 Hello everyone and welcome to the 11 a.m. to 11 30 a.m. session of the 2020 Open Simulator Community Conference. In this session we are happy to introduce a presentation called State of the Open Simulator Community. Our speaker is Maria Korolov. Maria Korolov is a published author and covers artificial intelligence for CIO Magazine and cybersecurity for CSO Online. She is also the editor of Hypergood Business since 2009. During her 20 years as a journalist, she's run a business news bureau in Shanghai, covered wars in the former Soviet Union, and has written about local politics for the Chicago Tribune. But none of that prepared her for covering Open Simulator, which has been both intensely frustrating and infinitely enjoyable. And today she'll talk to us about Open Simulator. Please check out the website found at conference.opensimulator.org for speaker bios, details of sessions, and the full schedule of events. The session is being live streamed and recorded. So if you have questions or comments during the session, you may send tweets to at open simcc with the hashtag OSCC20. Welcome everyone. Let's begin the session. Well, thank you very much for having me. I love being at this conference every year. And as you can see this year, my hair is quite a bit longer. It's the pandemic hair because I haven't been able to get to the hairdresser. And it looks pretty much the way it does in real life. So gay. Let's see. We're going to be talking today about the hyper good business statistics that we collect every year and every month in our database. So and that's located at hypergoodbusiness.com. In case any of you don't know it, it's an online blog. We've got probably a couple of hundred contributors, more than three million visitors over these past 10 years. And every month we publish a stats report about open sim statistics. And so you can go online to get it. And my email is Maria at hypergoodbusiness.com. I've posted it in local chat earlier. If you have any story suggestions, or if you want us to cover something, or if you would like to contribute an article, opinion, essay, review, travel log, or if you want to run a free ad, all our ads are free. We have free ads for all community, opens of community events, grids, anything at all open sim related. So do come check us out if you haven't yet. And today I'm going to be talking about specifically the stats that we do every year. And last year the stats were down across the board, but this year they have gone up, possibly because of the pandemic. In our database we've had over 400 grids that were active at some point this year. And in these grids we count public grids, grids that have public websites where you can create an account or grids that are accessible via the hypergrid and post events, announcements, so people can come in and visit them. So this is not somebody's individual grid that they run at home and don't tell anybody about or a closed company grid because, well, first of all, you know, it's not really a benefit to our readers to know about those grids, but also there's no way for us to find out about those grids. In open sim, anybody can run a grid behind their firewall or at home for free without telling anybody. And there is no way to track those numbers. And by some earlier estimates, this hidden dark metaverse is like several times bigger than the known metaverse of known public grids. So open sim is a pretty decent size platform. It's a niche platform, but it's not as small as sometimes we think it is. So the hypergrid is still huge. There is only one major grid that's not accessible to the hypergrid and that's TAG. And about 92% of all active users in open sim live on hypergrid-enabled grids and travel between grids. And 97% of all land area is on the open public grids. And that's generally because hypergrid-enabled grids tend to be less expensive than the closed commercial or proprietary grids. So the average cost of land in open sim this year, by the way, it's not on the slide, but I happen to note off top head, is $15 a month for a standard size region that's equivalent to like a second life region in terms of primacy capacity. $15 a month. And there's half of all grids rent those regions at less than $15 a month. You can get a lot of land in open sim really inexpensively. And that's also not considering the fact that some grids offer variable sized regions. So you can get your region spread across a lot of land area, two by two, four by four, you know, eight by eight, and even bigger for the same price. So that is an awesome new technology that's really, really spread across the hypergrid and become kind of like default table stakes for grids this year. So our users, as you can see, they went down a little bit. The regions went down a little bit in 2019, and they've gone up again in 2020. And so have, where's our users? Here's our users. And the same thing happened with our active users. They went down last year, they went back up this year. Now that just could be natural growth, or it could be because of this huge horrible pandemic that happened this year. And I'm going to be talking about this later. Last month, we did our annual open sim grid survey, where we asked people to rate the grid that they're on. Now with 400 grids out there, we weren't asking people to compare grids because nobody's visited all 400 grids. So we asked people just to rate their own grid. So, you know, on average, people liked the grid they were on. We had about 250 people vote this year. And Kitely was the grid that most of our respondents spent most of their time on. That's the grid that they rated, followed by open OS grid, craft, Digi World's discovery, and tranquility, and a whole bunch of other grids. And this is the grids people visited. Because all the grids that I mentioned are hypergrid enabled grids, which means that people can easily travel to another grid in order to go to a non hypergrid enabled grid, they would have to create a new account. So we also asked people what other grids that they've been on and OS grid, obviously as an elite, it's the oldest grid, it's the biggest grid, it's a nonprofit that allows people to connect home based regions for free. So if you have a home computer and an internet connection, you can have your own land for free in open sim as much of it as your computer can support. And usually you can support like a four region little space pretty easily on a typical home computer. And you can support a handful of simultaneous visitors on a typical home connection. So this is a really, really good deal. If you have a couple of friends and you want them to visit you and you want to have land on a big major grid, OS grid has a very easy region installer that you can use. And you just spin up a region. And there you are, pre virtual land online that all the pretty much all the open sim users can access. And open sim users love their grids. 95% of our respondents said that they would absolutely recommend their grid to others. That's up from 91% last year, there were some unhappy people last year. And hardly anybody said definitely not. It was like around 2%. So whatever the grids are doing, the major grids that people were rating, they're doing it pretty well. We also asked grids to be scored on in various categories, including content, community, support and technology. So you can see that the grids that got the most votes, how they did. So Terra Nova did very well this year, which is a smaller startup grid that people had to write in their vote for it. And Utopia Sky also did very well. And not surprisingly, Kitely did well as well. Now you might see that OS grid is a little bit further down here in this. But that's to be expected because I said people sign in with home based regions. And every home computer connection is different. So the regions might not be up all the time. It might not be that stable. It might not be that fast. And also the grids are nonprofit run by volunteers. So tech support can be a little uneven depending on how the volunteers feel that day because they're volunteers. So it rates a little bit less than some of the other bigger commercial grids. But that doesn't mean that it's a worse grid. It just means that they do more for people with fewer, with less staff and at a scale that nobody else sees in OpenSAM. Now we asked people specifically about technology and Mobius Terra Nova and Utopia Sky got excellent scores. Mobius grid is an innovative grid. They're dedicated to gaming. It's one of the focus of their grids. And they were some of the first to roll out some new features like global payments. They were in the lead for that and some of the other new experimental features. And their users are noticing Terra Nova and Utopia Sky also had perfect scores for support and content. Again, these are smaller grids. So it's easier for a smaller grid to really devote a lot of time and attention to their residents. And it's harder to do it for a larger grid. So keep these statistics a little bit of grain of salt there. As grids get bigger, it doesn't mean that they get worse. It means that it's harder for them to do all these things. And again, Terra Nova had a perfect score for community followed by Mobius and Tranquility grid. And we asked people how many other grids they've been to. Now keep in mind that this is based on how many grids people remember visiting. And so like me, for example, I've probably visited hundreds of grids. But if you're to ask me to name the grids I visited, I could probably name maybe a dozen before I just give up. So the people who submitted our survey were asked to name the other grids that they visited. On average, they've been to four and a half different grids in addition to the grid that they lived on. So the open SIM is definitely a community. Once people figure out how to use the open SIM viewer and they get in for the first time, then they look around. They travel to other grids. They explore the hypergrid. And that for me is very encouraging because I like to think of this as a metaverse. This is like the internet compared to the walled garden that AOL had. This open SIMs the World Wide Web and Linden Lab is AOL. So that's kind of how I went into it thinking about it 10 years ago. And I kind of still think that way except that open SIM hasn't quite taken off the way the World Wide Web has. But that's a topic for a very different much longer discussion. I also want to talk about some of this year's biggest news stories before we go on to answering some questions. So first of all, the pandemic used their counts when up in open SIM in the spring. And then they went up again a lot in the fall as people stayed home during the pandemic. And in fact, in May, Linden Lab announced that they were having trouble getting enough server capacity to create the all the new second life regions that people wanted, which I guess is a nice problem for them to have, especially considering that they haven't had a lot of issues with growth in the past few years. We had several grids open and closed this year and some grids did both. So the great Canadian grid closed last winter. They were technical issues and funding issues. And then the owner got sick with coronavirus in March and ended up in a hospital. That grid came back up in October and they're trying to recover operations. And I mean, it's a disputed question as to how well they're going to be able to recover. But they're going to need help if that's something that you're interested in, if you have a personal feeling for the great Canadian grid, it had a very strong supportive community for several years. It's one of my shining examples of one of the benefits of OpenSim. You can take a community like a community in Second Life or a community somewhere else online, and you can bring them into OpenSim and create a grid for them. And you can do it really inexpensively and just unleash the creativity and unleash the group community feeling. And that's something that I've seen happen with many different groups and it continues to happen. We will talk about this with the creativity panel later on this afternoon how other groups are also coming to OpenSim and take an advantage of it and building communities. Oh, and the other big dramatic open and closing thing was Avi Worlds. And I do want to summarize this. This is really funny because yesterday I got a bunch of notes from Alex Papacelli about his new grid shutting down again. So Avi Worlds has been around for a long time, has been officially closed like more than a dozen times, lots of drama, lots of business models, people call it the yo-yo grid. It's a nightmare for residents, great fun for journalists of course to cover this. But not so much fun if you have property on the grid then it just disappears with no warning and everything shut down and all the social media sites are shut down, you can't communicate with anybody. This is not how you close a grid folks. By the way, give people notice at least a month's notice to collect their content, figure out another home, you know, prepare for like everything they need to prepare. If you can't give people a month's notice, you're just going to leave a bad taste in everybody's mouth and you're going to have a really hard time working on your next project, which is what happened with Alex Papacelli. Every time he closes and reopens, it gets harder and harder for him to get any traction because of his bad history with the previous incarnations of the grid. So this spring he sold it to a former business partner, Josh Bone, who has been running it very successfully and steadily and reliably ever since. But of course Alex couldn't let that go, so he launched his own grid, Virtualville, to big fanfare, lots of promises, shut that down again, relaunched it as Avitron. Again, new business model, lots of promises, and then yesterday people are telling me that he shut it down again and I talk to Alex and yeah, he's like, oh, I can't do it real life. So which means he'll probably be up again as under a new name and a new incarnation tomorrow. Meanwhile, he says he's helping Josh Bone out with the old grid every world. I hope he doesn't interfere too much in his operations. So then for me, this is the last bit of news before we open up the questions. So for me, the sad thing was that Google has abandoned VR. Not completely, but it looks like they're really scaling back. They ended the Daydream headset, which was my favorite phone-based headset. They ended Expeditions, which was a school project where they gave out a bunch of headsets to schools, millions of students visited destinations of virtual reality. That's been shut down. Nobody knows what's going to be instead of it. They shut down their Poly 3D, 3D model system. And nobody knows what's going to happen next with their VR stuff. We don't know what's happening with Apple's VR stuff. They're investing in VR and AR, but we're not really seeing anything happening. So the only real work that's actually taking place with VR right now is the Facebook Oculus ecosystem, which is a very closed, proprietary kind of platform. And so that's disappointing to me because I do want to see an open metaverse with standards. And one thing that Google does is they do make their platforms like Android more or less open. So not necessarily like 100% open, but close to it. And there's nobody gearing to be the next one. High fidelity has basically in effect shut down its operations for all intensive purposes. So and that was it. That was the last slide. Okay. Well, we've got just, I think we're allowed a minute or so here. There's just one question if you can answer it very quickly. Michael Christopher asked very early on if there's any idea how many unlisted grids there are in the metaverse? No, because there's really no way to know. For a while, the Open Simulator project was counting downloads, but like a big organization could download it once and then install like 1000 different grids, you know, for all its students or whatever, or somebody could download it and not install it, but they stopped tracking downloads in any case. So that's a good point. And then once I did a talk to some hosting providers to see what percentage of their business customers were running in private mode versus public mode. And that's where I got the numbers that the hidden metaverse is several times bigger than the public one. But again, again, no concrete data. And then Dream Grid also publishes their list of all their installs and they have several thousand. So again, that's also bigger than the public one. But that's again, a small segment of the whole OpenSim ecosystem. Okay, well, thank you. We're out of time. So thank you, Maria, for that very informative Open Simulator update. As a reminder to our audience, you can see what's coming up on the conference schedule at conference.opensimulator.org. Following this session is a meal break and the next session will begin at 12 30 p.m. in this keynote region entitled What Future for Immersive Social Spaces Panel. Also, we encourage you to visit the OSCC20 poster expo in the OSCC expo 3 region to find accompanying information on presentations and to explore the HyperGrid tour resources in OSCC expo 2 region along with the real gallery and the sponsor and crowd funder booths located throughout all of the OSCC expo regions. Thank you again to our speaker and to our audience.