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Open Simulator wasn't something I expected to see on HN.

Open Simulator checks off almost all of the boxes for the "metaverse". Multi-user 3D world, check. User-created content, check. Open system, check. Interoperability between servers run by different parties, check. Anybody can run a server, check. Compatibility with external asset storage systems, check. Compatibility with external payment systems, check. Second Life itself isn't as open.

So why isn't it the metaverse?

Well, there's a problem. It's not "fun".

If you start up an instance of Open Simulator, you get a blank piece of terrain. You can log in and visit it, and so can others, if you let them. Now you can build things. You can import assets and place them in world. You can sell or give parcels to others so you can have neighbors, who also can build.

This appeals to the fraction of the population which needs an outlet for their creativity. People who probably have a workshop or a drawing pad or a software development environment or a CAD program. It's not a passive form of entertainment. This makes it niche.

That may be a generic problem with the "metaverse". People don't actually go to any of the NFT worlds much. Decentraland runs about 200-300 concurrent users. (They hit 350 today!) Sominium Space, maybe 25. Most of the rest are vaporware at this point.

Attempts to make metaverses fun mostly so far involve bringing in DJs, or adding gambling. You need something fun for new non-creator users to do the first time they log in.

You can put games inside a metaverse. That's what Roblox is. Roblox is Youtube for junior game developers. Upload something, compete for attention and revenue. Open Simulator and Second Life are a bit too sluggish for that. Mostly because of dated implementations. Open Simulator only has one real maintainer at this point. Linden Lab has a new VP of engineering who's trying to increase performance, but he's facing a long-standing corporate culture of "can't do".

(I've been working on an SL/Open Simulator client that uses Rust/Rend3/WGPU/Vulkan, and can get consistent 60FPS frame rates. But it's nowhere near feature complete. The performance problem is solveable through parallelism and some algorithms that turn O(n) into O(n log n). The fun problem, I don't have an answer for.)

The main reasons are:

- The viewer is fricking hard to use by today's standards. I regularly introduce people to Opensim/SL and they can't figure out what the hell is going on. IT doesnt help that SL has a bonkers ancient avatar system, where people wear 2 avatars, use an alpha to hide the first and then wear a second as attachments. Good luck explaining this to people whose computer skills end at scrolling.

- People use underpowered laptops that crash all the time. Sadly it s the reality of having $1000 phones and $200 laptops/desktops

- It's buggy as hell. Hypergrid is a hack, nothing more. It's not supposed to be there, but thanks to the patience of some viewer developers they make it barely work. Unfortunately opensimulator does not have enough developers (basically only one person, Ubit) , and almost nobody is working on making a viewer exclusively for it.

- Opensimulator is a complex system, hampered by the need to emulate the SL protocol in a distributed world. The developers try hard but it's so hard to improve without a complete rewrite and a team of devleopers that can actually cooperate (there are like 100 forks, lack of leadership, and developers generally dont get along)

- There are more than enough regions -- but most are empty because of the chicken-and-egg issue (not enough users means people get bored and leave) and because its so buggy that people crash while trying to teleport.

- There is a lot of content pirated from SL that keeps people busy in opensim. Unfortunate but also true.

- There is a popular farming system , sailing system, almost every kind of animated roleplay that you can do in second life, there is the ability to script elaborate scenarios with NPCs (that dont exist in SL) . All those keep a lot of people busy (shameless plug you can find them at https://opensimworld.com). AFAIK there is nothing that it is missing from Second Life at the moment except the users. If you think something is missing, i d be happy to build it

The metaverse doesn't NEED to be for everyone, but it can certainly have wide appeal if it is easy to access and people can express themselves . In a social environment the games etc are mostly a distraction, what matters is finding users to interact with. Non-creators spend most of their time modifying their avatar.

And BTW people don't need to run a region to log in to the hypergrid. You can instantly create an account in one of the open grids like https://osgrid.org and go online, and then you can jump to any world.

> The metaverse doesn't NEED to be for everyone, but it can certainly have wide appeal if it is easy to access and people can express themselves.

If there are still technical problems both about and inside the "metaverse", why not focus on making it appealing to people with technical chops first? It surely isn't, otherwise this wouldn't be the first time I hear of OpenSimulator.

GP says it's not fun, and that attempts to making it fun involve bringing some lowest-common-denominator forms of entertainment. But what is it about it that makes it not fun for techies? Or for creatives with enough patience to pick up the necessary tech skills along the way? These people should be able to provide content, activity and root out technical problems. It's how many technological products in the past (including the Web, arguably) became popular: first becoming popular with tech-savvy people, and building up widespread appeal on that base.

It IS appealling to those people. This is a 15 year old project with only 1 active developer yet it still has thousands of users despite needing to set up a bunch of ini files and NAT loopback to run it. The problem is that it is hard even just to visit. Most people who run grids and regions are quite technical people who were in second life around the time it was hot , which is a long time ago, thats why you dont hear a lot about it. During the VR hype mania years many people left to try the new platforms until they failed. And in general people don't seem to reach outside their social media bubbles much.

Afaik there are no casinos in opensim btw. It s usually parties with wannabe DJs, real DJs and often live music

Aah, all these issues were apparent in the first couple years of the project (2008-2009).

Let's be frank: The early oughts want their '90s-level-graphics klunky 3D-metaverses back.

If the Snow Crash, Gibson, Matrix - level metaverse is ever going to be a real thing, it needs to be:

* technically up-to-date - at the graphics level of a recent unreal or unity game

* Mobile / pad-friendly

* AR//VR enabled

and most importantly:

* It has to be truly, organically interesting to experience from the get-go (as a viewer, not a content creator)

The present state of the field seems to have limited appeal beyond content builders and hard-case SL fans.

I would argue that some of the larger minecraft servers are much closer to the metaverse than this. They often have 'hub' servers where you can teleport to different worlds with different rulesets. Creative servers for artistic expression, survival servers for gameplay, and any number of other more niche rulesets. It's not unusual for servers to host several hundred people.
You're not wrong, but I will point out that Dreamgrid has an option for people to import pre-made enviroments (OAR files) from the outworldz server so you don't completely need to be a builder -but as far as I know, regions top out at 100 users (not that there's probably even 100 unique people on the hypergrid anyway -but I digress) so that goes back to your point regarding concurrent users.

High Fidelity got around that, but I'm not even sure if they're still around any more?

Certainly you can buy pre-made environments. There are some nice ones available.

Lots of concurrent users in one place is a tough technical problem. Improbable claimed to have solved it with Spatial OS, but it only scaled fully for limited situations, like large numbers of spaceships, and it cost too much to operate. Roblox is working on it. Their goal is a stadium of 50,000 people where you can wave to your friend on the far side and they can see you and wave back. I admire their technical ambition.

High Fidelity pivoted to spatial audio. They didn't do a big, seamless world, just something where you could have your own island. Sinespace and Sansar are other examples of that niche, which I call "game level loaders". Long loading delays of mostly static worlds, mostly running locally. Sansar did a lot of that. Ready Player One prop museum, Star Wars prop museum, etc. Turned out to be a very tiny niche. Nobody in that space got concurrent user counts past 2 digits. Second Life runs 30,000 to 50,000 concurrent users. Open Simulator, nobody knows, because it's so distributed.

I think you could take the Second Life / Open Simulator architecture, which is good for maybe 40 users/region, and get it up to 200 or so by multithreading. But to get to a thousand would need a new approach.

This is a real problem, because social 3D worlds need crowds. You can build a city, but it feels empty.

We're a couple of decades away from having compute and network infrastructure to actually have large, high fidelity crowds of real users.

That said I don't believe the statement that social, 3D worlds need crowds is true. The abundance of them without crowds speaks to that. You just don't build cities. A lot of the problem is that metaverse thinking tends to be about replicating the real world in a virtual one. Rather than thinking about how to make something better, or more exciting, or more empowering than the real world. A problem games have been solving for a long time.

There are always more than 100 people on hypergrid and more than a thousand online regions: https://opensimworld.com/
>Regions Online: 1,438

>Active: 122 avatars in 82 regions

"There are always more than 100 people" ...just barely. How many are you left with after you strip away the concurrency alts?

They are real users. Regions with alts are removed . Most users are alone in their regions though. And these are just the regions that use this directory. You can also check the stats of popular grids like osgrid https://www.osgrid.org/infos_grid_result.php
Heh, I played with this when I was working in the Second Life/Virtual world bubble (around 2008). Back then it was called OpenSim and the code was a mess, not made any better by running in an itself very buggy (at least then) Mono runtime. Enthusiastic hackers working on it though!

Back then the client (viewer) was still closed source, which seems to have changed since.

If you're remembering the date correctly then you're wrong about the client; the Second Life client was open sourced in Jan or Feb 2007.

It's still called "opensim" informally, but the formal name has (since 07 or so) always been "opensimulator".

Development around the client hasn't closed but a lot of enthusiasm around both the opensimulator server and the second life client has quieted down, in part due to restrictions put in place by Linden Lab on 3rd party viewers sometime around 2012 (for the sake of "shared experience").

For folks interested in exploring Opensimulator on their desktop or vps, there's a easy-to-use package made up which includes a configuration creator and some utilities: https://outworldz.com/Outworldz_installer/

There's a support forum for it on Mewe: https://mewe.com/group/5bc12bdc322b35103f0965d3

BTW, people do not need to run opensimulator to visit regions, they can join an open grid like OSgrid and use firestorm viewer to visit anywhere. There are lots of people that give away free land to people who want a home: https://opensimworld.com/land
BBC article on metaverse yesterday got me thinking that the time may have come for the success of lifesim/metaverse applications. I think we’ll see several providers emerge as we did with social, some consolidation and failures, with a single large provider remaining, as with search and social networks. I think the media frenzy and megatrend needed to support this is starting right now. You could do worse than re reading neuromancer.
I do think it is picking up. In particular with things like AltSpace VR and VR Chat and a few others. And I think within the next few years as really lightweight and comfortable VR glasses/headsets come out it will probably explode.

But of course people have been anticipating the extreme popularity of VR since the 80s. OpenSim came out 14 years ago for example.

But I am looking forward to really comfortable and capable AR/VR glasses so I can ditch my laptop for everyday work.

I think before AR glasses show up, we may end up modeling the world like this. If your local supermarket created a virtual version of the store, you could just hold up your iPhone and see the the store through the AR camera. Instead of asking a human for help, you’d simply hold the phone up to something and some virtual 3D store worker would come and give you answers.

The metaverse will most likely have to be built this way until we get real AR. The old jobs will go away, of course.

> If your local supermarket created a virtual version of the store, you could just hold up your iPhone and see the the store through the AR camera. Instead of asking a human for help, you’d simply hold the phone up to something and some virtual 3D store worker would come and give you answers.

Honestly, at that point, why not have the phone identify and/or guide you to the products directly? Adding virtual 3D store workers seems like useless inefficiency[0].

I've been bouncing ideas in my head over the past weeks, about an app that would highlight the products you're searching for on a camera view of your phone, as you walk around the store (and over time building a database, allowing to navigate you to them). But when shopping last week, as I was walking back and forth between shelves while asking my wife over IM about some weird foodstuff she wants me to buy, I got accosted by the store manager, who sternly told me that making photos in the store was not allowed[1]. I wasn't making any, and he backed down, but this shows there are definitely social hurdles to overcome with this idea.

--

[0] - The virtual worker will likely be operated by someone in company's central (or, more likely, outsourced to cheap labor in some far part of the world), so the answers to all the questions they can answer come from some computers, which means they can be displayed to you without the pointless faux-human interaction. For all other questions you may have, you really want to talk to an actual human working in the very store you're in.

[1] - I asked "why" in a polite and roundabout way, and all I got was "some customers are making photos and we want them not to, because it ... er .... goes against store policy". No further explanation, and I don't know where I could find the "store policy" anyway.

I can understand your point, but I mainly approached the concept as prototype 1 to ready for prototype 2 with AR. I fully expect to eventually see 3D models projected into the world on every aisle (like Pokémon Go).

Couple of use cases for this might be for the not so tech savvy (elderly).

The other main use case would be sharing your view of the virtual world with another person without sharing privacy defying live video. Your wife would see the virtual aisle (metaverse), and the virtual product(s). The hope is she might be able to even just say ‘actually you know what, just get the other thing on the top shelf to the right’.

Virtual projections could also say ‘follow me, I’ll take to you to the right aisle’. That would be even better for finding locations on the street where right now we rely on a compass essentially.

AR glasses do exist. They just aren't comfortable or popular and inexpensive.
The Second Life architecture was never a good approach to a virtual world, so it's surprising to see this project still going.

It looks like despite the very long list of technical shortcomings, there isn't really an alternative to date?

VRChat isn't comparable because you don't host it yourself and content + speech is all heavily controlled.

There isn't one because of the VR bubble. People spent too much trying to build the VR version of it, only to realize that VR is too limited and people don't want VR. HighFidelity was supposed to build something like that but they scrapped the project completely. Opensimulator is still the only open source alternative.
Does anyone else feel like the metaverse is like 3D TVs? i.e. something no one really wants except tech folks who need to sell us on the next big thing?

I played There(https://www.prod.there.com/). I hung out in Second Life, cultivated an area, setup live concerts... It was cool for a year at most. Am I just being old or is the whole idea played out and, even combined with better graphics and 3d goggles, just sort of tedious and boring?

Does anyone else feel like the metaverse is like 3D TVs?

I think VR goggles are like 3D TVs. Around 2019 I made that remark on the blog of some "influencer", and was threatened with a ban. VR headerger is fine if the world keeps you in a small area, like Beat Saber. Moving around in a big world with VR headgear is more of a niche market. Until someone figures out how to make VR a lot better than the current best systems, it will probably remain a niche.

The metaverse needs field of view. Visiting a 3D world through a phone is too cramped. Even laptops are cramped. Nobody wants big desktops any more, even though giant curved screens are now available. Sitting in front of an entertainment sized TV screen with a game controller is more common.

AR is something else. That will be a cross between Facebook, Marshall Brain's Manna, and the Hyperreality video, I suspect.

There is, interestingly, a market for tedious and boring virtual worlds. Second Life has a deal where, if you buy a premium membership for about $100 a year, you get a house in world. Two years ago, they upgraded that, with much nicer unfurnished houses in what looks like a nice American suburban neighborhood. This became quite popular, and they've rented about 60,000 of those houses, building out more and more nicely landscaped areas of suburbia. Users get one of these, furnish it, put up seasonal decorations, have parties and BBQs, and generally go through the motions of TV sitcom suburbia. This seems to appeal to people who can't afford real American suburbia.

I agree with you. People don’t want a single, VR metaverse. Even in fiction, like Ready Player One, the metaverse is imagined as a dystopia.

Having experienced Oculus, Hololens, and Pokémon Go, I think it’s much more likely people want AR layers on the real world than to have a VR headset on. There’s plenty of evidence people enjoy owning and designing virtual property, but that can happen with AR or on screens (like it does today in FarmVille, Animal Crossing, and Eve Online). There’s evidence people value an avatar that can enter games on their behalf (Mii, Bitmoji, character builders). I don’t see evidence people want a single company to own a metaverse platform… one company just doesn’t have the skills to pull off enough genres of experience.

There are no 3D TVs anymore, but there are 3D worlds. While they may appeal to a limited user base that has the patience/time to use them, they have been around for decades, it's not something new.

VR, AR, and the metaverse are separate things

Yes, on top of the fact that just about every portrayal of 'The Metaverse' has been a dystopian nightmare.
Pretty much. Sadly there is no chance of a successful metaverse that isn’t tied to data slurping and advertising.
Maybe there is. Second Life and Open Simulator don't have much advertising. There's signage for stuff in world, and some billboards along roads. That's about it. I don't think Roblox has much.

Like in-game advertising in MMOs, it's possible, but not popular.

You’re right, but that was a generation ago ie ancient

The proper way to experience it today is via VR.

This plus the announcement of FB that they'll hire 10,000 to work on the "metaverse" is making my head spin. Does anyone else feel like they're living in the prequel to "Snow Crash"?
Maybe Carmack hid a trillion-dollar algorithm somewhere in his VR game for a player to find :^)
I was hoping to find that the Ugandan Knuckles meme started on this platform but sadly that was VRChat which seems to be its own propritary system built with Unity.
Great project, has been going strong for over a decade. I had the pleasure of working on the physics engine for an early version.
To all those who are saying (correctly) that part of the problem with Open Sim is the developer, I'd like to recommend this fork, run by Mike Chase of Utopia Skye grid.

https://github.com/OpenSim-NGC/OpenSim-Sasquatch

Ever since mesa on Linux I’ve thought it would be cool to have your desktop in a 3d world to promote collaboration and fun desktop toys.
I never tried it, but at one point after DOOM was open sourced someone made a version that supposedly allowed you to do admin tasks in a doom like program.

I had to look it up -it's something I never used myself; here it is https://doom.fandom.com/wiki/Doom_SysAdmin_Tool

So that's ...close?

Yes! That was actually rolling around in the back of my mind as i made the previous comment. I just think it would be fun to be able to hop in a little ship and fly around other peoples desktops to visit, troll them, etc. you could get creative with notifications and messaging apps, etc.
the Oculus Rift supported this when I last used it 3 years ago, it was pretty cool to see your desktop rendered within the VR space
Assuming all the technical stuff is done, I wonder is it sad to live in "fantasy". Space is so massive take forever to get anywhere so can go "inwards" with virtual worlds. Does "being real" matter. Personal interest/values.
It's definitely an escape medium for a lot of people which also makes it a lot more interesting and quirky than the bland social hate networks of today
Yeah and I'm not talking down at it. I just wonder, like meaning of life sort of thing which is subjective. I still play videogames and I think VR Chat for example is pretty cool. Probably watching too much scifi (WestWorld) I think of this virtual world/marble that's buried under dirt and the Earth itself is destroyed/far into future, humanity is digitized (concept of "real"), what's wrong with that.
Depends on what you consider real? I've read in the past that to some extent what someone experiences in virtual can imprint on the mind in a way that it's almost indistinquishable from reality.

Memory is very malleable, so in a sense it seems like it's a it's a faint distinction?

I'm starting to feel that the question of meaning in "being real" vs. "being virtual" is mostly about permanence and effort to modify. Like, imagine if Eve Online got frozen in its current incarnation, became magically impervious to any hacking, and its servers physically shipped out to a magically impenetrable vault. Everything that happens in game now becomes permanent[0], there's no longer the underlying threat of the company rebooting or shutting down the game. That becomes much more real in my eyes.

Of course, the ultimate determinant is, the real world is the one you can die in. But if we factor out death, the only thing that remains special about our reality is that no human controls it, it cannot be arbitrarily changed without putting extreme effort in terms of energy and coordination.

--

[0] - At least on the scale of human lifetime.

Brain vat, cliche thoughts. I wonder if people weren't burdened with a daily job/9-5 schedule, would they go insane. I'm just rambling.

There are personal goals still.