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Sinespace, a virtual world platform from OpenSim co-founder Adam Frisby, launched its virtual reality beta last week for Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, and Windows Mixed Reality headsets.Read More →

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LSL Editor, software that helps users write scripts more easily for Second Life and OpenSim objects, has been updated with more support for OpenSim functions. With the new version 2.56, users can also create scripts that run other scripts, LSL Editor developer Frank Rulof told Hypergrid Business, and the testingRead More →

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US $10 for a 20,000-prim region on the hypergrid-enabled GeVolution grid, with a 14-day free trial. Private grids also available, at $150 for the first month and $125 a month after that.Read More →

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OpenSim active user numbers hit a new high of 34,908 users this month. Land area also went up and is now at the equivalent of 80,175 standard regions, reversing a couple of months of declines. However, it still falls short of the 88,225 regions last November. Much of the movement isRead More →

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The Sacrarium grid has taken down illegal content after receiving complains from users through emails and forums, and removed users who allegedly engaged in illegal behavior with child avatars. Neustadt, a region in Sacrarium grid and which was selling naked child avatars and had children avatars moving around naked, wearing BDSMRead More →

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[Editor’s note: Timothy Rogers has been a valued member of the OpenSim community since he launched SoftPaw Estates back in 2012. That evolved into the Zetamex OpenSim hosting company, which has been ranked as one of the top hosting providers since 2013 in our annual reader surveys and is the companyRead More →

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About a week ago, a social media post accused a region on the Kitely grid of distributing infringing content. Strictly speaking, any infringement complaint needs to be made by the original content creator, through official channels. That wasn’t the case here. It was a pseudonymous user, DMCA GridSkipper, claiming that the FashionistasRead More →

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Keng City will open a new museum on Wednesday, February 1 on the DigiWorldz grid to celebrate Black History Month. The museum will showcase African-American accomplishments and events throughout history starting with the slave trade to present day inventors and innovators. Although they will not exhibit everything owing to space limitationsRead More →

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OpenSim’s longest-running live music venue – Maritime Club Belfast — is celebrating its tenth anniversary this weekend. The party starts at the club location on OSgrid on Sunday, January 28, at 1 p.m. Pacific Time. The club is a virtual recreation of a blues club opened and run by Van Morrison in 1964 inRead More →

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OpenSim land area fell by the equivalent of  8,667 standard regions, and active users dropped by 3,473 due to combination of school holidays and fewer grids reporting stats than in the last couple of months. In addition to InWorldz, Great Canadian Grid, and The Adult Grid, other grids that did notRead More →

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This May, a major new regulation goes into effect — the European General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR. It affects any company anywhere in the world that collects data on Europeans. And yes, that includes emails and IP addresses, and there’s no minimum company size required. If you’re an organized grid,Read More →

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The results of the 2018 OpenSim sentiment survey are in, and the responses are, in general more optimistic than pessimistic about OpenSim’s future, and in general planned to more active this year. Readers were nearly twice as optimistic as pessimistic about OpenSim — 48 percent said that they were optimisticRead More →

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Update: The Chamber of Commerce group mentioned in this article has been shut down, according to a source. Merchants on the closed, commercial InWorldz grid are concerned about perceived drop in users and commercial activity, and worry that the grid owners are no longer committed to the success of theRead More →

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One of my top sources of OpenSim-related news this year has been OpenSim Virtual and similar Google Plus communities. Many grids also have Facebook pages and Twitter accounts, but I find that Google Plus offers a really convenient way to keep track of what’s going on across the metaverse. So,Read More →

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One of the most important numbers in OpenSim is how many new people sign up for accounts each month. New people means new customers for merchants, new creators and performers who help improve quality of life on the grid, new people to interact with, and, of course, potential new landRead More →

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  YrGrid denies allegations that it is refusing redemptions in order to profit from the recent spike in Bitcoin prices. Instead, the problem is caused by their Bitcoin wallet service provider, said the grid, which is a Hong Kong-based commercial gambling-oriented grid with a Bitcoin-based virtual currency. Residents and users haveRead More →

Hypergrid Business Data December

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OpenSim’s public grids reached a new high in active users this month, as traffic went up more than 7 percent, or nearly 2,500 actives. There are now 34,881 active monthly users on the grids that report these figures. The OpenSim Community Conference last weekend accounted for 335 of the new actives,Read More →

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Second Life, with a much bigger economy than that of OpenSim, also has a much bigger problem with copyright infringement than OpenSim. For instance, copybotters have long been using specialized third party viewers to duplicate creators’ content and offer them for sale, lowering demand for the legitimate versions of theRead More →

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OpenSimulator’s core developers said that they’ve gone pretty much as far as they can with the server code, and what the project needs is new people — and a new viewer. “My own kids say that it looks ancient,” core developer Melanie Thielker said at the developer panel that kickedRead More →

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The OpenSimulator Community Conference opened this morning. This is the fifth year that AvaCon is running the conference, celebrating ten years of OpenSim. It is being live streamed on YouTube. From 7 to 8 a.m., Pacific time, the developers will discuss the latest 0.9 release of OpenSim. Panel members includeRead More →

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OpenSim hosting company Dreamland Metaverse received the highest scores for performance, support, stability and its user interface in this year’s hosting providers survey for the fourth year in a row, followed by  Zetamex Network, DigiWorldz and 3DLES. There were 36 responses total to this year’s hosting survey, which asks grid ownersRead More →

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The submission deadline for Tangle Grid‘s Winter Picture Contest has been extended to Sunday, December 17 following an outage that saw the grid offline for more than a week. The previous deadline was December 1. The grid came back up yesterday after a series of technical issues that included aRead More →

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If you are a 360-degree photographer, or want to become one, then working with Google Street View and becoming one of their Trusted Photographers will definitely help establish credibility in the industry. In fact, Google actually helps their contributors get hired to create virtual tours. According to Google, market research conductedRead More →

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First, I’d like to apologize. I first noticed that Zetamex had posted its OpenSim hosting prices over the summer, and meant to do a story then, even contacting the company and some of its customers for quotes. But then a family medical emergency happened, and I’ve spent much of theRead More →

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Apple has lagged behind in the virtual and augmented reality race so far. Their phones can be used for some low-end VR, via the Cardboard platform from Google, but they haven’t had anything of their own to match the higher-end Samsung Gear VR and Google Daydream View headsets. Its latestRead More →

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Phantom limb pain can be debilitating but is often treatable with mirror therapy, which tricks the brain into thinking the amputated limb is still there. Now the same treatment is available as a virtual reality app, which offers a more efficient, effective, and engaging way to get the therapy, accordingRead More →

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Millions of people have already played Sea Hero Quest on the mobile phones — and helped scientists learn how people find their way around in order to better treat dementia patients. Now the game is also available in virtual reality, for Samsung Gear VR users. Sea Hero Quest VR wasRead More →

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Oncomfort, a startup based in Houston, Texas is helping patients diagnosed with cancer manage their anxiety through virtual reality. Oncomfort helps patients deal not only with their anxiety, pain management and stress but also provide information about their medical journey. To pursue its goal, the company has already launched fiveRead More →

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Grids are getting an early start on the holidays this year, with a number of winter-themed regions already up and ready to visit, and a full calendar of events planned across the hypergrid. Skiing and Winter Expo in Tangle Grid This year’s Tangle Winter Expo will run from December 1 toRead More →

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OpenSim land area grew by the equivalent of 3,905 standard regions last month, a new record high of 88,225 regions. This was despite the fact that several large grids have stopped publishing land area stats, including InWorldz, Great Canadian Grid, and The Adult Grid. The biggest gainer was OSgrid which addedRead More →

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Although many creators do not speak up, theft and illegal distribution of their content is hurting their morale and creativity, and may even be driving some out of OpenSim altogether. One creator of mesh avatars, who did not want to be named, saw her products distributed full perms across multipleRead More →

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With all the latest news headlines about sexual harassment, Los Angeles based startup Vantage Point thinks it can make a difference with virtual reality. The company has developed a training program aimed at universities and corporations, and is now looking for funding to build a virtual reality experience around it. The crowdfundingRead More →

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More than 400 responses came in for this year’s Eighth Annual OpenSim Grid Survey, and Littlefield received the highest overall scores, followed by AllCity, Virtual Brasil, and DigiWorldz. DigiWorldz also had the largest number of readers who said it was their primary grid, followed by Kitely. This is the second year inRead More →

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The total land area of the public OpenSim grids fell by more than 1,000 regions this month as ZanGrid shut down and Genesis Metaverse moved its hosting. Total active users numbers continued to rise, however, with about 2,000 new actives. Zangrid, which had 439 regions as of last month, is closingRead More →

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There is a lot you can do or a lot of places you can travel to in-world during this Halloween festive period, with many OpenSim grids running Halloween-related events such as hunts and parties, some grids having Halloween related islands and regions where they are celebrating OpenSim builds and hostingRead More →

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Tangle Grid is hosting the Halloween Expo starting this Sunday, October 15 at the Expo Isle region where different creators from all around OpenSim will come show off, sell and promote their Halloween-related items to visitors. It will be the fourth time that the grid is running the event, whichRead More →

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As anyone with an innovative idea has probably discovered, a great idea can only go so far without support, and when it comes to creating music content in the virtual reality space two key questions often arise: How to convince the music industry to support productions and how to keepRead More →

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One of  oldest commercial OpenSim grids is shutting down at the end of this month. ZanGrid was founded five years ago as Zandramas grid, and is one of the top 25 grids by both popularity and land area. Last month, the grid reported 351 active users and the land area equivalentRead More →

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Barely a year after Genesis Metaverse stopped hosting its own grid infrastructure and moved to hosting services from DigiWorldz, the grid has decided to go it on its own again, according to a post. The move was not due to financial problems with DigiWorldz because it has paid for the service inRead More →

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Gloebit has built, tested and proposed to Firestorm viewer team, a patch that, if implemented, will bring multi-currency support in OpenSim and eliminate the need for Gloebit users to do complicated coding and configuration for their grids and regions to support various money modules. With the current viewer implementation, theRead More →

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OSgrid, OpenSim’s largest and oldest virtual world, launched a fundraising campaign today. The OSgrid Carnival Fundraiser kicked off today at 10 a.m. Pacific and will run until 10 p.m. Pacific today on the grid’s Event Plaza region. It will continue from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Pacific on Saturday at the same venue andRead More →

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AviWorlds is back online after owner Alexsandro Pomposelli put aside his differences with SkyLife owner Josh Boam. The two had an acrimonious dispute last year after AviWorlds went down due to server issues and other problems. “I always found Josh to be a very smart person and never doubted his knowledge andRead More →

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This year’s AvatarFest, an annual celebration of OpenSim creativity, opens its doors this Saturday, September 23, at noon Pacific time. The third annual festival begins with two days of entertainment this weekend, followed by a 30-day-long exhibition. The event is hypergrid-accessible, at avatarfest.net:6000, and will features singers, poets and DJs fromRead More →

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This year’s OpenSimulator Community Conference will be held on Dec. 9 and 10, and applications for volunteers and presenters are now open. Organized as a joint production by core developers of OpenSimulator and AvaCon, this year’s conference will focus on the latest software release, visions for the future, and technologies or contentRead More →

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OpenSim’s public grids gained 2,546 active users this month, and land area increased as well, by the equivalent of 2,475 standard region. OSgrid gained the largest land area — 4,440 new standard region equivalents, followed by DigiWorldz with 848, Virtual Worlds Grid with 441, Kitely with 411 and Atek Grid with 256Read More →

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If you’ve been keeping up with media based content marketing — and hopefully you have — then you know the current trend is to publish and share immersive, 360-degree videos. While a 360-degree video is playing, you can pan the camera view to see the entire area, hence the “360-degree”Read More →