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Las Vegas’ Neon Museum released a virtual reality app for the Oculus Rift last year and was ported to the iPhone and Android last spring for viewing with Google Cardboard-compatible headsets. Now the app is also available for Samsung’s Gear VR. Thanks to VRFocus for the heads-up. Watch a previewRead More →

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Virtual reality is a fast-changing field, and is about to explode. Stay on top of the news by subscribing to the top blogs on the subject. The page authority numbers are from Open Site Explorer and are estimates of how the site does in search results — the higher the number,Read More →

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According to Roy Taylor, corporate vice president of Alliances for AMD,  there will be 30 million virtual reality headsets in use in North America and Europe by 2018. He was citing figures that resulted from the inaugural meeting of the VR Council, an industry group with 70 members. Half ofRead More →

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The Scienceverse Kickstarter, originally scheduled to begin today, has been postponed until September 10. The company plans to build an open source virtual reality platform that supports social interactions and third-party app development. It is built on top of Unreal Engine 4 and promises to be compatible with all majorRead More →

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Kat Walk, a new type of omnidirectional treadmill, successfully raised nearly $150,000 in its Kickstarter, on an original goal of $100,000. This was enough to meet its $120,000 stretch goal, which was to put little wheels under the treadmill to make it easier to move the entire setup. The wheels tuck inRead More →

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On Saturday night, Mal Burns joked that virtual reality headsets are now like the AOL disks — they’re everywhere. All we need now is to see them in cereal boxes. With prices of $5 or less for Google Cardboard sets — $1 or less if you buy them in bulk —Read More →

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My Freefly VR headset came in the mail a couple of days ago — I ordered it from Amazon exactly a week earlier. Bottom line: this is a great headset, and I’m looking forward to comparing it with the Samsung Gear VR, which is being shipped to me as I writeRead More →

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It’s a law of economics that, over time and with perfect competition, the price of a product tends to approach the marginal cost of the product — that is, how much it costs to make one more item. The marginal cost of a virtual good is just about as closeRead More →

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The DigiWorldz grid has rolled out a new viewer for its residents, based on the Alchemy Viewer, and included Qarl’s mesh deformer functionality. The mesh deformer is a crowd-funded project that successfully raised more than $5,000 from users in Second Life and OpenSim on Indiegogo in 2011. In 2013, InWorldz hired formerRead More →

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Dahlia Trimble, an OpenSim core developer who’s been with the project since the summer of 2008, announced today that she is leaving. “I am sad to announce that I will be leaving OpenSimulator Core,” she told fellow developers. “I’ve been finding lately that I no longer have a use forRead More →

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Update 2: The community meeting transcript is here, and the Bright Canopy service will probably be coming back only for a limited number of users until the Amazon price fluctuations are dealt with. Update: The company will hold a community meeting Saturday morning in Second Life to answer user questions.Read More →

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The United Nations teamed up with Vice News and the VRSE virtual reality platform to deliver a new documentary about Ebola, Waves of Grace. The documentary can be watched online as a standard 360-degree video, or in immersive virtual reality by those who have Gear VR or a Google Cardboard-compatibleRead More →

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Although some Vive virtual reality headsets will be shipping late this year, most consumers probably won’t see them until 2016, according to a press release. “Later this year, HTC will offer the first commercial Vive units via a limited quantity of community and developer systems, with larger quantities shipping inRead More →

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It’s been a good-news, bad-news summer for Virwox, the European virtual currency exchange that used to dominate third-party Linden Dollar trading. On August 1, all third party Linden Dollar trading officially came to an end. And, before that, the Avination grid cut off its ties with Virwox, and warned users not to trade theRead More →

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Kitely, the largest commercial OpenSim grid, has rolled out a new region monitoring tool for its users, and published a new guide for detecting and fixing world performance problems. The grid has also added a Web-based option to manually stop a running world, the grid announced earlier this week. “As aRead More →

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What better way to marketing a Canadian independent science-fiction horror musical than with a creepy virtual reality trailer? Load up this video in a immersive headset — like one of those in our big virtual reality headset list here — and keep an eye on the creepy guy sitting inRead More →

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Since June, Wells Fargo has been putting virtual reality Oculus Rift Development Kit 2 headsets on consumers at local events across America as the San Francisco bank works to build brand awareness in a fun way. It’s called the Together Experience tour, and has consumers playing a virtual maze game andRead More →

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Bright Canopy will come out of invitation-only pre-release phase on August 29 and will make its Second Life cloud-based streaming service available globally for $17 a month. The Texas-based company allows users of the globally popular virtual world Second Life the means to enjoy it without the need to invest in high-end gamingRead More →

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Upload VR and Greenlight VR has ranked companies by venture capital investment, and Magic Leap was in the lead with nearly $600 million of total investment. The ranking was based on a Greenlight VR report released in late July. In the past five years — not including acquisitions such asRead More →

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Zero Latency opened the doors of the world’s first virtual reality gaming arena in Melbourne, Australia yesterday. Players carry a backpack containing a computer and wear an Oculus Rift Development Kit 2 headset and carry a gun controller. Sessions are 50-minutes each, and run in the evenings and weekends forRead More →

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Despite the August heat — at least, here in the northern hemisphere — total region counts, user numbers, and monthly actives were all up in OpenSim. Or perhaps it was because of the heat, as people opted to stay inside, at their computers, in the air conditioning. There are nowRead More →

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The Kitely Market hit another milestone this month, with a new total of 10,162 different item listings grouped into 5,030 different products. This is up from 9,971 different listings a month ago. Of the listings, 6,080 are exportable, or 60 percent. Kitely groups items together, so that, say, a red versionRead More →

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As my regular readers know, I’ve been trying to use a smartphone-and-Cardboard combo as an Oculus Rift replacement so that I could walk around my OpenSim builds without having to shell out $350 for the Oculus development kit. It’s not that I’m cheap — okay, yes, I’m cheap — butRead More →

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For many years, former IBMer Justin Clark-Casey has been the eternally-youthful face of OpenSimulator development and the president of the Overte Foundation which oversees OpenSim licensing issues. Then, on Sunday, the Justin Era ended with a post on his blog, Everything that has a beginning has an end, in which he saidRead More →

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There are many reasons why a region might be slow to load, but one of the hardest to address has been that of slow scripts. OpenSim doesn’t make it easy to discover which particular scripts are contributing the most to lag — but that is about to change. Kitely hasRead More →

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Update: In August, I bought a FiiT VR 2S, and that is now my new favorite. Another headset I’m recommending is the BoboVR Z4 headset, which has a 120-degree field of view, built-in headphones, and a built-in control button. A new virtual reality headset came in the mail for me today, the C1-Glass fromRead More →

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The Transport Systems Catapult, one of seven technology innovation centers established by the UK’s innovation agency, Innovate UK, has opened a “Visualisation Laboratory” in the town of Milton Keynes where virtual reality technology will be used to help generate innovation and overcome problems in the UK’s transport network. The laboratory is builtRead More →

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Sphericam, a mid-range 360-degree camera, completed its Kickstarter today with over $460,000 raised on a campaign target of $150,000. This means the project achieved its first two stretch goals — producing the camera in multiple colors, and making it dust-proof and water-resistant. The tennis-ball-sized camera was priced at between $1,300Read More →

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Most people who’ve traveled the hypergrid have had the experience of not being able to bring stuff back home, or of mysteriously not being able to take content to other grids. Recently, a number of different OpenSim developers have taken on the fight, and have been reporting progress. Crista LopesRead More →

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I’ve never sat through an entire presentation dedicated to the launch of a new phone before, and I probably never will again. But the OnePlus 2 launch last night, from Chinese firm OnePlus, was an unusually compelling and intimate experience. Presented completely in virtual reality — or, for those withoutRead More →

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AltspaceVR, which offers multi-user virtual reality software, announced that it raised an additional $10.3 million in venture capital, bringing total funding to $15.7 million. “We’re working hard to make AltspaceVR the most natural and fulfilling way to communicate online, and the additional resources will help us get there faster,” theRead More →

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Combined revenue for head mounted displays, and virtual reality accessories and content will increase from $108.8 million in 2014 to $21.8 billion worldwide by 2020, with a compound annual growth rate of 142 percent, according to a new report from Tractica. “Getting users to experience virtual reality technology firsthand, and therefore trulyRead More →

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The Adult Metaverse community on Google Plus was the fastest-growing OpenSim community over the last two months, gaining 121 new members for a new total of 866 users. OpenSim Virtual was in second place, with 108 new members for a new total of 1,511. This meant that OpenSim Virtual comfortably retained its place asRead More →

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So you want to try out some of the new virtual reality apps coming out, or you want to watch movies in 3D, but aren’t quite ready to shell out real money for a real headset. I don’t blame you. The technology is evolving quickly — by the time the headset arrives,Read More →

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Late last year, Destination British Columbia filmed British Columbia’s raw wilderness with 360-degree cameras to create The Wild Within VR Experience for the Oculus Rift. If you don’t happen to have an Oculus Rift developers kit, you can watch the behind-the-scenes video below about how the virtual reality experience was filmed.Read More →

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The world’s first virtual reality product launch — for the OnePlus Two smartphone — is scheduled for 7 p.m. Pacific on Monday, July 27, and the app is now available for download from the Google Play store. The app works in combination with a Google Cardboard or other compatible virtualRead More →

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AviWorlds, a grid best known for closing repeatedly with no warning, is on a mission to rehabilitate its public image as a member of the OpenSim community. The grid has hired OpenSim developer Quill Littlefeather, has begun donating code and patches to the OpenSimulator project, and is offering custom viewersRead More →

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Car companies have been getting into virtual test drives lately. There’s the Volvo XC90 Experience, for example. And Mercedes VR for Cardboard for Android phones. And Subaru Motorsports, also for Android — look for the videos with the 360 symbol, and select the virtual reality headset mode. But this Castrol EDGERead More →

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A new virtual reality treadmill, Kat Walk, uses a parachute-style harness instead of a waist-high ring to keep people in place — and is already 84 percent of the way to its $100,000 fundraising goal with 28 days still to go in the fundraising campaign. The treadmill is from KatVR,Read More →

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AT&T has partnered with Google Cardboard headset maker Knox Labs to offer a $10 white cardboard virtual reality headset, based on last year’s model. These older-style headsets, normally $15 each, have the magnetic button on the side of the headset, not the touch-sensitive button on top like this year’s modelsRead More →

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OSgrid has received legal recognition as a non-profit, the grid’s administrators announced earlier this month, just in time for the grid’s 8th birthday celebrations this weekend. OSgrid is the oldest grid running on the OpenSim software, dating back to the summer of 2007. For much of its existence, it hasRead More →

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Adult content has long been a driver for new media. Early cave paintings, sculptures, etchings, poetry, books and photographs typically featured either sex or violence. Adult content played a role in the video tape standards wars, and helped motivate early adopters to purchase video tape players when they were stillRead More →

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The Kitely Market has successfully delivered purchases to customers on 96 different grids, including both hypergrid-enabled grids and closed grids. “Our marketplace’s reach is continuing to grow,” Kitely CEO Ilan Tocher told Hypergrid Business. “By now it has become quite clear that merchants who take the time to create highRead More →

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Correction: Due to an error in collecting data from OSgrid, land area was undercounted this month. In fact, OpenSim’s land area actually increased by the equivalent of 828 regions. OSgrid did lose some land area, but only 395 regions — not 2,500 as reported. “Many people — including myself – have consolidatedRead More →

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For the last couple of years, Zetamex, an OpenSim hosting company, has also been hosting Zadaroo.com, which has a complete collection of Linda Kellie’s OARs, IARs, XML files, and textures. It’s a treasure-trove of content and includes everything most small grid owners need to get going: avatars, clothing, furniture, buildings, landscaping, scriptsRead More →

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It seems that every week, I talk to at least one person or organization who start out by saying, “and, of course, we started out project with Linda Kellie’s content.” Last week, for example, I talked to two researchers at City University London helping stroke victims recover their speaking skillsRead More →

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In an attempt to combat dwindling logins during the summer months, Craft is organizing a series of summer events — and participants who rent land from the grid get two months free rent for attending. Every year, residents who are still around complain about how few people there are in-world,Read More →

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Virtual world artists who wish to participate in Metropolis grid’s Summer of Arts 2015 can begin submitting their works tomorrow. New submissions will continue to be accepted until the end of summer. The exhibit opens to the public on September 25 and will run through October 25. This exhibition willRead More →