Surprising revelation: Virtual world users don't necessarily want their avatar to be their digital self. In fact, they don't necessarily only want to have one avatar.

During the Metaverse hype of 2022, you could often read statements like, "In the future, everyone will have an avatar."

This practically always meant that everyone would have one avatar. This avatar would be their digital twin, as close to their real-life self as possible. And, as New World Notes point out, [url=]Horizons is entirely based on this idea.

Mark Zuckerberg had Meta Horizons, what most people think "The Metaverse" refers to, designed around this idea. And with hardly any way to deviate from it. He wants Horizons to be 3-D Facebook with everyone having an avatar on Horizons, only one avatar, and that avatar must be the digital representation of their real-life selves. Just like he wants everyone to be themselves on Facebook by having nicknames banned early on. Horizons was and still is planned to become 3-D Facebook.

This, however, is one out of several signs that Zuckerberg doesn't know anything about virtual worlds. As shown in the link above, Zuckerberg knows that there has been something called Second Life, but I'm not sure whether he knows that Second Life still exists. And he definitely doesn't know what Second Life is like. Even though Cory Ondrejka, who is behind Facebook's acquisition of Oculus, used to be a Linden himself. But Zuck doesn't care what people say. He knows everything better. He isn't the Meta CEO and a multi-billionnaire for nothing. And they aren't.

Of course, if you talk about virtual worlds with people who have never used virtual worlds yet, at least not with avatars of their own, this is generally their idea of how virtual worlds are used. Mass media generally follow the same notion and even amplify it by spreading it. In the future, you'll have a digital twin in the Metaverse. That's how it's done. Could it possibly be any different?

In the virtual worlds which exist today, it is different. Very different.

Perfect places to prove people wrong are Second Life and OpenSim-based worlds. Compared with Roblox or Rec Room or VRChat or other platforms, their avatars are fairly realistic which, you may think, should make life-like digital twins even more life-like.

Now, just get yourself an avatar in Second Life or on some OpenSim grid, preferably one connected to the Hypergrid, but most are. Go to some event where a lot of avatars have gathered like a club party with a DJ. Look at the avatars that are there.

And then ask yourself: "Do all these people look like this in real life?"

Because everyone will look like a combination of a super-model and a dolled-up Instagram influencer. At the very least. Especially the female avatars. They all have big boobs, they all have big butts, they all have big, voluptuous lips. Almost all have long, lush manes. In OpenSim probably more than in Second Life, they're dressed in ways that you couldn't imagine digital avatars to be possible to dress in. Or real-life women, for that matter. Some of the ladies will be dancing on six-inch platforms with twelve-inch spike heels, regardless of the underground.

Also, in OpenSim probably more than in Second Life, female avatars in particular may be outright unnatural. Humongous breasts which nonetheless no gravity seems to be tugging on in spite of the obvious lack of a bra. Hips at least twice as wide as the waist. Thighs that they could fit their heads into.

Male avatars aren't quite as extreme. But if you see male avatars with an open shirt or topless, they always have chiseled abs.

If you really think they're all digital twins of their users, think twice. Especially about the female avatars with the outrageously unrealistic body measurements that are completely impossible in real life. Even disregarding these, the "digital twin" logic means you must have stumbled into some unguarded super-model meet-up. Until you discover that avatars look like this everywhere.

Also, look around again. How many avatars are female, how many are male? You'll notice that female avatars are the majority. Again, if you spend some more time looking around and meeting avatars, you'll discover that female avatars are the majority in general.

So, does this mean that many more women use Second Life and OpenSim than men? But why?

No, they don't.

Here's the truth: Just because an avatar is female, doesn't mean the owner is female.

Second Life is so very very much not 3-D Facebook. It never aimed to be 3-D Facebook, not only because it pre-dates Facebook by several years, but also because the name "Second Life" indicates that your avatar can live a life independent from your real life without being "digital you".

Oh, and by the way:

• Second Life avatars have a forename and a surname. But the surname has never been a free-text field. At most, you have a list of surnames to choose one from. So no naming your avatar like yourself unless your family name just happens to be offered in Second Life, and even then only if nobody else has chosen that name before you.
• Second Life lets you have more than one avatar. Linden Lab doesn't really like it when their users create so-called alts for themselves, but it's possible. And it's commonplace.
• Alts are even more commonplace in OpenSim. For starters, you can have multiple avatars with the same name on multiple grids. Besides, there are fewer obstacles in creating alts, even on the same grid. In OpenSim, it's even more common to have alts for various purposes.
• As indicated in the first link, one out of three male users of virtual worlds have female main avatars.
• Also, as indicated in the first link, one out of ten female users of virtual worlds have male main avatars.
• Again, they may always have alts. Just because a guy has a male main, doesn't mean he doesn't have at least one female alt somewhere.
• According to estimations, behind every other female avatar in Second Life and OpenSim, there's a male user.

If you don't believe any of this: I personally know a whole bunch of female OpenSim avatars with guys behind them. In three cases, it's blatantly obvious: Two of them have weekly DJ gigs, the third one DJs on particular occasions, and all three announce by voice. In all three cases, there are guys talking. Only one of them has a male DJ alt, but you have to address to his female main for song requests.

It becomes blatantly obvious that remaking your real-life self in Second Life and OpenSim is not only not the primary goal, but undesired once you start customising your own avatar. Unlike other virtual world platforms, Second Life and OpenSim don't do this in some avatar appearance editor with nothing but switches and sliders, nor do they rely on imported monolithic avatars à la Ready Player Me. There is no way of scanning yourself or even only importing a photograph of your face and using that for your avatar.

Instead, you have to piece your avatar together. And you have to acquire these pieces into your inventory first. Said pieces were all made by users as opposed to being supplied by the same people who develop the worlds.

You need a body. You almost always need a separate head. You need a set of skin textures. You need hair. And that's just the basic building blocks; I'm not talking about clothes and accessories yet.

Now look at what you can get. Everything is geared towards young, beautiful, sexy. Where's the chubbier stuff? Where's the elderly stuff? In fact, where's the normal stuff? You may discover variants of female mesh bodies or add-ons for female mesh bodies with more realistically-sized breasts, usually marketed as something like "petite". But since everyone is used to standard big boobs, many users consider these bodies not realistic, but underage and their users potential paedophiles.

Why is there no more normal stuff? Because there's too little demand for it. It simply isn't worth making. Go figure. And remember that all these bodies, these heads, these skins, this hair and all the clothes and accessories for your avatar come from the community.

In fact, one reason why so many guys have female avatars, often even female main avatars, is because you've got many many more customisation options for female avatars, especially clothes. Both Second Life and OpenSim are full-blown menswear ghettos.

It's partially a vicious circle and partially self-fulfilling. It's commonly said that women basically need a walk-in wardrobe whereas a guy needs one shirt, one pair of jeans and one pair of shoes. But often, the reason why male avatars rarely change their outfits is because they don't have that much to choose from in the first place. Menswear is considered not worth making at such a variety.

So while men are more inclined to outfit their avatars once and then leave them like this for all eternity whereas women are more inclined to "play Barbie" giving their avatars a different outfit each day, there certainly are guys who want to be virtual dressmen. And if they can't "play Ken" with a male avatar the way they want, they resort to "playing Barbie" instead and getting themselves a female avatar.

Of course, there are many other reasons to make an opposite-gender avatar. Women may want to avoid sleazy guys by having a male avatar. Both may want to experiment with how an opposite-gender avatar is made, or they need one to test opposite-gender clothes and outfits before selling them. Just a few examples.

This is actually one of the nice things about virtual worlds: You can be what you want to be. Your avatar doesn't have to be your digital self. You can choose to try and model it after you, but you've also got the choice not to do that. You can even roleplay if you want to. And if you want to play different roles, many worlds let you create multiple avatars with different identities.

It isn't wise for a virtual world to force its users to have only one avatar and make it a digital copy of their real-life selves. Not because the owners of the world "say so". Not because it's their corporate philosophy. Especially not because it's unimaginable to them that virtual world users would not make their avatars their digital twins.

A vital lesson that virtual world companies need to learn from existing virtual worlds instead of disregarding them entirely and re-inventing the wheel from zero again.

Whenever I describe a picture from a virtual world, the description grows far beyond everyone's wildest imaginations in size; here's why

I rarely post pictures from virtual worlds anymore. I'd really like to show them to Fediverse users, including those who know nothing about them. But I rarely do that anymore. Not in posts, not even in Hubzilla articles.

That's because pictures posted in the Fediverse need image descriptions. Useful and sufficiently informative image descriptions. And to my understanding, even Hubzilla articles are part of the Fediverse because they're part of Hubzilla. So the exact same rules apply to them that apply to posts. Including image descriptions being an absolute requirement.

And a useful and sufficiently informative image description for a picture from a virtual world has to be absolutely massive. In fact, it can't be done within Mastodon's limits. Not even the 1,500 characters offered for alt-text are enough. Not nearly.

Over the last 12 or 13 months, I've developed my image-describing style, and it's still evolving. However, this also means my image descriptions get more and more detailed with more and more explanations, and so they tend to grow longer and longer.

My first attempt at writing a detailed, informative description for a picture from a virtual world was in November, 2022. It started at over 11,000 characters already and grew beyond 13,000 characters a bit later when I re-worked it and added a missing text transcript. Most recently, I've broken the 40,000-character barrier, also because I've raised my standards to describing pictures within pictures within a picture. I've taken over 13 hours to describe one single picture twice already.

I rarely get any feedback for my image descriptions. But I sometimes have to justify their length, especially to sighted Fediverse users who don't care for virtual worlds.

Sure, most people who come across my pictures don't care for virtual worlds at all. But most people who come across my pictures are fully sighted and don't require any image descriptions. It's still good manners to provide them.

And there may pretty well be people who are very excited about and interested in virtual worlds, especially if it's clear that these are actually existing, living, breathing virtual worlds and not some cryptobro's imagination. And they may want to know everything about these worlds. But they know nothing. They look at the pictures, but they can't figure out from looking at the pictures what these pictures show. Nothing that's in these pictures is really familiar to them.

So when describing a picture from a virtual world, one must never assume that anything in the picture is familiar to the on-looker. In most cases, it is not.

Also, one might say that only sighted people are interested in virtual worlds because virtual worlds are a very visual medium and next to impossible to navigate without eyesight. Still, blind or visually-impaired people may be just as fascinated by virtual worlds as sighted people. And they may be at least just as curious which means they may require even more description and explanation. They want to know what everything looks like, but since they can't see it for themselves, they have to be told.

All this is why pictures from virtual worlds require substantially more detailed and thus much, much longer descriptions than real-life photographs.

The medium

The wordiness of descriptions for images from virtual worlds starts with the medium. It's generally said that image descriptions must not start with "Picture of" or "Image of". Some even say that mentioning the medium, i.e. "Photograph of", is too much.

Unless it is not a digital photograph. And no, it isn't always a digital photograph.

It can just as well be a digitised analogue photograph, film grain and all. It can be a painting. It can be a sketch. It can be a graph. It can be a screenshot of a social media post. It can be a scanned newspaper page.

Or it can be a digital rendering.

Technically speaking, virtual world images are digital renderings. But just writing "digital rendering" isn't enough.

If I only wrote "digital rendering", people would think of spectacular, state-of-the-art, high-resolution digital art with ray-tracing and everything. Like stills from Cyberpunk 2077 for which the graphics settings were temporarily cranked up to levels at which the game becomes unplayable, just to show off. Or like promotional pictures from a Pixar film. Or like the stuff we did in PoV-Ray back in the day. When the single-core CPU ran on full blast for half an hour, but the outcome was a gorgeous screen-sized 3-D picture.

But images from the virtual worlds I frequent are nothing like this. Ray-tracing isn't even an option. It's unavailable. It's technologically impossible. So there is no fancy ray-tracing with fully reflective surfaces and whatnot. But there are shaders with stuff like ambient occlusion.

So where other people may or may not write "photograph", I have to write something like "digital 3-D rendering created using shaders, but without ray-tracing".

The location

If you think that was wordy, think again. Mentioning the location is much worse. And mentioning the location is mandatory in this case.

I mean, it's considered good style to always write where a picture was taken unless, maybe, it was at someone's home, or the location of something is classified.

In real life, that's easy. And except for digital art, digitally generated graphs and pictures of text, almost all pictures in the Fediverse were taken in real-life.

In real life, you can often get away with name-dropping. Most people know at least roughly what "Times Square" refers to. Or "Piccadilly Circus". Or "Monument Valley". Or "Stonehenge". There is no need to break down where these places are. It can be considered common knowledge.

In fact, you get away even more easily with name-dropping landmarks without telling where they are. White House. Empire State Building. Tower Bridge. Golden Gate Bridge. Mount Fuji. Eiffel Tower. Taj Mahal. Sydney Opera House which, admittedly, name-drops its rough location, just like the Hollywood Marquee. All these are names that should ring a bell.

But you can't do that in virtual worlds. In no virtual world can you do that. Not even in Roblox which has twice as many users as Germany has citizens. Much less in worlds running on OpenSim, all of which combined are estimated to have fewer than 50,000 unique monthly users. Whatever "unique" means, considering that many users have more than one avatar in more than one of these worlds.

Such tiny user numbers mean that there are even more people who don't use these worlds, who therefore are completely unfamiliar with these worlds. Who, in fact, don't even know these worlds exist. I'm pretty sure there isn't a single paid Metaverse expert of any kind who has ever even heard of OpenSimulator. They know Horizons, they know The Sandbox, they know Decentraland, they know Rec Room, they know VRchat, they know Roblox and so forth, they may even be aware that Second Life is still around, but they've never in their lives heard of OpenSim. It's that obscure.

So imagine I just name-dropped...

[...] the Sendalonde Community Library.

What'd that tell you?

It'd tell you nothing. You wouldn't know what that is. I couldn't blame you. Right off the bat, I know only two other Fediverse users who definitely know that building because I was there with them. Maybe a few more have been there before. Definitely much fewer than 50. Likely fewer than 20. Out of millions.

Okay, let's add where it is.

[...] the Sendalonde Community Library in Sendalonde.

Does that help?

No, it doesn't. If you don't know the Sendalonde Community Library, you don't know what and where Sendalonde is either. That place is only known for its spectacular library building.

And you've probably never heard of a real-life place with that name. Of course you haven't. That place isn't in real life.

So I'd have to add some more information.

[...] the Sendalonde Community Library in Sendalonde in the Discovery Grid.

What's the Discovery Grid? And what's a grid in this context, and why is it called a grid?

Well, then I have to get even wordier.

[...] the Sendalonde Community Library in Sendalonde in the Discovery Grid which is a 3-D virtual world based on OpenSimulator.

Nobody, absolutely nobody writes that much about a real-life location. Ever.

And still, while you know that I'm talking about a place in a virtual world and what that virtual world is based on, while this question is answered, it raises a new question: What is OpenSimulator?

I wouldn't blame you for asking that. Again, even Metaverse experts don't know OpenSimulator. I'm pretty sure that nobody in the Open Metaverse Interoperability Group, in the Open Metaverse Alliance and at the Open Metaverse Foundation has ever heard of OpenSim. The owners and operators of most existing virtual worlds have never heard of OpenSim except those of Second Life, Overte and maybe a few others. Most Second Life users, present and past, have never heard of OpenSim. Most users of most other virtual worlds, present and past, have never heard of OpenSim.

And billions of people out there believe that Zuckerberg has invented "The Metaverse", and that his virtual worlds are actually branded "Metaverse® ("Metaverse" is a registered trademark of Meta Platforms, Inc. All rights reserved.)" Hardly anyone knows that the term "metaverse" was coined by Neal Stephenson in his cyberpunk novel Snow Crash which, by the way, has inspired Philip Rosedale to create Second Life. And nobody knows that the term "metaverse" has been part of the regular OpenSim users' vocabulary since before 2010. Because nobody knows OpenSim.

And that's why I can't just name-drop "OpenSimulator" either. I have to explain even that.

[...] the Sendalonde Community Library in Sendalonde in the Discovery Grid which is a 3-D virtual world based on OpenSimulator.

OpenSimulator (official website and wiki), OpenSim in short, is a free and open-source platform for 3-D virtual worlds that uses largely the same technology as the commercial virtual world Second Life.

That alone would be more than your typical cat picture alt-text.

But it'd create misconceptions, namely of OpenSim being another walled-garden, headset-only VR platform that has jumped upon the "Metaverse" bandwagon. Because that's what people know about virtual worlds, if anything. So that's what they automatically assume. And that's wrong.

I'd have to keep that from happening by telling people that OpenSim is as decentralised and federated as the Fediverse, only that it even predates Laconi.ca, not to mention Mastodon. Okay, and it only federates with itself and some of its own forks because OpenSim doesn't run on a standardised protocol, and nobody else has ever created anything compatible.

[...] the Sendalonde Community Library in Sendalonde in the Discovery Grid which is a 3-D virtual world based on OpenSimulator.

OpenSimulator (official website and wiki), OpenSim in short, is a free and open-source platform for 3-D virtual worlds that uses largely the same technology as the commercial virtual world Second Life. It was launched as early as 2007, and most of it became a network of federated, interconnected worlds when the Hypergrid was introduced in 2008. It is accessed through client software running on desktop or laptop computers, so-called "viewers". It doesn't require a virtual reality headset, and it actually doesn't support virtual reality headsets.

This is more than most alt-texts on Mastodon. Only this.

But it still leaves one question unanswered: "Discovery Grid? What's that? Why is it called a grid? What's a grid in this context?"

So I'd have to add yet another paragraph.

[...] the Sendalonde Community Library in Sendalonde in the Discovery Grid which is a 3-D virtual world based on OpenSimulator.

OpenSimulator (official website and wiki), OpenSim in short, is a free and open-source platform for 3-D virtual worlds that uses largely the same technology as the commercial virtual world Second Life. It was launched as early as 2007, and most of it a network of federated, interconnected worlds when the Hypergrid was introduced in 2008. It is accessed through client software running on desktop or laptop computers, so-called "viewers". It doesn't require a virtual reality headset, and it actually doesn't support virtual reality headsets.

Just like Second Life's virtual world, worlds based on OpenSim are referred to as "grids" because they are separated into square fields of 256 by 256 metres, so-called "regions". These regions can be empty and inaccessible, or there can be a "simulator" or "sim" running in them. Only these sims count a the actual land area of a grid. It is possible to both look into neighbouring sims and move your avatar across sim borders unless access limitations prevent this.

I'm well past 1,000 characters now. Other people paint entire pictures with words with that many characters. I need them only to explain where a picture was taken. But this should answer all immediate questions and make clear what kind of place the picture shows.

The main downside, apart from the length which for some Mastodon users is too long for a full image description already, is that this will be outdated, should the decision be made to move Sendalonde to another grid again.

And I haven't even started actually describing the image. Blind or visually-impaired users still don't know what it actually shows.

The actual content of the image

If this was a place in real life, I might get away with name-dropping the Sendalonde Community Library and briefly mention that there are some trees around it, and there's a body of water in the background. It'd be absolutely sufficient.

But such a virtual place is something that next to nobody is familiar with. Non-sighted people even less because they're even more unlikely to visit virtual worlds. That's a highly visual medium and usually not really inclusive for non-sighted users.

So if I only name-dropped the Sendalonde Community Library, mentioned where it is located and explained what OpenSim is, I wouldn't be done. There would be blind or visually-impaired people inquiring, "Okay, but what does it look like?" Ditto people with poor internet for whom the image doesn't load.

Sure they would. Because they honestly wouldn't know what it looks like. Because even the sighted users with poor internet have never seen it before. But they would want to know.

So I'd have to tell them. Not doing so would be openly ableist.

And no, one sentence isn't enough. This is a very large, highly complex, highly detailed building and not just a box with a doorway and a sign on it. Besides, remember that we're talking about a virtual world. Architecture in virtual worlds is not bound to the same limits and laws and standards and codes as in real life. Just about everything is possible. So absolutely nothing can ever be considered "a given" and therefore unnecessary to be mentioned.

Now, don't believe that blind or visually-impaired people will limit their "What does it look like?" to the centre-piece of the picture. If you mention something being there, they want to know what it looks like. Always. Regardless of whether or not they used to be sighted, they still don't know what whatever you've mentioned looks like specifically in a virtual world. And, again, it's likely that they don't know what it looks like at all.

Thus, if I mention it, I have to describe it. Always. All of it.

There are exactly two exceptions. One, if something is fully outside the borders of the image. Two, if something is fully covered up by something else. And I'm not even entirely sure about the latter case.

Sometimes, a visual description isn't even enough. Sometimes, I can mention that something is somewhere in the picture. I can describe what that something looks like in all details. But people still don't know what it is.

I can mention that there's an OpenSimWorld beacon standing somewhere. I can describe its looks with over a 1,000 words and so much accuracy that an artist could make a fairly accurate drawing of it just from my description.

But people, the artist included, still would not know what an OpenSimWorld beacon is in the first place, nor what it's there for.

So I have to explain what an OpenSimWorld beacon is and what it does.

Before I can do that, I first have to explain what OpenSimWorld is. And that won't be possible with a short one-liner. OpenSimWorld is a very multi-purpose website. Explaining it will require a four-digit number of characters.

Only after I'm done explaining OpenSimWorld, I can start explaining the beacon. And the beacon is quite multi-functional itself. On top of that, I'll have to explain the concept of teleporting around in OpenSim, especially from grid to grid through the Hypergrid.

This is why I generally avoid having OSW beacons in my pictures.

Teleporters themselves aren't quite as bad, but they, too, require lots and lots of words. They have to be described. If there's a picture on them, maybe one that shows a preview of the chosen destination, that picture has to be described. All of a sudden, I have an entire second image to write a description for. And then I have to explain what that teleporter is, what it does, how it works, how it's operated. They don't know teleporters because there are no teleporters in real life.

At least I might not have to explain to them which destinations the teleporter can send an avatar to. The people who need all these descriptions and explanations won't have any use for this particular information because they don't even know the destinations in the first place. And describing and explaining each of these destinations, especially if they're over a hundred, might actually be beyond the scope of an image description, especially since these destinations usually aren't shown in the image itself.

Avatars

Just like in-world objects, avatars and everything more or less similar require detailed, extensive descriptions and explanations. People need to understand how avatars work in this kind of world, and of course, blind or visually-impaired people want to know what these avatars look like. Each and every last one of them. Again, how are they supposed to know otherwise?

I'm not quite sure whether or not it's smart to always give the names of all avatars in the image. It's easy to find them out, but when writing a description especially for a party picture with dozens of avatars in it, associating the depictions of avatars in the image with identities has to be done right away before even only one of these avatars leaves the location.

One thing that needs to be explained right afterwards is how avatars are built. In the cases of Second Life and OpenSim, this means explaining that they usually aren't "monobloc" avatars that can't be modified in-world. Instead, they are modular, put together from lots of elements, usually starting with a mesh body that "replaces" the default system body normally rendered by the viewer, continuing with a skin texture, an eye texture and a shape with over 80 different parameters and ending with clothes and accessories. Of course, this requires an explanation on what "mesh" is, why it's special and when and why it was introduced.

OpenSim also supports script-controlled NPCs which require their own explanation, including that NPCs don't exist in Second Life, and how they work in OpenSim. Animesh exists both in Second Life and OpenSim and requires its own explanation again.

After these explanations, the actual visual description can begin. And it can and has to be every bit as extensive and detailed as for everything else in the picture.

The sex of an avatar does not have to be avoided in the description, at least not in Second Life and OpenSim. There, you basically only have two choices: masculine men and feminine women. Deviating from that is extremely difficult, so next to nobody does that. What few people actually declare their avatars trans describe them as such in the profile. The only other exception are "women with a little extra". All other avatars can safely be assumed to be cis, and their visual sex can be used to describe them.

In virtual worlds, especially Second Life and OpenSim, there is no reason not to mention the skin tone either. A skin is just that: a skin. It can be replaced with just about any other skin on any avatar without changing anything else. It doesn't even have to be natural. It can be snow white, or it can be green, or it can be the grey of bare metal. In fact, in order to satisfy those who are really curious about virtual worlds, it's even necessary to mention if a skin is photo-realistic and has highlights and shades baked on.

Following that comes a description of what the avatar wears, including the hairstyle. This, too, should go into detail and mention things that are so common in real life that nobody would waste a thought about them, such as whether there are creases or crinkles on a piece of clothing at all, and if so, if they're actually part of the 3-D model or only painted on.

Needless to say that non-standard avatars, e.g. dragons, require the same amount of detail when describing them.

Now, only describing what an avatar looks like isn't enough. It's also necessary to describe what the avatar does which means a detailed description of its posture and mimics. Just about all human avatars in Second Life and OpenSim have support for mimics, even though they usually wear a neutral, non-descript expression. But even that needs to be mentioned.

Text transcripts

They say that if there's text somewhere in a picture, it has to be transcribed verbatim in the image description. However, there is no definite rule for text that is too small to be readable, partially obscured by something in front of it or only partially within the borders of the image.

Text not only appears in screenshots of social media posts, photographs of news articles and the like. It may appear in all kinds of photographs, and it may just as well appear in digital renderings from 3-D virtual worlds. It can be on posters, it can be on billboards, it can be on big and small signs, it can be on store marquees, it can be printed on people's clothes, it can be anywhere.

Again, the basic rule is: If there's text, it has to be transcribed.

Now you might say that transcribing illegible text is completely out of question. It can't be read anyway, so it can't be transcribed either. Case closed.

Not so fast. It's true that this text can't be read in the picture. But that one picture is not necessarily the only source for the text in question. If the picture is a real-life photograph, the last resort would be to go back to where the picture was taken, look around more closely and transcribe the bits of text from there.

Granted, that's difficult if whatever a text was on is no longer there, e.g. if it was printed on a T-shirt. And yes, that's extra effort, too much of an effort if you're at home posting pictures which you've taken during your overseas vacation. Flying back there just to transcribe text is completely out of question.

This is a non-issue for pictures from virtual worlds. In most cases, you can always go back to where you've taken a picture, take closer looks at signs and posters and so on, look behind trees or columns or whatever is standing in front of a sign and partly covering it and easily transcribe everything. Or you take the picture and write the description without even leaving first. You can stay there until you're done describing and transcribing everything.

At least Second Life and OpenSim also allow you to move your camera and therefore your vision independently from your avatar. That really makes it possible to take very close looks at just about everything, regardless of whether or not you can get close enough with your avatar.

There are only four cases in which in-world text does not have to be fully transcribed. One, it's incomplete in-world; in this case, transcribe what is there. Two, it's illegible in-world, for example due to a too low texture resolution or texture quality; that's bad luck. Three, it is fully obscured, either because it is fully covered by something else, or because it's on a surface completely facing away from the camera. And four, it isn't even within the borders of the image.

In all other cases, there is no reason not to transcribe text. The text being illegible in the picture isn't. In fact, that's rather a reason to transcribe it: Even sighted people need help figuring out what's written there. And people who are super-curious about virtual worlds and want to know everything about them will not stop at text.

But why?

Yeah, that's all tough, I know. And I can understand if you as the audience are trying to weasel yourself out of having to read such a massive image description. You're trying to get me to not write that much. You're trying to find a situation in which writing so much is not justified, not necessary. Or better yet, enough situations that they become the majority, that a full description ends up only necessary in extremely niche edge cases that you hope to never come across. You want to see that picture, but you want to see it without thousands or tens of thousands of worlds of description.

Let me tell you something: There is no such situation. There is no context in which such a huge image description wouldn't be necessary.

The picture could be part of a post of someone who has visited that place and wants to tell everyone about it. Even if the post itself has only got 200 characters.

The picture could be part of an announcement of an event that's planned to take place there.

The picture could be part of a post from that very event. Or about the event after it has happened.

The picture could be part of an interview with the owners.

The picture could be part of a post about famous locations in OpenSim.

The picture could be part of a post about the Discovery Grid.

The picture could be part of a post about OpenSim in general.

The picture could be part of a post or thread about 6 obscure virtual worlds that you've probably never heard of, and number 4 is really awesome.

The picture could be part of a post about virtual architecture.

The picture could be part of a post about the concept of virtual libraries or bookstores.

The picture could be part of a recommendation of cool OpenSim places to visit.

It doesn't matter. All these cases require the full image description with all its details. And so do all those which I haven't mentioned. There will always be someone coming across the post with the picture who needs the description.

See, I've learned something about the Fediverse. You can try to limit your target audience. But you can't limit your actual audience.

It'd be much easier for me if I could only post to people who know OpenSim and actually lock everyone else out. But I can't.

On the World-Wide Web, it's easy. If you write something niche, pretty much only people interested in that niche will see your content because only they will even look for content like yours. Content has to be actively dug out, but in doing so, you can pick what kind of content to dig out.

In the Fediverse, anyone will come across stuff that they know nothing about, whether they're interested in it or not. Even elaborate filtering of the personal timeline isn't fail-safe. And then there are local and federated timelines on which all kinds of stuff appear.

No matter how hard you try to only post to a specific audience, it is very likely that someone who knows nothing about your topic will see your post on the federated timeline on mastodon.social. It's rude to keep clueless casuals from following you, even though all they do is follow absolutely everyone because they need that background noise of uninteresting stuff on their personal timeline that they have on X due to The Algorithm. And it's impossible to keep people from boosting your posts to clueless casuals, whether these people are your own connections and familiar with your topic, or they've discovered your most recent post on their federated timeline.

You can't keep clueless casuals who need an extensive image description to understand your picture from coming across it. Neither can you keep blind or visually-impaired users who need an image description to even experience the picture in the first place from coming across it.

Neither, by the way, can you keep those who demand everyone always give a sufficient description for any image from coming across yours. And I'm pretty sure that some of them not only demand that from those whom they follow, but from those whose picture posts they come across on the local or federated timelines as well.

Sure, you can ignore them. You can block them. You can flip them the imaginary or actual bird. And then you can refuse to give a description altogether. Or you can put a short description into the alt-text which actually doesn't help at all. Sure, you can do that. But then you have to cope with having a Fediverse-wide reputation as an ableist swine.

The only alternative is to do it right and give those who need a sufficiently informative image description what they need. In the case of virtual worlds, as I've described, "sufficiently informative" starts at several thousand words.

And this is why pictures from virtual worlds always need extremely long image descriptions.

---

Set of hashtags to see if they're federated across the Fediverse:

#ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #AltText #Accessibility #Inclusion #Inclusivity #OpenSim #OpenSimulator #SecondLife #Metaverse #VirtualWorlds

How Linden Lab managed to fool almost everyone with a spectacular tech stunt in 2008

In mid-2008, at the peak of the Second Life hype, a remarkable project went live which, until today, is unprecedented: the attempt at connecting 3-D virtual worlds from two different developers and sending avatars from one world to another. Some may remember the story of people teleporting from Second Life to OpenSim and the project being abandoned not much later.

Just recently, Wagner James "Hamlet" Au published a new post on his New World Notes blog and took the opportunity again to show OpenSim in a bad light again. His wording even makes it look like OpenSim has long since vanished when it's actually growing faster than Second Life with more than four times of the latter's landmass.

But there's more to the whole story.

A bit of history

Let's look back in time first. Second Life, one of the most successful 3-D virtual worlds ever, was launched in 2002 and opened to the general public in 2003. Being operated by a for-profit, however, it had to make money. It started with pay-to-play, but eventually switched to a revenue model based on land rentals. Plus an increasing number of taxes.

It didn't take long for the Second Life API to be reverse-engineered and alternative 3rd-party viewers to be developed. But eventually, someone who was disgruntled with Second Life's rampantly capitalist system decided to build something against the other side of the API, a free, open-source virtual-world server application similar to Second Life. It was first released the same month that Linden Lab open-sourced the official viewer, January, 2007. At first, it was named "OpenSecondLife", but it was eventually renamed "OpenSimulator".

In July, half a year later, the first public OpenSim grid went online, OSgrid. It is not only the oldest, but one of the two biggest of probably over 4,000 OpenSim grids, having recently surpassed even Second Life's landmass.

At first, all OpenSim grids were stand-alones. If you wanted to visit a certain place in a certain grid, you needed an avatar on that grid. This changed in 2008 when OpenSim developer Diva Kanto introduced the concept of the Hypergrid which connected OpenSim grids in such a way that avatars could travel between them, looks, inventory and all. Like many things in early OpenSim, it was very buggy. But it worked.

Industry interest

The invention of the Hypergrid, the first interconnection between separate virtual worlds, coincided with the Second Life hype. In those days, Second Life was all over tech media. Some media outlets, even including mainstream mass media, had offices in Second Life to be able to see things from up-close and interview avatars and such. Second Life was that big. And the announcement that an open-source Second Life spin-off had just made it possible to travel from one grid to another caught quite a lot of people's attention.

IBM was particularly interested. The Hypergrid looked like the future of virtual worlds to them, especially with the mindset of those days that virtual worlds are the future. And OpenSim was still very close to Second Life in technology. It had to because it depended on third-party Second Life viewers since it had no development capacities for its own viewer.

And so the idea came up to create a network of virtual worlds that should include not only OpenSim grids, but Second Life as well.

In general, IBM got very interested in OpenSim. They offered the OpenSim devs to collaborate and set a few dozen paid developers aside to improve the OpenSim code, especially the fledgling Hypergrid. They also got into contact with Linden Lab to launch a project named Open Grid, a connection between Second Life and the Hypergrid.

The publicity stunt

On June 30th, 2008, the cooperation between IBM, Linden Lab and the OpenSim developers appeared to come to fruition: A bunch of "gridnauts", both Lindens and IBM developer avatars, "teleported from Second Life to OpenSim". That's the short version of the story.

But first of all, they did not start from the Second Life main grid. A special beta grid was created and even partly decorated for this occasion. For the time being, it was declared impossible to teleport from the Second Life main grid because changes had to be done to the beta grid to make this connection possible. Some of the "gridnauts" kept their avatars as standard Ruths, but a few did some modifications on their looks. Of course, not being on the main grid, they had no access to the assets on the main grid such as clothes.

In addition, this could not be done with the official Second Life viewer. Linden Lab provided a special viewer named the Open Grid Beta Viewer.

The destination of the trip was not, however, an OpenSim grid specifically created for the Open Grid project. It was bone-stock OSgrid. Granted, OSgrid has been running development code since its creation, but there must have been precious little Open-Grid-specific code in it, if any. "IBM's modified code", as cited in the official Second Life wiki article linked above, was probably almost entirely bugfixes plus a few new features that everyone in OpenSim could profit from. This could have included the possibility to register new avatars in a viewer rather than only on the website of a grid.

Torely Linden captured the event on video and edited the footage into a two-minute clip called "Across the Metaverse". Yes, Torely Linden spoke of "the Metaverse" 13 years before Mark Zuckerberg did. But the OSgrid founders did so another year earlier.

When the "gridnauts" arrived on OSgrid, their inventories were empty. Linden Lab explained this was the case because it was technologically impossible to transfer an inventory from Second Life to OpenSim or vice versa.

It was all show

What few people know: It was all show. A Second Life user and former Open Grid beta-tester called it "smoke and mirrors" on the official Second Life forum.

Linden Lab fooled the public, and Linden Lab probably also fooled both the IBM devs, the beta testers and maybe even some official Lindens until they understood what was actually happening. All that the IBM devs had to do was make OpenSim fit for the event and iron out bugs that might have ended up awkward. IBM was probably working entirely on the OpenSim side of things. Linden Lab took care of the Second Life side, the beta grid and especially the beta viewer, alone without IBM having any insight. Thus, the IBM devs probably never really knew what Linden Lab did, and that the alleged teleportation from Second Life to OpenSim was nothing but a lie.

At no point did any avatar ever actually teleport from a Second Life grid to an OpenSim grid.

What the Open Grid Beta Viewer really did was log the Second Life beta grid avatar out and an OSgrid avatar with the same name in. On the way back, the OSgrid avatar was logged out, and the Second Life beta grid avatar was logged in. When logged into OpenSim, "_EXTERNAL" was added to the name tag after the avatar name.

So what people actually saw during the OpenSim segment of the video footage of this trip weren't Second Life avatars stripped of their inventories. They were OSgrid avatars.

At first glance, this was not too obvious. An avatar from the same grid as the one logged in usually doesn't show its home grid in the name tag above its head. So there was no "@osgrid.org:80" above the heads of the "gridnauts".

Also, as the video footage shows, the whole trip was restricted to a piece of hilly, barren land rather than one of the OSgrid Plazas. Only a few signs had been placed. Otherwise, nothing had been done, nothing had been built. It was obviously a sim created for this specific purpose. Access to this sim was probably limited to a specific group which the OSgrid avatars of the "gridnauts" were added to immediately after their creation. No group names are shown, though; it's either because the Open Grid Beta Viewer had group-showing code removed, or Torley Linden had switched group tags off.

By the way, notice how the name of the sim is censored in the video. Also, notice the absence of OSgrid avatars. Or OpenSim avatars in general. There was no welcome committee.

...an obvious show even

If you know a thing or two about OpenSim or even only Second Life, however, a few things make painfully obvious that the whole show was just that, a show.

The best sign is Torely's empty inventory. I've seen empty OpenSim inventories. And believe me when I say they're never completely blank. Even if there are no assets in the inventory, even if a grid does not add a pre-filled library with a few things to new avatars' inventories, there's always the basic directory structure. But Torely's video doesn't even show that.

Instead, it says, "No matching items found in inventory." It only says that and looks that blank when something has been searched for and not found. Either the Open Grid Beta Viewer was hard-coded to search for something that would definitely never be in Torely's inventory. Or it reset the search field while being closed and re-opened, but not the search itself. Either way, some search was used to artifically wipe Torely's inventory view clear.

Either Linden Lab thought it'd be easier for clueless casuals watching the video to understand that the inventory is empty when it's actually completely blank, or Torely had something to hide.

It gets even better. Pay close attention to the avatars in the video. Pause it if necessary. Yes, Torely's avatar looks like a standard Ruth on OSgrid. But Torely's avatar on the beta grid is a standard Ruth, too.

Now look at Hamilton Linden. He is wearing a dark top on the beta grid, prior to departure. This top is actually one of the few clothing items whose texture manages to load during the OSgrid segment in spite of the corrupted cache. It's the same dark top as on the beta grid. Everything an avatar wears when teleporting from one grid to another must be in the inventory and remain there. This means that Hamilton Linden has his dark top readily available in OSgrid. Thus, it has to be in his inventory. But if transferring content from a Second Life grid to an OpenSim grid is not possible, how did it get there?

Better yet: Zero Linden is wearing a skirt. On a Second Life or OpenSim classic avatar, it's just another texture layer, but it has to be there. It's grey on Zero Linden, but completely absent from all the other avatars, so it has to be there. Again, how could it possibly have gotten there?

I'll tell you how: At least Hamilton and Zero, just like Torely, knew from the get-go that the whole shindig was as fake as it could ever get. In order to make their avatars recognisable on both sides, they wanted to redo their beta grid look in OSgrid. So they logged into both grids and redid the few changes on their beta grid avatars in comparison to standard Ruth on their OSgrid avatars. All "gridnauts" who were filled in on the scam had previously created avatars on OSgrid. And at least these two couldn't help but customise their avatars. The uninformed "gridnauts" had their OSgrid avatars created for them and probably also had to keep their beta grid avatars stock Ruths.

Torely was right about the inventory not being carried over, though. What the "gridnauts" had in their inventories on OSgrid was either supplied by OSgrid or remade by hand.

Obvious precautions

It's obvious that Linden Lab had precautions taken to make it more credible. Torely's artificially "blanked" inventory was one part of it.

Another part was the "gridnauts" landing on almost barren land, all alone. There weren't even OSgrid officials present to welcome them and interact with them, at least not in Torely's video edit. The "gridnauts" needed to have this unwelcoming piece of land for themselves for a short while. If OSgrid officials arrived later to greet the "gridnauts", this must intentionally have been left out. Most likely, if they had been there, the Open Grid Beta Viewer would have slapped "_EXTERNAL" on their names as well because it couldn't distinguish between OSgrid avatars owned by admins and OSgrid avatars owned by "gridnauts".

It's even more likely that this sim was not only group access-only, but that the "gridnaut" avatars were the only ones in the group. Even OSgrid officials weren't allowed in. Linden Lab could not risk the presence of non-"gridnaut" avatars. For one, a fully decked-out OSgrid official avatar with "_EXTERNAL" behind the name would have ruined everything. Even worse, OSgrid or other visitors could have made their own video of the whole show. And it would have looked a whole lot different without the trickery demanded by Linden Lab. Don't forget that YouTube already existed in 2008, and much more than today, it was a place where everyone could upload self-made videos.

With all those precautions in place, it's interesting how none were taken to trick OpenSim users into taking this for genuine. They were probably considered too few to be a real danger because nobody outside their own little bubble would even notice them. And with no chance to prove Linden Lab's manipulation with a video of their own, there was little they could do anyway.

For the vast majority of the target audience of Torely's video, the precautions were sufficient. At least Hamilton and Zero re-doing their avatar looks on OSgrid was allowed in order to make them recognisable to people who don't know that an avatar's look is stored in the inventory. Only the few OpenSim users who had already Hypergridded back then knew what that meant. Everyone else, maybe even including some Second Life users, didn't see how this contradicted Torely's tall tale of empty inventories.

But why?

Now you may ask yourself: Why did Linden Lab even take all this effort upon themselves?

I can only speculate. But I guess it's because, in stark contrast to IBM, they never really wanted Second Life and OpenSim to fully connect. They wanted to present it as "technically possible, but too unfeasible to continue working on it".

Linden Lab and Second Life would have had nothing to gain from such a connection if it had ever gone fully functional but a whole lot to lose. "Fully functional" would have required taking your entire inventory with you in both directions.

First of all, this would have required adding support for there being more than one grid to Second Life, just so that it could identify avatars from other grids, assets from other grids et cetera. For OpenSim, any Second Life grid would only have been one more grid. Second Life, AnSky, 3rd Rock Grid, Metropolis, it would have been pretty much all the same, only with different names and maybe with different quirks.

At first glance, this connection would have been a dream coming true for businesspeople. OpenSim would have opened up Second Life's markets to more customers. In theory.

In practice, it wouldn't.

Unfair advantage for OpenSim

OpenSim never had an official inter-grid payment system. In fact, it was only in 2008 that 3rd Rock Grid was launched as the very first grid to implement payment beyond "Monopoly money". And that was an in-world currency that could be bought from real money, but not sold back. And that currency was only available on 3rd Rock Grid. It would have been impossible to introduce the Linden Dollar to OpenSim in general, much less force it upon all grids.

It wouldn't have been worth the effort anyway, seeing as how few users OpenSim had in 2008, especially considering how many users Second Life had. After all, it was Second Life's heyday in full effect.

It also wouldn't have been worth the effort because next to nobody in OpenSim would have bought anything in Second Life anyway. Why should they? Early OpenSim's everyone-for-themselves, all-rights-reserved culture carried over from Second Life was fading away with the arrival of freebies being shared with full permissions. The Queen of Freebies was Linda Kellie, formerly known as Karra Baker in Second Life where she attempted the same thing before Linden Lab kicked her out. She made and released more and more free stuff, and in 2008, she opened up her first freebie sim, Linda Kellie Designs. Everything on that sim was made by her, and everything on that sim could be copied, modified and shared freely.

There simply wasn't much of an incentive to go to Second Life and buy stuff if you could get your stuff for free, full-perm and under a public-domain-like CC0 license in OpenSim. And by 2008's standards, Linda's stuff wasn't even bad. When she still was Karra Baker in Second Life, she was actually considered unfair competition for the commercial creators. And after LK Designs had been launched, an increasing number of OpenSim users started creating stuff and offering it for free and often even full-perm.

And if assets could have been transferred both ways, there would have been a great lot more incentive for Second Life users to go "shopping" in OpenSim. For free. Some may even have taken Linda's CC0 stuff to the Second Life Marketplace and tried to sell it for money until someone else would have come and offered the self-same stuff for free.

Introducing the Linden Dollar and access to the Second Life Marketplace to OpenSim would have led to disaster itself. That's simply because Second Life's permission system isn't nearly as effective in OpenSim as it is in Second Life. After all, anyone can set up their own grid and connect it to the Hypergrid. In this case, even connect it to the Open Grid network and thus to Second Life.

On your own grid, however, you're your own boss, your own Linden. And you have Linden-like powers. In fact, your powers may even exceed those of an average Linden. You have god-mode. Third-party viewers for Second Life that were also compatible with OpenSim provided you with it. And this god-mode not only lets you circumvent permissions, but even manipulate them.

So in theory, an OpenSim user with an own grid and enough money could have gone to Second Life and bought all the hottest stuff in-world. Or they could have bought it on the Marketplace and, if necessary, just picked it up in Second Life. Of course, all this content would have been either no-copy or no-transfer and usually also no-modify. But not for long.

For then they could have rezzed that content in-world, maybe even still in the shape of sales boxes. Then they could have used their god-mode to set all that content to full-perm. And then they could have hung it up in their own store and offered it for free. Even to Second Life users. In fact, they could have gone one step further, made new box art and made themselves the "creators" of this content. And Linden Lab could have tried to DMCA them all they wanted, but to no avail if that grid and its owner were located someplace where U.S. laws don't apply.

In addition, the Open Grid connection would have been bad for Second Life's land rentals, one of Second Life's main sources of revenue. In order to visit friends in Second Life or attend events in Second Life, you would no longer have had to live in Second Life. You could have had not only your avatar in OpenSim, but also your land. More land area and a much higher prim allowance for a fraction of the costs in comparison with Second Life. And in fact, even the friends and the events might have moved to OpenSim, the events particularly because event locations could have been built bigger with more prims on cheaper land.

Creators would have set up at least second homes in OpenSim. There, they would have been able to create and experiment without paying upload fees to Linden Lab. Once their creations would have been done, they simply could have sent them to their Second Life avatars that would have adjusted the permissions and offered them for sale.

All in all, the Open Grid connection was probably recognised to be costly for Linden Lab in various ways. It would have cost a fortune to implement and make stable, also because Second Life would require the majority of changes. Unlike OpenSim, it was not designed to connect to other grids. And after its implementation, Second Life's revenue would have tanked because OpenSim would have provided cheaper or free alternatives to almost everything.

Tying an overambitious corporation down

I'm pretty sure that Linden Lab was well aware of at least some of these potential consequences, if not all of them. Under no circumstances was any of this allowed to happen. But IBM wanted it to happen. They didn't know about these consequences because, truth be told, they didn't know much about Second Life and OpenSim in general. And just telling IBM, "We don't want to do it because it'll ruin our revenues," would have looked bad.

At the same time, IBM not having have a realistic idea about what was possible and what wasn't, especially not what was possible or not for Linden Lab, turned out to be an advantage. And so Linden Lab put up a show that demonstrated that what IBM wanted was allegedly basically possible (to satisfy IBM a little), but not very feasible (to disappoint them just enough that they wouldn't follow the Open Grid idea any further). It must have been convincing enough that IBM changed their plans.

That is, IBM didn't drop out of virtual worlds entirely. They continued to support and even develop OpenSim until 2011, hoping to create a free, open, decentralised metaverse without Second Life, only based on OpenSim. I'm not sure what caused this to end. Maybe it was IBM losing interest. Maybe it was IBM not making any money off of it.

If Linden Lab could actually foresee what terrible consequences an Open Grid connection to OpenSim's Hypergrid would bring with itself, it's strange how they could not foresee the consequences when they published the Copybot source code in 2009.

How the new version of the Firestorm viewer with support for Physically-Based Rendering enrages its users

As to be expected, the Second Life community is completely exploding over PBR, now that the single most popular viewer has rolled out the first version with Physically-Based Rendering. And I don't mean exploding with cheer.

The announcement thread on Reddit shows people with Nvidia GeForce RTX cards who suddenly have slideshow-like FPS for some reason. I must admit this makes me wonder because I get fairly great results out of a Radeon RX590 which is even less high-end. Under Linux. With an open-source driver from the Debian testing repos. In OpenSim, but that shouldn't make so much of a difference unless Second Life surrounds you with 2K PBR content everywhere now.

Another Reddit thread is about how Second Life users take their frustration out on the volunteer Firestorm support in Second Life as in in-world. They catch all the anger that should rather go directly to Linden Lab.

Despite what some users experience with dedicated video hardware that partly isn't even six years old, it's apparent that many of those who complain about the PBR viewers being slow are on toasters that shouldn't have been used for anything 3-D in the first place, especially not virtual worlds full of amateur-made, unoptimised content. Worlds in which optimisation is quality degradation, and ARC is a measurement for good looks.

At least among the Firestorm users, over 10% of them are on mobile hardware that's at least ten years old which usually means on-board graphics. In fact, people are still whining over 32-bit Windows support being axed because their only (or most powerful) computer is so ancient that it still boots 32-bit Windows. And yet, they use it for 3-D virtual worlds because they haven't been able to afford any computer, new or used, in a decade and a half.

So the sharp drop in FPS came not only from a new rendering engine, but also from turning stuff on that was off before and then ripping off the switches. Advanced lighting model, bump maps and normal maps, transparent water, shaders, light sources other than the Sun, the Moon and ambient...

The irony is that Linden Lab and the Firestorm team decided to turn the Advanced Lighting Model including normal maps and specular maps permanently on to make normal maps more convenient and more attractive for content creators. I mean, what they currently do is make their content for potato computers on which all graphical bells and whistles have to be turned off, including normal maps. So how do you make small surface details if you can't rely on normal maps? You build them into the mesh itself, making it vastly more complex in the course and cutting into everyone's FPS.

It's also apparent that nobody could be bothered to read up about PBR. Many seem utterly surprised about the FPS drop. They're used to Firestorm becoming slower and slower to them with every release, but not by such degrees. They seem not to have read that this would happen.

The complaints about how stuff suddenly looks differently come for the same reason: People didn't read up on PBR. They seem to think that PBR is ALM with mirrors instead of an entirely new lighting and rendering model. However, PBR also includes High Dynamic Range, and at least in Second Life, both forward rendering and the old ALM have such a low dynamic range that they render everything in pastel tones, and content creators had to tint everything in garishly cartoonish colours to balance that.

What's happening is largely exactly the same as whenever Linden Lab introduces something new: Conservative users reject it because they reject all changes that actually change stuff and can't be turned off. I guess the outcry when viewers dropped the mesh option and permanently forced everyone to see mesh must have been as big as the outcry when mesh was introduced.

At this point, it really is a pity that there's no real OpenSim forum on which people from all grids can congregate and discuss things. OpenSimWorld has built-in forums, but hardly anyone knows because nobody ever pays attention to the left-hand sidebar.

If there was a central place to discuss OpenSim matters, I guess the outcry against the new Firestorm would come a bit more slowly, but be even more extreme, and even more people would be opposed to it and PBR in general. Including those who say they'll never upgrade to Firestorm 7 while still using Firestorm 6.5.6 or 6.4.21 or so.

There would be four reasons for this. One, while the Second Life community is already so old that it needs newbies who stick around to equal users passing away, the OpenSim community manages to be even older on average, and that means even more conservative. Even more than Second Life users, OpenSim users are likely to want OpenSim back the way it was when they joined. There are still people in OpenSim who vocally oppose mesh. And it isn't too unnormal in OpenSim for users who have been around for long enough to have avatars on a 2010 or even 2007 level whereas you risk being ostracised in Second Life if your mesh body is older than 12 months.

Two, OpenSim is basically Second Life for those who can't afford Second Life. You can get land for dirt cheap, and you can get e.g. a Maitreya LaraX, LeLutka EvoX heads and Doux EvoX skins and hair for absolutely free. The latter isn't legal, but still. So it isn't only the cheapskates and the anti-capitalists who flock into OpenSim, but especially those who genuinely don't have the money to have a decent Second Life experience. And if they don't have money for that, it's highly unlikely that they have money for a decent computer. In other words, many of those who use the Firestorm Viewer on mobile hardware from before 2015 are probably OpenSim users. OpenSim has to have an even higher number of toasters per 1,000 users than Second Life.

Three, and this comes on top: Second Life has a three-versions rule. Only the three most recent versions of any given viewer are allowed to connect. OpenSim doesn't have such a rule. Certain grids or sims might limit which viewers their visitors are allowed to use and mostly do so to keep copybotters out, but in general, such a rule doesn't exist. You can use OpenSim with a Firestorm 5.x if you want to, and if you're living in a bubble on a grid that still runs on OpenSim 0.8.2.1 in which next to nobody has a mesh body, and nobody uses BoM. Absolutely having to upgrade your viewer is not part of OpenSim's culture. Instead, it's perfectly normal to keep using old viewers if you reject certain new features, e.g. EEP.

And four, most OpenSim users aren't even used to seeing Blinn-Phong, i.e. the old normal map and specular map model. Most of the time when content is illegally exported from Second Life and put back together, normal maps and specular maps are omitted. Doing so saves time that can be used to churn out more stuff which probably also explains why some importers don't even add the missing AVsitter back into furniture unless it's sex furniture. And besides, so many OpenSim users are on toasters and have normal maps and specular maps off anyway, and it isn't worth adding what next to nobody can see. It's really mostly only a few of OpenSim's own original creators who add normal maps and specular maps, but their creations aren't available on the big popular freebie sims where everyone picks up their stuff nowadays.

So criticism on PBR in OpenSim would be mixed with a lot of "change is bad" attitude. Expect people demanding OpenSim's development split from Second Life's, and OpenSim finally get its own viewer, just so that OpenSim doesn't have to take over all the "new crap" that Linden Lab whips up. Expect some saying this should have happened long ago, up to the point of some old-timers saying that the introduction of mesh was a mistake already and basically wanting OpenSim to look like Second Life did in 2008 for all eternity because that's what they're used to. And that's what they think their toasters can handle because they've all but forgotten what it's like to be surrounded by thousands of prims.

If you're a frequent partygoer in OpenSim, you're likely to know at least some of these

How Second Life's ageplay scandal that isn't even so much about there being ageplay increases "underage" avatar paranoia in OpenSim

Breaking news yesterday was an article on Medium about ageplay in Second Life. Sexual ageplay. As in sexual encounters between adult-looking avatars controlled by adult users and underage-looking avatars controlled by adult users. And how Linden Lab not only seem to ignore it to such degrees that they're allegedly doing so intentionally, but some Lindens are allegedly involved in it themselves. I won't link to the article, but here's the thread in the Second Life subreddit about this article and its impact.

To make one thing clear: Yes, we're definitely talking about adult users in all cases. For those of you who don't know Second Life: First of all, Second Life has a content rating system for sims. General is PG which means pretty much squeaky-clean. Moderate is 18+ and allows for stuff like public nudity and sexual actions in private unless a sim owner explicitly forbids it. Adult is 18+, too, and allows for everything in public.

Besides, Second Life has age verification. You have to send in a copy of your ID or something similar to prove your real-life age, otherwise your avatar will be restricted to General-rated sims. And General-rated sims, by definition, don't allow for sexual encounters because the scripted furniture necessary for acting out sexual activities is not allowed to be installed on General-rated sims in the first place.

So in this scandal, everything is vague so far. But the impact is the bigger already. In Second Life, not few users have been sceptical about the nature of avatars that look like children. But now this has turned into a veritable witch hunt against anyone and everyone who doesn't look "grown-up" by Second Life standards, also because Second Life Residents feel like they have to take matters into their own hands if the Lindens have actually been proven to do diddly-squat time and again.

The situation in OpenSim

But I don't want to talk about the Second Life side. I want to talk about how this affects OpenSim, for the vast majority of OpenSim users are Second Life users as well and closely follow Second Life news and Second Life blogs.

In OpenSim, apart from most of the underlying technology, things are a lot different from Second Life. OpenSim is as decentralised as can possibly be, and it has been since its very inception in 2007 and the introduction of federation in the shape of the Hypergrid in 2008.

OpenSim doesn't have a central authority in any shape or form. OpenSim doesn't have any centralised rules or rule-making in any shape or form either. The only reason why OpenSim has the exact same three content rating levels as Second Life is because it's used with Second Life viewers, and thus, it has to be compatible with Second Life.

But even these content rating levels become meaningless without a central authority that defines them and enforces them. And the only thing that's central in OpenSim is the development of the vanilla OpenSim server software. In OpenSim, rules only matter if you're in a place where someone else makes the rules. But you don't have to. Anyone can launch their own private or public grid and make their own rules or none at all, and as long as they're on their own grid, they live by their own rules or the lack thereof.

In fact, the only grid I know that has written-down definitions for the content rating levels is the commercial grid DigiWorldz. Even DigiWorldz allows these rules to be used "liberally" on the side of making them stricter. You may have an Adult-rated sim which, at the same time, is G-rated.

On top of that, the content rating levels are half-useless in OpenSim anyway. There is no central avatar registry either. There is no central authority that does more or less mandatory age checks for avatars. In fact, almost no grid has ever had any age verification, and even if there was something like that, it was limited to that one grid and to its own residents. OSgrid couldn't possibly automatically inquire from Metropolis if an avatar that Hypergridded in from Metropolis to OSgrid had a verified adult user. So a mechanism that could keep underage users away from Moderate-rated or Adult-rated sims doesn't exist because it's impossible to implement, much less make it as 100% water-tight as in Second Life.

Thus, the content rating levels aren't much more than "decorative" and could theoretically serve as not much more than a content warning.

So much about the OpenSim background.

No central authority means a safe haven

Now, due to this decentralised, inherently borderline anarchist ecosystem, OpenSim became a new home for people who were banned from Second Life for whichever reasons. After all, even if they also ended up being banned from several OpenSim grids, they could always start their own grid. And if too many grids blocked their grid, they could start a new one with a new identity. And so forth. But many don't even have to go that far because grid-hopping and having more than one identity slows down actions against them.

This doesn't only apply to notorious troublemakers. It applies to paedophiles just as well. Only newbies are completely unaware that there are paedos in OpenSim, but then again, many newbies who haven't been in Second Life before coming to OpenSim can't imagine that there's virtual sex in OpenSim at all. Even if they discover that all technical requirements are fulfilled.

In particular, there have been two particularly infamous cases of paedophiles in OpenSim. One was a guy from Texas who always rejected the rules of sims, the rules of entire grids and even local and national laws and substituted his own. Or rather, he claimed that whatever he did did not break any rules because of some specifics in the wording or something.

For one, he tried to talk nude adult female avatars into ageplay while remaining fully dressed himself at first. In this case, ageplay would have meant an adult user of an adult male avatar acting as an adult man and an adult user of an adult female avatar acting like a little girl. Essentially, to get around anti-ageplay or anti-child-avatar ruling, he aimed for daddyplay with grown-up counterparts, something he would have been able to claim to be perfectly legal on the sim, in the grid and in all real-life jurisdictions involved and thus unsanctionable.

Besides, however, he was repeatedly caught butt-naked next to child avatars on General-rated sims. It couldn't ruin his reputation anymore, no matter how many identities he had. But it could completely destroy that of the sims and their owners for "allowing" this to happen.

The other case was a convicted English paedophile with a different modus operandi. All his avatars were little girls as in children. He had a whole number of identities readily available for them so he could quickly register new avatars.

This was obvious from a number of points: So there were these little girls randomly appearing on sims where there was at least one more avatar. They had different names. They came from various grids. But sometimes girls from different grids had the same name. And they all acted exactly the same.

They landed on the sim. They stayed on the landing-point. It was usually or always a sim which, if it was an event location, didn't have the landing-point right next to the party. They picked out one of the avatars on the sim. And then they got into contact with that avatar via IM. The wording was always exactly identical. That guy had a notecard or a text file or a Word document or something from which he copy-pasted not only avatar names, but also always the same dialogues. I wouldn't wonder if even the intended ageplay would have acted out along pre-defined lines that he would have copy-pasted.

And this guy certainly had enough avatars to keep going for months. He could always make new avatars by registering one on another grid, copy-pasting in the forename and the surname, then having the brand-new avatar meet one of his already existing avatars and the existing avatars sending over a bunch of items to the new avatar's inventory. He eventually vanished altogether, either because OpenSim became uninteresting, or because it became too much of an effort compared with whatever else he discovered, or because he was convicted in real life once more.

OpenSim's war on child avatars

It's due to such happenings that many OpenSim users, sim owners and owners of not-exactly-tiny public grids in particular, have been up in arms against ageplay for a couple of years already. And as there's no central authority in OpenSim that could make rules against ageplay and combat it, there's no central authority to keep individuals' efforts in this direction from going completely out of hand.

One attempt at a countermeasure is the attempt at re-defining the Adult rating. The "Adult" part is to refer to the visual age of the avatars visiting a place, and the Adult rating is to mean that no child avatars are allowed. This sounds like a given, but at the same time, Adult-rated sims are often not PG-rated, but G-rated at the same time, not allowing nudity or even only scanty clothing anywhere. Sometimes, entire grids do that, but it's mostly the owners of sims having such a re-defined Adult rating who defend their one-sided re-definition.

A nasty side-effect of this, however, is that the Adult rating loses its effect as a content warning. More and more OpenSim users simply don't expect anything naughty on Adult-rated sims anymore, and they're highly irritated when they come to an on-going event on an Adult-rated sim such as Stark and see naked avatars. At the same time, nudists can't count on nudity being allowed on Adult-rated sims anymore. And there have actually been cases of avatars being permanently banned from Adult-rated sims that nonetheless don't allow nudity, but that don't announce their ban on nudity anywhere.

Another attempt is the infamous Childgate. It's a script that checks the height of an avatar, and if it's below a certain threshold, the script automatically both kicks and permanently bans the avatar. So far, so good.

Collateral damage: realistic and non-sexy avatars

But the Childgate is pre-configured to kick and ban any and all avatars under 6 feet which is 1.83m. That's taller than most women in real life, and it's even taller than many men in real life. But due to Second Life's unreliable avatar height measuring, namely up to the eyes rather than the top of the head, Second Life users quit paying attention to the height indicated by their shapes which quickly led to ludicrously tall avatars becoming the standard. This, of course, bled into OpenSim which does not have that quirk, but few people know OpenSim doesn't have it. Still, if you have a realistically-sized avatar, chances are good that you'll be kicked and banned from sims with a Childgate on the spot.

I'm not even sure if the Childgate measures an avatar's height the OpenSim way or the Second Life way. And I've read somewhere that some sim owners have configured the Childgate to kick and ban everyone under 7 feet which is 2.14m because they unironically consider avatars of that height underage.

And then there are less voluptuous versions of popular mesh bodies, especially Athena Petite. Athena Petite is basically a variant of the Athena mesh body for more realistic avatars. Athena is much more on the "sexy" side with breasts which, even at small settings, would be very likely to be inflated with silicone in real life, so big are they. Athena Petite has realistically-sized breasts. The original target audience are the same people who adjust their avatar's height to something realistic; if they're women in real life, it's often their real-life height.

However, the average OpenSim user isn't used to that. The average OpenSim user is used to completely distorted female avatars as the standard. 7' or taller. BBBBBL (big butt, big boobs, big lips, referring to a large derriere, a pair of unnaturally-sized breasts and a mouth with unnaturally enormous lips in a perpetual kiss shape not unlike a duckface). A skin tone that'd require you to sleep in a tanning-bed, but still with bright red lipstick. The avatar being nine or ten times as tall as the head is big when seven and a half or, at most, eight times would be realistic. 60% of the body height being the legs, not even necessarily including the feet which are permanently fixed in a position for 6-inch heels. And, of course, arms that are so short that the fingertips don't reach farther down than the crotch.

Athena is being perceived as a "normal" woman because over 90% of all female avatars roaming the Hypergrid since 2015 have been Athenas, often with hardly modified shapes. "Sexy" starts with Legacy which has an absolutely unnatural waist-to-hip ratio, and if that doesn't suffice, there are the various HG bodies which have an even more ridiculously huge butt and hips that are three times as wide as the waist. Well, and if there's something that's less voluptuous than bone-stock, standard, everyday, off-the-shelf Athena, it's automatically perceived as probably underage.

Even before the current situation, there have been known cases of sim owners kicking and banning avatars with Athena Petite bodies in the course of enforcing their "no child avatars" policy because they consider Athena Petite to be 14 years old at most.

But there have also been cases of avatars being kicked and banned for looking underage because they didn't check enough "sexy" marks. Realistic height plus realistic shape which results in a "bubble head". Toned-down lips, even though hardly anyone does that. Too pale skin tone. Freckles, only kids have freckles. No make-up. Hairstyle other than long flowing locks. Wearing too much pink without at the same time looking like a total slut. Wearing too much pastel. Wearing too bright colours. Wearing flat sneakers because female avatars are expected to always only ever wear sandals or high boots, in both cases with at least 6-inch heels. Wearing socks because female avatars are expected to wear black nylon stockings or no hosiery at all. Sometimes only one of these is enough for a female avatar to be flagged a child avatar.

Bleak future

Again, this has been the status quo up until that article on Medium. And it isn't like the article doesn't have any effect on OpenSim. In fact, it has already started. And I expect it to escalate further.

Soon, you'll have to max out the sexiness of your avatar everywhere all the time. Sim owners will raise the threshold of what's considered a grown-up avatar. Not only will they ban even more avatars that aren't sexy enough on sight, but avatar attachment gates will spread. These things can and do remove avatars based on what the avatars wear. And I expect these gates to be fed with more and more content which, according to OpenSim sim owners, is typical for child avatars. It already starts with all known kid mesh bodies and all known kids' clothes. I think Athena Petite will quickly be added to most of them. And I actually expect them to soon include keywords like "sneakers" or "freckles" or the like.

How hard to find are our event locations? Yes.

The mainland of Dorenas World has probably got some of the most well-hidden event locations on the Hypergrid. Let me sum them up by sim.

Landing

The festival ground is the easiest location. It's open-air, it's big, it's impossible to miss the stage, and you land right next to it either way.

There's also an amphitheatre, but I've yet to see something happen there. Anything in the grid that requires a stage happens on the festival ground.

Nihilon

Home of the legendary Rock-House that has seen the same event with the same DJ each Friday for almost ten years, first for four hours, now for five, with only three Fridays without an event.

But "Rock-House" already says it: It's inside a building. But the landing-point isn't. The OSW beacon lands you in front of the beacon which is diagonally opposite the parking-lot. From there, you still have to walk to the building, open a semi-transparent door and go inside.

The map lands you at 128,128 which is under water, and the sim is decorated under water, so you're tempted to believe it's an underwater event.

Oh, by the way, landmarks inside the Rock-House don't work properly either. They land you on the roof. Thus, setting the landing-point inside the building, right next to the dancefloor with the avatar oriented towards the dancefloor, won't work anyway.

Westend

The UnFassBar BassBar is currently home of a bi-weekly Thursday event. But it adds to the difficulty of finding it. Not only do you land outside, and the events are in-doors, but you land near the middle of an urban sim from where the event location isn't even visible. It's along a street, around a corner and along another street, and then it's inside a building with doors that can be found all over the Hypergrid, but rarely with a club inside it. At least it has a neon sign outside.

Before you ask: No, there is no teleporter. There aren't even arrows. Unless someone offers you a teleport, it's about a minute of walking if you know the way.

GridTalk

Named after the eponymous German OpenSim forum that's almost as old as the grid and founded and run by our Thursday DJ, this is the sim that makes finding recurring events the most difficult to find.

This starts with GridTalk having a whopping six event locations. Five of them have dance balls, all except the amphitheatre. Yes, another amphitheatre. At least three are used by the regular Tuesday event.

Oh, and the landing-point is in the middle which is nowhere near either of the locations. There are paths everywhere. But again, no teleporters, especially not the one teleporter that takes you straight to where the party is.

For most of the year, the Tuesday event is at the campfire in the northeast. In summer, it's on the beach in the west. The cold of the winter drives us into the club building in the southwest.

To make matters worse, that building has two clubs inside, connected by spiral stairs that aren't too obvious to find. The GridTalk-Club is upstairs, that's where you end up when you walk to the building from the landing. It's fairly straight-forward to find, even for an HG-Safari, but you have to know that it's there where an event is happening.

The Haifischbar is downstairs, and you can't even really see any traces of it from anywhere else on the sim except when you look closely enough inside the GridTalk-Club, and you discover the stairs.

To make matters even worse, we're at the Haifischbar this winter.

An honourable mention goes to the Keule, a club in the north near the campfire that was built by our very own ProgRock producer. "Keule" is one of his favourite words, and it's German for "club" as in the weapon. I've only seen him do a set there once, but our Thursday DJ has hijacked the club on one occasion this winter in order for it to see some use. Now, it's still a club inside a building, one without doors, but a building.

Dorenas World

The old landing sim and the oldest sim in the grid is an honourable mention of its own because years may pass without a single event. It has the rather spacious dance club Dancing Desire in a building with lots of glass, and the landing is close to the building, so finding your way there is not too difficult because you should actually be able to see the party itself.

That said, the grid is not beyond pop-up dance clubs such as for Dorena's birthday last year. We held a surprise birthday in a park in the east of the sim where usually nothing happens at all. Also, it coincided with the HG-Safari visiting the grid. Some travellers had quite some difficulties finding the location in spite of red arrows everywhere.

Anachronia

Yet another honourable mention is the second-oldest sim in the grid. As far as I can tell, it currently has three locations, none of which are used regularly, and none of which are easily visible from the main landing point.

One is Gulliver's, the grid's own Irish pub in the northwest and the grid's oldest and smallest party location. Back when Dorenas World was new, it was big enough. I've only experienced one event there, and that was my own idea: Since St. Patrick's Day was on a Friday last year, I suggested moving it to the Gulliver's and playing some Irish tunes. The only way of fitting the irregular guests who came that day into the club was by up to six ladies dancing on the bar counter.

Anyway, the club is outside the wall that surrounds the main area, and so you can't see that there's a club on the sim at all. Oh, and the building doesn't immediately look like a club from outside because there are some nearly identical buildings around that have nothing inside them, particularly not a club. And just how many Hypergridders would expect an event inside a tiny Irish pub built in 2010?

Then there's the Glass Onion in the east which is similarly hard to find. I've been told that it has only ever seen one event. But since I live not too far away, dibs on it, should I ever start DJing. Yes, it's outside the wall, too.

Lastly, there's a location at the top of the tower in the middle of the sim. That tower is easily one of the highest structures in the whole Hypergrid. Getting all the way to the top requires several minutes of climbing stairs or a teleporter. The only events I've ever seen there were performances by Torben Asp before he passed away, and when these happened, there was always at least one teleporter in Anachronia itself and, I think, additional teleporters in key places on the grid such as Landing.

So you think you'll have your metaverse under control? Think again! (CW: nudity mentioned, sex mentioned, BDSM mentioned)

Okay, so you're working on creating a metaverse. Maybe proprietary, non-free and closed-source, maybe free-as-in-freedom and open-source. Maybe a walled garden, maybe something actually decentralised with worlds that are federated with one another, maybe even "the Metaverse" that shall become an Internet-wide standard or a least a part of it.

Of course, you're a professional. You think you've got everything down pat. No, you've never been in a virtual world. Or maybe you've worn a VR headset for a couple minutes once or twice before you've started your development. But you think you're as much of a virtual worlds expert as they ever come, simply because you've grokked the technology, and technology is all there is to virtual worlds.

And you think that you, as the creator of this platform, have everything fully under control.

My prediction as a several-years-long user of virtual worlds: You'll fall flat on your face. You'll be caught off-guard by and overrun with unexpected user-driven developments in your virtual worlds that neither you nor your worlds are prepared for. And you will have to doubt the two above paragraphs.

And here's why:

• Virtual worlds that absolutely require a VR headset won't become popular. Virtual worlds that absolutely require a VR headset from one specific brand will become even less popular. All the popular worlds out there can be used as "pancakes" on a run-of-the-mill desktop or laptop computer with a run-of-the-mill 2-D screen that folks have at hand anyway.
• The more limited your avatars are (e.g. no lower body/legs or no limbs, just hands and feet), the higher the probability that everyone will laugh about them. And compare them to Second Life.
• At this point, you'll find out that Second Life itself is not only unexpectedly still alive after two decades, but it has evolved a lot since 2008. At least on the desktop, that's your competition. Soon on phones as well. And it doesn't need simplified, cartoonish avatars in simplified, cartoonish worlds because it isn't made to always deliver 60fps on fanless mobile hardware, so it can go all the way with graphical details.
• If you leave world-building to corporate world owners and their paid designers, you have to pay your designers well for years and decades to come so they keep on building. Otherwise, your world will go stale because everyone will have seen everything, and nobody will want to come visit it anymore except for newbies. The key to successful virtual worlds is giving users the opportunity to build. And "users" doesn't only mean rich celebrities who pay virtual land admins to plop down their designer-built mansions on their ten-million-dollar parcels.
• And even building won't happen if you make it too difficult for users to build. Guess why Second Life and OpenSim are so popular.
• Virtual headquarters of cool brands only stay cool and exciting and interesting for so long and for so many people. Especially if they can't enter them. Ditto virtual mantions owned by celebrities.
• If there's the possibility to attach anything to an avatar, people will make avatar design more flexible than what the designers have planned.
• If you have professionals as your target audience, and your avatars have lower bodies, female users will demand appropriate business attire. This means you'll have to make skirts possible.
• Your standardised skirts which have worked pretty well under your lab conditions will show rampant leg clipping in daily use. You'll learn that Sinespace, Vircadia and Overte exist by finding out that they've got their own physics-based solution for skirts. And for long hair.
• Speaking of business attire, high heels. If avatars have feet, high heels will be requested. And not necessarily with only one height. Both the virtual world standard you're building on and your engine will only support flat feet from the beginning because who could really expect this?! So implementing high heels requires either re-writing half the avatar standard and half the avatar engine, also to account for the avatar being "taller" on heels, or an ugly kluge that nobody really is happy with.
• Alts. People will have alts.
  If you ask someone interested in virtual worlds who has never been in a virtual world or maybe just for business purposes, they'll tell you that everyone will have a "digital twin" avatar in The Metaverse in the future. As in exactly one avatar.
  Ask actual spare-time users of virtual worlds, and many will laugh and tell you they've got several avatars already now. In one and the same world.
  In a decentralised metaverse, this will be even more likely and impossible to prevent. Just look at OpenSim where almost everyone who has been around for at least a couple of months has avatars in multiple worlds, multiple grids, even though you can teleport between grids, between servers with different owners and operators running different versions of OpenSim, using the same avatar. And having multiple avatars with different identities isn't rare either, even within the same grid.
• Crossplayers. If the avatar looks female, that doesn't necessarily mean that there's a female user behind it. Especially not if text chat is used instead of voice.
• If kids can use your metaverse, and there's any incentive for kids to use your metaverse, kids will use your metaverse. Especially if it can work as a "pancake" without requiring a headset. And they're very likely to get themselves cool "grown-up" avatars, regardless of whether or not underage-looking avatars are possible/available or not. They're kids after all. Why should they only play themselves in-world if they can also play someone else just like they often do in real life?
• Vice versa, just because an avatar looks like a kid, doesn't mean the user behind the avatar is one.
• Nudity. And naughty stuff all the way to virtual sex. It will happen. Users will find a way. Maybe not right away, but they will.
  You may design your world for people to build virtual office spaces, virtual after-work dance clubs and virtual live music venues. But they will build fully-functional virtual swinger clubs and virtual BDSM dungeons once they figure out how.
  And you'll be so unprepared that banning everything remotely naughty out-right, while being a game of Whack-a-Mole itself and not even backed by actual rules at first, will be vastly easier than implementing content ratings, especially regional content ratings.
• A free, open-source, decentralised metaverse will not only consist of worlds operated by staffs of hired full-time professionals. There will be private people running their own worlds, either on a machine at home or on rented Web space.
• This also means that you can't bet on land scarcity and ask premium prices for your land in a free, decentralised metaverse. Why should people spend ridiculous amounts of money on chunks of your land if they can make their own land anytime?
• The easier it becomes for private individuals to set up their own worlds in a decentralised metaverse, the more people who really shouldn't operate any kind of server will do so nonetheless. And the more people will do so just to circumvent bans because nobody can ban them from their own worlds. Another two lessons OpenSim has learned, but nobody will learn from OpenSim as long as nobody knows that OpenSim exists, and as long as everyone only acknowledges virtual worlds that have a CEO.
• Different worlds, different rules. You'll find out quickly enough how this applies to decentralised networks of virtual worlds. The OpenSim community already did: Second Life's General/Mature/Adult content rating definitions are pretty much useless if each grid can re-define them as it pleases. General-rated clothing-optional beaches are just as real as places that are both Adult-rated and G-rated and only use the Adult rating to keep avatars looking like children out.
• Different worlds, different server software versions. In a decentralised metaverse based on anything designed or developed centrally, be it the server software, be it the standards definition, it's impossible to guarantee that all worlds always run the exact same version. You'll find out the hard way when a compatibility-breaking upgrade creates a rift through your precious metaverse between the worlds that have upgraded and those that haven't.
  Don't count on all worlds upgrading ASAP either. There will be worlds several years worth of new releases behind for whichever reasons, and be it because world owners disappear under a rock for years while keeping their worlds online.
• A decentralised and truly open-source metaverse will inevitably mean forks. And the forks want to stay compatible with the original. This also means that if you mess up, and you refuse to admit and fix your mistake, world owners may increasingly switch to forks and abandon your original project altogether.
• If you implement the possibility for one world to completely block another world, in-bound, out-bound or both, this feature will be used in feuds and other kerfuffles between worlds. Or between their admins. Or between the admin of one world and one user of another.
  If you don't implement it, users of rogue worlds can run rampant, and stopping them will be difficult or out-right impossible.
• Any innovation, any new feature you add to your virtual world system will not necessarily only be used the way you intended and designed it for. Never underestimate the creativity of your users.

Those who really know their way around virtual worlds can tell you all this and more.

But they aren't other creators of new virtual worlds. They aren't virtual world CEOs. I guess they aren't even Philip Rosedale, and on top of inventing, creating and leading Second Life, this guy has also actually read Snow Crash.

They aren't academic researchers either who interview virtual world designers and virtual world CEOs and other virtual world researchers and occasionally read what mass media or tech media write about virtual worlds without ever spending more than 15 minutes in a virtual world themselves.

No, they're the people who actually use virtual worlds. Regularly. A lot. And I don't mean the newfangled proof-of-concept stuff or small worlds specialised for exactly one purpose, one task.

The actual virtual world experts are the veterans of big, established, popular worlds like Second Life, including those Lindens who actually go in-world and thus have stories to tell. And the real experts on free, open-source, decentralised virtual worlds are the OpenSim veterans.

They haven't just heard or read about something being done in virtual worlds. They've witnessed it being done first-hand. Or they've actually done it themselves.

The free, decentralised metaverse is older than you may think

So I'm writing a lot about a thing called OpenSim. Or OpenSimulator. But outside my excessive image descriptions, I never explain what it is. And for everyone who finds one of my OpenSim-related posts and knows what it is, there have to be hundreds of thousands who don't.

If you can be bothered to Google it, you might still end up none the wiser. What you discover is either a human body simulator or a Wikipedia-style website that has something to do with virtual worlds, but that's so ripe with devspeak and adminspeak that you don't understand anything. Well, if you're on a phone, you probably can't be bothered to fire up a Web browser anyway.

Second Life, but free and open-source...

The latter result is actually the official OpenSim website. No, it doesn't have anything with a better UI/UX for casual visitors. So allow me to elaborate.

tl;dr: OpenSimulator is a free and open-source re-implementation of Second Life.

If you've never heard of that either: Second Life is a 3-D virtual world created by a guy named Philip Rosedale after reading Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, the book that coined the term "Metaverse". It's developed, maintained and operated by Linden Labs, and it was launched in 2003. It had a huge hype around itself in 2007/2008.

Some claim it was shut down in late 2008 or early 2009 because nobody has heard anything of it ever since. Even mainstream mass media and tech media occasionally do. In fact, it was only the hype that was over. Corporations left Second Life and mass media with it, so that's why there was no mass media coverage of Second Life anymore.

Second Life is alive and well. It celebrated its 20th birthday last year. And it has evolved a lot since the hype. Remember those choppy, blocky in-world videos from around 2007, recorded on an utterly underpowered and overwhelmed single-core computer and compressed in glorious MPEG-2, showing ugly avatars and awkward movements? All this is a thing of the past. Second Life looks a lot different now. And two years from now, it'll look different again.

Oh, and it has adopted the term "metaverse" in 2022, trying to get its share of the hype.

...17 years old itself...

OpenSim did so, too, but 15 years earlier. In 2007. Over 14 years before Zuckerberg's announcement. When hardly anyone even knew that term.

Its development must have started in 2006. It was made possible when Linden Labs made their official viewer, that's what a client or "app" for Second Life is called, open-source. This, of course, meant that the Second Life API was laid open. This, in turn, led to the development of alternative, usually open-source third-party viewers for Second Life.

Now, in these days, not everyone was content with Second Life's rampant capitalism. Almost everything involved Linden Dollars. Freebie creators were either mobbed out of Second Life, or if they weren't, they were banned for costing Linden Labs more money than they made them. And that wasn't the only thing that people were fed up with.

So someone took the logical next step. Third-party viewers were built against the server side of the Second Life API. So why not build a whole new virtual world against the client side, against these third-party viewers? You wouldn't have to re-invent the wheel, you'd already have viewers, and people wouldn't have to re-learn everything when coming over from Second Life. They could even keep using the same application.

The project was first called OpenSecondLife, but that name just begged for a lawsuit. It then became OpenSL, but that meant everything and nothing at the same time. So it was renamed OpenSimulator. And its first public release was version 0.4 in January, 2007.

...a metaverse before it was cool...

The same year, OpenSim introduced the term "metaverse" into its own lingo by branding itself "The Open Source Metaverse" as seen in this static, archived copy of OpenSim's project website from December, 2007.

So it was not Zuckerberg who was the first to use this word for a non-fictional virtual world. And even OpenSim might have taken inspiration from an in-world conference in Second Life in 2007 that was named "Metaverse", too.

...and decentralised, not quite unlike the Fediverse

In spite of all similarities, OpenSim is quite different from Second Life. The biggest difference is that Second Life is an enclosed, centralised walled-garden virtual world. And OpenSim is not.

Technically speaking, OpenSim is only a server application for running worlds similar to Second Life. But this also means that anyone could do that theoretically. Anyone could run their own Second Life-like virtual world. It helps that OpenSim is cross-platform in spite of being server software; it's available not only for Linux, but also for macOS and for Windows which it was actually developed for originally.

So OpenSim is truly decentralised.

Now you might wonder what could possibly be so great about having lots of big and small Second Lifes if they're all separate worlds. Well, they aren't. At least most of them aren't.

For in 2008, OpenSim introduced a new feature called the Hypergrid. The Hypergrid made it possible to have an avatar in one world and travel to others, appearance, inventory and everything. Nowadays, over 95% of OpenSim's combined landmass is connected to the Hypergrid.

In other words: The free, decentralised metaverse has been reality for more than a decade and a half.

Some of you may recall Linden Labs' Second Life-to-OpenSim Hypergridding PR stunt. But that's another story and shall be told another time. Just so much: It was staged. It was all show.

Of grids and regions

Now I'm going to take a little dip into the lingo of Second Life and OpenSim.

Linden Lab refers to Second Life, the world, as a grid. And OpenSim worlds are called grids, too.

That's because they're split into square areas with a corner length of 256 metres or roughly 280 yards for those of you who aren't familiar with the metric system. These are called regions.

Unlike similar structures in other virtual worlds, however, they aren't isolated from one another. They aren't enclosed worlds within worlds. You can look from one region to another. In fact, if you crank the drawing distance all the way up to 1,024 metres, you can look across three regions and into the fourth.

Normally, all there is in a region is water. In order for something else to exist there, a so-called simulator, sim in short, has to be in place. In Second Life, each sim always only covers one region. OpenSim has introduced a feature called varsims in 2011 which makes it possible for one sim to cover a square area of theoretically up to 32x32 regions; that's about 64 square kilometres or 25 square miles. Regions with no sim running in them are rendered as ocean, and they can't be entered by avatars. The same goes for the area outside the actual grid.

This makes scaling grids easy: Sims in a grid don't necessarily have to run on the same server. Before the switch to AWS, Second Life ran three server farms for only one production grid. Big OpenSim grids are spread across multiple servers, too. Some grids even allow you to host your sims yourself and attach them to the grid which is usually even cheaper than renting a sim or even completely free-of-charge.

Of course, sims can also sit right next to one another. Second Life's mainland alone is made of thousands of them. And you can not only look from one into another, you can walk from sim to sim without using a teleporter. In the earlier years of both Second Life and OpenSim, this had the tendency of being rather wonky, especially between sims on different servers, but now it's quite reliable. In fact, even riding vehicles from sim to sim is possible. Hypergridding still requires a teleport, though.

Another difference between Second Life (or any other centralised virtual world) and OpenSim is that land in Second Life is finite. The grid has only got so much capacity for sims and so many regions available. While still considerably cheaper than especially crypto-based worlds, land in Second Life is still costly, not only because land rental is one of Linden Labs' main sources of income, but because there's only so much supply of it.

In OpenSim, on the other hand, land is practically infinite. The grids generally cover much larger areas. Unlike Second Life, no OpenSim grid has ever run out of regions. And more land can always be created by launching new grids. So even in the unimaginable case of all public grids with sim rentals being full, you can launch your own grid, and then you have as much land as you need.

One region in Second Life costs you about $250 a month, and that's in a more remote area. The mainland is even more expensive. Most OpenSim grids with sim rentals offer the same land area with an even higher object capacity for $10 a month. Some are more expensive, but especially on larger grids, $15 get you a sim on a rock-solid grid with good support. If you want more adjacent land area, you can usually rent varsims as well. And a 2x2, 3x3, sometimes even a 4x4 varsim isn't considerably much more expensive than a 1x1 sim.

Size comparison

If you've never heard of OpenSim before, you might imagine that it has to be tiny, even all grids compared.

This is actually far from being the case.

Second Life measures between 27,500 and 28,000 standard regions which amounts to over 1,800 square kilometres. Exact numbers for OpenSim don't exist as there are no stats that include all existing grids, but all of OpenSim combined is definitely over four times as big as Second Life. And again, over 95% of this are part of the Hypergrid.

OSgrid was the first public OpenSim grid, launched in July, 2007. Not only has it adopted the "Open Sim Metaverse" slogan from OpenSim itself, but it also grew into the biggest of all OpenSim grids, both in land area and in active users. Several times in recent history, most recently last year, OSgrid alone has surpassed Second Life itself in land area.

Also late last year, the Wolf Territories Grid was the second grid to grow bigger than Second Life. In fact, it has recently even outgrown OSgrid and become the biggest OpenSim grid. So there are two grids bigger than Second Life now.

However, these grids have reached their sizes in very different ways, and they're structured differently. OSgrid, for example, doesn't offer any land rentals. In fact, it doesn't even need a powerful region server. OSgrid itself only hosts a handful of "official" sims such as the various Plazas. Everything else is attached externally and hosted by the sim owners. So technically speaking, OSgrid still holds the record for running on the highest number of individual machines.

The Wolf Territories, on the other hand, started out in 2020 as a quickly growing bunch of 4x4 varsims owned by @Lone Wolf in ZetaWorlds. Several fully automated railway lines connected them. Later the same year, Lone launched his own grid and transferred all his land to it.

Two factors make the Wolf Territories grow so big. One is that Lone Wolf traditionally generates all of his own land on the grid himself using an algorithmic terrain generator. The main islands around the landing are terraformed and often had some stuff added to them, and be it a railway line. Younger sims are either untouched wilderness or owned by customers.

The other one is that the Wolf Territories have almost everything on varsims of 4x4 regions and upward, so the number of sims is not that staggeringly high. After all, the vast majority of sims covers 16 standard regions each. And yet, eight of these still cost less per month than one remote region in Second Life.

Empty World Syndrome

So if OpenSim has so much land area even in comparison to Second Life, how can it be that obscure? After all, it must have lots of users then.

Well, no.

Second Life is hardly growing. Its number of active users is more or less stagnating short of 55,000 per month.

OpenSim is constantly growing and breaking its own records. But OSgrid, slightly larger than Second Life, doesn't even have a tenth of Second Life's active users with a bit over 5,000. The Wolf Territories are hot on its heels, but still with fewer active users on even more landmass. And in both cases, this includes Hypergridders who mostly teleport in for partying or shopping. Without its number of event locations, the Wolf Territories would be even more deserted.

It's hard to tell how many users OpenSim has altogether. Grids claim they can identify alts (alternate avatars of the same user) as such instead of counting each one of them as an individual user. But there is no way of tracking users across all of OpenSim or even only the Hypergrid. And even alt identification may still be flawed if someone has avatars on multiple grids. This might affect both grids: The Wolf Territories aren't exactly the choice of newbies, so whoever makes an avatar there has already got at least one elsewhere. And OSgrid is popular not only amongst newbies, but also for parking spare alts.

So as great OpenSim is for building, it is not so good for socialising. In Second Life, you keep coming across other avatars almost all the time. In OpenSim, you really have to choose places that are populated if you want to meet other avatars:

• event locations with soon-to-start or on-going events
• freebie shopping sims that are so popular that there's always someone shopping there, but even then they may not want to be disturbed
• Lbsa Plaza, the main landing sim in OSgrid; there is always someone there, but whoever that may be does not necessarily qualify as a greeting committee, much less mentors

Everywhere else you can be lucky to come across even only one avatar.

Still close to Second Life

Feature-wise, OpenSim is largely on par with Second Life. And most of the time when Second Life introduces a new feature, OpenSim won't take too long to roll out the same feature. It does take its time, of course. Second Life has a whole full-time development staff behind itself, and OpenSim is mostly developed and maintained by four people in their spare time with some help from a few devs in OSgrid which, despite its size, is still the same experimental grid as in 2007.

But OpenSim doesn't have much of a choice. After all, it doesn't have a viewer of its own, at least none that's being actively maintained and that's sufficiently functional. It uses largely the same third-party viewers as Second Life, provided they support it.

None of these viewers have enough development capacity to basically split in two, i.e. have a largely independent variant only for OpenSim. Some special features of OpenSim have to be supported such as grid selection, Hypergridding or the distinction between avatars and non-player characters which Second Life doesn't have. But going beyond that is out of question.

Even the most popular third-party viewer for Second Life and the most popular OpenSim viewer altogether, the Firestorm Viewer, has a team of 20 people behind it, many more than OpenSim itself. But it's said that only one of them is an OpenSim user; the rest only knows Second Life. They simply don't have the capacity to maintain a separate code base for OpenSim.

Firestorm is nonetheless the only viewer with dedicated OpenSim variants. And a couple of years ago, there were actually two separate Firestorms, one for Second Life, one for OpenSim, because OpenSim itself was lagging behind in adding a new Second Life feature. This ended with the OpenSim branch not getting any updates at all because it didn't have a single maintainer anymore. Only when OpenSim had caught up with Second Life, this could be resolved by merging the two code bases again.

So whatever Second Life introduces has to be included in the third-party viewers. And whatever is added to the third-party viewers will usually inevitably have to be added to OpenSim as well. Especially if it replaces something older that's being phased out in Second Life, OpenSim can't keep it and has to implement the successor.

To put it in a nutshell, it's easier for OpenSim to add all new Second Life features just to stay compatible with existing viewers than to develop and permanently maintain its own viewer. Hence, anything that Second Life introduces will likely come to OpenSim as well.

An explanation for the landing point controls and how to make landing points act the way you want them to

There are many sims where the landing point is obviously misconfigured. This led me to believe that not exactly few users don't know how the landing point configuration works.

So let me try to explain how to configure it.


(A description of the image above can be found through this link.)

In Firestorm, click on "World" on the menu bar in the top left, then on "Parcel Details". Alternatively, right-click on bare ground so that the circle menu opens, then click on "About Land..." Either way, you'll get the window which the picture above shows.

The landing controls are at the bottom right; I've drawn frames around them.

Before I explain them, there's another important thing to know: There are two ways of landing on a sim or a parcel.  One is without coordinates. Copied hop addresses from OpenSimWorld are always without coordinates. And if you use the map to search for a sim, and you just click the sim mane, it's without coordinates, too.

The other one is with coordinates that define where the avatar should land. Landmarks are always with coordinates. Many sim-to-sim teleport scripts use coordinates. Hop addresses can contain coordinates. And if you use the map, and you click on a certain place on a sim, it's with coordinates, too.

Now to the actual controls:

The buttons in the blue frame are for the landing point. If one is defined, you see its coordinates above the buttons and the orientation angle. The menu in the red frame defines where avatars land; I'll get to that.

If no landing point is defined, avatars that come in with their own coordinates (e.g. by landmark) will land at these coordinates, and avatars that come in without their own coordinates (e.g. through OpenSimWorld) will land at 128, 128, x.

In order to define a landing point, go to where you want the landing point to be, turn into the desired direction, and click "Set". The landing point will be defined as where your avatar is plus how it's oriented.

"Clear" deletes the landing point setting. "Teleport" takes your avatar to the defined landing point.

The menu in the red frame under "Teleport Routing" defines where avatars land when they teleport in.

"Blocked" means that avatars cannot teleport onto this land at all. They may still walk in or fly in (if flying is allowed) or come by boat or train or bus or whatever, but they cannot teleport in. Careful: If used on an entire sim, "Blocked" renders landmarks and OpenSimWorld hop addresses useless because teleporting onto the sim is not possible at all.

"Landing Point" means that avatars are forced to always land at the landing point. This setting mercilessly overrides their own coordinates. Coordinates in landmarks become null and void. Even if avatars have carefully chosen a nice place to land, e.g. at a bus stop or on a wooden pier or something, and taken their landmark there, they won't land there; they will be forced to land at your landing point.

"Anywhere" means that avatars that come in without their own landing coordinates land at the landing point. This setting prevents them from landing at 128, 128, x. It does not override an avatar's own coordinates. So if avatars want to land in a particular place on the land, they can do so.

tl;dr: Where do avatars land?

No landing point defined:
Via OSW beacon: 128, 128, x
Via hop address without coordinates: 128, 128, x
Via hop address with coordinates: Coordinates at the end of the hop address
Via map, no place on the land selected: 128, 128, x
Via map, particular place on the land selected: Selected place
Via landmark: Landmark coordinates

"Blocked":
Via OSW beacon: No teleport allowed
Via hop address without coordinates: No teleport allowed
Via hop address with coordinates: No teleport allowed
Via map, no place on the land selected: No teleport allowed
Via map, particular place on the land selected: No teleport allowed
Via landmark: No teleport allowed

"Landing Point":
Via OSW beacon: Landing Point
Via hop address without coordinates: Landing Point
Via hop address with coordinates: Landing Point
Via map, no place on the land selected: Landing Point
Via map, particular place on the land selected: Landing Point
Via landmark: Landing Point

"Anywhere":
Via OSW beacon: Landing Point
Via hop address without coordinates: Landing Point
Via hop address with coordinates: Coordinates at the end of the hop address
Via map, no place on the land selected: Landing Point
Via map, particular place on the land selected: Selected place
Via landmark: Landmark coordinates

So when should you pick what?

"Blocked" is for if you don't want avatars to teleport in at all. If you want them to enter by walking or riding a horse or use a scripted ferry boat or something like this, but they must not teleport. Don't use it for private parcels/sims! For that, go to "Access" and uncheck "Anyone can visit".

"Anywhere" is the recommended setting. It lets avatars with landmarks land where they've taken their landmarks, and it has those who come through OpenSimWorld land where it's appropriate.

"Landing Point" is for forcing all avatars to land at your pre-defined landing point, no matter what. Only use this setting if it's really important to have everyone land at the same spot. That could be a role-playing/adventure sim with a pre-defined starting point, a story-telling sim (unless the story is so long that people are tempted to use landmarks like bookmarks in a book so they can come back later), a maze, any kind of parcours or your personal land where you want visitors to land at the entrance rather than in your bedroom or on your secret sky platform.

Do not use "Landing Point" for exploration sims or for shopping/freebie sims! And do not use "Landing Point" for party sims either! Yes, it may be convenient for visitors to land right next to the dancefloor. But not everybody wants to be FORCED HARD to land there. Some of us prefer to land somewhere more natural/somewhere where they can't be seen rezzing and then walk to the party location. If "Teleport Routing" is set to "Landing Point", they can't do that.

Troubleshooting Q&A:

Q: My visitors always land in the water!

A: That's because you have water at 128, 128, x, and you don't have a landing point set for your sim. Find a good landing spot for your visitors. Go there with your avatar. Turn your avatar so you're facing into the right direction. Open the settings as described above. Under "Landing Point" (see the red box), click "Set". Under "Teleport Routing" (see the blue box), pick "Anywhere" if you want to allow avatars with landmarks to land somewhere else or "Landing Point" if you want absolutely everyone to always land at the landing spot you've selected.

Q: My visitors complain that their landmarks don't work; they're always forced to land in one particular spot on my sim!

A: That's because you've set "Teleport Routing" to "Landing Point". Switch it to "Anywhere".