Covering virtual reality, immersive worlds, and other emerging technologies
Features / Metaverse / VR & AR
by Maria Korolov · Published August 22, 2019 · Last modified August 23, 2019
There is now a virtual reality enabled version of the Firestorm viewer, developed by by Peter Kappler. Austin Tate, director of the Artificial Intelligence Applications Institute at the University of Edinburgh, has posted an...
From the editor: The commentary below is from Sam Adama, owner of Caprica Grid, about the Kazakhstan-based freebie grid Sacrarium, which has been accused of hosting stolen content and inappropriate child avatars and accessories....
It took ten years for me to get my first book done, Krim Times. The second one just took eight months! Thank you to all my beta readers who helped make it possible! If...
The total number of active users on OpenSim’s public grids dropped by just over 500 active users, which is typical of the summer months. But land area was up by nearly 5,000 standard region...
The topic of Second Life’s — and OpenSim — default camera offset is an old one. The first Second Life blogger who brought it to people’s attention was Penny Patton, with her seminal post...
A couple of weeks ago, the Firestorm team announced that they planned to split the Second Life and OpenSim versions of their popular virtual world viewer. “This means we can now issue updates for...
Immersive technology means you are able to place yourself inside a world, not just to peer inside it. Like all of the tech industry, extended reality features a diversity imbalance — is this burgeoning...
The Encore Escape grid will be celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Woodstock music festival in mid-august. The Woodstock 2019 reenactment will take place in real-time, from August 15 to August 18, on 150...
In case you’re thinking that fully immersive virtual reality will require full-body suits of some kind to replicate all the senses, there’s promising research coming out of the medical prosthetics field that shows that...
All the stats were up this month on OpenSim’s public grids, including land area, registered users, and active users. Land area was up by 49 standard region equivalents, to 83,516. OpenSim grids also registered...
Patriotic Americans — or anyone, really, who’s looking for a party — will find plenty to do on OpenSim grids this week. Begin your day out on Discovery Grid, where the party starts at...
I’ve been creating virtual world content since 2005, selling games like Greedy Greedy primarily in Second Life. I plan to stay in Second Life and continue supporting my games and developing new products there...
One of the first questions every new grid owner must answer is whether to have in-world payment, so that users can buy stuff, or pay for services, or donate money while they’re on the...
If you are a resident of Paris or visiting this week, check out the NewImages Festival. For five days, the “City of Lights” will host an array of innovative VR program that includes virtual...
Do you like reading science fiction and telling authors what’s wrong with their books? I need you! The draft of my second story in my Krim series is done and I’m certain that it’s...
Active users were down this month on OpenSim’s public grids by 1,872 users, but regions were up by the equivalent of 1,521 standard regions. OpenSim is a popular platform for educators, so traffic is...
$5 per month for a 20,000-prim region on the hypergrid-enabled 92 Miles Grid.
If you, like me, are looking to launch a little OpenSim grid of your own — or even a big commercial grid — but you don’t want to mess with all the details of...
Kitely rolled out its virtual private grid service at the beginning of the year. Today, I finally decided to try it out. The bottom line? It looks like a good option for schools, non-profits...
If you’re new to OpenSim, you’re probably here because you’ve heard about the ridiculously low land prices. Many grids offer regions for $10 a month — or less — and you can get a...
The Utopia Skye OpenSim grid will be holding an art fair this month, and submissions will be accepted until June 15. The Skye Art Fair itself will run from June 29 to July 28,...
The gaming-themed Mobius Grid has introduced display names for its residents and is working to make the technology wider used within OpenSim, grid owner Roy Corr told Hypergrid Business. The grid rolled out display...
Grids Renting Land / OpenSim Hosting / Vendors
by Maria Korolov · Published June 6, 2019 · Last modified June 12, 2019
$23 a month for a two-by-two or four-by-four 30,000-prim varregion on the hypergrid-enabled Discovery Grid. Includes Vivox voice and Gloebit currency.
Columns / Features / Metaverse
by Maria Korolov · Published June 2, 2019 · Last modified June 14, 2019
OpenSim’s average region price has dropped to $15 per standard region, down from $18 last February. The lowest price for a region dropped slightly to $4.90 a month, at Tranquility, while the highest price...
AviWorlds, the grid with the most ups and downs in the OpenSim metaverse, has changed course again. In a reversal of last month’s announcement that the grid would turn off hypergrid access and no...
If you’re a writer, or an artist you may cringe at the idea that computers are coming for your jobs. If you dig into how the content for AI art and poetry and stories...
Citing a lack of users and decent hardware, High Fidelity has decided to pivot away from the consumer market to focus on serving enterprises and laid off a quarter of its staff this month....
I miss having my own OpenSim place. I didn’t use it much when I had it, but now that it’s gone, I want it back. So, of course, since I don’t want to have...
Update: For a full list of grids’ social media links, calendars, and forums, please see our Active OpenSim Grids List. Google Plus used to be a favorite place for grids and event organizers and...
Closed grids — where users can’t teleport over to other grids — have been losing ground in OpenSim lately and suffered a big hit last year with the closing of InWorldz. But some people...
OpenSim has suffered a number of shocks in the past year, with several significant grid closings in a row. OpenSim’s largest closed grid, InWorldz, shut down last summer. Its successor, Islandz, closed earlier this...
In its ongoing quest to find a sustainable business model, the commercial AviWorlds grid is giving the no-hypergrid approach another go. “AviWorlds needs to be a private community now,” grid owner Alexsandro Pomposelli told Hypergrid...
The Kitely Market, OpenSim’s largest commercial content marketplace, has passed the 30,000 item milestone this month. The market currently delivers to 345 different grids, both hypergrid-enabled and closed, private grids. (Instructions for how to...
Being someone with autism, I always found myself being drawn to the logic-oriented characters of science fiction movies, such as Star Wars’ C-3PO, Sonny from I, Robot, or Baymax from Big Hero 6. They...
If you haven’t done enough this week to honor our planet you can get some belated Earth Day action this weekend at the annual EarthX conference in Dallas, Texas — and, if you can’t get...
If climbing Mount Everest in real life is too expensive or dangerous, but you still want to find out what it’s like, virtual reality may have the answer. EverestVR is an immersive experience for...
A couple of readers — okay, several readers — have written to me complaining about the outages on the Hypergrid Business website, so this morning I’ve been following up with tech support at my...
Bargain Hosting / Grids Renting Land / OpenSim Hosting / Vendors
by Maria Korolov · Published April 3, 2019
US $6 per month for a 20,000-prim standard region on the hypergrid-enabled Breath in Freedom grid. Variable-sized regions and additional prims also available.
This Friday, New York City-based multimedia startup Walk In My Shoes Media is launching a VR platform that uses immersive storytelling to make a social impact and promote inclusivity. Company employees, or members of...
The VR Airway Lab training application for medical professionals was recently put to the test in a study that found VR simulation to be on par, if not better than expected, when compared to a traditional...
John Skakandy, known to OpenSim users as Cloneu Inglewood, died of cancer last month in Florida. Skakandy was the owner of the Lost Paradise grid, which he founded in 2011. The grid received the top...
The first annual OpenSim Fest officially opens its doors tomorrow, with musical performances tomorrow and this weekend, then a showcase of exhibits from 45 different grids in the OpenSim community running through April 6....
Grids Renting Land / Metaverse / OpenSim Hosting / Vendors
by Maria Korolov · Published February 15, 2019 · Last modified February 17, 2019
US $12 (R$50) for a 25,000-prim region on the hypergrid-enabled, Portuguese-language Vida Dupla grid.
You know the scene. You’re walking down the street in a town, maybe your hometown, on a quiet Tuesday afternoon. The sun is shining, people are sitting outside a coffee shop chatting and browsing,...
Keng City, OpenSim’s only major African-American grid is working to promote awareness and inclusivity on the hypergrid, and to battle prejudice, with exhibits, events, and destinations of interest. Even simple things, like finding appropriate...
by Maria Korolov · Published February 12, 2019 · Last modified February 14, 2019
Gloebit is a virtual currency accepted on about forty different OpenSim grids, and is the most popular currency on the hypergrid by a very large margin. Gloebit works roughly similar to PayPal. Users create a Gloebit...
As many of you pointed out in emails to me, Hypergrid Business has been down since Friday morning. There was an infection on the site, and it took Sucuri, our security service, and DreamHost, our...
Metropolis, one of the oldest non-profit OpenSim grids, and the second most popular grid (after OSgrid) announced that it will be upgrading to the latest version of OpenSim at the end of the month....
Sony Pictures announced that it’s making a sequel to the hit Bill Murray movie Groundhog Day. But it’s animated. And it’s in virtual reality. Groundhog Day: Life Father Like Son takes place in the...
The Advanced Imaging Society held its tenth annual awards ceremony this week at Warner Bros Studios and virtual reality was a major focus of the event. Ready Player One, based in a virtual reality world,...
As a person of color and a woman, I’ve become aware with the lack of representation expressed outside of the entertainment or sports world. That is even more prevalent within the Virtual Reality community....
Exhibitors can already start setting up for February’s Sci-Fi Expo on Tangle Grid. The month-long exposition, accessible to hypergrid visitors, officially opens on Tuesday, February 5 and runs through March 5. The hypergrid address...
Islandz, the official successor to the InWorldz grid, is shutting down, owner Beth Reischl announced today on the grid’s Discord channel. Residents will have ten days to wrap up any current projects. Reischl,...
There’s a lot of OpenSim stuff out there. Last year, for example, there were 380 different grids for the public to explore, and an unknown number of personal, business, and educational grids that didn’t...
by Maria Korolov · Published January 14, 2019 · Last modified January 20, 2019
Jan. 20 Update: First, thank you, everyone, for helping put the book on the Amazon best-seller list for Science Fiction and Fantasy Short Reads last week. It was amazing — we broke the top 50!...
Kitely rolled out their new private grid service yesterday, and there’s a lot of information there to take in all at once. It’s not a full separate OpenSim grid, like you’d get from DigiWorldz...
Kitely is now offering private grids for organizations, the company announced today. For more information, check out this Kitely support thread. There are a lot of questions about how this will work. I will...
Bargain Hosting / Grids Renting Land / Metaverse / Vendors
by Maria Korolov · Published January 7, 2019 · Last modified June 2, 2019
1,000 Gloebits (about US $5) per month for a standard region on the hypergrid-enabled AnonGrid. Free land and varregions also available.
A group that claims to be affiliated with the Anonymous hacktivist collective announced the launch of a new OpenSim grid on Saturday. “Anonymous began to a great degree in a virtual world called SecondLife,”...
Virtual reality is a hot topic in the field of science and technology. It is assumed that the cost of hardware and the complexity of production are the obstructions for the massive adoption of virtual reality....
If you got an Oculus headset this Christmas — or didn’t, and are planning to buy one — this guide can help you learn about the most important features.
More than 300 responses came in for this year’s Eighth Annual OpenSim Grid Survey, and Sacrarium received the highest overall scores, followed by Virtual Brasil, Utopia Skye, Kitely, Tranquility Grid, DigiWorldz, Discovery Grid, OSgrid and DreamNation, in that order. Between them, the respondents...
The 2018 OpenSim Community Conference. started off with a bang this morning with an announcement of a new virtual reality viewer for OpenSim. OpenSimulator core developer Melanie Thielker — also known as Melanie Milland...
From The Ashes Of AvatarFest, OpenSim Fest Rises AvatarFest has been a creative effort which has celebrated the people of OpenSim for years, and AvatarFest 2018 was its final year. In the spirit of...
Update: I’ve added numbers for more than 40 additional grids since this article first run, and now the active user numbers show an increase of more than 2,000. I’ve run the stats for OpenSim...
The 2018 OpenSim Community Conference is this weekend, and you can check out the schedule here. Registration is free, and you can still register here. In previous years, the conference was also broadcast via...
AviWorlds, the grid that’s up and down more than a yo-yo, is back again — this time offering 100 free full-sized regions. Owner Alexsandro Pomposelli has shut down the grid more than a dozen times...
Tangle Grid’s Winter Expo opens its doors this Saturday, inviting hypergrid travelers from any OpenSim grid to come and check out the exhibits and shopping opportunities. The hypergrid address is tanglegrid.net:8002:expo isle. For folks new to...
Registration is now open for the Mainstreaming Virtual World Learning Colloquium. This Colloquium is a free event — held on December 1, 2018 from 9:00 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. Central Time – in the...
Islandz, the successor to InWorldz, officially opened for business last week, writes Ryan Schultz. InWorldz, one of the most successful and longest-lasting commercial grids in the OpenSim ecosystem, closed in August due to financial...
“We estimate that on average 1.5 new VR studios open for business somewhere in the world every day.” “Regardless of what you or I may think about it the big brands are the ones...
In case you’re wondering what I’ve been doing with myself now that I’m not blogging about OpenSim as much, here’s an update. First, I’m super busy at my day job. I’m covering artificial intelligence...
Augmented reality endorsement picks up pace, according to a recent market forecast. The AR market volume is expected to hit $30 billion by 2023, growing at 39 percent CAGR. This growth is rooted in AR’s...
As the November 1 opening of the Santorini 1st Digital Bienniale art festival approaches, organizers have made available the 28-page preview book free exclusively for Hypergrid Business readers: download it here. Read the original festival announcement...
Earlier this year, I wrote about how I’m ready to start winding down Hypergrid Business and move on to the next part of my life. My kids are out of the house, I’ve rented a...
When we started OpenSim many years ago (back with MW, lbsa71 and many others who have since drifted on), we had grand ambitions. Yes, it started as a fun tinkering project that we spun...
Since Google announced that they were shutting down their Google Plus social platform by end of next summer, organizers of OpenSim-related communities on that platform have begun searching for an alternative. Google Plus was...
Google has announced today that it is shutting down the Google Plus social network for consumers. The platform has been popular for OpenSim users to share news about the hypergrid. OpenSim Virtual has more than 2,000...
The Second Life-based Community Virtual Library is opening two branches in OpenSim next summer, on the Kitely and Avacon grids. The two new library branches will be CVL Hypergrid Resource Libraries with content designed...
Kristopher Therrien, known as Quill Littlefeather to the OpenSim community, passed away this month. His family will be holding a memorial service on Saturday, September 29 at 11 a.m. at People’s United Methodist Church in...
by Maria Korolov · Published September 19, 2018 · Last modified September 20, 2018
High Fidelity, the new virtual world platform started by Linden Lab founder Philip Rosedale, now allows its users to convert its virtual currency to real-world cash. “This opens the possibility for people to...
Rockcliffe University Consortium Conference to Return to San Francisco on November 9-10, 2018 SACRAMENTO, Calif. — The Annual Rockcliffe University Consortium Conference ‘The Future Present’ is happening November 9-10, 2018 at the Fort Mason...
by Press Release · Published September 18, 2018 · Last modified September 19, 2018
Survey: Enterprise Companies Seeing Strong Return on Investment in VR & AR LONDON – Businesses working in areas such as automotive, construction, manufacturing and retail are seeing a good return on their investment in...
Breadables creator oYo, formerly based on the now-defunct InWorldz grid, has found a new home — the Tag Grid. The True to Life horses have concluded a successful beta test and will be officially...
Elf Clan, one of the largest themed communities in OpenSim, has found a new home after the collapse of InWorldz. It will now be headquartered on OSgrid, with hypergrid linked locations on DigiWorlds, Kitely,...
OSgrid, the largest grid in the OpenSim metaverse, will hold a donation carnival this month, staring on Friday, Sep. 21 and running through Sep. 28. “We are hoping to raise enough this year...
Pornhub Awards Show to bring Virtual Reality to the Masses Combining live VR streaming and a massively multiuser VR virtual world will deliver two breakthroughs for the premier of the Pornhub Awards Show on September...
Beth Reischl, founder and owner of the now-defunct InWorldz grid, is starting a new grid, called Islandz, she told New World Notes yesterday. The new URL has been purchased, islandzvw.com, though there is nothing up...
One of the more novel shows of this summer has been NBC’s “Reverie,” which grapples with the potentials and risks of realistic virtual reality. The show stars Sarah Sashi (Person of Interest) as Mara...
Citing changes in the social fabric of the hypergrid, Han Held announced in the official AvatarFest Google Plus group that 2018 would be the last year of AvatarFest, the annual OpenSim festival celebrating end...
The 1st Digital Bienniale immersive interactive art exhibit will open to the public on September 20 on the Metropolis Grid. There is also companion physical world event organized by Berlin’s KW Institute for Contemporary...
Editor: This is a contributed announcement from Tag Grid. The Adult Grid has changed its name to Tag Grid. We can still be reached on our old URL and we are in the process...
In the comments section on one of the several InWorldz-related articles these past few days, I saw some people talking about whether OpenSim is safe for content. The idea being that InWorldz was somehow...
DigiWorldz and Discovery Grid were the two top destinations of former InWorldz residents looking for a new home, with respondents almost evenly split at 38 and 36 percent, respectively. Kitely was in third place,...
OpenSim grids are welcoming former InWorldz residents with open arms, offering technical support to get their OARs uploaded, discounts on region rentals, and even free homes and stores. Scroll down for details about special...
Editor: This is a contributed comment from hypergrid entrepreneur Frank Corsi. The Atek Grid has been a long running open to connect grid, supporting many residents who enjoy the abilty to connect land regions from...
The lights went out at midnight. InWorldz, one of the oldest and most successful OpenSim grids, shut down last night. And it ended in a way fitting for a social grid — with a...
Editor: InWorldz cofounder and former CTO David Daeschler just asked us to publish this statement about the current situation with the grid’s crowdfunding campaign. For all those that have been asking me what is going...
Update: As of July 25, the GoFundMe campaign has been halted, after having raised more than $16,000 — just shy of the $17,000 goal. It’s unclear what is happening now. The official InWorldz announcement...
InWorldz, one of the oldest and most successful commercial grids, is shutting down this week, owner Beth Reisch announced today, citing financial difficulties. According to Reischl, travel-related communication problems, bureaucratic mistakes and other issues...
Kitely will soon offer the option of hosting Virtual Private Grids on top of the Kitely grid, the company announced this week. According to the company, this new offering will enable groups and organizations...
Firestorm viewer now supports virtual reality
22 Aug, 2019
1 Aug, 2019
Climb Mt. Everest in virtual reality
19 Apr, 2019
VR startup lets users walk in others’ shoes
20 Mar, 2019
VR poses challenges for software testing
13 Feb, 2019
Groundhog Day sequel is coming–to VR
2 Feb, 2019
VR Headset QR Codes posted on March 27, 2017
App lets you configure your VR viewer posted on March 28, 2017
Active OpenSim Grids posted on March 26, 2012 Most Popular Hypergrid Worlds posted on April 4, 2015
10 best VR headsets under $100 posted on April 12, 2016
How to choose your OpenSim grid type
11 Jun, 2019
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
How to choose your OpenSim grid type
11 Jun, 2019
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
Recent Comments