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Over the last three years I’ve planned, designed, and orchestrated a dozen learning events in the virtual world of Second Life. I’ve been fortunate enough to work with extremely experienced and talented programmers, producers, content experts, scripters, and machinima artists from whom I have learned volumes about planning and stagingRead More →

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SpotON3D will address the patent issue in a discussion on the first day of its Content Creators Expo in Second Life. Philippe Pascal, SpotON3D’s developer program manager, invited Hypergrid Business readers to attend the Expo, including those concerned about reports that SpotON3D has filed for five patents on OpenSim-related technology. ThoseRead More →

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I have been using OpenSim since October, 2008. The software is still in an alpha stage of development, but it has come a long way, and its usage has exploded, and will continue to do so. Linden Labs has basically stopped focusing on education — which has also included droppingRead More →

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Thanks to a “small bounty” from Birmingham, U.K.-based Daden Limited, OpenSim has new NPC functionality — otherwise known as non-player characters or bots. “Having this functionality broken was becoming a real pain for us, as having NPCs and autonomous avatars in virtual worlds is a lot of what we are about,” DavidRead More →

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Press release: Avination hires full-time community manager LONDON, U.K. — Avination Virtual Limited has hired Jolanda Mastenbroek as Community Manager for the grid, the company announced today. Mastenbroek will be known inworld Avination as Joyce A-Team. Her primary focus is to build up social, cultural and educational communities. Mastenbroek will beRead More →

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Kitely users will get at least one more free month of hosting, as the company’s billing system has been delayed. “Due to the time we’d spent improving OpenSim in the last couple of months we are a few weeks behind schedule,” Kitely CEO Ilan Tochner told Hypergrid Business. The companyRead More →

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The Aurora-Sim distribution of OpenSim now supports mega regions of unlimited size, according to an announcement made this weekend. That doesn’t mean that the regions offer endless land to build on — buildable land is limited to the size of the underlying region, either a standard region or a variable-sizedRead More →

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History and ‘heat’ of glass factory comes alive with new 3-D virtual living museum Using photos from University Libraries to guide them, designers for Ball State’s IDIA were able to simulate the conditions of factory life at the Ball Brothers Glass Manufacturing Co. in Muncie. Advanced 3-D technology is allowingRead More →

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The top 40 OpenSim grids now have a total of 18,498 regions — up by 1,539 regions from a month ago. Meanwhile, total registered users grew by almost 12,000 to 206,098. Avination, InWorldz lose ground Both of the top commercial grids — Avination and InWorldz — lost regions over the past month.Read More →

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The recent furor over patents by SpotON3D is understandable. However, we may be overemphasizing that issue while staying naïve about other formidable developments. Let me begin with a specific illustration. Back in December of 2010, Hypergrid Business ran an article that indicated IBM had filed a patent on sim designRead More →

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At the 2011 Second Life Community Convention (SLCC) in Oakland, California, Linden CEO Rod Humble announced that in the next few months Linden Lab will release a new version of Second Life for the web and tablets. This new software will be separate from the current Second Life, not justRead More →

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Students show more interest in class and have better learning outcomes when 3D technology is used, according to the Boulder Valley School District. Focused and attentive Students focus on the content more and paid more attention in all the classrooms using 3D technology, reported Len Scrogan, director of instructional technologyRead More →

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SpotON3D has actually filed five patents, not just one, SpotON3D CEO Stevan Lieberman, an intellectual property attorney with Greenberg & Lieberman, said at an outreach event Sunday morning. He did not provide any additional information about the patents at the event, though the company website offers a few hints. Thank you to Vanish Seriath, whoRead More →

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Despite the patent controversy, and public relations problems that ensued from it, SpotON3D has a good product. It’s viewer plugin wrapper might not be a technological breakthrough, but it feels like a big technological breakthrough. No other browser-based solution — neither Tipodean’s www.BuiltBuy.me, nor 3Di’s Rei, nor Rezzable’s Unity-based viewer —Read More →

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Press release: Second Places announces the Launch of the first Private Virtual World hosted on the Unifier Platform Cheshire , U.K. – Second Places, a leader in development of virtual worlds, today announced the first private virtual world hosted on the Unifier platform. The secure private world is for kids aged 3-18 and notRead More →

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At a public forum today, an OpenSim grid executive told the audience that creators could lose their intellectual property rights if their work is copied. This is a common — and harmful — myth that may keep creators from sharing their work. In fact, you cannot lose your copyright ifRead More →

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SpotON3D attempted to address the controversy over its plans to patent technology for putting an OpenSim viewer on a webpage in an outreach event this morning, but some of the company’s toughest critics failed to show up, the company failed to answer key questions about its technology, and the meetingRead More →

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The good folks at the Virtual Worlds Education Roundtable are training new people to host our meetings, and they’ve asked us veterans to share our ideas. The following  principles have worked fairly well for me over the past few years. 1. Open forums are not completely open When I host one ofRead More →

Image: maple / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

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In recent months, the amount of innovation coming out of the OpenSim community has been staggering. Hypergrid travel is not only more secure, but now supports cross-grid friendships, messages, and landmarks. OpenSim providers are hosting their regions on-demand and in public (and private) clouds, offering full regions for under $10Read More →

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AvWorlds has announced that the company will be releasing a Facebook plugin this week, allowing users to quickly create avatars based on their existing Facebook identities. Those without Facebook accounts — or who don’t want to expose their identities — will also be able to use Yahoo and Google logins,Read More →

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Competing OpenSim hosting companies are concerned that SpotON3D‘s viewer plugin patent isn’t original, will hinder innovation, and that the company isn’t playing fair with the broader open source community. Other developers, however, say that SpotON3D’s innovation can help energize OpenSim adoption — and the patent, if it is granted, mayRead More →

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For years I have been wanting to see 3D on the web become ubiquitous and with Katalabs‘ OurBricks, I am closer than ever to seeing that dream come true. Leveraging the power of WebGL and its supported browsers, OurBricks allows users to examine a full 3D version of any modelRead More →

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Press Release: WorldViz 3D Interaction Walls bring Semi-Immersive Virtual Reality to Mainstream Santa Barbara, CA –WorldViz, the industry leader in interactive virtual reality solutions, has released two turnkey 3D simulation systems based proprietary motion-tracking technology and a single front-projected 3D screen. The systems enable low-cost immersive Virtual Reality applications forRead More →

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Press release: Plenary Sessions at Serious Play Conference To Tackle Major Challenges of Serious Games SEATTLE – Some of the best minds in serious games are coming together to discuss the major challenges facing the use of games for training and learning at Serious Play Conference, Tuesday through Thursday, August 23Read More →

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Avination may deploy the Havok physics engine for its grid. This is the same physics engine used by Second Life. “It is being considered and talks with Havok have started,” Avination grid manager Melanie Thielker told Hypergrid Business. “The content of these talks are under NDA [non-disclosure agreements.” OpenSim grids normallyRead More →

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A lot of folks sit around complaining about not having a decent Web-based viewer for OpenSim and Second Life. (Okay, maybe just me.) The existing stand-alone viewers require that users download and install the software. There’s nothing wrong with installing software, but as more applications migrate to the Web, folksRead More →

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Press Release: InWorldz, LLC and CariNet Inc. To Power Virtual World Technology and Hosting Through Joint Venture Venture to focus on quality of service, scalability, and core software to promote growth and technical innovation NY and SAN DIEGO, CA – InWorldz, LLC a leading provider of virtual world services, and CariNetRead More →

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There have been several attempts over the past year to create a viewer for Second Life and OpenSim based virtual environments that would run in a browser. I’ve tried to write about them all, from Linden Lab partnering with GaiKai to provide a server-side rendered and streamed experience of SecondLife to TipodeanRead More →

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Virtual worlds gained 214 million new users in the second quarter of 2011, according to virtual worlds research firm KZero Worldwide. It was the largest quarterly increase since the company began tracking these numbers in 2008. Second Life, with 27 million registered users, continued to hold the top position inRead More →

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Until yesterday, I’ve been keeping up with — but haven’t been particularly concerned about — the Google Plus real names controversy. After all, I already used my real name in all my social networking and the only complaint I have with virtual worlds is when I can’t use my realRead More →

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First of all, I’d like to thank all the creative folks who are creating original products and distributing them in freebie stores on OSGrid, JokaydiaGrid, GermanGrid, FrancoGrid, and many other locations. OpenSim has come a long way since I started writing about it two years ago and it’s now possibleRead More →

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OSGrid, the largest grid running on the OpenSim software, is celebrating its fourth birthday this weekend with parties, games, tours, and training classes. OSGrid currently has 6,896 regions and more than 63,000 registered users. By comparison, the next-largest grid, ScienceSim, has around 1,800 regions — but many of those are scalabilityRead More →

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I’ve been traveling around the hypergrid a lot lately enjoying the new hypergrid landmarks, friends, and messages — and updating the Hyperica directory. And I’ve been amazed at how far the grids have come. Areas which were bare or under construction when I last visited are now looking finished andRead More →

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US $15 a month for a 15,000-prim on-demand region. Easy OAR exports and imports, voice, hypergrid, megaregions.Read More →

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Aurora-Sim is a hot, fresh, new distribution of OpenSim that promises some nice features for grid managers (see story here) but, until this weekend, its users were cut off from the rest of the metaverse. That compatibility problem has been solved, and residents of OSGrid, FrancoGrid, and most other gridsRead More →

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Update: Please people, stop linking to this post! Unless you are actually an OpenSim user this is not relevant to you at all! This article is about a very, very, narrow niche use of Unity that’s only relevant to a small handful of people. I understand that Unity is not aRead More →

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Two major players in the OpenSim community have recently joined ReactionGrid in promoting the Unity 3D platform. In addition to ReactionGrid’s Jibe environment, we now also have Second Learning’s Unifier environment, and a product from Tipodean to convert OpenSim regions to Unity scenes. Jibe starts at $50 a month, Unifier atRead More →

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Press release: Daden creates Chatbot Business Case Calculator to help companies understand potential savings Birmingham, U.K. – An innovative business case calculator has been created by technology company Daden Limited to help organisations understand the potential savings that using an interactive virtual agent – or chatbot – can deliver. Chatbots are computerRead More →

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It’s been a record-breaking months for OpenSim, with the top 40 grids passing 16,000 regions and 200,000 users for the first time in history. The total number of regions on these 40 largest public grids was 16,959, an increase of 1,669 regions since mid June — the biggest single-month increaseRead More →

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If you’re launching a new grid, your number one problem is lack of content. Whether your grid is a corporate office complex for your employees, a campus for your students, or a large social and roleplaying world for your residents, they all need clothes, skins, hair, shoes, furniture, productivity tools,Read More →

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People pay the same amount of attention at virtual and physical events, says a  new report from the Professional Convention Management Association, UBM Studios, and the Virtual Edge Institute, detailing the behaviours of people in regards to virtual events that will be released Monday. “Too often the argument centers onRead More →

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Press Release: ProtoSphere Lync Edition to support Office 365 and associated online functionality LANSDALE, Pa.–ProtonMedia, a Silver Unified Communications Microsoft partner, today announced its ProtoSphere Lync Edition application will support Microsoft Office 365. This will provide users the benefits of Microsoft’s Lync high-quality VoIP and Office 365 platform through ProtoSphere’s engaging virtual collaborationRead More →

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Second Places announces the name of their long anticipated virtual world platform — Unifier. A new web based platform presents opportunities to developers, a more immersive experience to users and a simple easy to manage interface for those who wish to control their own virtual world. Unifier takes virtual worldRead More →

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If you’re treating your virtual workers like regular staff, but paying them as contractors, you might be setting yourself up for a lawsuit — even if you’re paying your employees in a virtual currency. At least, that’s the opinion of Donald C. Dowling, Jr., partner in the international labor andRead More →