community, famous for their macroscopic Greenies builds and ethereal, dream-like fantasy Sims, announced yesterday, that they will be moving away from SL in July 2009. They plan to reopen the Rezzable Grid in Opensim “for people to help us test/improve OpenSim as well as showcase things that work there“, so they say in the same post
Obviously, this is both a big loss for the Second Life community and a clear signal to Opensim users. The last few weeks showed, that Opensim is becoming a useful and stable platform for Virtual Worlds development: The LSL reimplementation is nearly complete, Charles Krinke, one of the main Opensim developers has stated that Opensim reached 95% compatibility with Second Life, new methods to legally copy your SL content to Opensimulator based regions have sprung up, and the Hypergrid technology makes it easy to freely teleport between your home Grid and any other hosted regions.
While I wouldn’t say that Opensim is perfect in mimicking Second Life (or should be), I feel that both worlds have their own sets of features. But in contrast to the closed servers of Second Life, the possibilities for plugging into and interacting are much broader for Opensim. It’s easy to build a Web application that enables users to upload content (like a powerpoint slideshow, or a music playlist, or a 3D model of any object) via a web browser, transfer it into Inventory content, and make it pop-up in-world, for example.
On the other hand, transfering parts of that lovely “3D-chatroom” into other media domains is easy too, and is done in multiple ways already: With Sparkle IM there exists an iPhone application to log into any Opensim Grid and partake in the ongoing Chat, private and group IM, for example (without rendering the fancy objects, of course). Other existing bridges are the IRC gateway, and the Elgg social web platform, that simply displays your user profile, your friend list, IMs (…) on a web platform.
These are just some examples of how Opensim is improving and processing into a universal communication platform, instead of just mimicking the collaborative 3D aspect it has been descending from. If you haven’t yet, I can heartly recommend you to fetch an account in your friendly Opensim Grid (for example our virtyou MainGrid), and start exploring this new worlds now. Btw, Opensim is having it’s second birthday on July 22nd, so you really should have overcome the Ruth stage by then! (We have a starter set of cool avatars and buildings available, just in case^^)
See you in one of these worlds!
Torrid