Second Life may be the 8000 pound gorilla in the virtual worlds universe, but it’s not the only one. There are several dozen worlds for you to choose from, though most are still small and even the largest doesn’t yet come close to matching Second Life’s massive user base.
Comparing worlds by population size is not easy, because of the difficulty in determining how many are actually active users, of determining how many are multiple avatars of a single person, and because not all worlds report population in the same way.
An alternate way of measuring world size is by the number of regions in that world. HypergridBusiness.com reports that the dozen largest virtual worlds (Open Sim worlds and Second Life) by region are:
- Second Life: 31,552 regions
- OSGrid: 5,758 regions
- Avination: 925 regions
- Virtual Worlds Grid: 819 regions
- InWorldz: 816 regions
- New World Grid: 612 regions
- ScienceSim: 338 regions (for science researchers and projects)
- AlphaTowne: 316 regions
- Meta7: 292 regions
- NexXtLife: 288 regions
- FrancoGrid: 262 regions (French speaking)
- MyOpenGrid: 245 regions
OSGrid is run by the same group that has established the Open Sim platform for hosting virtual worlds. All the virtual worlds on this list except Second Life are based on it. It has a feature that will appeal to people like me: the ability to host a region in the world on your own computer, at no cost other than the cost of operating your computer.
Avination has unique feature that I haven’t encountered in other worlds: although when you’re creating your account, it forces you to choose from a list of avatar last names, you can change it to your Second Life avatar name through a two step process in which you first register your Second Life name with Avination and then visit an Avination ATM in Second Life, where you complete the linkage. Avination appears to also offer the ability to use the ATM for transferring funds between it and Second Life through these ATMs, though I didn’t try it.
InWorlds is the world that people I know personally in Second Life are beginning to migrate to, and it’s the world that most favorably impressed me when I first logged on.
I wasn’t able to open an account in Virtual Worlds Grid. I tried but wasn’t able to navigate to the account creation page. Maybe they were having problems today, but it’s the most confusing page I’ve seen in any of the worlds.
The other world where I had a problem was New World Grid. I got several errors when I tried opening my account, including being told that my password was too short (it was) and that my email address was invalid (it wasn’t). When I tried reentering the information, it told me that the avatar already existed, so I tried logging and had no problem, despite the too-short password.
However when I tried creating a second avatar, I got the very same errors but this time I wasn’t able to log on with that avatar. Very confusing!
I use the Imprudence viewer for logging into all these worlds; if a world isn’t listed in the Grids on the Imprudence login page, you can use the Grid Manager to add it. You can also use other viewers, including Phoenix and Hippo.
It may be worth to check Openlife too!
Its a lovely world and over 3 years old!
http://openlifegrid.com/
OpenLife sounds like an interesting world, but I didn’t cover it because I’m looking for virtual worlds that Second Life residents can easily explore without having to download new software. It doesn’t appear to me that any of the approved Second Life viewers can be used to visit OpenLife. Please correct me if I’m wrong!
Hypergridbusiness.com has stopped including OpenLife in its reporting because OpenLife software has diverged significantly from the Open Sim standard. You can read the report.
Anyone who wants to learn more about OpenLife should read this entry at starlord.net, which gives a lot more information.
No you are not wrong, you have to download the Openlife viewer.
That viewer comes from the hands of KirstenLee Cinquetti (kirstens viewer) who is on the third party registry of SecondLife. That link you provide is a good one and sums it all up about Openlife, thank you for that!
For anyone who doesn’t know, the Kirstens Viewer mentioned by DawnyDaviau is an excellent viewer that is aimed especially at Second Life photographers and machinimatographers. My usual viewer is Imprudence, but when I need a viewer that has Viewer 2 functionality, I use Kirstens (kirstenleecinquetti.blogspot.com).
I’m currently the Director of Community Development at ReactionGrid, so naturally I’m going to toss that grid into the ring as a suggestion for places to visit. 😉 http://reactiongrid.com
ReactionGrid focuses on education. You can visit the public ReactionGrid world, but most of the activity is on the 100+ private grids that we host for many different groups. One such world is JokaydiaGRID (http://jokaydiagrid.com), which is also open to the general public.
And if folks are interested in meeting up with other people who spend a lot of time exploring other grids, you might want to check out my Hypergrid Adventurers Club. (http://becunningandfulloftricks.com/hypergrid-adventurers-club/)
I highly recommend exploring Pathfinder’s link to the Hypergrid Adventurers Club. There’s some fascinating stuff there. I expect I’ll be writing about it in the future, after I learn more. The concept of hypergrid exploring is compelling.
I haven’t had time yet to check out ReactionGrid, but I will look into it.
How about Kitely? It is currently hosting more than 1000 regions and can be accessed using Imprudence and all the v2-derived viewers.
It’s currently in beta and people can get as many free regions as they wish within minutes of opening an account.
Just for history :
In France, we have a community called “Le Village 3D”, existing since 1998. It is still alive, graphics are a bit old now, but the community is very active… http://3d.levillage.org/
In 1997, we also had a virtual world that closed in 2001. The name was “Le deuxième monde”, if you translate in english, it means “Second World”. A page of old fans is still on the web : http://asso.bimondiens.com/
All those links are french, sorry, but if you need a bit of translation i can help, even if my english is not so good …
Why not merge all those grids together, all those diff viewers/grids/accounts and regions makes it complicated. I know Imprudence could access more grids then V2 but if you know ppl in 1 grid why swapping between them. If we were talking about INVU/Ultima online or the Sims Online that would make a diff because the creators are diff.
Anyhow i ll stay on the maingrid i guess, but who knows my curiosity will kill the cat