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Kitely Market to have delivery to High Fidelity

Kitely [1], the largest commercial OpenSim grid by land area, plans to deliver its Kitely Market [2] content throughout the metaverse — not just to OpenSim grids.

Our goal is to make Kitely Market the main metaverse marketplace,” Kitely CEO Ilan Tochner told Hypergrid Business. “As there are more than one platform vying to become the metaverse we aim to deliver to all platforms that don’t block us from doing so.”

Philip Rosedale, founder and CEO of High Fidelity, visiting the MOSES OpenSim grid. [3]
Philip Rosedale, founder and CEO of High Fidelity, visiting the MOSES OpenSim grid.

First up: Philip Rosedale’s High Fidelity [4] platform.

Ilan Tochner [5]
Ilan Tochner

Even though High Fidelity is still very far from becoming a viable architecture, we’ve already started work on supporting it as a Kitely Market delivery target,” Tochner said.

In fact, Kitely has already begun contributing to the High Fidelity project, with two code commits this month [6].

High Fidelity seems to be organized into three parts. Closest to the user there will be an open source client. According to remarks made by Philip Rosedale during a recent speech on the MOSES grid [7], there will be two versions of the client. One, a fully-functional interactive client, will be traditional downloaded software. Another, a view-only client, will run in the browser with no downloads necessary.

Next, the virtual world server software, also open source, will be available free for anyone who wants to set up their own High Fidelity virtual world — similar to the way that OpenSim can be downloaded and installed today.

Finally, the third part is provided by High Fidelity itself, and will be the source of the company’s revenues — a directory of virtual world locations, a virtual currency system, and a virtual goods marketplace.

It will be interesting to see what impact, if any, the Kitely Market will have on High Fidelity’s business model.

Today's best-selling items on the Kitely Market. [8]
Today’s best-selling items on the Kitely Market.

Second Life?

In theory, Kitely Market could deliver to Second Life, as well, but there are some issues.

Due to the closed nature of Second Life we’ve yet to decide whether to pursue it as a delivery target,” said Tochner. “Doing so will require significantly more work than supporting an open platform and we’ve yet to decide whether we trust Second Life to not shut us out if Kitely Market becomes popular with their users.”

Kitely currently delivers to any hypergrid-enabled grid, as well as some closed grids, such as Zandramas [9], that choose to accept Kitely Market deliveries. According to today’s data, that is 145 grids, out of 215 grids total.

Share of hypergrid-enabled regions and active users on the public OpenSim grids. Green is hypergrid-enabled, red is closed. [10]
Share of hypergrid-enabled regions and active users on the public OpenSim grids. Green is hypergrid-enabled, red is closed.

According to the latest Hypergrid Business data, hypergrid-enabled grids account for 91 percent of the land area of the public OpenSim grids, and 42 percent of all active users. Adding in Zandramas users, that means that Kitely Market delivers to 44 percent of the residents of OpenSim’s public grids. By comparison, the next-largest delivery area is that of InWorldz, which currently accounts for 37 percent of OpenSim users. InWorldz has more residents than all other closed commercial grids combined.

Kitely merchants and creators can specify whether their products are allowed to be delivered to other grids or not, and can set different prices for exportable products.

Growth in items listed on the Kitely Market. [11]
Growth in items listed on the Kitely Market.

Since Kitely Market enabled hypergrid delivery this past March [12], the number of items available for export has been rising, as seen in the blue area of the chart above.