The Great Canadian Grid is back, grid owner Rod MacDougall — also known as Roddie Macchi in-world – told Hypergrid Business. “I have spent an entire year day and night learning the back end of everything,” he said. Previously, MacDougall used an OpenSim hosting provider to manage the back end, a

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!” she

A virtual walkthrough of the new planned Pentecost Church of Lumberton in North Carolina has been built in Tangle Grid in order to show parishioners what the final building will look like. The virtual build was commissioned by the senior reverend to help the church raise money for construction and

OpenSim grids added a total of 1,574 standard region equivalents to their land area in the last one month, while the number of active users increased by 375. On a further positive note, OpenSim gained an additional 4,000 registered users. OSgrid gained the largest land area in terms of the

Grids around the OpenSim metaverse are gearing up to celebrate Halloween, and some have already started the festivities. Tag Grid holds Halloween build contest The Halloween Build contest on the Tag Grid started on Wednesday, October 7, and will run until Friday, October 31. To participate, a builder chooses a ten-by-ten

Update 10/25: The new grid, now called AviTron, has changed its prices yet again today. For some reason, though this is a commercial grid, Pomposelli is calling the rents “donations” and it starts at $10 per month for a 15,000-prim region and goes up to $200 a month for up

Update 10/15: Alex Pomposelli just sent out an email saying that Virtual Ville was back up and asking for financial support. “The grid is online now and if we will do this I am going to need your help and support,” he wrote. “The estate of my finances is critical after

A new virtual reality camera was successfully delivered to the International Space Station today. It’s not the first VR camera on the ISS, but this new one will allow the astronauts to film spacewalks in virtual reality. According to NASA, The International Space Station Experience is creating an immersive virtual reality series

Metastellar, a new online magazine dedicated to speculative fiction, is now accepting submissions of flash fiction stories for paid publication. They’re looking for original, never-before-published fantasy, horror, or sci-fi stories and are absolutely open to publishing stories about virtual reality of virtual worlds. The stories need to be less than

OpenSim grew by more than 1,700 regions over the past month while active users increased by more than 1,400. There is usually a seasonal uptick in the fall as students and teachers return back to school. This year, that may have been accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, as well. OpenSim

“Garden of Eden,” the first in a series of three live VR art explorations, concerts, and shows organized by HBO, kicks off today at 10 p.m. Eastern time on VRChat, a social VR platform. Those without a VR headset can watch the “Garden of Eden” livestream on YouTube and will be

The Fire and Ice Opensim grid is running an abstract art competition to celebrate hitting several milestones this month. “The theme is abstract art, beyond this, the scope is very open,” grid owner Sara Payne told Hypergrid Business. “Entries can be your own art. Additionally, they can also be an

Multi-grid payments provider Gloebit has been experiencing technical difficulties these past few months, resulting in processing details. But the core problem has been fixed, company founder and CEO Christopher Colosi told Hypergrid Business “I’m still waiting to hear from more people,” he said. “But in my own testing, I completed

Virtuality Grid halted new user registrations in July and will wrap up all operations at the end of this month. Region archive files — OARs — and cash refunds are being distributed now. “Once that is done, all DNS will be shut down,” grid founder Candi Infiniti told Hypergrid Business.

AOs — Animation Over-riders — are popular scripted items in Second Life and OpenSim that replace the built-in system animations for walking, running, sitting, and other basic motions, but they usually bog down servers. I have written a drop-in replacement script that uses a feature of OpenSim to make these

Kay McLennan, OpenSim educator and professor at the Tulane School of Professional Advancement is holding a survey to determine how educators are changing their use of virtual worlds and virtual reality during this coming academic year in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. “As evidenced by educator participation in annual Open

OpenSim stats are down this month by a little over 1,000 active users — but Tag Grid, OpenSim’s largest closed grid, did not report stats this month, and had over 1,500 active users this month. Active users are expected to increase again next month, as students return to school. Craft

Craft World has seen a 25 percent increase in the number of school regions and more teachers attended lessons in immersive education at the grid as a consequence of the coronavirus lockdown, grid owner Raffaele Maci told Hypergrid Business. “At the moment, we have about 140 teachers, 350 students —

Virtual reality use cases have greatly matured over the past few years. VR has gone from an experimental technology to something that’s transforming the way enterprises work. A large portion of the industry has moved past proof of concept into real world applications. A Grid Raster survey this spring found

Discover.film will be holding its short film festival in virtual reality this Friday on the VRChat virtual reality meeting platform. The event will start at 8 p.m. British time — or noon Pacific, following by a second screening at 1 a.m. British time, or 5 p.m. Pacific. The screenings will

VRCollab, a remote meeting and collaboration app that lets users in the construction industry coordinate and collaborate on projects in real-time from different construction sites and offices, has witnessed a twice-and-a-half increase in monthly signups during the coronavirus pandemic related lockdowns. Because many people have been unable to go to

SuperViz is a browser-based platform that supports 360-degree videos, and thus allows users to attend or host any virtual event, and attend conferences and meetups without any need to download any app on their device, and the user does not need to wear a virtual reality headset to use it.

The Firestorm viewer developer team has created a quick, three-question survey to help them determine their user base on OpenSimulator and what problems they have with viewer compatibility. According to the developers, if they know what operating systems and grids their users use most, they can try to make the

AviWorlds will host a party from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. Pacific time this Friday, 24 June at the Bellmar Dance Club – also known as Bellmar Islands 16 — to celebrate attaining 1,000 registered users, and will donate all the proceeds towards COVID-19, grid owner Josh Boam told Hypergrid

The number of active users on OpenSim dropped by around 3,500 users this month, mostly due to stats problems on the adult Brazilian 3D Love grid, which reported more than 3,000 active users last month but none this month. Another big drop was a loss of over 1,000 actives on

It is four times faster to train employees soft skills when using virtual reality than when using traditional in-person classroom or online training, according to a new study by PricewaterhouseCoopers. And it’s cheaper, too — organizations spend about $195 per trainee when using virtual reality, compared to the $207 to $265

The coronavirus pandemic is accelerating the use of virtual reality and augmented reality, experts say, especially in retail, education and health. “The trajectory is clear that this technology is set to become the next ubiquitous computing platform, much like we saw with mobile devices and personal computers,” Taylor Freeman, founder

The number of active users on OpenSim increased by more than 3,000 this past month, and land area grew by over 2,000 regions as people continue to wait out the pandemic. Meanwhile, if OpenSim users are wary of attending real-world Fourth of July events, OpenSim grids, including Tag Grid and Littlefield,

A new pop-up marketing will open on June 19 and run through July 5 at the Seattle Space Needle. The virtual Seattle Space Needle, the one on the Seattle region of the Discovery grid. “The previous pop-up markets were  highly successful with over 200 visitors from throughout the metaverse,” said

A sonic art exhibit title “Synapse” will have its grand opening at the Nuna Art Gallery on 3rd Rock Grid  This Sunday, June 14, at 11 a.m. Pacific Time. This exhibition is an interactive sound installation where viewers are part of the work. Created as a collaboration between Lorin Tone,