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Tangle Grid‘s Halloween Expo opened for business today and will run through November 15. But the grid is still accepting exhibitors. “We are looking for creators that would like to show their creation in this theme or just drop a few items down to give people something to look at,”Read More →

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The Las Vegas-themed Neon Grid is having a grand-opening party tonight at 8 p.m. Pacific at the Landing Strip Club on its Welcome Center region. The grid is among the few — possibly, the only– commercial grid that uses PayPal for games and shopping via the PayPal money module. During theRead More →

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The OpenSim community has come together for a user-focused event next month, AvatarFest 2015. The event will run from November 13 through 16, with the exhibit and performance submission deadline on November 7. See the AvatarFest calendar for more details. Community members were inspired to hold the event by the factRead More →

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There’s been a recent trend with real estate companies to create virtual walk-throughs of properties for prospective customers. But one company, eXp Realty, has taken this a step further and actually has its offices in a virtual environment. “We don’t have any physical bricks-and-mortar office of any significance, other than toRead More →

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This Christmas shopping season promises to be a good one for virtual reality, with a $30 View-Master virtual reality headset hitting the market just about now. This is brightly-colored headset from Mattel that is fully compatible with the Google Cardboard standard and can play any of the hundreds of theRead More →

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Trying to find new virtual reality apps? Check out WearVR, which catalogs nearly 1,000 virtual reality applications for all major platforms. Apps can be sorted by newest, highest rated and most popular, and can also be filtered by device, platform, and genre. The site also has a section of virtualRead More →

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If you don’t have your hands on a Google Cardboard headset yet, you might be able to get one from Air New Zealand if you hurry. The company is giving away 1,000 headsets so that people can try out its virtual reality app for Android devices and for iPhones. It’sRead More →

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Virtual reality cameras cost hundreds — or thousands — of dollars. But Shot, a startup based in Spain, hopes to bring the price down to under $100 with a new Kickstarter campaign by combining fisheye lenses and some clever software. The way it works is that you clip the lenses toRead More →

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The Adult Metaverse community on Google Plus has just crossed the 1,000 member mark. With 135 new members since the start of August, it is the fastest-growing OpenSim-specific community on the platform. DigiWorldz was in second place by growth, with 89 new members bringing it to a total count ofRead More →

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With around 2 million Google Cardboard devices already in user hands, and Taobao and AliBaba alone selling 300,000 additional units a month, mobile-based virtual reality is going gangbusters. The iOS app store and Google Play have hundreds of virtual reality apps. Microsoft’s app store has less than two dozen. So,Read More →

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Yes, virtual reality technology will turn us all into drooling idiots and destroy civilization — but it won’t be the first. Here are ten other technologies that have already destroyed civilization. 10. The Internet The Internet is more addictive than cocaine. Back in 1995, fewer than 15 percent of Americans usedRead More →

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I just got my Samsung Gear VR a couple of weeks ago and have been testing it out. It’s a nice headset, light, wide field of view, but I sent it back today for a refund. I will probably get the updated version once it comes out in November, since itRead More →

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According to a report released earlier this month by Shanghai-based Interface News, China’s two leading online commerce platform,  Taobao and AliBaba, together sell more than 300,000 virtual reality headsets every month, with lower-cost headsets accounting for the bulk of the sales. The report does not include direct sales from theRead More →

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Editor’s note: This article was updated on 1/27/2023 to remove dead links and links to malicious sites. InWorldz and Avination — two of OpenSim’s biggest and oldest commercial grids — have just made extremely large code donations to the OpenSim community. OpenSim server code is distributed under the BSD license.Read More →

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Bright Canopy, the browser-based streaming access service for Second Life and OpenSim, is coming back on Wednesday after a three-week outage. The service launched at the end of August to great reviews but was hit by a sharp spike in the price of cloud computing services. It was offering users all-you-can-eatRead More →

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Want to attend the TechCrunch Disrupt conference but can’t make it in person? Being there in virtual reality might be the next best thing. Today, YouVisit is livestreaming the conference via its free virtual reality app, available for iPhone, and Android platforms, as well as online through traditional 360-degree video thatRead More →

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Tangle Grid’s 2015 Steam Expo has been drawing both local residents and hypergrid visitors, grid owner grid owner Leslie Kling told Hypergrid Business. And each event seems to draw more and more people, she added, as word gets out. The Steam Expo and the Fashion Expo are the most popular sheRead More →

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I have tried on my share of headsets. The Oculus Rift development kits. The various Google Cardboards and the higher-end smartphone-based headsets. The Fove. Let me just say that even if I didn’t know that I was wearing a headset, I’d instantly know that I was looking at virtual reality,Read More →

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Sony announced the new name for the Project Morpheus headset: PlayStation VR. “The name ‘PlayStation VR’ not only directly expresses an entirely new experience from PlayStation that allows players to feel as if they are physically inside the virtual world of a game, but it also reflects our hopes that weRead More →

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AviWorlds now has a Facebook app that allows people to take pictures in-world and post them to Facebook. Many other grids have Facebook pages, but the only other commercial grids with Facebook apps are Island Oasis, which launched theirs late last year, and Kitely, which has had one since 2011. SecondRead More →

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Virtual city recreation project Digital Lisbon, currently a part of the AviWorlds grid, has launched a crowd-funding campaign on IndieGoGo to set up its own, dedicated world. Founder Carlos Loff is looking to raise $2,000, which will cover half a year of hosting and provide money for events and content. LoffRead More →

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OpenSim grids saw continued steady growth this month, with total region counts, user numbers, and monthly actives all reaching new record highs. There are now the equivalent of 65,122 standard regions on OpenSim’s 317 active public grids, a new record high. There are also 478,497 registered users and 31,567 active users, anRead More →

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I’ve written before about what an amazing service AOL did in getting people to go online for the first time. They spent more than $300 million on all those disks. They were at checkout counters. They came in the mail. They were in cereal boxes. They were everywhere. As aRead More →

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Pirate’s Atoll announced today that the grid is moving to DigiWorldz. The Atoll has been a small, hypergrid-enabled standalone minigrid hosted with Oliveira Virtual Lands. Grid owner John Simmons, also known as Strannik Zipper in-world, said that he decided to move the grid to be closer to DigiWorldz’ music scene, to take advantageRead More →

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Mini USA, the company behind the iconic Mini Cooper, has just jumped on the free Google Cardboard bandwagon. They’re following in the footsteps of several other companies that have been giving away virtual reality headsets lately, including Volvo, cell phone manufacturers LG and OnePlus, the HomeLane furniture store, a pornRead More →

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If you live in Los Angeles, keep an eye out for the VAN Beethoven customized truck. The Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra has created a new virtual reality experience for the Oculus Rift, the opening of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, and is making it available to the public. Check the schedule forRead More →

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Next year’s Game Developers Conference, to be held in March in San Francisco, will be accompanied by a brand-new event, the Virtual Reality Developers Conference, and is accepting submissions now for its gaming track and its entertainment track. The submission deadline is October 2. Read more about it at Road to VR.Read More →

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Press release: Marriott Hotels Introduces The First Ever In-Room Virtual Reality Travel Experience Bethesda, Md – Marriott Hotels today announced the launch of “VRoom Service” – a first-of-its-kind guest service that allows guests to order inspiring virtual reality experiences to their rooms. Created in collaboration with Samsung Electronics America, “VRoom Service” isRead More →

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I didn’t get a chance to go the U.S. Open and put on an HTC Vive headset and play tennis against Maria Sharapova. But I’ve been following the news coverage, and can’t wait until something like this comes to a virtual reality arcade in my area — this doesn’t look likeRead More →

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DigiWorldz has announced a referral and affiliate program for residents, bloggers, and anyone else who would like to bring new users to the grid and earn a commission on all future land payments. This is not a one-time payment, grid founder Terry Ford told Hypergrid Business. Whenever a new userRead More →

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Las Vegas’ Neon Museum released a virtual reality app for the Oculus Rift last year and was ported to the iPhone and Android last spring for viewing with Google Cardboard-compatible headsets. Now the app is also available for Samsung’s Gear VR. Thanks to VRFocus for the heads-up. Watch a previewRead More →

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Virtual reality is a fast-changing field, and is about to explode. Stay on top of the news by subscribing to the top blogs on the subject. The page authority numbers are from Open Site Explorer and are estimates of how the site does in search results — the higher the number,Read More →

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According to Roy Taylor, corporate vice president of Alliances for AMD,  there will be 30 million virtual reality headsets in use in North America and Europe by 2018. He was citing figures that resulted from the inaugural meeting of the VR Council, an industry group with 70 members. Half ofRead More →

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The Scienceverse Kickstarter, originally scheduled to begin today, has been postponed until September 10. The company plans to build an open source virtual reality platform that supports social interactions and third-party app development. It is built on top of Unreal Engine 4 and promises to be compatible with all majorRead More →

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Kat Walk, a new type of omnidirectional treadmill, successfully raised nearly $150,000 in its Kickstarter, on an original goal of $100,000. This was enough to meet its $120,000 stretch goal, which was to put little wheels under the treadmill to make it easier to move the entire setup. The wheels tuck inRead More →

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On Saturday night, Mal Burns joked that virtual reality headsets are now like the AOL disks — they’re everywhere. All we need now is to see them in cereal boxes. With prices of $5 or less for Google Cardboard sets — $1 or less if you buy them in bulk —Read More →

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My Freefly VR headset came in the mail a couple of days ago — I ordered it from Amazon exactly a week earlier. Bottom line: this is a great headset, and I’m looking forward to comparing it with the Samsung Gear VR, which is being shipped to me as I writeRead More →

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It’s a law of economics that, over time and with perfect competition, the price of a product tends to approach the marginal cost of the product — that is, how much it costs to make one more item. The marginal cost of a virtual good is just about as closeRead More →

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The DigiWorldz grid has rolled out a new viewer for its residents, based on the Alchemy Viewer, and included Qarl’s mesh deformer functionality. The mesh deformer is a crowd-funded project that successfully raised more than $5,000 from users in Second Life and OpenSim on Indiegogo in 2011. In 2013, InWorldz hired formerRead More →

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Dahlia Trimble, an OpenSim core developer who’s been with the project since the summer of 2008, announced today that she is leaving. “I am sad to announce that I will be leaving OpenSimulator Core,” she told fellow developers. “I’ve been finding lately that I no longer have a use forRead More →

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Update 2: The community meeting transcript is here, and the Bright Canopy service will probably be coming back only for a limited number of users until the Amazon price fluctuations are dealt with. Update: The company will hold a community meeting Saturday morning in Second Life to answer user questions.Read More →

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The United Nations teamed up with Vice News and the VRSE virtual reality platform to deliver a new documentary about Ebola, Waves of Grace. The documentary can be watched online as a standard 360-degree video, or in immersive virtual reality by those who have Gear VR or a Google Cardboard-compatibleRead More →

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Although some Vive virtual reality headsets will be shipping late this year, most consumers probably won’t see them until 2016, according to a press release. “Later this year, HTC will offer the first commercial Vive units via a limited quantity of community and developer systems, with larger quantities shipping inRead More →

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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 →

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Kitely, the largest commercial OpenSim grid, has rolled out a new region monitoring tool for its users, and published a new guide for detecting and fixing world performance problems. The grid has also added a Web-based option to manually stop a running world, the grid announced earlier this week. “As aRead More →

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What better way to marketing a Canadian independent science-fiction horror musical than with a creepy virtual reality trailer? Load up this video in a immersive headset — like one of those in our big virtual reality headset list here — and keep an eye on the creepy guy sitting inRead More →

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Since June, Wells Fargo has been putting virtual reality Oculus Rift Development Kit 2 headsets on consumers at local events across America as the San Francisco bank works to build brand awareness in a fun way. It’s called the Together Experience tour, and has consumers playing a virtual maze game andRead More →