By:
On:

Discovery Grid is celebrating its sixth birthday with an air show and a pyro-musical fireworks display. The event, Thunder over Discovery 2022, takes place this Saturday, July 2, at 2 p.m. Pacific time, with an encore event at 6 p.m. Pacific. The hypergrid address is discoverygrid.net:8002:Lousville. You’ll want to arrive earlyRead More →

By:
On:

On this day in 2008, Crista Lopes, a professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine, sent an email to the OpenSim developers mailing list. “I started working on an extension to OpenSim that makes it work in peer-to-peer mode… I’m really excited to say that this is working!” sheRead More →

By:
On:

The third hypergrid Treasure Hunt officially began on Friday, with 14 grids participating. It will run through August 6, so there’s plenty of time for both hunters and grids to jump in. Prizes include $25 cash, Linden dollars, and Bluetooth MP3 speakers, Holland Woodenshoes key chain, and a HipHop Band T-shirt. For moreRead More →

By:
On:

The Kitely Market is now offering more than 12,500 different items, 64 percent of which are exportable to other grids, with exports growth continuing to outpace Kitely-only content. “We’re very happy with Kitely Market’s current growth,” Kitely CEO Ilan Tochner told Hypergrid Business. “Last month we reached a record highRead More →

By:
On:

Hypergrid Business readers recommended fifty different hypergrid performers in our latest survey, with a total of 98 votes submitted. Here are the top ten vote-getters. 1. Truelie Telling Also known as Ellen Olhsson, you can catch Truelie Telling at the Maritime Club on the Maritime Club Belfast region of OSgridRead More →

By:
On:

The people have voted, and the results of the avatar outfitter survey are in. More than 50 destinations were submitted, and the top ten are the following. Clutterfly Linda Kellie’s new grid easily earned its first place. Located at clutterfly.world:8002, this is a huge collection of CC0-licensed content — clothing, avatars,Read More →

By:
On:

The 2015 OpenSim Community Conference starts this Saturday, leaving just three days to register. Registration is free here, but you can also choose to make a tax-deductible donation to support OpenSim development and get some extra benefits. For example, the “Exclusive Access” ticket, at $35, includes an invitation to a VIP Q&ARead More →

By:
On:

Many grids, especially those with unique or specialized content, struggle with content protection issues. Both closed and open grids have problems with copybotters, while hypergrid-enabled grids also have the additional risk to scripts. Grids with large quantities of unique or high-end content are particularly at risk. So, for example, SecondRead More →

By:
On:

On this day in 2008, Crista Lopes, a professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine, sent an email to the OpenSim developers mailing list. “I started working on an extension to OpenSim that makes it work in peer-to-peer mode… I’m really excited to say that this is working!” sheRead More →

By:
On:

It’s been a good-news, bad-news summer for Virwox, the European virtual currency exchange that used to dominate third-party Linden Dollar trading. On August 1, all third party Linden Dollar trading officially came to an end. And, before that, the Avination grid cut off its ties with Virwox, and warned users not to trade theRead More →

By:
On:

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 →

By:
On:

I don’t usually go around telling people what the best grids are. I run surveys, or I punt the question and just say, “What ever grid works best for you” or “Your own private grid” or something like that. The thing is, everybody is looking for something different. Some peopleRead More →

By:
On:

Inventory exports, or IARs, became a heated topic of discussion in Google Plus communities yesterday, with one grid even disabling its IAR exports temporarily as a result. Much of the debate is due to a misunderstanding of how IAR backups work — and of how thieves steal content. What isRead More →

By:
On:

Someday soon, we will have a virtual reality metaverse. A fantastical place, limited only by our imaginations, where time and space mean nothing and experiences are shared as easily as bit and bytes are today. What technology will form the basis of this metaverse? Will it be created by Facebook?Read More →

By:
On:

I think, looking back, we’ll see 2014 as a pivotal year in the growth of the metaverse. This was the year that early adopters realized that virtual reality was on its way, the hypergrid came into its own, Google Plus became the social platform of choice for metaverse residents, theRead More →

By:
On:

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 →

By:
On:

The on-demand, cloud-based Kitely grid has had hypergrid connectivity on its to-do list ever since it first launched in the spring of 2011. Actually enabling hypergrid, however, took quite a bit longer than expected — but the wait is finally over. Last night, the first group of users tested Kitely’sRead More →

By:
On:

I beta-tested the latest version of the New World Studio today. It took me exactly five clicks to have a new OpenSim-based world up and running on my computer. And the whole process took five minutes. Though probably half of it was spent taking pictures of my computer screen, resizingRead More →

By:
On:

Metaverse security took a big step forward today as Avination donated OpenSim code implementing an “export” permission setting. The company also worked together with Singularity viewer developers to add support for this new permission to the viewer. Today, OpenSim has three permissions — copy, transfer, and modify — that determine whatRead More →

By:
On:

Sick and tired of the inaccurate statistics in Hypergrid Business every month? You know who you are. You’re sure you can do better. Well, I’m going to help you out. We’re running far behind on updating the Hyperica directory and I was thinking of automating some of the tasks, suchRead More →

By:
On:

Hypergrid inventor Crista Lopes, professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine has added out-of-the-box support for groups and offline messages to OpenSim. Previously, grids that needed groups functionality had to install one of two separate third-party groups modules, Flotsam or Simian. “For both Flotsam and Simian you haveRead More →

By:
On:

Three years ago today, on Oct. 26, 2008, Crista Lopes fired off the email that marked the birth of the hypergrid. Lopes, an OpenSim core developer, is also a professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine, and came up with a peer-to-peer system that allowed people to teleport fromRead More →

By:
On:

As John Rogate pointed out today, the 4096 bug — which limits hypergrid teleports to no more than 4,096 regions in any direction — is a significant impediment to hypergrid travel and to the growth of the metaverse as a whole. But, as several people commented, there is another impedimentRead More →

By:
On:

Hypergrid is probably one of the greatest and unifying features for OpenSim, and virtual worlds in general. Basically, virtual worlds cannot be what they should be without the hypergrid. It is the same unifying feature and innovation as the hyperlink was – and still is – for the unification ofRead More →

By:
On:

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 →

By:
On:

Simple curiosity and the pioneering spirit are driving the growth in hypergridding, despite technical challenges. According to data from The Hypergates, the total number of travelers using their teleport gate system has more than tripled from 133 a month in May of 2009 to 471 last month – and theseRead More →

By:
On:

Hypergrid inventor Crista Lopes, professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine called today on big public grids to begin a mass migration to lower regions. The reason is that Second Life-compatible viewers don’t handle jumps of more than 4,096 regions in any direction — causing problems both forRead More →

By:
On:

You cannot compare Second Life and OpenSim. One is a social world. The other is an open source piece of server software. You can’t even compare Second Life to individual grids using OpenSim as their backend software. Second Life has around a million users logging in each month, while theRead More →

By:
On:

[Editor’s note: We encourage groups using virtual worlds to tell us about their experiences — both good and bad — in order to educate the public about this new industry segment, and to encourage platform and hosting vendors to improve their services. If you would like to contribute a review,Read More →

By:
On:

(Last updated April 26, 2013) There are plenty of reasons to run OpenSim on your own computers. If you’re a content creator, you can have as many regions as you want, for free, and load them up when you need to work on them. There’s no lag due to connectivityRead More →

By:
On:

Austria-based VirWoX began trading Avination’s C$ virtual currency today. VirWoX is best known as a leading exchange for Lindens in Europe, and for its hypergrid-enabled OMC currency. “Given the strong growth of Avination and its clear focus on becoming a commercial grid, this looks like an interesting market to beRead More →

By:
On:

The non-profit, research-focused ScienceSim grid is now accessible via hypergrid teleports again, after more than a year of no hypergrid connectivity. ScienceSim turned off the hypergrid last January, due to security concerns. But new upgrades in the hypergrid technology — in particular, the ability to keep content from being takenRead More →

By:
On:

In the past year, the OMC virtual currency has gained both popularity and usefulness, with both the total currency in circulation and the number of grids it’s available for use on growing. The OMC, or Open Metaverse Currency, is a virtual currency from Austria-based VirWoX  that can be used to buyRead More →

By:
On:

Many grids today have hypergrid turned off, for fear that content will be taken from their grid to a less secure grid, copied, and distributed illegally. OpenSim developers are working to create a hypergrid-wide permission system for content that will help abate this fear, and open more of the OpenSimRead More →

By:
On:

Ever since Crista Lopes, professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine invented the hypergrid in 2009, people have been debating whether grids should be on or off the hypergrid. On the one hand, the hypergrid is very cool. You can teleport from one grid to another, hopping aroundRead More →

By:
On:

I have lost track of the number of times over the last few weeks that I have been somewhere in the OpenSim grid and heard someone say “This is like Second Life in the early days – I love it.”  This resonates for me – and I have been thinkingRead More →

By:
On:

Like the World Wide Web that preceded it, the new 3D Web has its own vocabulary. We try to make it easier to keep up. [anchor id=”avatar”]avatar A representation of a user, usually as a three dimensional cartoon character. Avatars can be realistic, based on actual photos of the user,Read More →

By:
On:

This month, the Youth for Christ charity celebrates its second year in Second Life. But the big party will be held in OpenSim, the charity’s new home. The reason? The Second Life Teen Grid, where the YFC has been offering support and mentoring programs for at-risk youth, is closing atRead More →

By:
On:

I was a guest on Tonight Live with Paisley Beebe on Sunday, October 10 and had a great time talking about hypergrid and OpenSim. Other guests that night included singer-songwriter Senjata Witt, who performed live,  and Dusan Writer, CEO of Remedy Communications and prolific blogger about Second Life.Read More →

By:
On:

Update: I still recommend the OMC currency, which has grown substantially since this article was first written and now used on 30 OpenSim grids. The two other currencies I mentioned — V$ and G$ — have not been getting much traction in OpenSim, and have pretty much faded away. SomeRead More →

By:
On:

Correction: Coral Estate regions start at $20, not $10. OpenSim hosting prices have fallen to a record-low, with providers like New Voice offering regions for just $10 per month — though the performance of such low-cost regions may be in doubt. New Voice on the map If you’ve glanced atRead More →

By:
On:

The hypergrid is like the World Wide Web of 3D worlds. You can create your own world, at your company, school, or government agency, and link it to worlds owned by partners, clients, or information providers. Hypergrid teleports look and feel much like regular, in-world teleports. In fact, usually theRead More →

By:
On:

Second Life released Viewer 2 in February and, though many complained that the new interface was confusing and less efficient it did offer a significant new benefit to enterprise and education users: the ability to show websites and other media on any in-world surface. However, the new viewer — commonlyRead More →

By:
On:

The OpenSim community is currently in the process of upgrading to Hypergrid 1.5, a more secure version of the hypergrid protocol that allows teleportation between different grids. However, Hypergrid 1.5 isn’t compatible with the previous Hypergrid 1.0 standard, according to hypergrid inventor Crista Lopes, professor of informatics at the UniversityRead More →

By:
On:

Hypergrid travelers are more likely to be looking for shopping than any other kind of individual destination, according to May visitor statistics of the Hyperica hypergrid destination directory. The top five pages viewed overall were the full list of hypergrid-enabled grids, the hypergrid-enabled regions on OSgrid, the list of hypergrid-enabledRead More →

By:
On:

Developers released a new version of OpenSim this week, with support for group management of land, the ability to offer teleports to other avatars, and other minor improvements and bug fixes. Many OpenSim users would already have seen these features on OSGrid, the Diva Distro, and other grids running theRead More →

By:
On:

Today, Web space is free. Almost. You can get free accounts for blogs on Blogger.com and WordPress.com — among many others. And storage space is so cheap that some Web hosts offer virtually unlimited storage. At Dreamhost, for example, you can add new sites to your hosting package for noRead More →

By:
On:

Virtual worlds run by non-profit organizations focus on providing a low-cost platform for other non-profits and individuals. To many in the non-profit sector, in-world economies belong on for-profit grids like Second Life and Blue Mars. However, some non-profits running grids on the OpenSim platform are beginning to embrace in-grid paymentsRead More →