By:
On:

Merrie Schonbach’s new grid’s business model is a mystery. Literally a mystery — Pillars of Mist will offer both self-paced and group murder mystery events. It is the newest example of a trend we’re seeing on the hypergrid, of focused, niche grids that don’t try to be all things to all people,Read More →

By:
On:

As everyone who has ever tried to set up a hyperport well knows, hypergrid destinations change frequently. Regions move, grids close — staying up to date can be a nightmare. Especially if you’re doing it all by hand. To help people out, and to avoid unnecessary duplication of work, I’veRead More →

By:
On:

The Adult Metaverse Google Plus community continued to attract members over the past six weeks, growing by 146 members from 444 members last month to 590 members today. At the start of the year, it only had 282 members. Second Life and other Virtual Worlds saw the next-highest growth, with 130Read More →

By:
On:

DigiWorldz launched this week, a new filtered grid from one of the founders of 3rd Rock Grid and digital worlds hosting and consulting company Digital Worlds Group. There were more than 30 new grids in the latest Hypergrid Business monthly stats report, but DigiWorldz stands out not only in the caliberRead More →

By:
On:

The new official release of OpenSimulator — OpenSimulator 0.8.1 — came out this week, with only minor changes compared with the preview release. “The most significant being a fix for a regression where script state was being lost for hypergrid transfers,” core developer Justin Clark-Casey said in an announcement. Compared toRead More →

By:
On:

The exportable content on the Kitely Market grew ten times faster than non-exportables over the past month, continuing a trend that began late last summer. The market added 245 new exportable items, compared to 23 non-exportable ones, for a new total of 7,950 different variations of 3,898 products. A singleRead More →

By:
On:

This was another record-breaking month for OpenSim, with new highs in regions, users, and active users on the 323 active worlds. For those who are new readers, OpenSim is a free, open source virtual world platform that’s compatible with the Oculus Rift. It allows people with no technical skills toRead More →

By:
On:

Mountain Dew has produced the Dew VR Snow Experience, a live-action snowboarding virtual reality experience that takes fans on a 360 degree adventure through the Utah backcountry. The on-site experience will debut at the Burton US Open of Snowboarding in Vail, Colorado and South by Southwest in Austin, Texas and willRead More →

By:
On:

I don’t usually go around telling people what the best grids are. I run surveys, or I punt the question and just say, “What ever grid works best for you” or “Your own private grid” or something like that. The thing is, everybody is looking for something different. Some peopleRead More →

By:
On:

This week, OpenSimulator released a security fix to protect content on public grids. All public grids should either install the fix, or configure an HTTP proxy to protect important ports, said OpenSim core developer Justin Clark-Casey in the announcement. But the danger goes beyond protecting the data on grid servers, ifRead More →

By:
On:

Cirque du Soleil Media has partnered with Samsung to produce a live action virtual reality aerial show to be viewed on its flagship Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge smartphones in combination with the Gear VR headset. Read full article at The Hollywood Reporter.Read More →

By:
On:

Icelandic article Björk is making a music video for the Oculus Rift. “It’s easy to get really intimate [with virtual reality],” she said in a recent interview. “It’s almost more intimate than real life. It also has this crazy panoramic quality. I think it’s really exciting.” Read the full article atRead More →

By:
On:

This past week’s Game Developers Conference in San Francisco featured more female speakers than ever before, according to new analysis from Vocativ. According to the report, the number of women speakers at the conference has doubled, from 10 percent in 2011, to 20 percent this year. Read full report here.Read More →

By:
On:

The RobStock team have set the date for the 8th annual RobStock Charity Event for the last weekend in March, from Friday, March 27 to Sunday, March 29. “We are asking artists to give an hour of their time free, all tips going to the charity,” the organizers said in a pressRead More →

By:
On:

OpenSim core developer Melanie Thielker is donating a new cluster storage solution to the community. Called FSAssets, it is designed to replace the MySQL databases or the RAID storage arrays used by other grids. FSAssets is also the new asset storage for OSgrid, which had previously relied on RAID storage. Any gridRead More →

By:
On:

Monthly pageviews for Hypergrid Business crossed the 100,000 milestone for the first time in its six-year history, according to today’s Google Analytics report. Visitors viewed 101,371 pages in February, up from 97,036 pages in January. Both of these numbers are a significant increase over last year, when monthly pageviews typicallyRead More →

By:
On:

US $10 (8 Euro) for a 15,000-prim region. Includes Bullet physics, hypergrid, Vivox voice, backups, choice of six starting OARs.Read More →

By:
On:

$15 per month for a 15,000-prim varregion region on the Tag Grid, no set up fee.  Can hold up to 100 avatars. Can be sized as a single standard region, a 2×2 varregion or 4×4 varregion. Grid has own online content marketplace. No hypergrid. Read More →

By:
On:

An open grid is one that allows outside people to connect their own regions. Those regions could be hosted for free on home computers, or be provided by third-party hosting companies, such as Dreamland Metaverse, Zetamex, CloudServe, Oliveira, or any other grid-agnostic vendor on our hosting list. Here is theRead More →

By:
On:

John Vechey, the cofounder of Bejeweled maker PopCap Games, has created a new startup, Pluto VR, to take advantage of the opportunity that the resurgence of virtual reality has created. Seattle-based Pluto VR will focus on the software needed to make virtual and augmented reality environments more social and connected. ReadRead More →

By:
On:

Inventory exports, or IARs, became a heated topic of discussion in Google Plus communities yesterday, with one grid even disabling its IAR exports temporarily as a result. Much of the debate is due to a misunderstanding of how IAR backups work — and of how thieves steal content. What isRead More →

By:
On:

OpenSim developer Dahlia Trimble has won a bounty for her work on fixing llLookAt, a function useful in making objects move better. “Fred Beckhusen has tested the code and is happy with the result,” said Talla Adams in an announcement today. Adams, who is the moderator of the OpenSim VirtualRead More →

By:
On:

OSgrid, the oldest grid running on the OpenSim software, is backup. The news was announced in a tweet a few minutes ago. “OSgrid is opening its gates to direct logins and regions at this very minute,”Melanie Thielker, founder and owner of the Avination grid and an OpenSim core developer, told Hypergrid Business. “It’sRead More →

By:
On:

WizDish‘s ROVR developer kit will cost £395, or about US $610, according to a report today in VRFocus. WizDish is an omni-directional treadmill similar to the $700 Virtuix Omni or the $600 Cyberith Virtualizer and is designed to allow users to walk or run while wearing virtual reality headsets. The device requires special shoes, andRead More →

By:
On:

Valve just announced that it will show off its own virtual reality hardware, SteamVR, at next month’s Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. Valve is the company behind Portal, Team Fortress 2 and the widely-used PC game distribution hub Steam. “At GDC 2015, we’ll be giving demos of the refined Steam Controller,Read More →

By:
On:

Ever since the hardware failure took down OSgrid‘s asset database last August, OSgrid residents have been worrying about whether the grid would ever recover — and, if it did, whether their inventories would be restored as well. The wondering is now over. The asset database has been rebuilt, in aRead More →

By:
On:

When it comes to virtual reality, there are two fronts, two main technical directions that the technology is evolving in that everyone is talking about. But there’s also a third front, that hasn’t been getting as much attention, but which has the potential of being truly revolutionizing. Videos and video games OneRead More →

By:
On:

River Island, a UK-based fashion chain, has released the first-ever fashion app for Google Cardboard-compatible virtual reality headsets. The app was released to promote the launch of the company’s Design Forum x Jean-Pierre Braganza collection, which hits the stores on February 24, and was created in partnership with the British Fashion CouncilRead More →

By:
On:

The drama-plagued AviWorlds grid is back up under its previous ownership with a new domain name, and a new business model. “This will not be a commercial grid and you can only enter by invitation or referral,” grid owner and founder Alexsandro Pomposelli told Hypergrid Business. He is also known asRead More →

By:
On:

Today, the US Patent Office awarded Apple a patent for a virtual reality headset that is, in effect, a case for an iPhone or iPod. The patent application does not mention the iPad — possibly because it was first filed seven years ago, in 2008, two years before the iPadRead More →

By:
On:

Given the choice between selling to Kitely‘s 1,003 local active users or to the 14,075 on the hypergrid, it makes sense that more and more Kitely Market merchants have gone the hypergrid route. In fact, exportables have long been growing at a faster rate than non-exportables for the past eightRead More →

By:
On:

The Adult Metaverse Google Plus group was the fastest-growing OpenSim-related virtual community over the past six weeks. The community, as it sounds, is dedicated to adult content and events on the hypergrid, and has grown from 282 members on January 1 to 444 members today, a growth of 162 members.Read More →

By:
On:

This was another record-breaking month for OpenSim, with new highs in regions, users, and active users on the 303 active worlds. For those who are new readers, OpenSim is a free, open source virtual world platform that’s compatible with the Oculus Rift. It allows people with no technical skills toRead More →

By:
On:

OSgrid has been able to restore the rest of the assets from the recovery disk, OSgrid grid administrator Allen Kerensky announced today. However, he did not provide an estimated date for when OSgrid will be coming back up. He did say that the grid was now working on setting up the networkingRead More →

By:
On:

Immersis, a project from the French VR company Catopsys, has hit its $100,000 Kickstarter goal for a virtual reality projection system. The technology adapts the image, in real-time, to the shape and size of the room you’re in. Watch the video below.Read More →

By:
On:

DX Exchange, one of the oldest exchanges trading Linden Dollars, has now entered the OpenSim payments space. The exchange is now providing the currency infrastructure for Sunlight Grid, with four other grids in beta testing. Currently, there are two main exchanges providing currency services to OpenSim grids. Virwox operates theRead More →

By:
On:

Mattel has updated its View-Master toy, this time, for the smartphone-owning virtual reality generation. The headset, which is scheduled to hit the market in the fall, is made in bright primary colors and works the same way as any other Google Cardboard-compatible headset — it breaks up the cellphone screenRead More →

By:
On:

In the past, several grid owners have discussed using Bitcoin, the peer-to-peer cryptocurrency, for in-world payments but, until now, no grid has done so — Bitcoins are typically too volatile to be used within a grid. To read more about coins and gambling legislation read on https://www.bestuscasinos.org/legal/new-york/ about what mightRead More →

By:
On:

Ireland’s Immersive VR Education Ltd., has launched a Kickstarter to raise funding for its Apollo 11 virtual educational experience for the Oculus Rift. The Kickstarter launched yesterday and is already more than €3,000 towards its €30,000 (US $34,000) goal. Watch the video about the project below. You can also watch an RTERead More →

By:
On:

Its not just cars, movies, and hotels using virtual reality for marketing. Outdoor-apparel brand Merrell showed off an Oculus Rift experience at the Sundance Film Festival last month and said it will do more virtual reality promotions. Watch the video below. Read the full story at AdAge.Read More →

By:
On:

Are you launching a new grid? I bet you’re looking for some combination of “virtual,” “paradise,” “life,” “world,” and “avatar” that haven’t been used yet. Stop! If you use a grid name that reminds people of other OpenSim grids then you will have triple the branding challenge you would have otherwise.Read More →

By:
On:

I Am Cardboard — known for their Google Cardboard virtual reality smartphone cases made out of cardboard or EVA foam — is moving up-scale. Its latest design, XG VR, has already raised $70,000 on Kickstarter, well past its $20,000 goal with 22 days left to go. It’s certainly one ofRead More →

By:
On:

DodoCase, one of the earliest and best known of the many companies that offer Google Cardboard kits, is now offering a design-your-own case for $30. According to the company, volume designs are available for quantities over 50. A plain pop-up viewer is $25, a little on the pricey side forRead More →

By:
On:

The initial batch of companies in what could be the first virtual reality accelerator have been announced. Among the projects selected by Rothenberg Ventures’ River are a system that creates 360-degree VR imagery, a headset that uses eye-tracking to build immersive experiences, and an embedded-in-VR journalism project. Each company got $100,000, office space and regular adviceRead More →

By:
On:

Running your own virtual world? Considering registering a dot-world domain name for it. For example, Sunshine.world is available for $28 from GoDaddy and $25 from NameCheap. The first grid to take advantage of this — ZetaWorlds — has already grabbed the domain Zeta.world, grid owner Timothy Rogers announced today. ICANNRead More →

By:
On:

OSgrid has been able to restore 25 percent of assets from the recovery disk, OSgrid grid administrator Allen Kerensky announced yesterday. He said that Melanie Thielker, an OpenSim core developer and owner of the Avination grid, has been helping with the recovery effort. “With Melanie’s cluster replication design, the assets are importingRead More →

By:
On:

The preview release of OpenSim 0.8.1 is out, with improvements to teleports, physics, varregions, scripting, and more. For large commercial grids, this is an opportunity to check out the new release on their beta grids, so that they are ready for the final release when it comes out — andRead More →