OpenSimWorld, Directory of the OpenSimulator Metaverse | Hacker News Reader

OpenSimWorld, Directory of the OpenSimulator Metaverse

opensimworld.com

This is not the center of Open Simulator activity. This is just someone's directory of it. With ads. Just as Yahoo was "the directory of the Internet". With ads. I've used Open Simulator and never heard of this site before.

A more useful site is Hypergrid Business.[1] This discusses the various players in the Open Simulator world and what they're doing. There already is a distributed, federated metaverse with no single ownership. It's just not all that big. There are currently 362 grid operators, each with their own servers and users. Some are commercial, some are personal. There's a list.

[1] https://www.hypergridbusiness.com/

Reading the "What is OpenSim" page on your link and... it sounds like the "Metaverse" already exists. The term is being sold like it's a new thing that doesn't exist yet, but it seems like Facebook is behind the times.

OpenSim seems pretty cool honestly. Similar draw as Second Life, in my mind. Though I downloaded Second Life and only played it a couple times.

> OpenSim seems pretty cool honestly. Similar draw as Second Life, in my mind.

It's the exact same technology as Second Life, just a third-party implementation.

These are ideas that have existed in pop culture for decades, and had a bunch of attempts at making it happen. It was surreal watching Zuckerberg talk about Horizon Home because it felt like he was projecting a Big Tech veneer over a hobbyists domain. People have been messing with this stuff in VR and earlier with virtual 3d desktops since the 90s, and possibly earlier that I am just not aware of.

It felt a bit like Elon Musk doing a keynote on a cool model RC plane he had built.

re: earlier than the 90s, I grabbed this link [0] from another metaverse thread, showing some 80s VR research (Judging by hardware, Sun-3, a macintosh, mentioned 20Mhz 386, otherwise no dates), I wish there was more info of who the people are, I would love to read their papers. At a Q&A near the middle, a researcher suggests allowing anyone to create content is a threat to the old publishers, pretty prescient but also typical 80s silicon valley I guess, but what do I know, I wasn’t born yet.

Also I rewatched Johnny Mnemonic today (set in 2021!) and apparently some form of that was written in 1981.

I realized what irk’d me so much about the Facebook’s presentation was that it had none of the flavor/aesthetic of being inside the computer, just a simulated mansion on the beach, super unimaginative, no attempt to explore the medium.

[0] https://youtu.be/5FC4UQDm_mQ

There was of course Habitat, and later World's Away. I came across this 1996 wired article about the "metaworlds" of the time:

https://www.wired.com/1996/06/avatar-2/

There's also the classic:

"The Lessons of Lucasfilm's Habitat"

Chip Morningstar and F. Randall Farmer Electric Communities

> This paper was presented at The First Annual International Conference on Cyberspace in 1990. It was published in Cyberspace: First Steps, Michael Benedikt (ed.), 1990, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.

http://web.stanford.edu/class/history34q/readings/Virtual_Wo...

Ed: see also this comment for habitat revived: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29055742

This is the largest list I know of (~176): https://ryanschultz.com/list-of-social-vr-virtual-worlds/

But it's missing many. Others have already mentioned Habitat (1986). Probably one of the most important.

It really feels to me like Facebook is basically squating the metaverse name, that existed for quite some time as a concept. And I don't like that at all - now everyone working on this stuff essentially has to start calling it with a different name or else they will look like they are somehow connected to Facebooks corrupted attempt at building a metaverse.

I think the opposite: everyone should keep using their existing metaverse name, to prevent Facebook from getting a viable trademark on it.

Good point, that could work as well! Especially as there is IMHO a good chance of Facebooks attempt to fail spectacularly (especially given a lot of people already involved in this area will not touch Facebooks stuff with ten foot pole), possibly soiling the name for quite a while if they manage to keep it.

That's right. It's like those open-source alternatives to Facebook, such as Mastodon and Diaspora. They work fine, and they have tiny user communities.

"Metaverse" is going to become a whole lot more nonsensical as it becomes a buzzword.

Between September and today this company added "We are building the Metaverse of the supply chain." to their front page.

https://web.archive.org/web/20210902024704/https://topo.cc/

https://topo.cc/

That one is Maria Korolov's blog where she blogs more about facebook and oculus these days (with obvious paid guest posts that are ads). Her grid list s manually crafted and very outdated. Curious why you didn't know of opensimworld , it exists for more than 5 years and its teleporters are everywhere. She has even embedded the opensimworld twitter feed in her front page.

The Active Worlds (unrelated software) universe server is still running and the client is still updated. This page has descriptions of some 94 worlds (of several hundred running, of several thousand all time total) that may still be accessible.

http://wiki.activeworlds.com/index.php?title=Category%3AWorl...

I remember this from back in the day. It felt way ahead of it's time.

IIRC it originally had a single unified world, which was massive, and you could build stuff in it. It seemed almost endless. You'd just walk and walk and walk and keep seeing new things that people built.

Activeworlds is what I think about when people mention the metaverse. A cool concept with great execution that ultimately ends up going nowhere.

Everything you saw is still there in Alphaworld (aw 0n 0e 0a 0), quietly losing textures and sounds that were hosted on the greater Internet (GeoCities, in many cases.)

BTW the first "Metaverse" is getting a "reboot":

https://github.com/frandallfarmer/neohabitat

I don't understand the website. Is a story repeated several times about 30 Ways To Avoid death supposed to be related? Bible stories that are true? Nebulous add/network links?

Edit: Reloading to 'view in desktop mode' seemed to remove these when switching back to mobile. Turned off for traffic spike?

>sex slave nudebeach

Umm no

MORE LIKE YES AMIRITE

This is what ultimately killed Second Life. In the early days it was being used by businesses, for meetings etc. Then all the people with kinks moved in and now no one takes it seriously.

Shame really.

> This is what ultimately killed Second Life. In the early days it was being used by businesses, for meetings etc. Then all the people with kinks moved in and now no one takes it seriously.

You got your order of events reversed.

In the early days of SL (2003-2007) it was mostly chaos: kinky content, ponzi-schemes, gambling and scams.

It is in this chaos that SL boomed, but sometime close to its peak (2006-2007) the management realized this isn't sustainable (for both legal and business reasons). So, they started to moderate user-content in order to make it more attractive to mainstream-consumers as well as businesses.

And we've seen how that went. Very few are interested.

Ah fair enough. I just remember those early days they were trying to push the Linden dollar as a way for business to monitize the virtual spaces and objects. It seems to have had a bumpy history.

I'm getting pretty fed-up of finding this word in half the headlines I read.

What with the metaverse title?

Contrary to popular press, the metaverse wasn't invented by Zuck in october 2021. Opensimulator is the most popular open metaverse since 10 years and more.

The biggest world has 6 users in it. It doesn't seem popular to me compared to something like VRChat.

vrchat is not open source. opensimulator is not VR, nor a chat

It may not be open source, but it is open. It's not some proprietary software only used in a single company.

I 'm not familiar, but can i run the server on my own machine to make sure that they won't be deleting / spying on it ?

It is NOT open, it's heavily moderated. If your avatar's or worlds are not PG-13, they will not be approved. Unless they combine zoophilia with pedophilia... then they get a pass somehow.

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