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Update: In August, I bought a FiiT VR 2S, and that is now my new favorite. But I’m also still recommending the BoboVR Z4 headset, because of its 120-degree field of view, built-in headphones, and built-in control button. I would not recommend that anyone go rush out and buy a virtual reality headset rightRead More →

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With this week’s Daydream announcement, Google is cementing its strong early lead in the virtual reality platform race. Although some virtual reality proponents don’t consider mobile-based headsets to be “real” virtual reality, this platform is adequate for watching traditional movies on virtual screens, and for experiencing virtual videos. This is currentlyRead More →

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Pornhub’s March launch of a channel dedicated to virtual reality content put a big stamp of approval on the technology, since it’s the most popular site for adult content on the Web. But there only had a handful of content providers to start with. That’s changing quickly. Last month, PornqueenVR launched withRead More →

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Music streaming service Rhapsody released a virtual reality application this week, Rhapsody VR, for Cardboard-compatible headsets. “We’re excited to unveil the latest project we’ve launched — Rhapsody VR, a virtual reality app that immerses you in a live concert experience by dropping you onstage with the artists,” the company saidRead More →

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If you are located near Northampton, Massachusetts, or plan to swing by, Northampton Community Television is offering free public virtual reality demos using the HTC Vive and Gear VR headsets. Stop by the NCTV facilities at 380 Elm St. on Tuesdays from 6 to 7 p.m. and on Wednesdays and Fridays from 2 to 3 p.m. It’sRead More →

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Google Expeditions, the virtual reality version of the 1990’s TV series The Magic Schoolbus, has reached over one million students, Google announced today. Google Expeditions was launched last spring, and is now in eleven countries. There are more than 200 virtual trips available to such destinations as Buckingham Palace and the Great Barrier Reef. TheRead More →

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EBay has launched the world’s first virtual reality store, in partnership with Australian retailer Myer. It works with all Google Cardboard devices, and the company is also giving away Shopticals, a branded headset made out of Cardboard. You can download the app for iPhones and for Android devices — but onlyRead More →

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Google announced a new operating system for virtual reality that will run on new, compatible Android phones, the company announced at its annual developers conference today. The platform is called Daydream and seems to include some of the features of the Samsung Gear VR platform, including a virtual environment thatRead More →

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The crowdfunding campaign for a Virtual Lisbon grid is up and running again, asking OpenSim users to contribute just $1 each to the project. The founder, Carlos Loff is an experienced virtual worlds builder and community manager, and has been active in Second Life since 2007. This is his fourth tryRead More →

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The Virtual Life Grid has turned on hypergrid connectivity, the grid announced in a press release today and on Twitter. The grid’s hypergrid address is now virtuallifegrid.com:8002. For those interested in learning more, the grid will be holding a general meeting for residents on May 28 at 2 p.m. Pacific at the Virtual LifeRead More →

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If there was any doubt, two new reports out this week confirm that we have the first killer app for virtual reality, and it’s watching videos. That might come as a surprise to people who expected immersive, first-person games to be more attractive, or virtual meetings and socializing. However, watching videosRead More →

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Virtual reality trailblazer Oculus VR has launched its VR for Good program, offering support to students, filmmakers, and nonprofit organizations looking to create immersive films. The first part, aimed at high school students in the San Francisco area, is a six-week program designed to help students explore careers in the sciencesRead More →

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Google added support for virtual reality headsets to its Android YouTube app late last year, enabling any video to be seen in side-by-side immersive view simply by clicking on a cardboard icon at the top right or bottom right of the video screen. Traditional videos were shown as if theyRead More →

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The total number of standard region equivalents dropped this month on OpenSim’s public grids due to a large cleanup of orphan regions on Metropolis. The grid removed around 1,600 unused region reservation slots from its grid map. The total number of standard region equivalents on the public grids is now 56,535,Read More →

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I love virtual reality rollercoaster apps because they’re an easy way to show off the technology to people who’ve never tried it before. You don’t have to teach people how to interact with the app, or how to navigate. All you do is pull it up and hand over theRead More →

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The Void, a Utah-based virtual reality theme park, is coming to Times Square in July with a Ghostbusters-themed experience. Customers put on virtual reality headsets and backpacks holding computers, and walk around inside a virtual world, Star Trek Holodeck-style. Read more about the Ghostbusters experience at The Verge. Watch aRead More →

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Samsung’s Gear VR had 1 million users last month, reported its content partner, Facebook’s Oculus VR. Oculus also reported that Gear VR now has 250 apps, including the recently-added Minecraft. The average user spends 25 minutes a day using the headset, which was released six months ago. Media the killer appRead More →

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The Kitely Market reported a new high in the number of product listings, and the share of those listings that are exportable to other grids was also higher than ever. The Market currently offers 13,703 different variations on 7,201 products. Of those variations, 8,909 are exportable to other grids. ExportablesRead More →

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More than 100 people responded to our survey of how people use OpenSim, and the results are in — the majority of people use OpenSim for work and for creative self-expression. The first question of the survey asked people who they were. The single biggest group of respondents, or aboutRead More →

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The Great Canadian Grid and DigiWorldz have been hit by a cyber-attack that has taken the grids offline on Saturday. There should be no damage to the grids themselves. Both grids are now back up. “Everything is good and I am now in the process of doing updates on all the serversRead More →

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Corrections: Well this story made people mad! But when I’m wrong, I’m wrong. Here are three corrections: 1. The question of who is handling the finances is a he-said, she-said situation. If the she-said side of it is right, then associating an innocent person’s name with this mess is theRead More →

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When I first heard about all-in-one virtual reality headsets, the idea seemed totally impractical. Who would want to spend several hundred dollars on technology that would become quickly obsolete? With mobile-based headsets, you’re still spending hundreds of dollars on technology — but you’re spending it on the phone, which youRead More →

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AltspaceVR, a social world with support for virtual reality headsets such as the Oculus Rift, Vive, and Samsung Gear VR, is adding support for its business users with Slack integration. Slack is a hot new messaging and collaboration platform and is free for small teams. Team members who do notRead More →

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Disclosure: I bought this headset with my own money, and the purchase links at the bottom of this article are to all the major sites I know that carry it, with affiliate links where available. Bottom line: This headset does not make my best-buy list. It is heavy in comparison to otherRead More →

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Disclosure: The folks at EverBuying just sent me a free review copy of the VRToto headset. Thanks, guys! The purchase links at the bottom of this article are to all the major sites I know that carry it, with affiliate links where available. Bottom line: This headset does not make my best-buy list. ItRead More →

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I’ve been noticing a disturbing trend in much of the news media and analyst research reports covering virtual reality hardware — a complete and utter dismissal of the virtual reality headsets made in China. Instead, all the attention goes to the super-pricey and super-niche tethered headsets like the Oculus Rift,Read More →

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Disclosure: The folks at GeekBuying just sent me a free review copy of the DeePoon V3 headset. Thanks, guys! The purchase links at the bottom of this article are to all the major sites I know that carry it, with affiliate links where available. Bottom line: Right now, this headset is giving my currentRead More →

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The Mobius Grid is seeking $2,000 in donations in order to port the Phlox script engine to standard OpenSim. The Phlox script engine was created by the InWorldz grid and donated to the community last fall. The open source community page for Phlox is located here, on GitHub and is distributed under theRead More →

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Today, Google Cardboard users who want to switch between virtual reality apps or videos need to take their smartphones out of the viewer and use the touchscreen to navigate the apps. A future version of the Android operating system may offer a more complete virtual reality experience, Ars Technica reports inRead More →

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I recently saw Hardcore Henry at the local mall, a movie funded via a crowdfunding campaign and filmed completely in a video game-style first-person point of view. This was not a great movie. It did not have a great plot, or great character development. It felt more watching someone playRead More →

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Merchants who sell virtual goods on the Kitely Market can now automatically share the revenues they receive with third parties, both for individual listings and for individual variations of those listings, the company announced this week. “Merchants have been asking us to add support for automatically splitting marketplace store revenue betweenRead More →

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OSgrid cleaned out about 1,000 dead region reservations from its grid map, but there was still a net gain in land area this month, with the public OpenSim grids adding the equivalent of 679 standard regions, for a new land area total of 57,612 standard region equivalents. OSgrid is the largest andRead More →

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Dan Banner was appointed president of OSgrid at the end of March, following a previous term as treasurer. Former president James Stallings, who is also known as Hiro Protagonist in-world, has stepped down from that position, but will remain a board member. “I have gone back to working full timeRead More →

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Developers love the Oculus, Vive, and PlayStation VR because they offer the most cutting edge technology and the highest degree of immersion. But developers are ACTUALLY working on content for the Google Cardboard ecosystem. Don’t confuse the platform for the little cardboard give-away sets, please! There are some VERY niceRead More →

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The folks at GearBest just sent me a free review copy of the PlayGlass headset. While this headset is one of the pricier ones I’ve reviewed recently, I was not particularly impressed with its field of view, usability, and opaque cover. However, it does have decent lens adjustment options andRead More →

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The second multi-grid OpenSim Treasure Hunt begins in two weeks, and there is still time for grids and region owners to participate. Promote your destination by picking up a stand from Hyperica at hg.hyperica.com:8022, Tangle Grid at tanglegrid.net:8002:HG Station 1, or WestWorld grid at westworldgrid.com:8102, or download an IAR fileRead More →

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Beijing-based Baofeng Technology Co. Ltd. has sold more than one million of its mobile-based virtual reality headsets since the beginning of this year, the company told the official China Daily newspaper. That compares to reported sales of half a million headsets last year, making Baofeng the industry leader. White theRead More →

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The results of our free land for hypergrid newbies survey are in, with over 60 responses. Here are the top seven grids mentioned by our readers. DigiWorldz This grid was mentioned by 17 different readers, even though it has one of the most restrictive offers — only 30 days, onlyRead More →

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Hypergrid inventor and OpenSim core developer Crista Lopes, also known as “Diva Canto” in-world, just won the $10,000 prize for software in the public interest from the Tides Foundation, a social justice and sustainability-focused organization. Lopes, who is the first woman to win this award, is also a professor of informatics at the DonaldRead More →

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Update: I was doing a demo yesterday and the Cardboard Enabler app I reviewed below mysteriously stopped working. I could no longer switch to the Gear VR view. Deleting the app forced me to reinstall the Gear VR applications and reboot my phone several times. Then my phone died forRead More →

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If you go to the official Google Cardboard site, you might think that there are only a dozen or so compatible headsets — and that half of them are made of cardboard. In fact, that page only shows a very tiny subset of the Cardboard-compatible headsets on the market. WorstRead More →

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Hulu had originally planned to have its virtual reality app for the Samsung Gear VR last fall, but finally released it yesterday. It is a free download on the Gear VR’s Oculus store, and supports both virtual reality films and Hulu’s entire library of traditional 2D videos. There was noRead More →

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Pornhub has launched a dedicated virtual reality porn channel and gave away 10,000 free virtual reality headsets to get people to try it. Totally not safe for work link: http://www.pornhub.com/vr Pornhub says it has over three million videos and attracts over 60 million visitors per day, and, at four million members, theRead More →

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I regularly get emails from new grid owners looking for publicity but very few grids can answer the first question I ask: “What makes your grid different?” Instead, I get generic answers, which could apply to any of the 300-plus active grids I’m currently following. Such as community, support, lowRead More →

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GearBest is holding a “flash sale” on its virtual reality headsets over the next few days, with free shipping. Some of the headsets on sale are older models, heavy and with a narrow field of view. But there are three worth checking out, that are newer releases, with wide fieldRead More →