It’s busy week. So busy, that I almost didn’t even notice when post number 2,000 went up – CloudServe shifts to wholesale market. Hypergrid Business first went live in March with the post The future of the Internet is coming on. Since then, we’ve averaged 32 posts per month, or a little bitRead More →

Avination, a closed commercial grid, announced a switch to a new currency yesterday, as a result of a previous theft of $126,000 from the grid. Back in the summer of 2011, crooks stole a bunch of US credit card numbers and used them to buy $126,000 worth of Avination’s C$Read More →

CloudServe, which originally launched as a low-cost OpenSim region hosting provider, has shifted to serving the wholesale market instead. Instead of selling regions to individuals, the company now focuses on serving grid owners and land resellers. “We have been for a while,” said Frank Corsi, the company’s chief technology officer. OneRead More →

There’s never been a better time to stock up on low-cost OpenSim land. Sure, you can run regions or mini-grids at home for free, but then you’re responsible for all your own tech support, backups, and upgrades — and the number of visitors is limited to what you home connectionRead More →

In a paper released today, neuroscientists from Sweden’s Karolinska Institutet have used virtual reality to find out how people feel when they think their body is invisible. “This experience affects bodily self-perception and social cognition,” the authors wrote. A person was primed to think they’re invisible by wearing a virtual reality headset,Read More →

I’ve gotten a little wary of trying new virtual reality applications because some of the best ones, graphically, do the nastiest job on my stomach. There was that one swimming-with-sharks simulations that made me seasick, that I still remember well. AltspaceVR has figured out how to put people in aRead More →

Since last September, the lowest-price regions in the metaverse were on the Great Canadian Grid. But their $5 region pricing is coming to an end. You can still get a 15,000-prim region, with no limit on visitors, for just CAD $5 — that’s around $4 in US dollars — butRead More →

One grid was not enough to hold all the drama that is AviWorlds — so now we have two. And they are at war. In one corner, there’s Alexandro Pomposelli’s AviWorlds grid, at aviworlds.us, with 61 regions and 83 active users. In the other corner, there’s Mike Hart’s AviWorlds grid,Read More →

OSgrid lost a chunk of new inventory items over the course of this past month, but the problem doesn’t affect other grids. “It appears that for the last month or so, the asset server was unable to write assets to the database,” OSgrid administrator Allen Kerensky said in yesterday’s announcement. The grid hasRead More →

There are many reasons to go into the freebie business on OpenSim: Create brand-name recognition for yourself as a designer in order to sell premium content Create brand-name recognition in order to do custom work To attract people to your grid, community, role playing group, casino, or event venue To helpRead More →

There is a new destination guide available for any hypergrid-enabled grid: Hyperica Destination Guide. To add the Hyperica Destination Guide as the default guide for your grid, simply edit your Robust.ini or Robust.HG.ini file. In the “[LoginService]” section there is a “DestinationGuide” parameter which can be used to communicate aRead More →

$15 a month for a 16,000-prim region on the hypergrid-enabled DigiWorldz grid, no setup fee. Private grid hosting also available on request.Read More →

The total number of regions and public grids in OpenSim hit new record highs this month but while more than 8,600 new users registered, the total number of active users fell by 909 to just below the 30,000 mark. For those who are new readers, OpenSim is a free, openRead More →

The Kitely Market has passed the 8,000 item milestone, with a new total of 8,300 different items, grouped into 4,116 product listings. Unlike the Second Life Marketplace, where, say, different colors of a dress would each be listed separately, Kitely Market counts these as variations of a common product listing.Read More →

The Firestorm Viewer is the most popular on the hypergrid by a wide margin, according to today’s analysis of Hyperica server logs. More than half of the last 3,600 visitors to Hyperica used the Firestorm Viewer. Less than a third used Singularity, and CtrlAltStudio, Cool LV, and Replex were all aroundRead More →

Virtual Desktop is a free Windows application that instantly makes the entire Windows operating system accessible via the Oculus Rift. Anything that you can use on your monitor, such as a word processor or a browser, you can use in virtual reality. Read a very thorough review at Road to VR.Read More →

Stray Cats — The Game opened its doors to beta testers at the start of this month. It’s an OpenSim grid dedicated to breedable cats. The owners say that users will be able to buy cats, sell them, breed them, train them, and enter them in competitions, and that thereRead More →

I’ve heard a lot of complaints about Linda Kellie while traveling the hypergrid. Okay, not about her per se — she’s probably done more for OpenSim than any other creator out there. But the fact that Linda Kellie’s content collection is licensed CC0, which is as close to public domainRead More →

For those interested in learning how to work with mesh objects, there’s a new series of Blender tutorials available online from Ontario-based retired artist Aine Caoimhe — also known as Mata Hari in-world. Blender is a free but powerful 3D modeling and animation program available for download here. It supports theRead More →

Merrie Schonbach’s new grid’s business model is a mystery. Literally a mystery — Pillars of Mist will offer both self-paced and group murder mystery events. It is the newest example of a trend we’re seeing on the hypergrid, of focused, niche grids that don’t try to be all things to all people,Read More →

As everyone who has ever tried to set up a hyperport well knows, hypergrid destinations change frequently. Regions move, grids close — staying up to date can be a nightmare. Especially if you’re doing it all by hand. To help people out, and to avoid unnecessary duplication of work, I’veRead More →

The Adult Metaverse Google Plus community continued to attract members over the past six weeks, growing by 146 members from 444 members last month to 590 members today. At the start of the year, it only had 282 members. Second Life and other Virtual Worlds saw the next-highest growth, with 130Read More →

DigiWorldz launched this week, a new filtered grid from one of the founders of 3rd Rock Grid and digital worlds hosting and consulting company Digital Worlds Group. There were more than 30 new grids in the latest Hypergrid Business monthly stats report, but DigiWorldz stands out not only in the caliberRead More →

The new official release of OpenSimulator — OpenSimulator 0.8.1 — came out this week, with only minor changes compared with the preview release. “The most significant being a fix for a regression where script state was being lost for hypergrid transfers,” core developer Justin Clark-Casey said in an announcement. Compared toRead More →

The exportable content on the Kitely Market grew ten times faster than non-exportables over the past month, continuing a trend that began late last summer. The market added 245 new exportable items, compared to 23 non-exportable ones, for a new total of 7,950 different variations of 3,898 products. A singleRead More →

This was another record-breaking month for OpenSim, with new highs in regions, users, and active users on the 323 active worlds. For those who are new readers, OpenSim is a free, open source virtual world platform that’s compatible with the Oculus Rift. It allows people with no technical skills toRead More →

Mountain Dew has produced the Dew VR Snow Experience, a live-action snowboarding virtual reality experience that takes fans on a 360 degree adventure through the Utah backcountry. The on-site experience will debut at the Burton US Open of Snowboarding in Vail, Colorado and South by Southwest in Austin, Texas and willRead More →

I don’t usually go around telling people what the best grids are. I run surveys, or I punt the question and just say, “What ever grid works best for you” or “Your own private grid” or something like that. The thing is, everybody is looking for something different. Some peopleRead More →

This week, OpenSimulator released a security fix to protect content on public grids. All public grids should either install the fix, or configure an HTTP proxy to protect important ports, said OpenSim core developer Justin Clark-Casey in the announcement. But the danger goes beyond protecting the data on grid servers, ifRead More →

Cirque du Soleil Media has partnered with Samsung to produce a live action virtual reality aerial show to be viewed on its flagship Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge smartphones in combination with the Gear VR headset. Read full article at The Hollywood Reporter.Read More →

Icelandic article Björk is making a music video for the Oculus Rift. “It’s easy to get really intimate [with virtual reality],” she said in a recent interview. “It’s almost more intimate than real life. It also has this crazy panoramic quality. I think it’s really exciting.” Read the full article atRead More →

This past week’s Game Developers Conference in San Francisco featured more female speakers than ever before, according to new analysis from Vocativ. According to the report, the number of women speakers at the conference has doubled, from 10 percent in 2011, to 20 percent this year. Read full report here.Read More →

The RobStock team have set the date for the 8th annual RobStock Charity Event for the last weekend in March, from Friday, March 27 to Sunday, March 29. “We are asking artists to give an hour of their time free, all tips going to the charity,” the organizers said in a pressRead More →

OpenSim core developer Melanie Thielker is donating a new cluster storage solution to the community. Called FSAssets, it is designed to replace the MySQL databases or the RAID storage arrays used by other grids. FSAssets is also the new asset storage for OSgrid, which had previously relied on RAID storage. Any gridRead More →

Monthly pageviews for Hypergrid Business crossed the 100,000 milestone for the first time in its six-year history, according to today’s Google Analytics report. Visitors viewed 101,371 pages in February, up from 97,036 pages in January. Both of these numbers are a significant increase over last year, when monthly pageviews typicallyRead More →

US $10 (8 Euro) for a 15,000-prim region. Includes Bullet physics, hypergrid, Vivox voice, backups, choice of six starting OARs.Read More →

$15 per month for a 15,000-prim varregion region on the Tag Grid, no set up fee.  Can hold up to 100 avatars. Can be sized as a single standard region, a 2×2 varregion or 4×4 varregion. Grid has own online content marketplace. No hypergrid. Read More →

An open grid is one that allows outside people to connect their own regions. Those regions could be hosted for free on home computers, or be provided by third-party hosting companies, such as Dreamland Metaverse, Zetamex, CloudServe, Oliveira, or any other grid-agnostic vendor on our hosting list. Here is theRead More →

John Vechey, the cofounder of Bejeweled maker PopCap Games, has created a new startup, Pluto VR, to take advantage of the opportunity that the resurgence of virtual reality has created. Seattle-based Pluto VR will focus on the software needed to make virtual and augmented reality environments more social and connected. ReadRead More →

Inventory exports, or IARs, became a heated topic of discussion in Google Plus communities yesterday, with one grid even disabling its IAR exports temporarily as a result. Much of the debate is due to a misunderstanding of how IAR backups work — and of how thieves steal content. What isRead More →

OpenSim developer Dahlia Trimble has won a bounty for her work on fixing llLookAt, a function useful in making objects move better. “Fred Beckhusen has tested the code and is happy with the result,” said Talla Adams in an announcement today. Adams, who is the moderator of the OpenSim VirtualRead More →

OSgrid, the oldest grid running on the OpenSim software, is backup. The news was announced in a tweet a few minutes ago. “OSgrid is opening its gates to direct logins and regions at this very minute,”Melanie Thielker, founder and owner of the Avination grid and an OpenSim core developer, told Hypergrid Business. “It’sRead More →

WizDish‘s ROVR developer kit will cost £395, or about US $610, according to a report today in VRFocus. WizDish is an omni-directional treadmill similar to the $700 Virtuix Omni or the $600 Cyberith Virtualizer and is designed to allow users to walk or run while wearing virtual reality headsets. The device requires special shoes, andRead More →

Valve just announced that it will show off its own virtual reality hardware, SteamVR, at next month’s Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. Valve is the company behind Portal, Team Fortress 2 and the widely-used PC game distribution hub Steam. “At GDC 2015, we’ll be giving demos of the refined Steam Controller,Read More →

Ever since the hardware failure took down OSgrid‘s asset database last August, OSgrid residents have been worrying about whether the grid would ever recover — and, if it did, whether their inventories would be restored as well. The wondering is now over. The asset database has been rebuilt, in aRead More →

When it comes to virtual reality, there are two fronts, two main technical directions that the technology is evolving in that everyone is talking about. But there’s also a third front, that hasn’t been getting as much attention, but which has the potential of being truly revolutionizing. Videos and video games OneRead More →

River Island, a UK-based fashion chain, has released the first-ever fashion app for Google Cardboard-compatible virtual reality headsets. The app was released to promote the launch of the company’s Design Forum x Jean-Pierre Braganza collection, which hits the stores on February 24, and was created in partnership with the British Fashion CouncilRead More →