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Entertainment companies are piling on virtual reality, with immersive Oculus Rift experiences that they take to conventions about public venues. The latest to jump on the bandwagon is Fox, which is bringing an X-Men-themed virtual experience to Comic-Con tomorrow. According to the Associated Press, attendees will get 90 seconds toRead More →

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Virtual reality camera maker Jaunt VR has teamed up with entertainment industry Variety for the first-ever virtual reality coverage of a red carpet premiere. David S. Cohen of Variety and Tara McNamara of ThatWasSomething.com co-hosted the coverage Monday night of the Hollywood premiere of “Gardians of the Galaxy.” Kenneth Voelker of JauntRead More →

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Warner Bros. will be rolling out a new virtual experience at Comic-Con this year, based on the new movie Into the Storm. Booth #4545 will feature “an intense experiential booth featuring a 4-D immersive Oculus Rift experience that puts fans directly into a recreated scene from the upcoming tornado survival film,” theRead More →

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Justin Clark-Casey’s monthly OpenSim development update reminded me that OpenSim now has a new command for grid owners — “show grid size.” The command counts up all the land area on a grid, including the land of variable-sized regions, and gives the answer in terms of square kilometers. And afterRead More →

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The first-ever hypergrid fashion expo begins this Saturday on Tangle Grid and will last through August 3. Time is running out for merchants and creators interested in being part of the event. To participate, contact IsambardKingdom Brunel on Tangle Grid, or Peter2 Veliz in Second Life. Merchants looking for a more permanentRead More →

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A new branch of OpenSim, ArribaSim, promises better performance than mainline OpenSim while maintaining full compatibility. And now there’s a packaged version of it, called Arriba Mini-Grid, that sets itself up with a single click. The package is provided by Dorena’s World, a mid-sized German-language commercial grid. In face, Dorena’s WorldRead More →

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Oliveira Virtual Lands, which rents regions and parcels on OSgrid and Metropolis, now has a presence on the French-language non-profit open grid FrancoGrid. Like the other two grids, FrancoGrid is hypergrid enabled and residents are allowed to make backups of entire regions and inventories. Oliveira has set up a home regionRead More →

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  Daden Ltd,. a UK-based virtual reality consulting firm, has released a virtual campus demo that runs in the browser. The demo showcases some of the company’s virtual tools, including the ability to display slideshows, videos, Web links and PDF documents in the world. It also offers maps, collaborative rating systems, comment boards,Read More →

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Press Release:  OpenSimulator Community Conference Announces Principal Scientist at Oculus VR as Keynote Speaker July 22, 2014 – The OpenSimulator Community Conference is pleased to announce Dr. Steve LaValle, principal scientist at Oculus VR and professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois, will be a keynote speaker at theRead More →

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According to a new report by UK-based virtual worlds research firm KZero, 83 million head-mounted virtual reality display devices such as the Oculus Rift will have been sold by 2018. In addition, 18 million virtual reality input systems will have been sold by that year. Prices to drop from $350Read More →

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A grid’s welcome region is like the home page of a website. It’s where new users arrive for the first time, and where hypergrid travelers land if all they know is the grid’s loginURI. For example, OSgrid’s welcome region is LBSA Plaza. Its full hypergrid address is hg.osgrid.org:80:lbsa plaza  but hg.osgrid.org:80 worksRead More →

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Mal, Maria and Tara are joined by Petlove Petshop and Cinders Vale for wide ranging discussion, including reflections on Relay for Life in Second Life, changes in the Terms of Service, the eighth closing of AviWorldz, the falling price of land in OpenSim and the latest improvements in OpenSim metrics.Read More →

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Zetamex CEO Timothy Rogers has posted an interesting article about WhiteCore-Sim, a version of OpenSim that is best known for providing the metaverse with variable-sized regions. A few grids have attempted to run based on the WhiteCore-Sim software or its predecessor, Aurora-Sim, including Nova grid in the picture above. But,Read More →

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The biggest choice every new grid makes is whether to enable hypergrid or not. Every single grid up until now has opted for either yes, no, or sometimes. Newly-launched Exo-Life, however, has picked a different path. It is on the hypergrid, but connects only to eight other grids. Currently, of theRead More →

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Poland-based headset maker Cmoar Ltd. has relaunched its Kickstarter this week with a lower-priced headset. “After only a couple of days since the original Kickstarter campaign has been launched, and in result of an interest it created, the company managed to start a cooperation with a new manufacturer who offeredRead More →

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So you’ve decided to start a commercial grids, hosting company, or consulting firm. Congratulations! But customers aren’t breaking down the doors like you expected. You could blame the customers for not being smart enough to appreciate what you’re offering. Or you could check and see if you’re making any ofRead More →

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In doing this month’s stats report, I updated the Terms of Service and Intellectual Property Rights policy links for a few grids. And I got to wondering about all the other grids that don’t have these policies posted. Out of 213 active grids this month, I only have links toRead More →

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In doing this month’s stats report, I updated the Terms of Service and Intellectual Property Rights policies for a few grids. And I got to wondering about all the other grids that don’t have these policies posted. Out of 213 active grids this month, I only have links to 23Read More →

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Last summer, Linden Lab got into some deep water with content creators when it updated its Terms of Service to grab too many intellectual property rights. Today, Linden Lab announced that it updated the TOS, but the update might not have gone far enough. Read the full Terms of ServiceRead More →

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Finally, some good news for avatars on the social network front – Google Plus, which has become a favorite platform for OpenSim communities — has dropped its real names requirement. “Today, we are taking the last step: there are no more restrictions on what name you can use,” the companyRead More →

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The top OpenSim grids saw a record increase in active users this month, and a near-record increase in region counts, despite the summer season and a lack of stats from a major grid. The top 40 public OpenSim grids gained 2,109 regions this month, for a new record high of 46,907 regions.Read More →

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When face-to-face meetings for mentoring and coaching sessions aren’t an option, most people would turn to telephone calls, Skype, or Google Hangouts. But a mentoring session in a virtual world offers some additional functionality and some benefits not found in other platforms. For example, in addition to removing the barriersRead More →

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Press release: Virtual Facebook Refugees find new home on Avatar Social Network As Facebook continues to crack down on pseudonymous accounts such as those of Second Life avatars, some virtual communities are migrating to other sites. Most recently, Pointe Fusion Elite, a community of DJs, artists, and music fans, has movedRead More →

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In a recent comment thread, some readers have asked questions about OpenSim’s long-term goals and road map. I’m going to offer some suggestions now, and ask you, my readers, to contribute others in the comments. Then I will do a survey of our readership to find out which long-term featuresRead More →

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Press release: ImmersiON announces strategic fusion with VRelia IRVINE, Calif. — Irvine-based ImmersiON has announced a partnership with Spain’s VRelia to combine ImmersiON’s head-mounted display technology with the Professional Head Mounted Display business unit of VRelia to provide the user with an unparalleled experience. “This is ground breaking news,” said Kevin Williams, chairman of International ImmersionRead More →

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The first image of Samsung’s new virtual reality headset, the Gear VR, have been leaked online. Gear VR is basically a more comfortable and durable version of Google Cardboard, though with one significant difference. Both headsets work by putting two lenses in front of a customer’s own smartphone. In theRead More →

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William Warren’s research group is advancing virtual reality technology in the service of studying the science of the swarm: how patterns of crowd movement emerge from individual behaviors. He described his work June 29 in a keynote address to a conference in Vancouver. PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] —The cognitive scientistsRead More →

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OSgrid became the second OpenSim grid to hit 100,000 registered users today. OSgrid is the leading testing and development grids for OpenSim, one of the oldest grids, and the second-largest grid by land area. The grid is celebrating its seventh birthday later on this month. InWorldz, the most popular commercialRead More →

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OculusVR, the company behind the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset that was acquired by Facebook for $2 billion this year, will hold a virtual reality conference in September. Oculus Connect will be held on September 19 and 20 in Hollywood, California and is aimed at virtual reality developers, engineers andRead More →

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Press release: Virtual Reality in Gaming Market Expected to Reach USD 5,839.9 Million Globally in 2019: Transparency Market Research ALBANY — According to a new market report published by Transparency Market Research, Virtual Reality in Gaming Market, the global virtual reality in gaming market was worth USD 466.6 million inRead More →

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The OpenSimulator Community Conference has begun running scalability tests on its grid every Tuesday at noon Pacific time. The hypergrid address is cc.opensimulator.org:8002:Keynote 1. Load testing doesn’t just help the conference organizers. “All related performance improvements are fed directly back into the OpenSimulator code base so will help everybody using the project,” saidRead More →

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There’s a number of things to be said about the publicity Linden Lab recently attracted for moving developers towards a next-generation version of Second Life. It’s bad for OpenSim. OpenSim still draws the majority of its users from Second Life due to the fact that it uses the same interface.Read More →

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The Kickstarter crowd-funding campaign for Control VR, a globe-based virtual reality motion control system ended successfully Saturday with $442,227 raised. The company had asked for $250,000. Delivery of the devices is scheduled to begin in December. A rig that includes both hands, arms, fingers and body cost $600 through theRead More →

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Press release: ‘Avatar Hookup’ Serves as Social Media Portal for Avatars A new social media platform is providing a safe space for avatars to connect. Avatar Hookup allows people to create anonymous identities to meet people with similar interests, add friends, post status updates, invite friends to events, place classified ads,Read More →

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I recently contracted with a builder to do some work on the Hyperica hyperport, and created a new provider agreement for the project. At the start of the project, before we had negotiated any terms, there were a bunch of options to pick from. The ones that were relevant to our project areRead More →

Screen shot of the WWII role play sim. (Image courtesy Suzan de Koning.)

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InWorldz residents are circulating a petition demanding the removal of a World War II-themed role playing build from the grid. “I cannot support a grid that makes it possible for people to play a role playing game based on World World II,” resident Suzan de Koning told Hypergrid Business. “ThereRead More →

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I’ve recently switched my advertising management platform from AdSpeed to Google’s DoubleClick for Publishers Small Business. It was a big change — I’d been using AdSpeed almost since Hypergrid Business was first launched five years ago. Since grids — especially commercial grids — can offer advertising to their customers onRead More →

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OculusVR announced this week that the first batch of the new, higher-resolution development kits, known as DK2, have left their manufacturing facility and are on their way to customers. “We expect to ship roughly 10,000 DK2s from the factory in July, with just over half of the units through distributionRead More →

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Oliveira Virtual Lands, an OpenSim hosting company known for its OSgrid regions, now allows its customers to save backups of their regions directly to Dropbox. “Oliveira Lands customers may make their backups at our server, they may choose to download to their own computers or save it to their DropboxRead More →

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A little more than two weeks ago, AviWorlds came back from its fifth official grid closing — not counting temporary outages due to technical issues — to announce that they will be running the grid by themselves from now on, with no outside help. Portuguese-language messages on the grid’s FacebookRead More →

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Press release: DreamNation Establishes Own Virtual Currency, DNCoins NEVADA — DreamNation has established its own virtual currency, DNCoins (DN$). DN$ was successfully and smoothly rolled out over the last two weeks of June, and has been adopted by members of the grid with enthusiasm. DreamNation previously used Virwox’s OMC$ as its internal currency prior to adoptingRead More →

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OpenSim grids are gearing up for the 4th of July and other summer events this coming month. OSgrid holds giant birthday bash OSgrid, the world’s most popular non-profit OpenSim grid, is having its seventh birthday celebration this month. The event will be held on July 26 and 27, and twoRead More →

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I’m a big believer in OpenSim. One reason is that I get to hear about large projects and deployments that use OpenSim that I’m not allowed to talk about. There are organizations out there paying sizeable sums for OpenSim builds and custom development work. Meanwhile, I also talk to vendorsRead More →

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If there’s anyone out there who can’t get crowd funding for their virtual world project, you no longer have any excuses. A rock simulator just got funded. Okay, it wasn’t much — its goal was $500 on IndieGoGo. But there’s still 28 days left to go in its fundraising campaign,Read More →