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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 stats went up across the board this month, with the number of regions hitting yet another record high, despite a cleanup on OSgrid that took down more than 1,000 region map reservations. Overall, land area went up by the equivalent of 86 standard regions, for a new high ofRead More →

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Update: Free service still available, but needs integration work. See full story here. Vivox, the voice service acquired by Unity two years ago, is discontinuing its free OpenSim service. “As of May 25, 2021, the Free Virtual World Voice service has been deprecated and we will no longer be acceptingRead More →

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DigiWorldz, a leading commercial OpenSim grid, is giving away a years’ free rent for 25 regions, each one a two-by-two varregion with 25,000 prims, The drawing is free to enter and its open to both local residents and hypergrid visitors — applicants just need to fill out a form beforeRead More →

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Podex, the second-largest OpenSim payments provider, has suffered a fire at its data center and services are temporarily down, but no user money has been lost. “The Podex system is on OVH servers based in Strasbourg and fire destroyed some of their data center,” Podex CEO Jacek Shuftan told HypergridRead More →

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The Kitely grid, the largest commercial OpenSim grid by land area, now has a tiny community. “It is called Weefolk Township and it’s located on the ‘always-on’ 64-region megaworld of Wellspring,” builder Snoots Dwagon told Hypergrid Business. Always-on regions are a new feature that Kitely added in January. Previously, regionsRead More →

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OpenSim’s total land area hit a record high this month, with the equivalent of 90,310 regions. And this is actually an undercount — many grids don’t report their stats, many schools and company grids run in completely private mode, and some grids count large variable-sized regions as single regions. ThisRead More →

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  AviWorlds has completed its migration to the multi-grid, hypergrid-enabled Gloebit virtual currency. “Gloebits have been working well for us,” AviWorlds CEO Josh Boam told Hypergrid Business. “I notice an improvement with transactions. The grid has sold a good handful of Gloebits from our Gloebits application.” With a local virtualRead More →

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Since it first began offering OpenSim hosting in 2011, Kitely has been known for its on-demand regions. The regions are activated when someone teleports in, and put to sleep when they’re not in use. This allowed the company to leverage Amazon cloud hosting and offer high-performance regions at a veryRead More →

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Update: On Saturday, Gloebit CEO Christopher Colosi told Hypergrid Business that Gloebit is back up. “The website is back up,” he said. “The API service should also be back up, though we are still testing some things and we have a lot of cleanup to do once we know everythingRead More →

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  Artificial intelligence is doing some amazing things in 2020. It’s driving our cars. It can create art and music. It’s reading our brain waves and letting us control computers and other devices with our minds. AI will only get better at all these things, and some new developments thatRead More →

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Half Life: Alyx is the 2020\’s VR game of the year. If you want to play the game the best way, we’ve put together a guide to the best VR headset for Half Life: Alyx. What is Half Life: Alyx? Half Life: Alyx is a VR game built from theRead More →

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2020 has been a challenging year and nobody could be blamed if they were looking for a little reprieve from reality. One outlet that’s gained in popularity during the COVID-19 pandemic is virtual reality or VR.Read More →

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You can now create apps controlled by a user’s thoughts. Yup, you can operate computers, lights, TVs, music, games with your mind — as long as you’ve got a little lighter-sized device strapped to your head. Neurotechnology startup NextMind is now shipping its 399 Euro development kit for a real-timeRead More →

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  Mursion, an immersive VR training platform focused on improving emotional intelligence in the workplace, announced that it closed $20 million in Series B funding led by Leeds Illuminate, a growth equity firm dedicated to partnering with high growth companies in education and workforce development. Mursion uses a combination ofRead More →

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Helsinki based Varjo has launched its next generation XR and VR headsets with human-eye resolution for use in industries where high visual accuracy is important, including training and simulation, engineering, research, medical and design. With most of the world working remotely and demand for virtual and mixed reality on theRead More →

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I just got my Samsung Gear VR a couple of weeks ago and have been testing it out. It’s a nice headset, light, wide field of view, but I sent it back today for a refund. I will probably get the updated version once it comes out in November, since itRead More →

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I’ve written before about what an amazing service AOL did in getting people to go online for the first time. They spent more than $300 million on all those disks. They were at checkout counters. They came in the mail. They were in cereal boxes. They were everywhere. As aRead More →

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Linden Lab is working on a next generation virtual world that would not be backwards compatible with Second Life, said Radegast viewer developer Latif Khalifa in a post at SLUniverse today. According to Khalifa, Linden Lab CEO Ebbe Altberg broke the news today at a meeting with third party viewerRead More →

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As the editor of Hypergrid Business, I regularly hear from people with stories of projects that failed. Most of these don’t make it into print — nobody wants to go on the record in a story about things going wrong, no matter how useful or enlightening it may be forRead More →