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A lot of debate about open source code versus proprietary code these days centers on the personalities of the folks involved, or on the politics behind the idea of open source. But, from a business perspective, the availability of open source alternatives is a net positive for enterprise — andRead More →

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In a major step forward for usability of OpenSim, Israel-based startup Kitely has created a Website that allows any Facebook user to create, load and enter an OpenSim world in less than two minutes. The world owner can then invite other individual Facebook users to visit, invite an entire group,Read More →

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Back when I was fresh out of college, in my first reporting gig, I learned that context matters a lot in getting folks to talk to you. At the start, a typical conversation would go like this: “Hi, this is Maria Korolov from the Chicago Tribune…” “No, thank you, weRead More →

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CliniSpace took first place yesterday in the AI-assisted training category of the Federal Virtual Worlds Challenge with its virtual medical training simulation. Los Altos Hills, CA-based Innovation in Learning, Inc. launched CliniSpace in September of 2010, based on the Unity 3D platform. (We’ve written about the company before, see full story here.)Read More →

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Avination grid owner Melanie Thiekler rolled out Vivox voice to her grid today — at no extra cost to residents or land renters. Residents immediately began trying it out, and it sounded great. Those who had good microphones came through crystal-clear, without any of the cutting in and out andRead More →

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InWorldz has taken a further step way from mainline OpenSim Tuesday with the announcement of a proprietary scripting engine, called Phlox, which is expected to enter beta testing this week. The new scripting engine promises to support 99 percent of existing Second Life scripts, with increased speed and stability. ScriptsRead More →

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Yesterday, I posted a story (yes, a little on the long side) about a new services from PioneerX Estates where they manage your whole grid for you. Everything — estates, land rentals, voice — all the tech stuff for a ridiculously low price of $41 a month. (No, they areRead More →

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Back when 3rd Rock Grid first launched in the spring of 2008, it was one of the earliest OpenSim grids and the owners had to figure out everything on their own. The grid’s managers had to learn how to install the software and maintain it, manage upgrades, backups, modules, land,Read More →

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Resellers of open source software survive by making life easier for their customers. For example, Website hosting providers handle the setup, backups, updates, load balancing and server management for you. Yes, you could run Apache for free on your own servers — but would you really want to? Those thatRead More →

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The world’s top 40 public OpenSim grids gained 424 regions and 12,746 registered users since the middle of February, a slightly slower than usual growth rate. However, we’re continuing to see growth in private and mini-grids. For example, 466 new copies of the Diva Distro were downloaded last month.This doesRead More →

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OpenSim’s largest commercial grid, Avination, announced a major new milestone today — it will be offering in-world Vivox voice at no charge to its residents and region renters, as well as to customers who host private grids with the company. Vivox is currently the gold standard of in-world voice, usedRead More →

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Open Wonderland — an open source, Java-based virtual world platform — marks the first anniversary of the project’s founding on March 11. Open Wonderland was originally Sun’s Project Wonderland, but support was discontinued and project staffers laid off in early 2010 after Sun was acquired by Oracle. Since then, theRead More →

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Employees willing to interact with a variety of avatars — except for those that are “creepy” Employees prefer to use more formal avatars to represent themselves According to a new study from Microsoft and the University of Washington, employees are generally open to using avatars for email and instant messaging,Read More →

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When aspiring freelance writers ask me for advice about how to get started, here’s what I always start out with: Don’t do anything that other people are willing to do for free. So if you love writing about politics, or the foibles of your pet cat, or how lousy SaturdayRead More →

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Leading virtual architect Jon Brouchoud has created Virtual Architecture 101, a 3D exhibit on Architecture Island in Second Life — and there are some nice lessons there for anyone looking to build a virtual environment for their school or company. While the exhibit is plagued by the text-on-board syndrome commonRead More →

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OpenSim grid owners now have another option for their grid server software — Aurora-Sim. This branch of OpenSim, still in “pre-alpha” stage of development, promises more security features and better vehicle physics than mainline OpenSim, but it is still too early to tell whether it will be able to deliver.Read More →

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After ReactionGrid announced plans to patent a process for deploying and managing OpenSim earlier this month, the open source community responded with dismay. In comments on the initial announcement, and in ReactionGrid’s follow-up clarification, and in the OpenSim discussion list, open source advocates worried that patenting processes might hurt the developmentRead More →

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The non-profit NewWorldGrid will stop allowing self-hosted regions to connect as soon as the grid completes its upgrade to the latest version of OpenSim. “We are currently starting tests on the current OpenSim development releases,” grid manager Olivier Battini told Hypergrid Business. There is no firm date yet for theRead More →

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Austria-based VirWoX began trading Avination’s C$ virtual currency today. VirWoX is best known as a leading exchange for Lindens in Europe, and for its hypergrid-enabled OMC currency. “Given the strong growth of Avination and its clear focus on becoming a commercial grid, this looks like an interesting market to beRead More →

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The non-profit, research-focused ScienceSim grid is now accessible via hypergrid teleports again, after more than a year of no hypergrid connectivity. ScienceSim turned off the hypergrid last January, due to security concerns. But new upgrades in the hypergrid technology — in particular, the ability to keep content from being takenRead More →

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Over the past couple of weeks, we’ve been surveying the owners of all the public OpenSim grids about what their grids are all about. We asked about hypergrid, currencies, maturity levels — and intellectual property policies. What we found suprised us. A number of OpenSim grids now have very detailedRead More →

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The number of regions of the 40 largest OpenSim grids went down this month for the first time since July, from 15,623 to 13,069, a loss of over 2,300 regions, a result of a long-overdue housekeeping on OSGrid. But the big story was from Avination, which rocked to second place thisRead More →

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Changchun is a city in northeast China known for its auto plants. “We’re the Detroit of China,” said David Deeds, IT manager and teacher at the Changchun American International School. “Except that they’re still making cars here.” The school, which was founded four years ago, is affiliated with an autoRead More →

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There are hundreds of OpenSim grids, most of them running quietly on private servers, behind corporate, school and university firewalls. The following two tables cover just the publicly accessible grids. Some of the grids are run by individuals or school groups and may not be up and running at allRead More →

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OpenSim grid developers Powersynch, LLC — the folks behind the SpotOn3D group of grids — launched a certified developer program today. The program is “somewhat comparable” to the Second Life solution providers program, Philippe Pascal, the company’s developer program manager, told Hypergrid Business. “We plan to offer a certification processRead More →

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Chris Lineberry is the principal of the Florence Virtual Academy in Florence, Arizona, about 60 miles southeast of Phoenix, serving students in grades six through 12 who live in the district – or anywhere else in the state. The school currently has 23 students, and enrollment is expected to riseRead More →

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Many grids today have hypergrid turned off, for fear that content will be taken from their grid to a less secure grid, copied, and distributed illegally. OpenSim developers are working to create a hypergrid-wide permission system for content that will help abate this fear, and open more of the OpenSimRead More →

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There are three main ways today to have a 3D virtual business meeting using your browser – VenueGen, Altadyn’s 3DXplorer, and Avaya’s  Web.alive. Of the three, VenueGen stands out by actively marketing its platform with ubiquitous Internet advertising. But the company wants to be known for its ease of useRead More →

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This year’s Virtual Edge Summit, held January 12 and 13 in Las Vegas and simulcast on eight different virtual conference platforms failed to take advantage of the social networking, immersive, and showroom capabilities of these vendors. Virtual attendance was up this year, with around 900 people attending virtually, up fromRead More →

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The top 40 OpenSim grids gained 529 regions since mid-December, to reach a new high of 15,623 regions on January 15 of this month. The monthly growth rate, 3.5 percent, was the second-lowest since we started gathering the statistics in the summer of 2009, a possible indication of a seasonalRead More →

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Companies looking to hold virtual conferences first have to decide whether to hold a Web-based conference – normally some combination of streaming video, live chats, slide shows, and social media – or one in an immersive environment. The immersive conference allows avatars to walk around inside a three-dimensional virtual environment,Read More →

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Virtual environments are changing rapidly, and it’s sometimes hard to keep up with everything that’s going on. Here is a quick round up of the best options for the most common uses of virtual worlds for various types of enterprise needs. If you’re looking for a high-end, Fortune 500-caliber virtualRead More →

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The script below works by pulling in data from the following page: http://www.hyperica.com/lookup/ Simply replace the URL at the top of the script with the codes for which region you want to go to. For example, you can use it to automatically look up the newest Retail destination, or theRead More →

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The following is a script you can place on any object to turn it into a hypergrid teleportation portal. If you put it on something that looks like a giant blue swirly circle, everyone will know that it’s a hypergate. But you can also use it to create teleport buttonsRead More →

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This year was a big one for OpenSim. Lots of growth, lots of technological breakthroughs. But some Hypergrid Business articles got more attention than others — and, thanks to the miracle of Google Analytics, we know exactly which ones. Here are the top 10 most-read articles of 2010. 10. OpenSimRead More →

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In January of 2010, I made a few predictions about what I thought was going to happen with OpenSim this year. I was way off on most of them. The OpenSim developers will continue to call it “alpha software” This one, I got right. They’re still calling it “alpha software.Read More →

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Grid owners with proprietary viewers can now add high-quality voice to their worlds Not yet included in Hippo, Imprudence — users must download add-on This week, vComm Solutions of Switzerland released the source code for Whisper, a high-quality voice option for OpenSim. Whisper supports directional voice and lip synching, andRead More →

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OpenSim grids hit yet another new peak this month, with 15,094 regions on the top 40 grids, an 11  percent increase from last month’s 13,564 regions — a gain of 1,530 new regions. Meanwhile, total registered users on these grids grew 5 percent from 140,053 in mid November to 147,565Read More →

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SpotOn3D will hold a benchmark test on Wednesday, December 15 to determine the difference in performance of OpenSim version 0.7.1 and OpenSim 0.6.9 when they run in the cloud. According to SpotOn3D co-founder and COO Tessa Kinney-Johnson, the test will be conducted from 2 to 3 p.m. SLT (Pacific time)Read More →

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Here at Hypergrid Business we spend a lot of time touring virtual environments, and we often find them difficult to navigate, inconsistent, and hard to use. But one of the world’s biggest corporate users of virtual worlds — IBM — is hoping to change that. With a new set ofRead More →

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San Francisco-based Tipodean Technologies will open its Canvas Web-based viewer next week to a select group of beta testers, but Hypergrid Business got a sneak peek this week. A test version of the viewer will go live on Monday. “We will see how big of a load it is,” saidRead More →

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ReactionGrid released a groups module for OpenSim this week and announced plans to upgrade to the next version of OpenSim “early next year.” According to its announcement, ReactionGrid’s group module will be rolled out to all region on ReactionGrid over the next two weeks. ReactionGrid doesn’t just run its oneRead More →

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California-based Katalabs has just released a free iPad and iPhone-friendly Web-based virtual world viewer, KataSpace, which works in conjunction with the open source Sirikata virtual world server software. KataSpace is built on the WebGL and HTML 5 Web standards, which means it will run in browsers without a plugin, andRead More →

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It’s easy to get frustrated with the pace of technological change. My wish list of OpenSim features gets longer with every day that I use the platform — but I’ll save it for my Christamas wish list post. Today, I want to express how thankful I am for what hasRead More →

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The OpenSim economy continued to grow this month, with both the OMC currency and the I’z currency from InWorldz growing in users and transactions. The OMC, a convertible currency from Austrian virtual currency exchange operator Virwox, is now accepted on 18 different grids — AnSky Grid, Avatar Hangout, FrancoGrid, GermanGrid,Read More →

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OpenSim grid hit a new peak this month, with 13,564 regions on the top 40 grids, a 9 percent increase from last month’s 12,425 regions — a gain of 1,139 regions. Meanwhile, total registered users on these grids grew 8 percent from 129,797 in mid October to 140,053 today. OSGridRead More →

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The Virtual Worlds Education Roundtable, a group of educators working in Second Life, is expanding to a new grid on the OpenSim platform. The group — originally called the Second Life Education Roundtable — began looking for expansion locations earlier this fall after Second Life announced the shut down ofRead More →