Covering virtual reality, immersive worlds, and other emerging technologies
After trying several business models with fail and shutting down and reopening several times thus earning the name “the yo-yo grid,” AviWorlds is back online. This time, it’s a closed grid, meaning people will not...
WorldViz virtual reality solutions are being used in a variety of ways in learning institutions, from enhancing virtual learning and collaboration, boosting academic research, studying human and behavioral interactions, to enhancing student language and...
Public OpenSim grids gained the equivalent of 1,257 regions this month, while the number of active users rose by 511, after falling for the past three months in a row. Great Canadian Grid, InWorldz...
Last week’s lawsuit against UploadVR is a reminder to the emerging virtual reality industry that it needs to pay more attention to being more inclusive and welcoming to women. This is an issue endemic...
OpenSim lost land area and active users this month — on paper, at least — as one large commercial grid did not report its stats this month, and another grid suffered an outage. The total...
AviWorlds is coming back — again — with a brand-new business model and a brand-new technology partner. Since early 2011, owner Alexsandro Pomposelli has experimented with being the most expensive grid, and with offering land...
Neverworld Grid has opened a fashion center, a group of hypergrid-enabled regions for avatar fashion and fashion shows where designers can showcase and sell items to both local residents and hypergrid visitors. There are...
Genesis Metaverse, a commercial grid that emerged last fall from the collapse of Avi-Labs, has been having problems with its currency vendor, Podex, and took the dispute public today. For residents, this means that...
The Great Canadian Grid will host its first annual Art Fest at 10:00 a.m. Pacific on Saturday, April 29 and Sunday, April 30 at the RR Estates regions. It will feature display of art, photography,...
The grid Haven Your World is rebranding as AviUnite this month, with new social features, a free land offer, Kitely Market deliveries, and hypergrid connectivity. “From Saturday, April 22, we will be offering all...
Key OpenSim stats fell this month, as two popular grids — InWorldz and The Adult Grid — opted not to report their total land area or their active users. InWorldz has been the most...
On the back of a new free land offer marketing campaign, Island Oasis gained 603 new registered users this past month, nearly twice as many as in March. This was the highest number of new registrations since...
DigiWorldz has bought VirTec this week and will resume normal business in two weeks when the vending machines will be running on DigiWorldz servers and be deployed to other grids. This comes after VirTec’s previous...
AltspaceVR, a social virtual reality platform, has launched a talk show focused on women in virtual reality that is taped before a live audience — well, live virtual audience. The show was launched on...
Submarine Channel, an Emmy-winning studio, has released their first-ever short virtual reality film Ashes to Ashes, which was shot from point of view of an urn containing the ashes of a dead grandfather. The...
VirTec has stopped selling its products to new merchants, but the company says it will continue to support existing customers of its multi-grid vending system. VirTec has removed the stands that sell the vending...
OpenSim grids reported a net fall in both regions and active users this month, but the regions drop was due to one grid with server issues, and the active users drop was due to...
Avination is one of the oldest commercial OpenSim grids and was, at one point, the largest. This week, both the grid and the company behind it has officially shut down after a long outage...
This time, AviWorlds shut down not with a loud scandal, but without even a whisper. Over the past few days, grid owner Alexsandro Pomposelli has opted not to renew his grid servers, let his...
To help schools and educators create, access and share more virtual learning and educational resources, an Educator Commons shop has been set up on OSgrid‘s Wright Plaza region by Kay McLennan, a professor of practice at Tulane...
To celebrate its first anniversary later on this month, the Croatian-language Kroatan Grid is holding a photo contest themed “my crazy virtual life.” The deadline for submissions is Monday, May 15, and the winning photos will be...
Island Oasis postponed its sixth anniversary, celebration, originally scheduled for March 1, after grid grid founder and COO Nicole Dreyer suffered a heart attack. Dreyer, also known as Sugar Paolino in-world, was rushed to the...
All active grids with infringing content have addressed the problem, according to VirTec owner Virtouse Lilienthal, one of the affected content creators. VirTec makes a multi-grid OpenSim vending system which has machines that report back...
The Kitely Market has passed the $100,000 sales milestone, the grid announced last week. The Kitely Market, which now delivers to 174 different OpenSim grids, is the leading online marketplace for OpenSim content. It accepts payment...
VisionZ HG Magazine will be celebrating its second anniversary on March 15 from 1 to 3 p.m. Pacific time on the 3rd Life Grid. “Our focus is on all things happening in the Hyperverse, those...
Active user numbers on the OpenSim hypergrid crossed the 80 percent share mark this month, reaching a new record high, while the hypergrid share of land area reached 95 percent, another new record high....
The annual No Borders Festival, which was previously known as ROBstock Festival, will take place on Saturday, February 11 and Sunday, February 12 from 8 a.m to 8 p.m Pacific time on 3rd Rock Grid to...
The total amount of money spent on purchases over the VirTec OpenSim vending machines network nearly doubled last year, increasing by 92 percent from $4,206 in 2015 to $8,080 in 2016, the company reported. Meanwhile, the total...
OutWorldz has released a beta version of the DreamWorld OpenSim installer for home-based mini-grids which now offers users a free subdomain for their grid, such as anygrid.outworldz.net. Previously, users had the option of registering their own domain...
OutWorldz founder Fred Beckhusen has purchased the Hyperica OpenSim directory from Hypergrid Business. He will continue to maintain the current website, add more content, and add more functionality, as well as the in-world hyperport,...
AviWorldz has officially joined the big grid migration of 2017, becoming the latest in a string of grids to switch to DigiWorldz hosting. DigiWorldz is mostly known as a popular commercial OpenSim grid, but...
It didn’t take long at all. It was less than three weeks ago that Alexsandro Pomposelli announced that AviWorlds was back up and running — from his garage. The much-troubled grid is now down...
myVR, a social virtual reality platform from the folks at myWebRoom, has opened the platform to allow brands and marketers create and publish in-app branded experiences. For instance, companies can place branded videos and...
Viar.Live allows users to upload and share 360 degree photos, create virtual reality tours from the uploaded 360 degree photos, embed virtual reality content on websites, and distribute the content across desktops, iOS and...
Public OpenSim grids gained land area, registered users, and active users this month, with active users reaching a new all-time high. Grids reported a net increase of 638 active users, for a new total of 36,330...
Last year was a mixed year for OpenSim grids. Active users were up, but the increase was much lower than in the previous year. The increase in registered users was also smaller, but this was...
Genesis Metaverse, a company which previously ran its own grid and also provided hosting to other grids, has left the hosting business and is now using DigiWorldz to handle its hosting and OpenSim management....
The OpenSim Embassy has a grand opening tomorrow, January 11, on the Second Life grid. Performers at tomorrow’s event, which starts at 11 a.m. Pacific, include the ChangHigh Sisters Fireshow of Light, Life and...
The Canadian Sun, an in-world magazine on the Great Canadian Grid, is sponsoring a St. Patrick’s Day parade on Friday, March 17. Participants are starting to build floats now, but there is still room...
The AviWorlds grid is back up and running, grid owner Alexsandro Pomposelli told Hypergrid Business today. This is now officially the grid’s tenth incarnation, not counting the times it was down due to server...
The Baller Nation and Kea Nation grids have both moved to DigiWorldz. The two were previously the marquee customers of Genesis MetaVerse, which, like DigiWorldz, both runs its own grid and also offers hosting...
Kitely has added a complete classifieds system to enable users to buy classified ads using Kitely Credits, as well as new search tabs in the viewer to allow people to search for avatars, OpenSim groups,...
Genesis Metaverse has been attacked and some systems have been damaged, but the grid has been able to recover much of its data. To help protect against future attacks, the grid has also switched...
Press release: vTime Now the Most Widely Available VR Social Network with Launch on Google Daydream Liverpool, UK – vTime, the VR Sociable Network, today becomes the most widely-available VR social network in the...
More than 70 virtual and argumented reality companies will showcase their products, innovations and demos at CES 2017, starting this Thursday in Las Vegas. The full list of those exhibiting in the gaming and virtual...
The Virtual Reality Festival will be holding its Extreme Virtual Reality Challenge event in Las Vegas starting next Thursday, January 5, but you still three days to vote for your favorite virtual reality movies, video games, and...
This past year has been a troubling one for OpenSim, with slowing growth rates and increasing concerns that OpenSim will be sidelined by advances in virtual reality platforms. Active users numbers went up, but...
An industry group and individual vendors are working to fix the problem of incompatibility across multiple virtual reality content hosting, distribution and advertising platforms. Currently, advertisers, publishers and brands often have to create native...
The public OpenSim grids reached a new high of active users, 35,692, an increase of more than 2,000 since this time last month. The 2016 OpenSim Community Conference was responsible for about a quarter...
The Great Canadian Grid has launched a new website GCG Pulse that allows users to publish their events to be hosted at the grid, and the website uses Google Calendar to help users include...
According to a new survey by Parks Associates, nearly 50 percent of U.S. broadband households who try a virtual reality headset plan to buy one. In addition, 3.5 percent of broadband households, or about 3.4...
Tangle Grid has released the participation numbers for the Hypergrid Hunts conducted this year, and participation peaked in the spring. More than 150 different users have participated in the hunts since they were launched a year...
AviWorlds has received backups of region files of its residents from a former employee, grid owner Alexandro Pomposelli told Hypergrid Business. “Josh has sent me the files for AviWorlds and AviBrasil grids,” he said,...
AviWorlds is coming back, grid owner Alexsandro Pomposelli told Hypergrid Business today. The Avi-Labs OpenSim hosting will also return, he said. “People can already order their free regions,” he said, even before the grid is...
Although high-end sets like the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and the PlayStation VR get more attention, the vast majority of the virtual reality headsets sold this year are projected to be the lower-cost mobile-based...
Press release: Registration is now open for the 4th annual OpenSimulator Community Conference AvaCon is pleased to announce the third annual OpenSimulator Community Conference, to take place virtually on the OpenSimulator Conference Center grid on December 10 and 11, 2016....
Holiday events on the hypergrid will be featured in the next edition of the VisionZ magazine, due to hit in-world kiosks on December 3.
Dacuda, a 3D scanning and room-scale virtual reality company is partnering with brain technology company MindMaze on a new headset that will offer positional tracing and improve social interactions in virtual environments. The new MMI...
The public OpenSim grids added 1,655 new regions this month, registered more than 10,000 new users, and grew active monthly users by 512. Meanwhile, Avination and AviWorlds are still down for the count, Logicamp suffered a...
The Belgium-based Logicamp grid has suffered a catastrophic ransomware attack, and has lost some content due to a lack of current off-line backups. “I know that it is unforgivable but I am alone to manage...
SkyLifeGrid, launched after the most recent collapse of AviWorlds, has now merged with the Sinful Grid. However, SkyLife will continue offering hosting services, owner Josh Boam told Hypergrid Business, on the SkyLifeHosting.com website. SkyLifeGrid originally...
Press release: Space, a new virtual world, launched today with free regions LONDON — Space, a browser-based virtual world platform from Sine Wave Entertainment, opened to the public after two months of private beta and seven years of...
The Orbi sunglasses, which film 360-degree videos, have just reached their crowdfunding goal. The glasses raised $88,568 from 269 Indiegogo backers in just a week, and there are still three weeks to go if you’re interested...
Purdue University has received a patent for putting a picture of a nose at the bottom of a virtual reality display — and is selling the licenses to use this idea through partner Virtualis...
AltspaceVR, a pioneering social virtual reality platform, announced today that it will be now offering virtual reality replays of live events. The full virtual reality environment is recorded, as well as the performances, so...
The US virtual reality market revenues will reach $38 billion in annual revenues by 2026, after an “inflection zone” over the next five years, according to Greenlight Insights, Inc. Of that, 62 percent, will be hardware...
Thanks to the CoreVR option on the Matterport 3D application, real estate and hospitality companies who have Matterport Pro 3D cameras can now capture 3D models of their locations, upload them, and convert them into...
The public OpenSim grids added more than 4,000 new regions this month, registered more than 4,400 new users, and grew by 735 new active users after maintenance and other outages depressed the numbers last month. ZetaWorlds,...
Press release: VisionZ October issue hits stands on Saturday Halloween is the focus of this month’s issue of VisionZ Hyperverse Magazine due out on Saturday, October 15. Typically, after a few days, the racks...
Three 360 degree films — the Peal, Help and Real — demonstrated that immersive storytelling can pack a big emotional punch. The three films took the top prizes at the FIVARS 2016 Awards last month at the...
It was a busy week for virtual reality announcements this week. Following on Google’s Pixel and Daydream presentation earlier in the week, Oculus showed off new hardware and software at their annual Oculus Connect...
NBC is partnering with AltspaceVR to bring viewers virtual reality feel of the U.S. Presidential debates and will be streaming the second debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump tonight at the AltSpace VR’s...
DigiWorldz and the Great Canadian Grid are back up after a nerve-wracking week when Hurricane Matthew threatened to cut off power to the grids’ Florida data center. “DigiWorldz is back online and no damage...
DigiWorldz and the Great Canadian Grid have gone off-line as Hurricane Matthew took down power lines in the area, set transformers on fire, caused power surges, and inflicted other damage. That caused unstable power situations...
Customers will purchase more than 450,000 Google Daydream View headsets by the end of the year, according to SuperData Research. Samsung’s Gear VR, Daydream’s closest competitor, is estimated to sell around 2.3 million units....
Google officially announced its new Pixel phone and its Daydream View VR headset today. The live stream of the presentation was watched by more than a quarter million people. Watch the full presentation below....
The U.S. Army’s Moses project is one of the most high-profile users of OpenSim, with a focus on training and simulations rather than on using OpenSim as a platform for a social grid. Last...
AviWorlds is back, and the company has its original domain back as well. This is the ninth time that the grid has come back up after it had closed. “Since I’m back in New...
Udacity, an online platform for college courses, is now offering a VR development course — with no previous programming experience necessary. The class costs $199 per month, and runs for six months. Those who...
The Kokua Viewer team has released an OpenSim-friendly version of their viewer this week, and 3rd Rock Grid is set as the default grid in the grid manager. Other grids included are Craft,...
Engage, a free multi-user virtual reality social platform that allows educators to create and share virtual environments and take students on virtual field trips is now available in preview edition and will launch early next...
MyWebRoom will launch a free new social virtual reality platform next month, myVR, which will allow users to create and customize private room, and hold events using mobile-based VR headsets. It could be the first virtual reality...
Time Inc., the publisher of the iconic Life magazine that closed in 1972, is relaunching the title — in virtual reality. The new Life VR features immersive storytelling, the company said in its announcement last...
The community-focused AvatarFest event kicks off on Friday, accessible to all OpenSim hypergrid users. There are about two dozen exhibitors already participating, and more than a dozen performances are scheduled, including those by OpenSim...
Google’s Daydream virtual reality platform is now open to the public. The Daydream software development kit came out of beta, the company announced Thursday. The kit, available here for Android, has native Unity integration...
The tenth annual Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education conference will be held March 29 through April 1 of next year — and is currently accepting proposals. Conference organizers are looking for presentations about new projects,...
People watching 360-degree videos recalled the brands mentioned 28 times more than in traditional ads, according to a new report by Nielsen. Recall of 360-degree content in general was eight times higher, and consumers were three...
The average price of a region on an OpenSim grid is US $20.39 per month for a region with 15,000 or more prims. Hypergrid-enabled grids are a little bit less expensive, with an average...
This year’s presidential election will be conducted, in part, in virtual reality. A partnership between NBC News and AltspaceVR is transforming a virtual recreation of New York’s Rockefeller Center Plaza into Democracy Plaza, where...
The social virtual reality platform AltspaceVR is doubling down on the social aspect, with interface changes designed to make it easier for people to get together. Previously, AltspaceVR — like many virtual environments —...
IMAX will begin its virtual reality roll-out as early as the end of this year, IMAX Entertainment CEO Greg Foster said at a conference in Los Angeles this Wednesday. Moviegoers will be able to purchase bundled...
Update: I missed a couple of grids in the first version of the story, AllCity updated their stats, and I removed Alife Virtual’s stats from the report because of questions about their accuracy. Read...
The 2016 OpenSimulator Community Conference, to be held in December, is now accepting proposals for presentations and activities. “We are particularly interested in speakers that can dramatically tell the story of their work and...
Carlos Loff has moved his Virtual Lisbon and Space Life projects to DigiWorldz, with plot rentals available for interested residents. He was previously hosted by AviLabs, the hosting company behind AviWorlds, which imploded messily and...
The next OpenSim Treasure Hunt has been scheduled, and it will rum from October 3 to November 7. The hunt, the fourth so far this year, is an opportunity for grids and venues to...
Due to user feedback, Las Vegas VR has moved beyond 360-degree videos with animated graphics and video overlays, as well as new interactive features to its application to improve navigation and user immersion. Since the app...
An OpenSim viewer that runs in a regular web browser has long been at the top of most-wanted lists for OpenSim users. And the U.S. Army is stepping up. This fall, the U.S. Army’s Simulation &...
Digitaleisure, one of the new grids created in the wake of AviWorlds’ latest flame-out, has been forced to rebrand as SkyLifeGrid due to legal issues. The original name and domain was too close to that...
The 2016 Fest’Avi event begins today, the third year that FrancoGrid is hosting the avatar exhibit. The event begins at 6 p.m. Paris time, or 9 a.m. Pacific, at hg.francogrid.org:80:FestAvi 2016. The event features an...
Google Plus continues to be the social media destination of choice for OpenSim users, due its usability, sharing features, and support for identities based on avatar names. I currently track 175 virtual communities that...
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