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Are you still holding off on getting a Google Cardboard kit and turning your smartphone into a super low-cost virtual reality device? Maybe Volvo will change your mind. On Tuesday, the company is giving away a limited number of Volvo-branded Google Cardboard kits. All you have to do is downloadRead More →

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On Monday, to celebrate the tenth anniversary of Firefox, the Mozilla foundation launched the MozVR project to help fosaster the emerging virtual reality Web. In June, an Oculus-compatible version of Firefox was released. This is not a full virtual world platform like OpenSim, but more of an open source alternative toRead More →

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With OSgrid down for three months and no news from its managers about when it is expected to come back up, other grids have been stepping up to serve its users. Most recently, Tangle Grid launched the open Tangle OS grid at the beginning of October. That grid is nowRead More →

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OSgrid has successfully recovered 1.9 terabytes, out of 3.5 terabytes total, grid president James Stallings II said during a conversation on OSgrid’s Internet Relay Chat channel yesterday. The conversation was reposted on OSgrid’s forums by grid administrator and OpenSim developer Allen Kerensky. Stallings — who was posting under the userRead More →

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If you live, like me, in a northern climate, then you might be starting to suffer from the lack of sunlight, and from the cold November winds. Fortunately, there’s plenty to do in on OpenSim grids, where the sun shines bright whenever you want it to and the temperature is alwaysRead More →

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Nimble VR is less than $1,300 away from its $62,500 Kickstarter goal, with 39 days left to go. It’s a sign that this is a useful bit of technology — a camera-based motion sensor that attaches right to the front of an Oculus Rift headset. A sensor attached to the frontRead More →

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There’s yet another smartphone-based virtual reality headset on the market, this time from Australia-based company Phenomec. The headset, called the VRSmartView Developer Kit, costs AU $49.99 or about US $43.48 and is available for order now from the company’s website. Delivery is currently scheduled for December 12 of this year.Read More →

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Seems that there’s a mania for mergers going on. Next Reality and SkyLife Grid merged with AviWorlds. 3D Grid merged with Metropolis. And now Lost World grid is merging with AviWorlds, too. Is there a merger in your grid’s future? Take this quiz to find out!Read More →

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The motorsports-focused Next Reality grid has merged with AviWorlds. Next Reality had 125 regions as of mid-October, and was known for its racetrack and for its adults-only Red Light Hotel. Grid owner Mike Hart had been running the grid on his own until a failure with its RAID storage broughtRead More →

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There are plenty of headsets on the market today that are basically shells made out of plastic — or cardboard — that you slide your smartphone into. Higher-end devices such as the Oculus Rift, Sony’s Project Morpheus, GameFace, AntVR, Vrvana Totem, CastAR, and Immersion VRelia, haven’t yet hit the consumer market.Read More →

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3DGrid, a small non-profit German grid offering free or nearly free regions to educational institutions, announced today that it is merging with Metropolis, Germany’s largest grid. 3DGrid is a three-year old grid that, at last count, had 14 regions. It did not release its user numbers. “My personal involvement inRead More →

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The Tokyo University of Information Sciences released a new tool this week for converting OpenSim regions to mesh. The new OAR Converter tool takes a region saved as an OAR backup file and converts it to a Collada file, which can then be used inside Unity 3D and other all-mesh environments.Read More →

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Love them or hate them — and many people do love them — but there are now breedables on the hypergrid. Previously, breedables in OpenSim were limited to closed grids like InWorldz, with Oyo Breedables, Fussels Breedables, and, of course, Amaretto Breedables. As of this week, however, breedable turtles have arrivedRead More →

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Merchants selling products on the Kitely Market can now advertise them. According to today’s announcement, merchants can now put up ads promoting individual products, or their entire stores. The ads will appear on top of search results in a “Featured Products” or “Featured Store” section. Prices start at US $0.10Read More →

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I just noticed that KZero has an excellent new design. Perfect timing, too — as interest in virtual reality is exploding, so is the need for virtual worlds consultants of all kind. Arch Virtual also has an excellent new site, as does Designing Digitally. Of course, lots of vendors in ourRead More →

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OpenSim Creations, the top site for OpenSim creators sharing original content under Creative Commons licenses, is gone. “In the wee hours of October 20, the entire /home folder of this server got wiped,” said owner Vanish Seriath in a post today. “Why, I don’t know. To make matters worse, I don’tRead More →

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This is a follow-up to yesterday’s article about the rules of grid competition. So you’ve decided to avoid self-sabotaging, unproductive, negative types of marketing and competition. What’s left? Lots of stuff! 1. Market your cool new features Don’t expect people to notice it when you add a major improvement toRead More →

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Terry Ford, founder of the commercial 3rd Rock Grid, is spearheading the formation of new association of OpenSim grid owners. “We at 3rd Rock Grid do not see other grids as our enemy,” he told Hypergrid Business. “Instead, we hope all grid are successful as their success is our success,Read More →

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As OpenSim grows bigger and bigger, some grids might think that an easy way to gain customers would be to bash other grids. For example, AviWorlds grid owner Alexsandro Pomposelli said in a recent comment, “For me a competitor is my mortal enemy.” Now, I’m all in favor of competitionRead More →

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Now that the Hyperica hyperport is starting to get into shape, I’ve set out some free hypergates for people. Just teleport over to hg.hyperica.com:8022 and pick them up. I’ve got some all-in-one gates, like the one from The Hypergates, and a Blamgate from Pathfinder, and Diva Canto’s teleporter. The gate fromRead More →

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The Hyperica hyperport gets a decent amount of traffic, and has a few scripts running on it. Plus, I recently rearranged the grid, and my hosting company updated our software. Let’s just say that region restarts are common place. And my gate scripts kept breaking. It’s turns out, this wasn’tRead More →

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Island Oasis, a closed commercial social grid, released a new viewer for its residents yesterday. The custom viewer — available for download here — is a version of Firestorm configured specifically to work with Island Oasis, including links to the grid’s online marketplace, currency purchases, and full search functionality, said theRead More →

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The Adult Grid became the second major closed grid to connect to the Kitely Market, the grid announced today in a press release. Zandramas, another closed grid, did the same this past April. The Adult Grid — like the name suggests — features adult content. It came in second inRead More →

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There is a new version of the OpenSimulator software, 0.8.0.2, which fixes an inventory permissions bug that appeared in 0.8 and 0.8.0.1. This change fixes a problem with the llGiveInventory and llGiveInventoryList scripting commands, said core developer Justin Clark-Casey in a post. When these script commands are used to give items to anRead More →

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OpenSim hosting company Zetamex is bringing founder Timothy Rogers back as its CEO, a new support partnership with Zandramas, and a limited time region offer to existing customers. This was the news that came out at last night’s public meeting at the Zetamex virtual office on their ZetaWorlds grid, andRead More →

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The total land area on OpenSim’s public grids rose by the equivalent of 1,616 standard regions to 52,180, the grids gained more than 6,000 new registered users, but the number of active users fell by 280 this month on the back of a continued outage at OSgrid. Metropolis was the biggestRead More →

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Trying to come up with a new name for a grid? Try to avoid any of the words in the cloud above so that you wouldn’t be confused with other grids.Read More →

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A new hosting provider, CloudServe, is offering cloud-based OpenSim regions starting at $7.95, mini-grids starting at $34.95 and full grids starting at $94.95. CloudServe is a service operated by Austin-based 3D Virtual Web, Inc., the company behind Virtual World City. Prices are mid-range — not as low as Zetamex, but aboutRead More →

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Attendees of the New York Comic Con 2014 got a chance to fly virtual dragons, thanks to the folks from DreamWorks Animation. The movie studio created a virtual experiences using Oculus Rift headsets, fans, and vibrating seats to put users on the back of flying dragons, part of the studio’sRead More →

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3rd Rock Grid, a mid-sized closed, commercial grid won’t be closed for too much longer. The next grid upgrade will bring hypergrid functionality in the next two or three weeks, grid founder Terry Ford, also known as Butch Arnold in-world, told Hypergrid Business. “We will have some safeguards in place to notRead More →

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Zetamex will not be accepting any new customers for the rest of the month, incoming president Richard Lehman said in an announcement posted today on the company’s website. Lehman became the owner of the company in mid-September, but previous CEO Timothy Rogers was slated to continue to serve as actingRead More →

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OSgrid residents who rent their regions from Dreamland Metaverse and who can no longer wait for OSgrid to come back up can have them moved to a private mini-grid, the company announced yesterday. The offer includes a free month of hosting, plus custom asset retrieval. OSgrid has been down forRead More →

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  Robert Bosch, the world’s largest supplier of automotive parts and equipment, is training between 8,000 and 10,000 mechanics on direct-injection and breaking technology — using virtual reality. The company has launched a 750-stop tour with Oculus Rift headsets that allow the technicians to get virtual tours of the insidesRead More →

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SkyLifeGrid founder Josh Boam agreed to provide hosting for the much-troubled AviWorlds grid last month. Now, the two grids are merging — and a third grid, QuickLifeGrid, is joining up as well. As of last month, SkyLife had a little over 100 regions and 36 active users. I have no data onRead More →

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The hypergrid turns six years old on October 26. On that 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’mRead More →

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I just spent an hour Googling around for this because half the tutorials out there are for older versions of GIMP, so they no longer work! But I needed some quick gold and silver textures — and this technique works for silks, as well. Here’s how to do it. CreateRead More →

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Exo-Life, a small social world, has completed its move from Zetamex to Dreamland Metaverse hosting this week. Zetamex and Dreamland Metaverse are the two leading hosting companies for companies, organizations and individuals running private OpenSim grids. How they switched The migration process was very straightforward, Dreamland CEO Dierk Brunner told HypergridRead More →

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Carl Zeiss, a company known for high-end lenses, is now in the virtual reality business. Their headset, the VR One, is currently available for pre-order, with shipping scheduled to begin before Christmas. The first version of the device will support iPhone 6 and Samsung Galaxy S5 smartphones, trays for otherRead More →

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One of the most popular articles on this site is Log your visitors to Google spreadsheet, which I wrote in 2012, and which Zuza Ritt updated the following year. Here’s an easier way to do it, and the script to go with it. Step One: Create the form Sign in toRead More →

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If you live in Houston, Los Angeles, or Washington DC, check out the Oculus Rift experience for the upcoming movie “Interstellar” by director Christopher Nolan. The virtual tour, which began in New York City this week, takes you on a three-minute trip through the spaceship “Endurance” featured in the movie.Read More →

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Update: Craft was back up earlier than expected, on Monday, October 6. See this post for details. OSgrid went down with RAID problems in late August and still hasn’t recovered. The Next Reality Grid was hit a week later. Now Craft, an open, non-profit European grid popular with artists, hasRead More →

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I’ve been feeling left out because so many cool virtual reality accessories coming out are for Android phones. And I have an iPhone. So I was really excited about the $49 AirVR, which just pulled in $25,000 Canadian — of a goal of $20,000 — with 11 days still left to go inRead More →

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Okay, so the field for motion control is wide open. Nobody knows what technology and user interface paradigm will actually take us into mainstream virtual reality. But this probably isn’t it. Watch the video below, where users wear thimbles on their fingers while pointing at computer screens. If you don’tRead More →

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A prototype virtual reality system from Sightline VR‘s Tomáš “Frooxius” Mariančík combines an Oculus Rift, a Leap Motion controller, and an innovative user interface to allow people to use their actual hands as controllers, no gloves required. I really like the in-world touch-screen interface but wonder whether your arms would get reallyRead More →

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The folks at Oculus VR have posted videos for all the keynotes and talks from their Oculus Connect conference two weeks ago, so if you weren’t able to get to San Francisco, here’s your change to catch up on what you missed. Watch the Oculus Connect introduction below. Then theRead More →