In order to travel the hypergrid, you must first start your travels on a hypergrid-enabled grid.
You can create a free account on any of the following public grids: OSGrid (U.S.), MyOpenGrid (U.S.), ReactionGrid (U.S.), NewWorldGrid (France), FrancoGrid (France), GermanGrid (Germany). Or any other hypergrid-enabled grid — more are coming online daily. You can also start out on your own hypergrid-enabled standalone grid or any other hypergrid-enabled grid.
We recommend starting out on OSGrid because it is the largest grid, and has regions in both the upper, middle, and lower regions. In addition, the three most popular viewers for traveling the grids — Impudence and Hippo — all have OSGrid as the default starting world. You can also use the Second Life viewer. Instructions for connecting to OSGrid with the Second Life viewer are here. Every other grid also posts connection instructions on its Website.
Once you are logged into OSGrid, click on a hypergrid address of the region you’d like to visit in our directory. A hypergrid address looks like this: hg.osgrid.org:80:Snoopies.
A teleport window will open up inside your viewer — click “Teleport” to travel to your new grid.
Here is a great video by National University Professor David Taylor:
You can also open the Map window (click on the “Map” button at bottom right of screen or press Ctrl-M) and copy-and-paste the hypergrid address into the search box. Click on the “Search” button and then click teleport once the destinations appears on the list
Finally, you can teleport from one world to another by using a hypergate. These gates can be found on many grids, and offer a choice of several destinations to travel to. Hypergates are normally activated by clicking on them or walking through them, and some have buttons on the outer edge, or nearby, for selecting a destination.
Hypergrid with Hyperica
To make hypergrid teleports easier, we have created three hypergrid terminals, located at the following addresses:
- hg.hyperica.com:8022:hyperica upper
- hg.hyperica.com:8022:hyperica central
- hg.hyperica.com:8022:hyperica lower
Teleport to whichever one of these is within reach from where you are. Each hyperport has the same 120 gates to the most popular destinations on the hypergrid, organized into four terminals — welcome regions to the main grids, shopping and freebie destinations, educational destinations, and culture and activities.
Simply walk onto a gate to teleport — be careful not to step on a gate by mistake!
Gates to top grids' welcome regions, at hg.hyperica.com:8022:hyperica upper
The gates are set up in sequence, so you don’t have to worry about the 4096 bug — if you’re too far away from your wanted destination, the gate will automatically pass you along to a gate that’s closer, and that gate will itself automatically send you on your way. By activating a single gate, you could travel from one end of the metaverse to another.
Why it sometimes doesn’t work
Hypergrid teleports, as any teleport, can fail for a number of reasons. The list of potential problems is almost as long as as the list of grids! What can I say? The technology was just invented. Old fogies like me may remember the early days of the Internet when websites didn’t load and the browsers crashed all the time. It’s like that. But it looks way cooler!
The developers and the grid managers are steadily working to fix these bugs and resolve the stability issues. It’s a multi-national, multi-pronged effort carried on by individual developers, academics, small development firms, and by major corporations like Intel and IBM. These guys are building the infrastructure of the next 3D Web, doing it fast, and its a sign of how good they are that we’re seeing enterprise and educational deployments of the platform even though it hasn’t even had its 1.0 release yet.
Anyway, if your hypergrid teleports fails, it could be one of the following reasons:
- The region you’re starting from could be running a version of OpenSim that is too far behind — or too far ahead — of the destination region. You can try jumping to an intermediate region first and circling around. This problem will fade as OpenSim development slows down and grid owners have time to catch up with the latest releases. If you’re on ReactionGrid, for example, you’re enjoying a stable, de-bugged version of OpenSim — but one that’s a couple of revision cycles behind that of OSGrid, a cutting-edge grid run, in part, by OpenSim developers. Today, there are three different versions of OpenSim in use by different grids, and the three are each mutually incompatible with one another. As grids upgrade this problem should resolve itself.
- Your destination could be too far away. Virtual worlds are laid out like squares on a checkerboard. If you’re trying to get from one corner to the opposite corner, you’ll have to make a stop in the middle first. More details about this so-called “4096 bug” are here.
- Some people are reporting that they can’t jump until after they’ve chosen a home region.
- The destination region might have moved, been taken down, or taken off the hypergrid. OpenSim regions are very inexpensive compared to Second Life, and often have no setup costs. As a result, region owners can easily move them around or switch them in and out. In addition, many region owners host their regions for free, from their homes. If they turn off their home computer, the region goes down. Finally, some regions are only hypergrid-enabled some of the time. A school, for example, might turn off hypergrid during the day so that strangers can’t show up during the middle of class — but turn it on at night, so that designers working on projects can teleport out to other grids for meetings or to get content.
- The destination might be too busy. Home-based regions can only handle a handful of visitors at once. Professionally-hosted regions can handle between 20 and 80, depending on the servers. Some private grids are also experimenting with automatic load-balancing, and we may soon see this on the top public grids as well.
- You can’t hypergrid teleport from one destination to another one that has exactly the same grid coordinates. This can be a problem for standalones, since many use the default 1000,1000 coordinates. Jump to another region first — try one of the regions labeled “Lower Gateway“.
- You may also not be able to hypergrid teleport from one region to another if they share the same server. Again, you may need to jump out to another region first — or walk or fly over to the neighboring region instead, or do a local teleport by simply searching for the region name, not the whole hypergrid address.
- It could just be one of those weird flukes. Try again a few minutes later, or from a different starting region. You can also try to jump to another region on the same grid as the region you’re trying to get to, and do a local teleport by entering just the name of the region in the “Search” box in the Map window.
- Normally, when a teleport doesn’t go through, you’ll get a warning message and return to your starting location. Occasionally, you will be redirected to another region near your destination instead, or to a central landing location on the destination grid.
- If you click on a hypergrid teleport link on our Website, and nothing happens, you may need to configure your browser to automatically launch your preferred viewer when clicking on that link. Instructions for configuring Firefox to run these links automatically are here. It should be taken care of automatically when you install a viewer, but sometimes things happen. You may have to reinstall, or manually copy-and-paste hypergrid addresses.
Security warning:
There have been no reports of this actually happening, and the OpenSim developers have closed this security hole in the latest release, but it is theoretically possible for an evil grid owner to send commands to your inventory and copy or delete items that you own. If traveling to unknown, potentially untrustworthy grids, some experts recommend using a second avatar who’s not carrying any valuable items in the inventory.
If any such grid is reported, we will not list it in our directory. We also recommend that region owners only put up hypergates to other destinations that they know well and trust — just as you would not put up a link on your Website to an evil site that hijacks browsers or steals banking information.
Finally, there are several currency platforms operating in the OpenSim worlds. The most trustworthy are those that take you to an Website for the payment authorization. These include PayPal and PayPal Micropayments, for example, as well as Google Checkout and other established e-commerce payment platforms. The next most trustworthy are those that are backed by established companies, like the Virwox multi-grid OMC currency. The OMC is fully convertible to US dollars, Euros, and Linden Dollars.
The Virtual Wallet V$ currency is not backed by a company, but by a single individual. The Cyber Coin Bank‘s G$ currency is not redeemable from its backers, but only from third-party resellers. As a result, we recommend V$ and G$ for small transactions only and warn against keeping a large balance in these currencies.
