Wandering warthogs in the East Africa Traveler Safety Simulation
Yesterday, the Hypergrid Adventurers Club (HGAC) visited the Center for Global Health’s East Africa Traveler Safety Simulation. About 20 of us made the voyage, initially gathering at JokaydiaGrid and then travelling together as a group. This was the first HGAC trip in a long time, and it was wonderful to see so many familiar friends as well as some brand new faces.
Attending the Opening Keynote Presentation
This past weekend I attended and spoke at the very first OpenSimulator Community Conference (OSCC13). It was an amazing event full of outstanding presentations, great networking opportunities, and spectacular venues with tons of attendees. It was also truly remarkable to see how far OpenSim has evolved and matured as a virtual world platform.
I’ve seen my fair share of online conferences, and this was the most professionally managed and engaging online conference I have ever attended. To everyone involved in making this event a reality, thank you!
And thank you all who attended my presentation. I apologize for not having time to answer all your questions, but if you leave a comment on this blog post I will be very happy to reply.
Lastly, for those of you interested in me possibly restarting the Hypergrid Adventurers Club tours (I got a lot of positive feedback at the conference), be sure to join the HGAC mailing list and post that you’d like to attend a future tour. If I see enough interest, I’ll definitely start them up again.
Please read on for my own presentation summary, video and downloadable slides. You can also watch recordings of all the other presentations in the Conference Archives.
“Exploring the Interconnected: How Past Dreams evolve into Future Reality”
Join us to hear more about how dreams from the past can dramatically change and evolve into something completely new. In this presentation you will hear all about John’s initial experiences in Opensim while still working at Linden Lab, the creation and mangement of “Pathlandia,” initial explorations of the Hypergrid, and how it all fits in with what he remembers as Linden Lab’s original vision of an expanding Metaverse of self-hosted and interconnected virtual worlds.
ADDENDUM 9/10/2013: Be sure to read this blog post: “The Future of Conferences.” It’s an outstanding summary of the conference by Crista Lopes, the inventor of the Hypergrid and one of the conference’s main organizers.
Take care,
-John “Pathfinder” Lester
Yesterday, the Hypergrid Adventurers Club visited OSGrid to explore Devokan Tao, the central hub of a collection of regions called Devokan Trust.
The entire area is inspired by Myst and Uru.
About 10 of us made the journey across four different grids, and you can follow in our footsteps by looking at our travel plan.
Our guide was Dot Macchi, who explained the history of the project to create a Myst/Uru inspired world built by many different people. It’s an amazing collaborative effort.
What we found were places of such stunning artistry and subtle aesthetics that I’m at a loss for words to describe them any further. So I’ll simply share pictures.
Thank you again, Dot, for spending so much time with us and explaining the beautiful storyline behind it all.
Today, the Hypergrid Adventurers Club took a trip from jokaydiaGRID to the OSGrid home of Linda Kelllie, a talented content creator who gives away a wide range of excellent items (including OAR files of entire regions) on her website LindaKellie.com.
Read on for a summary, some pics, and instructions on how you can make the journey yourself.
The Hypergrid Adventurers Club took a trip from jokaydiaGRID to OSGrid, where we visited an amazing Dune-inspired Sci-Fi area created by Lani Global Systems.
Read on for a summary, some pics, and instructions on how you can make the journey yourself. Be sure to mind the sandworms.
To celebrate the reboot of the Hypergrid Adventurers Club, we took a trip from jokaydiaGRID to OSGrid.
It was a very successful journey, and I hope everyone had a good time. Read on for a summary, some pics, and instructions on how you can make the journey yourself.
I started the Hypergrid Adventurers Club (HGAC) over a year ago to create a venue for folks interested in exploring the Hypergrid together. While we were working on some major OpenSim upgrades here at ReactionGrid the past few months, I decided to pause our weekly HGAC meetings.
We’re all very excited about rolling out OpenSim 0.7.2 to all our OpenSim clients. We’re doing this major upgrade on a case by case basis, and one of the great new features of this newer version of Opensim is upgrading to version 1.5 of the Hypergrid. This version is supported by the majority of OpenSim grids currently online. Which means we’re dramatically expanding the universe of interconnected OpenSim grids that our clients can explore during their hypergrid explorations.
And thanks to all the hard work of everyone at ReactionGrid, the Hypergrid Adventurers Club’s home base on jokaydiaGRID is now running OpenSim 0.7.2.
Starting this week, I’ll be resuming weekly meetings of the Hypergrid Adventurers Club. The first new meeting will be Thursday, January 5th 2012 at 4pm Eastern Time. We’ll be meeting on the region “Scooter” on jokaydiaGRID. For more details, please see this event on our calendar.
And be sure to join our Google Group if you’d like information about upcoming meetings.
See you on the Hypergrid!
Take care,
–John “Pathfinder” Lester
Chief Learning Officer
ReactionGrid Inc.
On April 30th 1939 (that’s 72 years ago!), over 200 thousand people gathered across an acre of land that only a couple years earlier was an ash dump. Thanks to four years of hard work and planning, those people were able to get a glimpse of the future.
They were attending the opening of the 1939 New York World’s Fair.
Paul M. Van Dort has organized a celebration of the Opening of the World’s Fair in ReactionGrid. This is the first time an event commemorating the Fair’s opening in a virtual world has ever been done. While only a few of the pavilions have been constructed so far, this is an opportunity to see the Fair and to actually walk around and explore it. Walk through the Trylon and Perisphere, view Democracity, and travel down the Helicline. Visit the New York City Building, the Belgium Pavilion, and Westinghouse Electric.
And keep in mind that what you’re seeing is a vision of the future from 72 years ago. It’s pretty mindblowing to remember that fact.
Our Hypergrid Adventurers Club visited a virtual recreation of Pic du Midi de Bigorre in NewWorldGrid this past Sunday. Follow in our footsteps and check it out for yourself!
Pic du Midi de Biogorre is a mountain in the French Pyrenees famous for its astronomical observatory.
Aime Socrates (who has also built some amazing recreations of nuclear research facilities at CERN and physics education spaces) is building the mountain out as a learning space for students interested in astronomy.
Here are some photos from our journey.
Our Hypergrid Adventurers Club visited a beautiful region called China Town in Francogrid this past Sunday. Follow in our footsteps and check it out for yourself!
China Town is under construction and being built by Vinc Sonic, but he’s already done a fantastic job of creating a very atmospheric cityspace with lots of detail.
Here are some photos of our journey.
Be Cunning and Full of Tricks 