Tag: OpenSim News

On Monday May 20th, the Overte Foundation and Avacon announced the First Annual OpenSim Community Conference, which will take place on the 7th and 8th September 2013.

The official programme will be held in-world on purpose-built grid, designed specifically for the conference. In addition, the conference grid will be HyperGrid enabled,  allowing attendees to move between it and other grids which may be hosting social events linked to the conference.

The conference is intended to be a celebration of the OpenSimulator platform and the large and varied community using it. As such, it will feature two days of keynote speakers, presentations and panels on different topics, and an exposition area to showcase community activities and projects and event sponsors. Therefore, anyone who is interested in the OpenSimulator software and the future of the metaverse is invited to attend, as well as OpenSimulator developers, grid administrators, and members of the community who participate on OpenSimulator grids.

Registration and Speakers

Registrations for the conference will open on June 17th 2013 on a first-come-first-served basis. The organisers hope to accommodate 200 users in total, and once that number has been reached, community members will still be able to register for the live UStream version of the conference, which will be provided on-line free-of-charge.

The exposition area of the conference grid will not be restricted to ticket-only access, and so will be only to anyone wishing to visit, subject to constraints on the number of avatars that the exhibition regions can hold at any given time.

The conference will comprise five tracks in order to cluster break-out sessions into common areas of interest. Anyone wishing to attend the conference as a speaker is invited to submit a proposal under one of the following headings – note that relevant guidelines are provided for each track, and should be read in full prior to submitting a proposal:

• Arts & Creativity
• Business & Enterprise
• Developers & Open Source
• Research & Education
• Social & Communities

All speaker proposals must be submitted no later than July 1st, 2013.

Sponsors and Volunteers

While the conference is being held in virtual space, it does incur some expenses (such as the professionally managed set-up and operation of the conference grid and the streaming and other web services). As such, the conference is seeking sponsorship from businesses, entrepreneurs,  and community members alike to help support the conference through a range of sponsorship opportunities, which are tax-deductible for US residents minus the value of any tangible benefits.

The conference also needs volunteers to assist with a wide variety of roles including greeting attendees, moderating breakout sessions, assisting with building and scripting tasks, providing technical support, and so on. If you are experienced with the OpenSimulator platform and have an interest in helping, please complete the Volunteer Application form.

About the Organisers

The Overte Foundation is a non-profit organization that manages contribution agreements for the OpenSimulator project.  In the future, it will also act to promote and support both OpenSimulator and the wider open-source 3D virtual environment ecosystem.

AvaCon, Inc. is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization dedicated to promoting the growth, enhancement, and development of the metaverse, virtual worlds, augmented reality, and 3D immersive and virtual spaces. We hold conventions and meetings to promote educational and scientific inquiry into these spaces, and to support organized fan activities, including performances, lectures, art, music, machinima, and much more. Our primary goal is to connect and support the diverse communities and practitioners involved in co-creating and using virtual worlds, and to educate the public and our constituents about the emerging ecosystem of technologies broadly known as the metaverse.

Related Links

• The Overte Foundation
• AvaCon, Inc
• First OpenSimulator Community Conference Announcement

Hypergrid Business, the online magazine run by colleague Maria Korolov has launched its 2011 OpenSim Grid Survey. The first such survey was conducted in 2010, and yielded some interesting results.

This year’s survey is again anonymous – although you will have to supply an e-mail address, this is only for validation purposes to prevent people submitting multiple forms on (for example) the same grid; no personal data will be held on-file, post verification.

Some 20 grids are listed in the survey – although there is space for you to add any grid not on the list. Also, if you do split your time between two or more OS grids and wish to respond to the survey for each of them, you can do so – but make sure you make it clear you are doing so in the COMMENTS field, or you may run the risk of all your submissions being invalidated.

In announcing the survey, Maria describes its purpose thus, “The goal of this survey is to help potential new residents and merchants identify grids they’d want to visit — and to help alleviate some of the fears that people have about OpenSim grids.”

She goes on to state that people should, “Please keep in mind that the more people respond to the survey, the more meaningful it will be. If only a couple of folks comment about a particular grid — and one of them has a bad experience — it may put the grid in an unfairly bad light.”

I’ve already completed the form for the grids I spend my time in when not in SL and for which I can give an accurate set of answers (there are some I’ve spent time in, but not in enough depth to be able to assess things like the overall community, support, etc.).

If you do spend a regular amount of time in an OS Grid, be it small or large, please take time out to complete the survey – it takes about a minute of your time.

You can reach the survey directly from here.

On Saturday 8th October, OpenSim core developer Justin Clark-Casey announced the release of OpenSimulator 0.7.2. This includes – among other things – support for mesh uploads that matches Second Life’s capability and which can be utilised using the official Second Life Viewer.

OpenSim has in fact had compatible mesh capabilities – albeit with limitations – to Second Life since the day after Linden Lab launched the SL Mesh Beta a year ago, thanks to the work of Teravus Ovares, Latif Khalifa and Intel’s John Hurliman. However, until now, the capability has been limited, but 0.7.2 makes it available as a full release – although the upload capability and the release itself are both tagged as  “experimental”.

Nor is it the only new feature. Commenting on the release, Clark-Casey stated on his blog, “Despite having a minor point release number, it actually contains a very large number of features and fixes, including experimental support for the mesh upload seen in the latest Linden Lab version 3 viewers, Hypergrid support for friends, lures, landmarks and instant messages, NPC functions, prim and agent limits on regions”.

The NPC functionality is also something Linden Lab are moving towards. It has actually been under development for a while within OpenSim, thanks to the intervention of UK-based Daden Limited. As Maria Korolov reported at the time in Hypergrid Business, Daden offered a small bounty to fund the capability.

Interestingly, the pay-to-develop route is something that has now come to Second Life, with Maxwell Graf’s project to have a basic parametric deformer developed for mesh clothing – although this project is going the public funding route through indegogo.com (and it should also benefit OpenSim once completed).

NPCs have a wide range of applications, from training scenarios through to providing background characters for role-play environments. Daden were particularly interested in the former, hence their willingness to sponsor the development of the capability within OpenSim.

The additional Hypergrid functionality – friends, lures, landmarks and instant messages – is similarly marked as “experimental”, but adds important new functionality to the capabilities of OpenSim. These will make travelling between grids in the Hypergrid environment more personal – allowing friendships to be made, landmarks to be stored and shared, etc. People on different grids will even be able to IM one another.

This capability has been under development by Crista Lopez, who is both a Hypergrid core developer and an Associate professor of Informatics at UCI, and who first blogged about the work in May of this year.

The abilities to both make friends across grids – additional checks are included in the process to prevent unscrupulous spamming of offers – and to IM across grids are liable to be warmly welcomed by OpenSim / Hypergrid community around the globe.

The release also brings a range of other features, improvements and fixes to the OpenSim environment, as specified in the full release notes.