Category: Features

Rhode Island Congressman Jim Langevin didn’t even have to get out of his iBOT wheelchair to board the new roller coaster at the Warwick Mall. With a pair of headphones and an Oculus Rift...

Sept. 18 update: All prices will be going up on Nov. 1 but existing customers — and all those who order before Nov. 1 — will be grandfathered in. Read more here. Aug. 9 update: The...

OpenSim users chose “better vehicles and physics” as a top priority more than any other feature in a Hypergrid Business survey this past week. You can see the raw results of the survey here....

Update: The survey is now closed, but you can see all the raw results here.   The explosion of new virtual reality developments, the announcement that Linden Lab is working on a new version...

Riftmax Theater 4D, a virtual environment with a theater and meeting space, has been released for the Oculus Rift and is now available for free as a download from Oculus Share or from the project website....

A new branch of OpenSim, ArribaSim, promises better performance than mainline OpenSim while maintaining full compatibility. And now there’s a packaged version of it, called Arriba Mini-Grid, that sets itself up with a single click....

The biggest choice every new grid makes is whether to enable hypergrid or not. Every single grid up until now has opted for either yes, no, or sometimes. Newly-launched Exo-Life, however, has picked a different...

The top OpenSim grids saw a record increase in active users this month, and a near-record increase in region counts, despite the summer season and a lack of stats from a major grid. The...

William Warren’s research group is advancing virtual reality technology in the service of studying the science of the swarm: how patterns of crowd movement emerge from individual behaviors. He described his work June 29...

Oliveira Virtual Lands, an OpenSim hosting company known for its OSgrid regions, now allows its customers to save backups of their regions directly to Dropbox. “Oliveira Lands customers may make their backups at our...

Second Life is a “viable and flexible” platform for physics simulations testing alternatives and predecessors to Newtonian physics, according to a paper published last month by a professor at the Lutheran University of Brazil The choice...

Update 2: The 200-plus-user drop on Zandramas, is due to a similar problem as at Metropolis, a glitch in the database during the recent upgrades. Update: The 700-user drop on Metropolis is a result of a...

Update: Simvalley, one of the grids mentioned in the below article, is no longer active. Folks who rent regions from Swondo, Dreamland Metaverse, Zetamex and Sasso can now upgrade them to super-sized varregions at...

The OpenSim metaverse nearly doubled in land area this month, as Virtual Worlds Grid added the equivalent of more than 18,000 regions to its grid, taking advantage of new variable size region functionality. Virtual...

Update: Kitely made some changes on June 11. The story below has been updated to reflect those changes. Many grids offer free land to residents (get your free land report here), but nobody goes as...

If you accidentally stumbled on this story on Google thinking it was going to be about how to arrange cereal boxes on a supermarket shelf, you’re in the wrong place. This article is about...

The students at St. Kieran’s, a school in the Irish town of Broughal, recently went on a field trip to Clonmacnoise, a nearby site with historic ruins. They came back, and created a virtual...

Despite the dystopian predictions in Enerst Cline’s Ready Player One, the future virtual reality metaverse will not be owned and governed by one single corporate entity, said former Linden Lab CEO and founder Philip...

Kitely Market is out of private beta and is now delivering goods to any hypergrid-enabled grid. By default, the Market offers a choice of deliveries to avatars on Kitely itself, as well as to...

Storytelling is changing and the authors at Greyville Writer’s Colony have banded together to tell tales in the metaverse. The writers have created interactive stories, allowing readers to explore their worlds as their story...

Businesses that sell land, currency or virtual content via their websites need to pay attention to online consumer interaction. Specifically, there’s a lot to be learned from e-commerce-related research about how to improve the...

The multi-grid, hypergrid-enabled OMC — Open Metaverse Currency — from Austrian currency exchange Virwox had its best year ever in 2013. The total value of transactions conducted in the virtual currency reached OMC 6.5 million in 2013, up...

Amiryu Hosoi has earned over $200 since starting to list items on Kitely Market last Tuesday. This is the story of how this well-known designer decided to try out this platform. Hosoi started out...

The Kitely Market is significantly different from Second Life’s Marketplace. Not only because it will soon allow delivery of items to foreign grids – that’s just the biggest and most obvious difference. But there...

The Kitely Marketplace is now open for business to residents of the Kitely grid with over 700 items listed. The web-based platform allows users to buy items for either Kitely Credits or real money, using...

While many OpenSim grids are trying to attract users from Second Life, or other grids, 3rd Rock Grid has decided to reach out to the real world for its latest marketing and outreach campaign,...

After Tuesday’s surprising announcement by Linden Lab prohibiting third-party trading in the Linden Dollar, some virtual currency exchanges are now fighting for their lives. “It is not only problem for Linden Lab or third party...

I’ve written about New World Studio before, and just reviewed their Community and Licensed editions. The following are instructions for how to run the Community Edition the first time, and how to configure it...

The commercial version of New World Studio is due out soon, and prices start at $20 per year for individual users, $38 for non-profits, and $64 for businesses. The Community Edition is still available...

Low costs and ease of use are inspiring educators to use the OpenSim virtual world platform to build historical recreations, several of which were presented last fall in Paris at the European Immersive Education Summit....

Sex has helped drive many recent technological innovations, from printing to VHS tapes to the Internet itself. Second Life has been a big beneficiary of the interest in virtual sex, as has Utherverse. But...

Interested in celebrating the holidays by playing with some free land on an OpenSim grid? There are plenty of options this holiday season, with many commercial grids rolling out promos, in addition to special...

Press release:  North Georgia Interns Develop 3D Virtual World Lessons to Engage Students CUMMING, GA – Cell phones, iPods, online gaming and social networking have revolutionized American culture. To take advantage of this digital...

When most users first make the move from Second Life to OpenSim, they have two main concerns: will they be able to find a community, and will they be able to find the stuff...

If there’s anyone still out there who doubts that sex helps drive technological development, they should have attended the Adult Entertainment Virtual Convention earlier this year in Utherverse. Utherverse is a 3D immersive virtual world,...

I just checked out the beta test of the 3Di Cloud, a browser-based social world platform. And though the two share some surface similarities, 3Di Cloud is no Cloud Party. In fact, as of...

Japen’s 3Di, Inc., best known for their browser-based OpenSim viewers, will be testing a new, free, public, Unity-based virtual world this weekend, called 3Di Cloud. According to 3Di senior manager Norman Lin, individuals and groups will...

Students learning to drive in Vermont are getting an edge on their written exams thanks to an online tutorial with animation filmed inside Second Life. Vermont’s Department of Motor Vehicles reported this month that...

An English teacher based in southern China has launched an OpenSim grid for English students. Currently, over 100 of his college-age students are using the grid, as well as students from Italy, Russia, and...

Kitely, the cloud-based, on-demand OpenSim grid, announced today that in-world teleports and choice of viewers are now supported. Previously, the only way to move from one Kitely region to another was to shut down...

We surveyed the biggest OpenSim hosting providers last week to find out how many private grids they were running for clients. Only three vendors responded — and some big, well-known vendors declined to provide...

Rivers Run Red was a pioneering 3D content development company in Second Life. No, make that THE pioneering content development company. The company brought major brands to Second Life — and was featured in...

One of the founders of the OpenSim project, Adam Frisby, is now focusing his efforts on the Unity platform — because it can scale better, the viewer runs on multiple devices, and it has better...

New research released today dispels the myth that OpenSim is the sole product of work by people who expected no personal financial gain — academics, employees of large corporations, and volunteers working out of...

The number of people using the hypergrid-friendly OMC currently rose by a factor of five over the course of 2011, from just over 500 people at the start of the year, to 2,859 at...