After Europe’s new data privacy regulations, GDPR, went into effect on May 25, OpenSim users saw a flurry of requests from grid owners asking them to agree to new privacy policies. Sometimes, those messages...
My new Oculus Go headset arrived today ($199 on Amazon) and I wasn’t originally planning to get it because I’m not a big fan of standalone headsets. That’s a headset that has the computer...
The gambling-focused, Bitcoin-friendly YrGrid has been down and out lately — and it’s looking like that might be permanent. We did see it online last month, so it’s still on our active grids list,...
2 Jun, 2018
You might have noticed that the volume of coverage in Hypergrid Business has fallen over the past few months. Well, it’s about to get worse. First, I’m cutting the monthly stats report. It’s a...
Earlier today, I posted an article about what we here at Hypergrid Business are doing to comply with GDPR. Fines are up to 20 million Euros or 4 percent of total annual global revenues...
You might have noticed a flood of emails lately and website popups asking you to consent to new privacy policies. That’s because a major new European privacy regulation, GDPR, goes into effect today. Fines...
Twice as many grids now use Gloebit-powered payments compared to an older service, Podex, due to Gloebit’s easier set up and overall lower costs. Gloebits reports that it now has close to 2,000 account users...
The public OpenSim grids lost the equivalent of nearly 4,000 regions, for a new total land area of 80,671 standard region equivalents. The number of active monthly users dropped by 2,580, to reach a total...
Interested in taking a flight without worrying about the engine blowing out? You can now fly virtually, on an airplane filled with other passengers, on the Kea Nation enclave on the DigiWorldz grid. Kea Nation...
The GreekLife grid has been around for eight years, but it has really started to take off in the last two, now reporting thousands of regions and active users. Now the grid owners are...
OpenSim land area and users rose slightly this month, despite outages and maintenance on several grids. Atek was down for a while before later resuming, as was Virtuality Grid, while Kinky Grid also went...
With sexism still strong in the gaming industry, a Europe-based 3D model marketplace is looking to create a welcoming place for women developers in the surging virtual reality industry. With almost as many women...
Child avatars are a sensitive topic in virtual worlds. For some users, the presence of child avatars opens the possibility of inappropriate sexual roleplay, which is at best extremely creepy and, at worst, illegal....
This year’s Virtual World Best Practices in Education 2018 conference, which ended last week in Second Life, was shorter than last year — three days, instead of four — and attracted about 1,100 attendees,...
Blockchain — the technology powering Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies — is coming to virtual reality. Today, High Fidelity, the new VR platform from Second Life founder Philip Rosedale, announced the launch of the Virtual...
The Atek Grid has launched a new cryptocurrency, which will become the primary in-world currency, grid owner Frank Corsi told Hypergrid Business. The new currency, Dosh Coins, is based on blockchain technology. This is similar...
OpenSim land area continued to increase gaining a total of 3,400 standard region equivalents this month — after gaining more than 9,000 regions last month. The number of active users also increased by 1,300....
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.
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...
The Immersive Reality grid, founded in late 2014, will close at the end of April due to new regulations and a lack of interest, owner Bob Reite announced yesterday. Land and currency sales will...
17 Feb, 2018
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...
15 Feb, 2018
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...
[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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
19 Dec, 2017
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...
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...
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...
Well, they’ve done it. Net neutrality is dead. I first wrote about net neutrality in June of 2014. At that time, we all had a unique opportunity to voice our concerns in a democratic...
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...
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...
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...
What happens if you’re resident on a grid, buy a bunch of products from the Kitely Market for your avatar on that grid, and the grid gets shut down and your avatar inventory is lost?...
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...
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...
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...
18 Nov, 2017
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
More than 400 responses came in for this year’s Seventh 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...
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,...
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,...
15 Oct, 2017
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...
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...
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...
4 Oct, 2017
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...
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...
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....
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....
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...
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...
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...
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...
12 Sep, 2017
Several OpenSim grids using a Florida-based data center for their hosting have been able to stay up during Hurricane Irma with the help of backup generators. The grids include DigiWorldz, Great Canadian Grid, Genesis Metaverse,...
Franco grid is calling on as many OpenSim creators as possible to submit their avatar creations for the fourth annual Festi’Avi 2017 event before the deadline at the end of September. The event is hypergrid-enabled...
Virtual reality can breathe new life into old games, says video game expert Patrick Soulliere. And Soulliere knows about games — he’s organized more than 100 online e-sports tournaments for Micron Technology that feature...
Second Life is moving its architecture to the cloud, Linden Lab announced last week, and that might help them offer lower land prices. The reason? On-demand cloud-based regions would only be up and running...
[Editor’s note: In this opinion column, Kitely CEO Ilan Tochner is responding to High Fidelity’s content protection plan, which uses the same blockchain technology as that which powers Bitcoin. Tochner previously managed an identity rights...
Educators are using virtual worlds, but not in the way they had used them in the past, and not in the same numbers. What you see now is a more selective and targeted use...
OpenSim’s public grids gained nearly 1,500 regions this month despite the summer season, but total active numbers were down by just over 1,700. The 257 currently active grids reported a record high area, totaling...
AltspaceVR, a social virtual reality platform, has come back from the dead. A couple of weeks ago, the company announced that it was shutting down because it ran out of funding. Today, it announced...
Educators are souring on virtual worlds, as evidenced by declining participation in online forums, in virtual conference attendances and education-related destinations on the Second Life grid. For example, Second Life Educators, the forum for...
SineSpace — formerly known as just Space — will hold a summer festival this coming weekend, August 19 and 20. The festival will include contests, live music, carnival games, a roller-coaster, movies, fireworks, and...
14 Aug, 2017
As you folks know, I’ve been struggling with collecting all the stats from all the grids every month, and, earlier this year, have almost fully automated the process, using an extremely jury-rigged Filemaker script....
Google’s Daydream virtual reality platform is currently my favorite. It’s built into the next generation of the Android operating system, and headsets cost under $100, making it widely accessible. And the platform’s motion controller...
The Island Oasis grid now has a new owner, and has been offline since Monday while the servers are being moved to their new location. The grid is expected to be back up on Friday, according...
Maria's Worlds / VR & AR / VR Resources
10 Aug, 2017
It can be hard to keep up with all the new virtual reality apps coming out. But, if you’re just starting out, it can be equally hard to find good ones to start with....
10 Aug, 2017
Last night, I wanted to try out the VR Spaceship VR app for Android on my Pixel phone with my Daydream View headset. Unfortunately, VR Spaceship is an older, Cardboard-compatible app, not a Daydream app, and...
If you’re using a default avatar that comes with some versions of OpenSim, your name might wind up on copybotted content without you knowing about it. That’s just what happened to a user known...
AvatarFest, which will showcase and celebrate non-commercial builds from talented OpenSim creators, will take place on September 23 and 24. Many exhibitors have submitted their applications but those who have not and are still...
Craft World grid is down today for maintenance, and is expected to be back up in three days. Meanwhile, Genesis Metaverse has completed a major upgrade of its own and is back up. Improvements...
3 Aug, 2017
Eight year ago, when I first launched Hypergrid Business, virtual worlds offered a unique set of compelling features. There was presence, and immersion, and the ability to create your own virtual environments. Plus, they...
Starting your own grid isn’t easy. You need your own servers, membership website, plus, of course, residents. Plus, if you want an in-world economy, you have to put payments in place. There are hosting...
AltspaceVR will close its doors next Thursday, August 3, because it ran out of money. “We can’t afford to keep the virtual lights on anymore,” the company said in a note posted last night....
28 Jul, 2017
I got the Xiaomi Play2 VR headset in the mail today, and while it looks a lot like Google’s cutting-edge Daydream View headset, it’s not. It’s just a Cardboard-compatible. It’s not made of cardboard...
The first set of Daydream View clones have hit the market, and I just got one of them in the mail – the BoboVR Z5. Disclosure: I received the BoboVR Z5 free from GeekBuying,...
The total reported land area of OpenSim’s public grids has passed 80,000 regions — a record high. This is despite the fact that InWorldz, the most popular OpenSim grid, did not report its land...
If you have a unused balance in your ZanGrid virtual currency account, the grid is suggesting that you donate it for War Child charity to help children and people affected by war. The grid is...
3rdLife grid will be hosting it is first year birthday on Friday, July 14 on its Amusement Park region, featuring live music and DJs. The following is the schedule for the day. 4...
Columns / Maria's Worlds / Metaverse
13 Jul, 2017
On Tuesday, David Kariuki’s article about a freebie store that distributed content that was “found and collected” on other grids — without any checks that the content was legal — drew some comments from...
The first meeting of the Hypergrid Chamber of Commerce will be at 11 a.m. Pacific time on Friday, July 21 and several major players in the OpenSim economy have officially joined as members, including Gloebit, Podex, and Kitely. Another...
Lost World grid is offering avatar make over freebies such as custom shapes, skins, hairs and clothes that have been collected from around OpenSim, all for free. However, the grid cannot confirm the origins...
Amazon is going all out today with deals on virtual reality products, running the whole gamut of headset options, computers, and accessories. If you’ve been waiting to get into VR until you see a...
After trying several business models with fail and shutting down and reopening several times thus earning the name “the yo-yo grid,” AviWorlds is back online. This time, it’s a closed grid, meaning people will not...
WorldViz virtual reality solutions are being used in a variety of ways in learning institutions, from enhancing virtual learning and collaboration, boosting academic research, studying human and behavioral interactions, to enhancing student language and...
It’s taken me a while to write this review, because I’ve been out of town and caught up with various other issues. So, my apologies to HelloPro, who sent me this headset more than...
Public OpenSim grids gained the equivalent of 1,257 regions this month, while the number of active users rose by 511, after falling for the past three months in a row. Great Canadian Grid, InWorldz...
Low-cost virtual reality viewers — some made out of cardboard — are a minimal investment from consumer standpoint or from a company who would like to distribute their virtual reality experiences themselves. A user...
Last September, I looked at the land prices on all the public OpenSim grids, and the average price was $20.39 per standard region. Today, I reviewed the prices of all 55 grids that I...
23 May, 2017
I occasionally get emails from people starting new OpenSim grids, and wondering how they’re going to pay for them. Here are the top five ways that OpenSim grids find success. 1. Commercial grids These...
Last week’s lawsuit against UploadVR is a reminder to the emerging virtual reality industry that it needs to pay more attention to being more inclusive and welcoming to women. This is an issue endemic...
OpenSim lost land area and active users this month — on paper, at least — as one large commercial grid did not report its stats this month, and another grid suffered an outage. The total...
VR SPOTLIGHT
12 Jun, 2018
CGTrader looks to make VR more welcoming for women
11 Apr, 2018
High Fidelity launches new VR blockchain alliance
22 Mar, 2018
12 Mar, 2018
VR app helps treat phantom limb pain
18 Nov, 2017
New VR game helps advance dementia research
18 Nov, 2017
Oncomfort is changing cancer care with VR
18 Nov, 2017
Can VR stop sexual harrassment?
1 Nov, 2017
How to get support for VR music content
12 Oct, 2017
How to set up your new mobile VR viewer
4 Jun, 2016
How to watch YouTube on Cardboard viewers
4 Jun, 2016
19 Oct, 2014
Hypergate script with region restart fix
18 Oct, 2014
How to make quick metal and silk textures in GIMP
11 Oct, 2014
Easier Google Spreadsheet Visitor Logger
8 Oct, 2014
Hypergate script with built-in threat level check
29 Sep, 2014
23 Sep, 2014
Copy this Terms of Service policy for your grid
20 Jul, 2014
Copy this copyright policy for your grid
20 Jul, 2014
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How to set up your new mobile VR viewer
4 Jun, 2016
How to watch YouTube on Cardboard viewers
4 Jun, 2016
19 Oct, 2014
Hypergate script with region restart fix
18 Oct, 2014
How to make quick metal and silk textures in GIMP
11 Oct, 2014
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