Guide to the Metaverse, Part 3: H-Town, A showcase grid

Continuing my trips to OpenSim grids, this morning I heard that the residential architecture company Hometta has opened their OpenSim interactive showcase grid, H-Town, to the general public. I had heard a lot of buzz about it recently and felt it was worth a visit, so I promptly registered. After registration I hit upon a stumbling block as the viewer offered for H-Town(a slightly customized Hippo viewer) was only for Windows and Macintosh. However, after a failed attempt to use Wine to run the Windows version of Hippo, I had found the instructions necessary to login with the regular Hippo viewer(on Linux).

Upon login, I landed at the Welcome Area, where there were several display signs that would take you to the house shown on the display. The grid itself, while technically small(only 3 regions), is well designed and certainly looks like a modern suburban neighbourhood in development. The houses already up are wonderfully built and are scripted to give visitors an interactive, hands-on experience. My personal favourite was the Draft House, and given that there's more houses coming soon, I'll be sure to make subsequent visits.

The Hometta folks have put a lot of effort into developing H-Town, and it shows. In my opinion, H-Town is a great example of utilizing OpenSim to showcase RL architecture to potential customers, and as a tool for architecture protoyping.

If you're into architecture or are looking to find a dream house to build, checking out H-Town is definitely worth a shot.

If you want to check out the other places where I've been, all of my "Guide to the Metaverse" posts are now tagged "metaverseguide".

Guide to the Metaverse, Part 2

Continuing my travels to OpenSim-based virtual worlds, we come to two worlds that aren't for general use, but are very important nonetheless: Meta7 and ScienceSim.

Meta7 is a world showcasing an innovative technology called LightShare. LightShare allows region owners to share their WindLight environment settings with users via LSL script. Aside from LightShare, Meta 7 sadly doesn't offer much beyond most other OpenSim worlds. However LightShare alone makes it at least worth a look, especially if you're an OpenSim admin or a viewer developer looking to spice up your grid/viewer.

ScienceSim is for those who wish to use OpenSim for scientific and bleeding-edge research, simulation and education. The uber-geek's virtual world, if you will. If "Fern Lifecycle and Population Genetics Simulations" are your cup of tea, then ScienceSim is right up your alley. Just be sure to change your starter avatar's chin if you choose the male starter avatar(unless you're Jay Leno).

There may be a part 3 soon, but in the meantime I highly recommend taking a look at the grid list at Hyperica, as there's a heck of a lot more grids out there than I could realistically travel to.

The hitchhiker's guide to the metaverse

(Apologies to Douglas Adams, but the title fits what I've been doing)

Lately I've been hopping around various OpenSim-based grids to research which one(s) would be viable replacements given that Second Life may be irreversibly heading in the same direction that There went. So here's the rundown of the grids I've been to as of this writing:

• OpenLife: OpenLife was the first OpenSim-based grid to have an in-world currency, and that alone set up OpenLife as the first possible competitor to Second Life. Unfortunately, the OpenLife folks had forked OpenSim and chose not to release their changes back to the OpenSim community. While this is technically allowed because of OpenSim's BSD license, this act had basically turned OpenLife into a non-OpenSim grid.
• InWorldz: A currently small but growing OpenSim-derived grid similar to OpenLife. You're actually pretty likely to catch the founders and devs of this grid right from the first time you login to InWorldz, which is nice.
• OSGrid: The first non-Linden Lab grid I've ever been to, and without a doubt the biggest OpenSim-based grid. While it currently lacks an in-world currency(intentional because it's a non-profit grid), it's more or less ground zero for OpenSim development.
• ReactionGrid: And for something completely different, there's ReactionGrid. ReactionGrid is a lot like OSGrid, but with some very distinct differences: ReactionGrid has a solid revenue model by being an OpenSim grid hosting company, their OpenSim grids are hosted on Microsoft's Hyper-V technology, and grid operators are free to modify their grid server functionality if they wish. ReactionGrid is targeted at educators and businesses for collaboration, but there 's nothing stopping grid operators into purposing their grids for other uses.

While I'm not a big fan of Microsoft technology, I have to give it up to the ReactionGrid folks. Their business model is solid and professional, but they don't gouge the customer like how SL does with land(Same can be said of most other OpenSim-based grids that have region purchasing options, of course). OSGrid is where you want to be if you want to keep up with OpenSim development and testing, and freely experiment around. OpenLife and InWorldz basically aim at providing an economy experience similar to SL, minus the land gouging.

This is by no means an exhaustive list or review of virtual worlds, just my opinions of those I've checked out so far. There's several others I'm interested in checking out, so stay tuned for a "Part 2" blog post in the near future.