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Press release: VirtualTourCafe Offers 3-D Virtual Reality Alternative to Traditional Real Estate Virtual Tours and Open House Online service embraces new 3-D technology developed by Matterport to offer international and out-of-town buyers an alternative to the traditional real estate virtual tours and being there in person. Pleasanton, CA  – VirtualTourCafeRead More →

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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 →

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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 →

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Press release: NextVR Completes First Live Broadcast Quality Virtual Reality Patented Technology Ushers in a New Era for TV, Film, Events, and Communications  Laguna Beach, CA – NextVR, a technology company that captures and delivers live and on-demand virtual reality experiences, last Friday announced they have successfully conducted the first ever live, broadcastRead More →

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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 →

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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 →

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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 →

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Zandramas — an invitation-only closed grid — will become ZanGrid tomorrow, where anyone is welcome to join. In addition, hypergrid visitors will be able to come in and get a preview of the grid on the hypergrid-enabled Club Zandramas region. According to manager and co-founder Suzan De Koning, the grid decidedRead More →

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Microsoft has unveiled a prototype of HoloLens, its most intriguing product in years, as part of a pre-launch of Windows 10. HoloLens gives a new dimension to the ‘holographic method’ invented by Hungarian-British physicist Dennis Gabor, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1971. It is a head-mounted holographic displayRead More →

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A week ago, I asked: Can AviWorlds find stability under new management? We got the answer today, and the answer is, “No.” “After many weeks of thoughtful consideration, as well as viewing the many comments on Google+, Facebook, and in private emails, we’ve decided to end the battle and closeRead More →

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The number of exportable items sold on the Kitely Market has exceeded non-exportables for the first time since the company enabled delivery to other grids early last spring. When Kitely Market merchants add products to their online stores, they can sell those products in a number of variations — differentRead More →

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A new data replication has successfully passed its first round of testing, OSgrid grid administrator Allen Kerensky announced on Monday. However, there was still no word as to when the grid will be coming back up. In addition, the grid still hasn’t received its recovered data drives from the companyRead More →

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The “dark metaverse” of private OpenSim grids gained regions at four times the rate of public grids, according to Hypergrid Business projections based on a survey of hosting providers. Last year, private grids accounted for an estimated 60 percent of all grids, adding up to 50,070 regions in the “darkRead More →

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Zetamex, a Las Vegas-based OpenSim hosting company, has opened its doors to new customers yesterday, and published their new price schedule for region rentals. The regions are available on ZetaWorlds, Atek, WestWorld, Metropolis or any other open grid. Prices start at $15 a month for a single region capable ofRead More →

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A third grid also offers the ability to upload and download avatar inventories — the Atek Grid, backed by  3D Virtual Web, Inc. and CloudServe, an OpenSim hosting company. The other two grids are the UK-based magic-themed grid Spellscape and Metropolis, an open grid based in Germany. An inventory backup, also knownRead More →

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Press release: Randi Zuckerberg To Keynote Next Galaxy’s Virtual Reality Focused Business Innovation And Growth Summit Next Galaxy Corp., a leading technology and content solutions company developing dynamic, innovative consumer virtual reality experiences and technology, is proud to announce that Randi Zuckerberg is scheduled to be the keynote speaker forRead More →

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If you’re looking for a world where women are the masters and men are the slaves — and who isn’t? — then you’re in luck this holiday season. Avalonia Estate, the only “femdom” lifestyle community grid in OpenSim is back. Now, running a grid is extremely labor intensive, so, thisRead More →

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Still undecided about which of the 200-plus active grids to use as your primary home base? This announcement should raise Metropolis a few notches on your list. The grid has just announced a Web-based inventory download tool that any grid resident can use. Metropolis inventory backup tool. The Metropolis toolRead More →

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Press release: InWorldz Residents Celebrate Holidays with Toys for Tots Donation Drive Residents give most ever to Toys for Tots in Annual Fundraiser San Antonio, TX — Last night wrapped up the annual Toys for Tots fundraiser on InWorldz, a 3D simulation platform that relies on User Generated Content. Events over theRead More →

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Growth in the Kitely Market‘s exportable products continued to exceed that of non-exportables this month, as Kitely rolled out several new features for merchants in recent weeks. The Kitely Market currently contains 7,213 different items or “variations,” grouped into 3,449 product listings. On the Kitely Market, like on Amazon andRead More →

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So you’re walking along on your virtual treadmill, wearing your virtual reality goggles, and you come to a door. You stretch out your hand to push it open and feel … nothing. Because there’s no physical door actually there. One way to fake a sense of touch is to attachRead More →

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AviWorlds, a commercial social grid with a history of experimenting with business models, is putting a stop to its latest experiment with the hypergrid. This is the fourth time, by our count, that AviWorlds has turned hypergrid connectivity on and off. The last time was this spring. Hypergrid is theRead More →

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What do OpenSim users want for most of all? Content. According to this year’s OpenSim  Hosting Survey, 35 percent of respondents most wanted an online marketplace, and 30 percent wanted a bigger selection of content — and 53 percent picked one or the other, or both. In third place was a web-basedRead More →

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It was a three-way competition between Dreamland Metaverse, Zetamex and CloudServe in this year’s hosting providers survey, since the OSgrid outage took a lot of the smaller hosting providers out of the running. Despite the outage, the total number of responses was up by 62 percent compared to last year.Read More →

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Toronto-based Cordon Media, Inc. has raised more than $21,000 Canadian dollars on a $50,000 Indiegogo campaign for a new virtual reality smartphone headset that works with both iPhones and Android devices, folds up into a slim 15mm phone case, and comes with an innovative multi-touch gesture interface. The Pinć– pronounced “pinch” —Read More →

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OMC helps establish an economy for the XMIR grid OMC allows hypergrid travelers to make payments OMCs can be purchased with the widest variety of payment options To help establish an economy for the grid, the recently-launched commercial Xmir grid has added support for in-world payments via the OMC currency from Virwox, a virtual currencyRead More →

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3rd Rock Grid, one of the oldest social OpenSim grids, has joined the hypergrid. As a result, the number of active users on hypergrid-enabled grids has just crossed the 12,000 mark, to 12,416. 3rd Rock reported 470 active users last month. And, with the addition of 3rd Rock’s 443 regions,Read More →

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OSgrid has begun the rebuilding process, grid administrators announced today, even as the latest attempt to recover data starts to approach the finish line. Around 3 terabytes of data has been recovered as of this morning, out of a total of 3.5 terabytes — or about 21 million files. On NovemberRead More →

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CANADA –  Corran Journal today announced their expansion to cover all OpenSim grids. Residents across the metaverse have a new source for reviews, opinions, and stories that affect their social lives. “We’ve been inworld since 2010, in SecondLife we were known as the Corran Sun,” said editor Winter Silversmith. “IRead More →

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The total number of regions, registered users and active users all hit new record highs this month. The total land area on OpenSim’s public grids rose by the equivalent of 1,943  standard regions to 54,123, the grids gained more than 8,000 new registered users, and the number of active users rose by an evenRead More →

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Press release: Announcing the Federal Consortium of Virtual Worlds 2015 Workshop, March 6-7, 2015 November 17, 2014 – The U.S. Army Research Laboratory, Human Research and Engineering Directorate, Simulation and Training Technology Center’s Military Open Simulator Enterprise Strategy (MOSES) and AvaCon are pleased to announce the Federal Consortium of VirtualRead More →

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Tangle Grid, a mid-sized commercial grid known for its hypergrid-enabled Expos, has decided to reduce the number of its 2015 Expos, but to make each Expo longer. “ The committee got together and looked at traffic and participation numbers for the Expos on TanGLe and we decided to make changes,” saidRead More →

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Crista Lopes — you might know her as “Diva Canto,” an OpenSim core developer, inventor of the hypergrid and professor of informatics at UC Irvine — is now also in the viewer development business. And her new viewer, OnLook, is a dramatic departure from other viewers we’ve seen so far forRead More →

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Are you still holding off on getting a Google Cardboard kit and turning your smartphone into a super low-cost virtual reality device? Maybe Volvo will change your mind. On Tuesday, the company is giving away a limited number of Volvo-branded Google Cardboard kits. All you have to do is downloadRead More →

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OSgrid has successfully recovered 1.9 terabytes, out of 3.5 terabytes total, grid president James Stallings II said during a conversation on OSgrid’s Internet Relay Chat channel yesterday. The conversation was reposted on OSgrid’s forums by grid administrator and OpenSim developer Allen Kerensky. Stallings — who was posting under the userRead More →

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The motorsports-focused Next Reality grid has merged with AviWorlds. Next Reality had 125 regions as of mid-October, and was known for its racetrack and for its adults-only Red Light Hotel. Grid owner Mike Hart had been running the grid on his own until a failure with its RAID storage broughtRead More →

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There are plenty of headsets on the market today that are basically shells made out of plastic — or cardboard — that you slide your smartphone into. Higher-end devices such as the Oculus Rift, Sony’s Project Morpheus, GameFace, AntVR, Vrvana Totem, CastAR, and Immersion VRelia, haven’t yet hit the consumer market.Read More →

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Press release: CloudServe announces appointment of Chief Technical Officer AUSTIN, Texas — OpenSim hosting company CloudServe is announcing the addition of  Josh Boam — also known as Josh Piper in-world — to its staff as Chief Technical Officer. As experienced programmer and content creator, Boam assumed his role with the CloudServe teamRead More →

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3DGrid, a small non-profit German grid offering free or nearly free regions to educational institutions, announced today that it is merging with Metropolis, Germany’s largest grid. 3DGrid is a three-year old grid that, at last count, had 14 regions. It did not release its user numbers. “My personal involvement inRead More →

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The Tokyo University of Information Sciences released a new tool this week for converting OpenSim regions to mesh. The new OAR Converter tool takes a region saved as an OAR backup file and converts it to a Collada file, which can then be used inside Unity 3D and other all-mesh environments.Read More →

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Merchants selling products on the Kitely Market can now advertise them. According to today’s announcement, merchants can now put up ads promoting individual products, or their entire stores. The ads will appear on top of search results in a “Featured Products” or “Featured Store” section. Prices start at US $0.10Read More →

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OpenSim Creations, the top site for OpenSim creators sharing original content under Creative Commons licenses, is gone. “In the wee hours of October 20, the entire /home folder of this server got wiped,” said owner Vanish Seriath in a post today. “Why, I don’t know. To make matters worse, I don’tRead More →

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Terry Ford, founder of the commercial 3rd Rock Grid, is spearheading the formation of new association of OpenSim grid owners. “We at 3rd Rock Grid do not see other grids as our enemy,” he told Hypergrid Business. “Instead, we hope all grid are successful as their success is our success,Read More →

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Island Oasis, a closed commercial social grid, released a new viewer for its residents yesterday. The custom viewer — available for download here — is a version of Firestorm configured specifically to work with Island Oasis, including links to the grid’s online marketplace, currency purchases, and full search functionality, said theRead More →

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The Adult Grid became the second major closed grid to connect to the Kitely Market, the grid announced today in a press release. Zandramas, another closed grid, did the same this past April. The Adult Grid — like the name suggests — features adult content. It came in second inRead More →

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There is a new version of the OpenSimulator software, 0.8.0.2, which fixes an inventory permissions bug that appeared in 0.8 and 0.8.0.1. This change fixes a problem with the llGiveInventory and llGiveInventoryList scripting commands, said core developer Justin Clark-Casey in a post. When these script commands are used to give items to anRead More →

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Press Release: First Classes in U.S. to Use Oculus Rift Virtual Reality System at Charlotte Latin School CHARLOTTE, N.C. — The art, engineering and programming students at Charlotte Latin School are the first students in the U.S. to use the Oculus Rift virtual reality system in their classes, announced Arch N.Read More →

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OpenSim hosting company Zetamex is bringing founder Timothy Rogers back as its CEO, a new support partnership with Zandramas, and a limited time region offer to existing customers. This was the news that came out at last night’s public meeting at the Zetamex virtual office on their ZetaWorlds grid, andRead More →

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The total land area on OpenSim’s public grids rose by the equivalent of 1,616 standard regions to 52,180, the grids gained more than 6,000 new registered users, but the number of active users fell by 280 this month on the back of a continued outage at OSgrid. Metropolis was the biggestRead More →