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According to a report released earlier this month by Shanghai-based Interface News, China’s two leading online commerce platform,  Taobao and AliBaba, together sell more than 300,000 virtual reality headsets every month, with lower-cost headsets accounting for the bulk of the sales. The report does not include direct sales from theRead More →

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Bright Canopy, the browser-based streaming access service for Second Life and OpenSim, is coming back on Wednesday after a three-week outage. The service launched at the end of August to great reviews but was hit by a sharp spike in the price of cloud computing services. It was offering users all-you-can-eatRead More →

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Want to attend the TechCrunch Disrupt conference but can’t make it in person? Being there in virtual reality might be the next best thing. Today, YouVisit is livestreaming the conference via its free virtual reality app, available for iPhone, and Android platforms, as well as online through traditional 360-degree video thatRead More →

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Tangle Grid’s 2015 Steam Expo has been drawing both local residents and hypergrid visitors, grid owner grid owner Leslie Kling told Hypergrid Business. And each event seems to draw more and more people, she added, as word gets out. The Steam Expo and the Fashion Expo are the most popular sheRead More →

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Press release: 23 million America adults already experimenting with virtual reality according to new study NEW YORK — As the technology world braces for major virtual reality product releases, many millions of Americans have already experienced the technology, according to a new study released today. According to YouVisit’s Virtual RealityRead More →

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AviWorlds now has a Facebook app that allows people to take pictures in-world and post them to Facebook. Many other grids have Facebook pages, but the only other commercial grids with Facebook apps are Island Oasis, which launched theirs late last year, and Kitely, which has had one since 2011. SecondRead More →

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Virtual city recreation project Digital Lisbon, currently a part of the AviWorlds grid, has launched a crowd-funding campaign on IndieGoGo to set up its own, dedicated world. Founder Carlos Loff is looking to raise $2,000, which will cover half a year of hosting and provide money for events and content. LoffRead More →

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OpenSim grids saw continued steady growth this month, with total region counts, user numbers, and monthly actives all reaching new record highs. There are now the equivalent of 65,122 standard regions on OpenSim’s 317 active public grids, a new record high. There are also 478,497 registered users and 31,567 active users, anRead More →

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Pirate’s Atoll announced today that the grid is moving to DigiWorldz. The Atoll has been a small, hypergrid-enabled standalone minigrid hosted with Oliveira Virtual Lands. Grid owner John Simmons, also known as Strannik Zipper in-world, said that he decided to move the grid to be closer to DigiWorldz’ music scene, to take advantageRead More →

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Mini USA, the company behind the iconic Mini Cooper, has just jumped on the free Google Cardboard bandwagon. They’re following in the footsteps of several other companies that have been giving away virtual reality headsets lately, including Volvo, cell phone manufacturers LG and OnePlus, the HomeLane furniture store, a pornRead More →

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DigiWorldz has announced a referral and affiliate program for residents, bloggers, and anyone else who would like to bring new users to the grid and earn a commission on all future land payments. This is not a one-time payment, grid founder Terry Ford told Hypergrid Business. Whenever a new userRead 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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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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Press release: OSVR Confirms Pre-order Date for Hacker Development Kit; Launches Content Discovery Platform Software platform reveals 65 new supporting companies including Legendary VR and NVIDIA’s Gameworks VR BERLIN – Organizers of Open Source Virtual Reality (OSVR), an open software and hardware platform for virtual reality, today announced development ofRead 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 world’s first full-length feature film to be shot completely in 360 degrees, “Career Opportunities in Organized Crime,” has begun filming in Baltimore. A documentary-style comedy about the Russian mafia, the movie is helmed by first-time director Alexander Oshmyansky, and features mostly unknown actors. The movie is scheduled to be released next year.Read More →

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Press release: ReelTime Revolutionizes Virtual Reality – Launches ReelTime VR Mobile App Worldwide Featuring Megs McLean SPRING HILL, FL – ReelTime announces the release of the ReelTime VR app and production suite, and a virtual reality film of country artist Megs McLean. ReelTime VR is available as a free app for iPhone, Android, and BlackberryRead More →

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Press release: Scienverse creates virtual reality world that combines VR apps and social network; Kickstarter campaign starts in 2 weeks THE HAGUE – Scienverse officially announces its project of creating a virtual reality world built with Unreal Engine 4 that provides a platform for third-party virtual reality applications combined with a nextRead 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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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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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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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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Press release: 3rd Rock Grid to transition to Podex 3rd Rock Grid is going through a number of changes as part of a transition to a new ownership model. One of the changes will be to transition away from directly managing their currency, the Geode, otherwise known as the GO$.Read 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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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 Immersive Education Initiative today announced the official IMMERSION 2015 speakers, exhibits, presentations, and workshops. Featuring nearly 100 sessions about virtual reality, augmented reality, 3D printing, wearable computing, brain interfaces, and more, IMMERSION 2015 is open to the public from 7 September to 10 September. Day passes  are available forRead More →

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LOS ANGELES, Calif. – Nokia today announced OZO, the first commercially available virtual reality  camera designed and built for professional content creators and the first in a planned portfolio of digital media solutions from Nokia Technologies, the company’s advanced technology and licensing business. “We’re thrilled to introduce OZO to theRead More →

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BRIGHTON, ENGLAND – Epic Games, in collaboration with the Wellcome Trust, a biomedical research charity based in London, has concluded the Big Data VR Challenge, awarding $20,000 to LumaPie. This international team created a VR visualization of study results of environmental and genetic factors that have shaped the development theRead 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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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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  Always known for its vibrant music scene, and charitable efforts, 3rd Rock Grid announced a day of music and literature in an effort to raise funds for the charity Doctors Without Borders. For the past eight years 3rd Rock Grid has held ROBstock in the spring, a three dayRead 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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CHICAGO–SIGGRAPH 2015, the annual interdisciplinary education experience and conference on the latest computer graphics and interactive techniques, will debut a new program this August. The 2015 VR Village will feature real-time immersion in the latest virtual and augmented realities, including Nomadic Virtual Reality (VR), Tabletop Augmented Reality (AR), Full-Dome Cinema,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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According to researchers at Stanford University, one of reasons people get motion sickness while wearing virtual reality headsets is that in real life, our eyes get more light bouncing back from near-by objects than from distant ones. In a typical virtual reality headset, however, all the light rays are comingRead 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 →

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The founders of the fast-growing, low-priced DigiWorldz grid have settled their ownership dispute, putting at rest fears about the grid’s stability and future. “I was able to negotiate an amicable agreement by all previous and current members of Digital Worlds Group, LLC,” grid founder Terry Ford told Hypergrid Business. “DigiWorldz is nowRead More →

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Press release: Syfy Launches Virtual Reality App with Google Cardboard for Highly-Anticipated Series “The Expanse” San Diego, CA — Syfy has announced the launch of a virtual reality app for The Expanse, the network’s highly-anticipated drama series from Alcon TV premiering in December 2015. Utilizing Google Cardboard, the app immersesRead More →

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The crowfunding campaign to build a virtual copy of the city of Lisbon was relaunched today, founder Carlos Loff said in an announcement. The project is now planned to be 144 regions in size, equivalent to about 9.4 square kilometers or 2,300 acres of virtual land. That’s about one-ninth the size ofRead More →