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A new art installation has its grand opening today, Monday, Sep. 12, at 1 p.m. Pacific time on the Craft World grid, the second contribution to the Ukraine Borderland Art Project. The installation, Ukraine Victory 2025, is by artist Rage Darkstone. The hypergrid address is craft-world.org:8002:Ukraine The installation is a “lyricalRead More →

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If you want to try high-end consumer virtual reality headset, one that’s not part of Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta ecosystem, the best options are the headsets that you tether to a PC. One that I haven’t tried yet is the HP Reverb G2 VR headset. And it’s discounted today, from $599Read More →

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According to psychologists, three reasons people love VR are that it reduces stress, helps us face our fears, and lets us have fun by warping our normal sense of time. As the VR industry takes off, VR headsets have become more affordable and accessible, leading to even greater adoption amongRead More →

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OSgrid, the largest grid in land area and active user numbers, will celebrate its 15th birthday starting on Monday, July 25. The celebration will run through July 31. “We’ll have live music and DJs to entertain us as we celebrate everything that is OSgrid,” grid president Wizard Atazoth. Former presidentRead More →

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OpenSim Fest 2022 still has three days to go, and it’s already breaking attendance records. “Since we opened the OSFest 2022 grid at the beginning of June, there have been a record 763 unique avatars on the grid from 158 hypergrid-enabled grids on the OSFest 2022 Grid,” OSFest 2022 director ShelennRead More →

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The public OpenSim grids lost more than 4,000 active users and nearly 2,000 regions since this time last month for a combination of reasons, the biggest being the closure of the Metropolis grid. Metropolis closed at the end of June so that the owners could focus on educational projects. TheRead More →

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Griefers can be a real nuisance in OpenSim. Also known as bad faith players, they can fill a world with various self-replicating items to deliberately irritate other users. There are a number of ways to do away with the objects left by griefers, including automatic detection, shutdown, and restarting ofRead More →

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I’m Snoots Dwagon, head of greeters, exhibitor, and a performer at this year’s OpenSim Fest. It’s my first OpenSim festival, and I’ve got two parcels you might want to check out, Rascal Flats and Replicant City. In the case of both exhibits, the entire purpose is to provide some funRead More →

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This year’s OpenSim Fest 2022 kicks off at 9 a.m. Pacific time on Friday, July 8 with pomp and color and goes until Monday, July 25, 9 p.m. Pacific time. The hypergrid address is grid.opensimfest.com:8022.  For further information check out the fest’s Discord community page or the official event website. The firstRead More →

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Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg showed off four new headset prototypes a few days ago that, he said, make virtual reality feel almost real. The goal is to invent displays “that are as vivid and realistic as the physical world and much more advanced than traditional computer screens we use today,”Read More →

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Discovery Grid is celebrating its sixth birthday with an air show and a pyro-musical fireworks display. The event, Thunder over Discovery 2022, takes place this Saturday, July 2, at 2 p.m. Pacific time, with an encore event at 6 p.m. Pacific. The hypergrid address is discoverygrid.net:8002:Lousville. You’ll want to arrive earlyRead More →

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OpenSim customers that use Diva Distro version of OpenSim or its Diva Wifi website interface screen, as in the image above, should install the latest security patch to the software to seal a vulnerability that could render their grids susceptible to crashing. The Diva Distro software is almost as oldRead More →

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The Metropolis grid will shut down on midnight on June 30. But before one of the oldest OpenSim grids closes for good, it will be the site of the premiere performance of a play by Reiner Schneeberger. The play is titled “The Art Giantess Is The Work: Thea von Harbou,”Read More →

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Last night, Google sent me a message that I could have one of its virtual AI-powered voices record my audiobooks for me. I wrote an article about for MetaStellar here: Google offers free AI-powered audiobook narration. You can edit the finished file to fix pronunciation mistakes and then download theRead More →

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The 15th annual Virtual World Best Practices in Education conference kicks off on  Thursday, March 31 and will run through April 2 at the VWBPE region in Second Life. This year, about 23 exhibitors including universities, non-profits, journals, community organizations, and individuals are set to exhibit at the VWBPE Conference Exhibit Hall,Read More →

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CIOs, CTOs and technology leaders agree: AI will be the main driver of innovation across industries throughout the next five years. Nearly half of CIOs say they’ve either already started using AI or plan to implement it in 2022, and two-thirds of workers surveyed recently said they want employers toRead More →

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“Metaverse” is a word thrown around a lot lately, and its meaning seems to mean whatever anyone wants it to mean. Here’s a breakdown of the most common definitions. Metaverse as virtual reality The term “metaverse” was first coined in Neal Stephenson’s 1992 science fiction novel Snow Crash. He usedRead More →

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The total land area of the public OpenSim metaverse shrank by over 2,000 regions over the past month. Nearly all of that loss can be attributed to ZetaWorlds — which lost 2,336 regions due to maintenance on the grids. The total number of both active monthly users and registered usersRead More →

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  Two years into the COVID-19 pandemic we’d expect hybrid teams to regularly meet, work and learn in virtual reality (VR), wouldn’t we? After all, over 10 million high-quality, reality-bending virtual reality (VR) headsets have been sold heavily. But here we are in our video meeting, staring at a webcamRead More →

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Blockchain technology, used to power cryptocurrencies and other decentralized record-keeping systems, has been struggling to find practical use cases outside ransomware and speculative projects like Bitcoin and NFTs. There have been a number of pilot projects in a variety of industries, but they’ve rarely turned into anything with significant businessRead More →

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The number of active public grids hit a record high of 382 this month, but usage stats were down across the board. The number of active users dropped by 3,844 since this time last month, to 37,301. This is mainly because several grids, including German World Grid and 3rd RockRead More →

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Active users passed 40,000 for the first time in history, hitting 41,145, up more than 2,000 compared to last month. This despite a number of grids not reporting their stats this month including Tag Grid, which typically has more than 1,500 unique monthly logins. The number of registered uses alsoRead More →

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The Hypergrid Safari tours will resume in January after more than three years off. The safari, which involves travel to arranged grids, will kick off at the brand new HG Safari region on OSgrid at 12 noon Pacific time on Wednesday, January 12. The group plans ten trips during theRead More →

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The ninth annual OpenSimulator Community Conference presentations and panels start today at 7 a.m. Pacific time on the OSCC grid. If you haven’t, you can still register to attend. Registration is free. Conference Schedule OSCC21 features over 65 speakers sharing innovative content, dynamic short presentations, and panels that all takeRead More →

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The 2021 OpenSimulator Community Conference is next weekend, and registration is now open — and free. This year’s conference features more than 65 speakers leading presentations, workshops, panel sessions, music, and social events across the diversity of the OpenSimulator user base. See the full schedule here. Attending the conference event isRead More →

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OpenSim is more flexible and economic to use when compared to other game engines like Minecraft, Mozilla Hubs, and Sansar, especially when it comes to creating and designing virtual worlds that can be applied for education. This is despite the OpenSim game engine being considered obsolete in graphical quality, saidRead More →

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Wyldwood Bayou grid will celebrate first anniversary from Friday, October 29 through Monday, November 1, which coincides with the grid’s second Halloween Bash to be held on Sunday, October 31. The grid was launched a year ago by Kith Whitehawk as a destination grid for the club Rockin’ the Blues, andRead More →

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More than 300 valid responses came in for the Twelfth Annual OpenSim Grid Survey, and Wildwood Bayou received nearly perfect scores in all categories, with Utopia Skye, Enchanted Grid, Craft World and Kitely close behind. Wildwood Bayou, Utopia Skye, and Enchanted Grid were all write-in grids. Most years, there’s at leastRead More →

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AviTron, is testing out cryptocurrency as an in-world payment method in addition to its in-world currency, Tron. The grid will be accepting Bitcoin and Dogecoin as payment for land rentals and in-world purchases, despite the fact that the currencies are highly volatile and pose regulatory and other hazards for grids.Read More →

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All OpenSim stats were up this month. Despite Tag grid not reporting its user numbers, OpenSim actives were up by 107, while land area increased by the equivalent of 673 standard regions. In addition, OpenSim’s public grids registered 875 new users. Most of the regions added this month are hypergridabble,Read More →

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After AviTron reported Gloebit payment problems on Saturday, other grids also seem to be having the same issue. Today, Gloebit confirmed that there’s an issue. “It appears that starting Sep. 27, some grids had some notifications of completion of transaction not make it back to the grid,” Gloebit CEO ChrisRead More →

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  The AviTron grid is reporting an outage in the multi-grid Gloebit payment system. “I have been emailing these guys for two weeks now,” AviTron grid owner Alex Pomposelli told Hypergrid Business. “No response yet.” According to Pomposelli, the problem is that the Gloebit DLL needs to be updated. TheRead More →