In May of 2014 I was sitting around with my friend Dot Matrix after a Kitely community meeting when we came up with the idea of leading tours to help our neighbors get out and explore the wider world.
Dot and I have never met in the physical world. This conversation took place in a virtual environment on computer. My avatar was hanging out with her avatar after the other eight avatars in the meeting had said goodbye and disappeared. We were excited because we were no longer confined to traveling between the hundreds of “worlds” on our local “grid.” We would now be able to easily travel to any other hypergrid-enabled computer in the world running the OpenSim software. This was the equivalent of being able to read any web page on any http server anywhere in the world in 1994. The possibilities were limitless.
Kitely was not the first grid to enable hypergridding. Crista Lopes (known as Diva Canto online) wrote the initial code enabling hypergridding in OpenSim in late 2008. In the intervening six years, OpenSim had grown into a stable, open source platform. People were building increasingly complex virtual worlds. Now that Kitely had just opened up to hypergridding, we thought tours would be a good way to help people get comfortable with the idea of traveling between worlds and meeting the people from other worlds.
The Metaverse Tours have been fun and continue to take place every Saturday. I started this site in part to document our ventures. Each week it gets a little easier to travel between virtual worlds. More and more blogs, social networks, and other tours are popping up. New people are joining OpenSim grids. It’s an exciting time in OpenSim.
I am very thankful to the geniuses who created and improve OpenSim and to the adventurers and entrepreneurs who are building this fabulous metaverse for us to wander around in.
Metaverse Tours
Every Saturday, 1:00 pm Pacific time
Meet at the Kitely Welcome Center
Everyone is welcome
Links:
http://www.kitely.com
grid.kitely.com:8002:Kitely Welcome Center
The history of the Metaverse Tours.
http://www.kitely.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=1602
OpenSim
http://opensimulator.org/wiki/Main_Page
What is the hypergrid?
http://justincc.wordpress.com/2008/12/19/what-is-the-hypergrid/
Crista Lopes
http://tagide.com/about.html