The smartphone is able to replace a lot of the things we use to need. Alarm clocks, GPS devices, cameras, mail delivery, televisions, radios, tape recorders, record players, calculators, guitar tuners, pedometers — the list goes on and on. The next-generation augmented and virtual reality headset, which looks like aRead More →

OSgrid celebrated its ninth birthday this weekend, but the events did not go smoothly on OpenSim’s largest and oldest grid. OSgrid has had some technical issues over the past few days, grid president Dan Banner told Hypergrid Business, starting with login in problems on Friday. Users were still able toRead More →

Leap Motion CTO David Holz spent more than an hour and a half last Thursday night answering questions about virtual and augmented reality in front of an audience of more than 200 avatars in AltspaceVR‘s virtual environment. He said that we’re about to see transparent, sunglasses-style virtual and augmented headsetsRead More →

Canada’s Tek Gear Inc. is offering a free virtual reality headset to anyone who wants one — as long as they pick up the shipping charges. “We’ve been in the VR business for over 24 years, delivering high end immersive solutions to military, medical, industrial and research institutions worldwide,” said TonyRead More →

Several grids did not report numbers this month, resulting in a drop in active users of 3,209. Avination was down this month, as were Virtual Dream, My Virtual Community, and Cyberface. Some grids, such as Activity Ds stopped providing active user numbers. In addition, eight of the top ten most popular grids lost activeRead More →

The number of non-exportable items on the Kitely Market dropped this week, while exportable products continue to rise, according to statistics released today by Kitely. The difference between the two was the second highest in history. The first, in November of 2014, came after Kitely significantly improved market functionality andRead More →

Virtual environments can let people step back in time, by visiting the recreation of a place or event. Tell people about your favorite historical destinations in the survey below. Each submission gives you another chance to win a virtual reality headset for your smartphone. Did you miss a chance to winRead More →

Last week, Linden Lab said that it was no longer working on its Oculus Rift viewer for Second Life, dashing OpenSim user hopes that eventually their viewer would be open sourced and be a usable virtual reality access option for their grids. However, CtrlAltStudio’s David Rowe says that he is updatingRead More →

On Friday, Virtuix, the maker of the Omni virtual reality treadmill, announced a joint venture with Hero Entertainment, a billion-dollar Chinese game publisher and developer of Crisis Action, the most popular mobile first-person shooter game in China with more than 400 million players. Hero will convert Crisis Action to VR gameplayRead More →

OSgrid was down on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday of this week when the grid was no longer able to access its asset services, but other grids probably don’t need to worry about the same thing happening to them. “It was an issue with the cluster and was not related to OpenSim,”Read More →

The$200 Insta360 Nano VR camera, which will be available for purchase on July 30, clips to your iPhone and uses two fish-eye lenses to take 360-degree photos or videos. You can see some videos that have been taken with the camera here. It works with the iPhone 6, iPhone 6 plus, iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s plusRead More →

UK-based education company Macunx VR has passed its Kickstarter goal of $4,308 — or £3,000 — with two weeks of its campaign still to go. The company plans to build a virtual reality Unity-based platform that will allow users to create and share virtual memory palaces. A memory palace is essentially a mental library forRead More →

The third hypergrid Treasure Hunt officially began on Friday, with 14 grids participating. It will run through August 6, so there’s plenty of time for both hunters and grids to jump in. Prizes include $25 cash, Linden dollars, and Bluetooth MP3 speakers, Holland Woodenshoes key chain, and a HipHop Band T-shirt. For moreRead More →

The final round of PlayStation VR headset pre-orders went live on Thursday, but sold out in minutes, a Gamestop representative told IGN. According to Sony, there won’t be any more pre-orders. The headset will be officially released on October 13. The headset itself is priced at $400, significantly less than the $600 Oculus RiftRead More →

Philip Rosedale’s virtual world startup High Fidelity has announced the launch of its Marketplace this week. Registered users can now upload new content again. The Marketplace has also been redesigned, with a new submission flow, hosting for all associated assets, and ability to like items, the company said. However, thereRead More →

HTC plans to set up more than 10,000 “experience sites” in mainland China by the end of the year, the China Daily newspaper reported today. The company is partnering with Suning Commerce Group and Gome Electrical Appliances Holding Ltd, two of the biggest electronic offline retailers in China, Alvin Graylin, head of HTC’sRead More →

Per reader request, I’ve added two new links to the menu in the black bar above — VR & AR, and Metaverse. The first will list all the VR articles, and the second will just have the OpenSim-related ones. If you subscribe to the Hypergrid Business RSS feeds, you can now subscribeRead More →

Google Expeditions, previously only available to select schools, is now available to the public, at no cost. “The app is available today for Android and will be available for iPhones and iPads soon,” the company announced earlier today. The app is designed to be used by both teachers and students. Teachers wouldRead More →

This year, Shark Week will be coming to virtual reality. It starts today, Sunday, June 26, and Discovery Channel will make parts of its Shark Week broadcast in virtual reality and 360-degree video format.   Discovery VR is available for mobile headsets with apps for iOS, Android, and Gear VR.Read More →

Samsung has branded its Milk VR 360-degree video platform as Samsung VR and has added the ability to upload user-generated content. “Creators can load their own 360-degree videos to the Samsung VR platform for sharing and for the first time view them in Samsung Gear VR,” the company said in anRead More →

The Gloebit multi-grid virtual currency is now out of beta and can be used for shopping. Users who previously had a beta account will need to sign up again for the live version. You can sign up here, with either an email address and password or by connecting an existingRead More →

A couple of weeks ago, I received a review copy of the UCVR headset in the mail. I haven’t been in a rush to review it, Because I didn’t have anything nice to say. I enjoy writing positive reviews a lot more. But I also don’t want people to waste their money.Read More →

  On its tenth anniversary, Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education is adding a new element in to its conference program, a science fair. “Educators from all disciplines and levels are invited to participate,” outreach committee head Lorraine Mockford, also known as LoriVonne Lustre in-world, said in an announcement. “If you are interested in includingRead More →

In case you missed it, OSgrid has been holding weekly meetings every Saturday at Wright Plaza, after a long period in which communications between grid managers and residents were problematic. “We restarted it about three months ago,” said grid treasurer Lawrence Roberts on the Inworld Review last week. “It’s been well-attended, andRead More →

Oculus has released an update to its software yesterday, allowing its games to run on other headsets. “We continually revise our entitlement and anti-piracy systems, and in the June update we’ve removed the check for Rift hardware from the entitlement check,” the company said in a statement. “We won’t useRead More →

The New York Times Virtual Reality app won the Mobile Grand Prix at Cannes Wednesday night. The newspaper has given away 1.3 million free Google VR headsets to subscribers to the Times’ Sunday edition since last November. Around 500,000 then downloaded the NYT app for Android or iOS, which generated a total of 1.5Read More →

The other mini headset that I ordered recently has arrived, the Shinecon Mini from AliExpress, which cost me $13.50. Since it came at about the same time as the Leji VR Mini that I reviewed yesterday, I was able to compare the two mini headsets. They have a lot in commonRead More →

Update: In August, I bought a FiiT VR 2S, and that is now my new favorite. Another headset I’m recommending is the BoboVR Z4 headset, which has a 120-degree field of view, built-in headphones, and a built-in control button. The Leji VR Mini that I ordered from AliExpress for $11 has just arrived,Read More →

The Dlodlo Glass V1 headset looks like a pair of sunglasses and weighs just 78 grams, or less than three ounces. It has a field of view of 100 degrees — a little higher than the Gear VR’s 96 degrees, and almost as good as the 100 degrees of theRead More →

Lucasfilm’s ILMxLAB has teamed up with secretive augmented reality startup Magic Leap to develop mixed reality content. To give a little taste of what it may look like, the companies released a video in which holograms of R2D2 and C3PO interact with one another and with real objects in a real living room. ReadRead More →

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. Last month, I received a free review copy of the Virtoba X5 headset from GeekBuying, and a coupleRead More →

Motion sickness is one of the big usability problems plaguing virtual reality today, and if you don’t want to attach electrodes to your head, there might be a simpler, easier solution — narrowing the field of view. Researchers at Columbia University discovered subtly making the image smaller during in-world motion wouldRead More →

Last Sunday’s Adult VR Festa had so many attendees that hundreds were forced to wait outside until police were called in to break up the crowd. The event, which was held at a venue in Tokyo’s high-tech Akihabara neighborhood, featured adult VR applications and devices. Read full story at RocketNews24.Read More →

I just received my free Loop VR headset from OnePlus. The company gave away thousands of headsets to promote the release of their new OnePlus 3 smartphone, and while it’s definitely an upgrade from the cardboard headset they sent out last year, it lacks many of the features that have recently becomeRead More →

The total land area of OpenSim’s public grids increased by almost 3,000 regions, but active users dropped by 405. The total number of standard region equivalents on the public grids is now 59,339, up by 2,821 compared to last month, the largest single-month increase in almost two years. The total includesRead More →

The Kitely Market is now delivering content to 138 different OpenSim grids and mini-grids and merchants are continuing to increase the amount of exportable content available on the platform. There are currently 7,486 product listings in Kitely Market containing 14,134 variations, of which 9,237 are sold with the Export permission.Read More →

Game studio Ubisoft and developer Red Storm Entertainment is working on a Star Trek game that allows four players to cooperatively fly a spaceship in virtual reality. The game, called “Bridge Crew,” is scheduled to launch this fall on the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and PlayStation VR. Read full story at the AssociatedRead More →

Director Steven Spielberg is working on a family-oriented virtual reality project for The Virtual Reality Company, where he is also one of the advisors, the company announced yesterday. That’s only a couple of weeks after Spielberg called virtual reality “a dangerous medium” at the Cannes film festival. The Virtual RealityRead More →

Fruit Ninja VR will launch for the HTC Vive later this month, with versions for the Oculus Rift, Playstation VR and Google Daydream planned for later this year, the company announced this week. Based on the video the company released, the game involves using gesture-based controllers to slice fruit. Only theRead More →

Avi-Labs, the OpenSim hosting company that grew out of the AviWorlds grid, has added OSgrid region rentals and OAR sales to its previous set of grid hosting services and managed server rentals. OSgrid regions go for $5 per month for 15,000 prims, with no setup fee, one of the lowest prices available. Two-by-twoRead More →

Medical software development company Vedavi has its virtual reality anatomy app all set and ready to go for the Oculus Rift, but the lack of a controller with six degrees of freedom is holding it up. The company also plans to port its VR Human Anatomy software to the GearRead More →

OSgrid residents who plan to exhibit at next month’s anniversary celebration can now claim their parcels on the OSG9BW, OSG9BN and OSG9BE regions, grid president Dan Banner announced today. The exhibits can be constructed off-site and brought over or built right on location, he said. There is a limit of 676Read More →

Did you just get a Cardboard-compatible virtual reality headset? You can tell if you have a mobile headset by the fact that it weighs very little, costs very little, and does not plug in to your computer. Instead, it has a place where you put in your smartphone. Then, if theRead More →

The latest version of the YouTube app can play any video in virtual reality mode, on both Android smartphones and iPhones. Just open up the app on your smartphone, and pull up any video. Take, for example, this  Cirque du Soleil virtual reality video. Notice the little Cardboard outline at bottomRead More →

The Great Canadian Grid is continuing to suffer from on-going distributed denial of service attacks. DigiWorldz grid founder Terry Ford, whose company also provides hosting services, has been working on securing the Great Canadian Grid’s infrastructure since the attacks first began about a month ago. His company does not host theRead More →

In general, I believe that marketing is advertising is great for promoting virtual reality.  Marketing experiences tend to short, well-produced, and, of course, well marketed. Plus, no company wants to make potential customers sick, so they pay attention to making their virtual experiences induce as little nausea as possible. And,Read More →

Baofeng Mojing, the world’s leading virtual headset manufacturer, has released a new viewer that incorporates Leap Motion gesture control. The Baofeng Mojing 5 Plus was announced at a press conference in Beijing yesterday, along with the Baofeng Mojing 5, which does not have the Leap Motion controller. Both headsets haveRead More →

Open-sided virtual reality headsets are small, fold flat, and can be easily carried in a pocket or purse. Since most don’t have head straps, they are typically suited for quick, on-the-go VR experiences or demonstrations. The open sides allow easy access to the phone screen for interactivity, or switching apps. However,Read More →