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  Kitely customers will now have an easier time trying out Kitely Market products. The “Try demo” link is now right there on the product listing page, said Kitely co-founder and VP R&D  Oren Hurvitz  in an announcement this week. Previously, customers had to add the product to their shopping cart,Read More →

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The Virtual Worlds City grid is moving from OpenSim to Unity 3D. “Since our clients only will shop and explore there is no need for all the build tools that the OpenSim-based viewers have,” said Frank Corsi, co-founder and CTO of parent company 3D Virtual Web, Inc. I’ve compared Unity to OpenSim before,Read More →

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Most people who run their own grids — and this includes the little Diva Distro I’ve got on my home computer — use one of the official, recommended distributions of OpenSim. This means the latest stable, recommended release from OpenSimulator.org, or the Diva Distro mini-grid, Sim-on-a-Stick, or New World Studio.Read More →

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You can’t keep these guys down. AviWorlds is back in action, now in its seventh incarnation. The grid is pledging to make backups of everything, grid founder Alexandro Pomposelli  — also known as Alex Ferraris in-world — said in a Facebook post Saturday,  “so that all is well this time andRead More →

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Stay inside this month, in front of the air conditioner, and catch up on all the OpenSim events you’ve been missing. Nara’s Nook celebrates new releases The authors on the Nara’s Nook grid are celebrating new releases today, with a party on the Reader Cove region. Teleport to world.narasnook.com:8900:Greyville via theRead More →

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Have you ever teleported from one grid to another and had your attachments disappear? That problem has now been fixed, thanks to code donations from the on-demand Kitely grid. Grids running the latest, cutting-edge OpenSim code should already have this fix, said Oren Hurvitz, Kitely’s co-founder and VP of research andRead More →

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Las Vegas-based Zetamex, one of OpenSim’s leading hosting companies, is experimenting with a $3 region offer for 15,000-prim regions on OSgrid and Metropolis. “This is an experimental service, meaning we are changing and it may not last all depending on how you our customers and future customers take to theseRead More →

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OSgrid, the oldest virtual world running on the OpenSimulator software, is turning seven years old and birthday celebrations begin 10 a.m. Pacific time on Saturday morning with DJs and live performances. These include DJ Foxx Bode at 10 a.m., Bolt Dominica at 11, Joaquin Gustav at noon, and Sonya Jevette atRead More →

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Facebook will be “investing aggressively” in virtual reality, company executives said on an earnings call yesterday. The company closed on a $2 billion acquisition of virtual reality headset maker Oculus VR earlier this week. “We’re not getting into more specifics on the exact headcounts,” said Facebook CFO Dave Wehner. “But weRead More →

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The first-ever hypergrid fashion expo begins this Saturday on Tangle Grid and will last through August 3. Time is running out for merchants and creators interested in being part of the event. To participate, contact IsambardKingdom Brunel on Tangle Grid, or Peter2 Veliz in Second Life. Merchants looking for a more permanentRead More →

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Oliveira Virtual Lands, which rents regions and parcels on OSgrid and Metropolis, now has a presence on the French-language non-profit open grid FrancoGrid. Like the other two grids, FrancoGrid is hypergrid enabled and residents are allowed to make backups of entire regions and inventories. Oliveira has set up a home regionRead More →

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Press Release:  OpenSimulator Community Conference Announces Principal Scientist at Oculus VR as Keynote Speaker July 22, 2014 – The OpenSimulator Community Conference is pleased to announce Dr. Steve LaValle, principal scientist at Oculus VR and professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois, will be a keynote speaker at theRead More →

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According to a new report by UK-based virtual worlds research firm KZero, 83 million head-mounted virtual reality display devices such as the Oculus Rift will have been sold by 2018. In addition, 18 million virtual reality input systems will have been sold by that year. Prices to drop from $350Read More →

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Press release: Virtual Facebook Refugees find new home on Avatar Social Network As Facebook continues to crack down on pseudonymous accounts such as those of Second Life avatars, some virtual communities are migrating to other sites. Most recently, Pointe Fusion Elite, a community of DJs, artists, and music fans, has movedRead More →

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The first image of Samsung’s new virtual reality headset, the Gear VR, have been leaked online. Gear VR is basically a more comfortable and durable version of Google Cardboard, though with one significant difference. Both headsets work by putting two lenses in front of a customer’s own smartphone. In theRead More →

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OculusVR, the company behind the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset that was acquired by Facebook for $2 billion this year, will hold a virtual reality conference in September. Oculus Connect will be held on September 19 and 20 in Hollywood, California and is aimed at virtual reality developers, engineers andRead More →

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The OpenSimulator Community Conference has begun running scalability tests on its grid every Tuesday at noon Pacific time. The hypergrid address is cc.opensimulator.org:8002:Keynote 1. Load testing doesn’t just help the conference organizers. “All related performance improvements are fed directly back into the OpenSimulator code base so will help everybody using the project,” saidRead More →

Screen shot of the WWII role play sim. (Image courtesy Suzan de Koning.)

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InWorldz residents are circulating a petition demanding the removal of a World War II-themed role playing build from the grid. “I cannot support a grid that makes it possible for people to play a role playing game based on World World II,” resident Suzan de Koning told Hypergrid Business. “ThereRead More →

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A little more than two weeks ago, AviWorlds came back from its fifth official grid closing — not counting temporary outages due to technical issues — to announce that they will be running the grid by themselves from now on, with no outside help. Portuguese-language messages on the grid’s FacebookRead More →

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Press release: DreamNation Establishes Own Virtual Currency, DNCoins NEVADA — DreamNation has established its own virtual currency, DNCoins (DN$). DN$ was successfully and smoothly rolled out over the last two weeks of June, and has been adopted by members of the grid with enthusiasm. DreamNation previously used Virwox’s OMC$ as its internal currency prior to adoptingRead More →

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Now that Facebook has bought OculusVR for $2 billion dollars, the pressure is on Google to do something in this space. This week, Google has released its own headset — and it’s made of cardboard.   Cnet calls Google Cardboard “perhaps one of the most important, quirky, and ingenious advances inRead More →

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Firefox is adding native support for virtual reality devices such as the Oculus Rift to its Web browser, developer Vladimir Vukićević said this week in a blog post. “We are adding native support for VR devices to early experimental builds of Firefox, so that Web developers can start experimenting with addingRead More →

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ANTVR — a Beijing-based, open source alternative to the Oculus Rift, completed a successful Kickstarter campaign this week. ANTVR is a wireless virtual reality headset that comes with a clever transformable controller. Kickstarter prices started at $270, and delivery is scheduled for this September. Some critics are worried that theRead More →

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Kitely, the largest commercial OpenSim grid by land area, plans to deliver its Kitely Market content throughout the metaverse — not just to OpenSim grids. “Our goal is to make Kitely Market the main metaverse marketplace,” Kitely CEO Ilan Tochner told Hypergrid Business. “As there are more than one platform vyingRead More →

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The popular Diva Distro version of OpenSim is now available with the latest 0.8 update of the software, supporting variable-sized regions and profiles. “Profiles and varregions both work out of the box for new installations of the Diva Distro,” developer Crista Lopes said in the announcement. Lopes, who is also known as DivaRead More →

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Linden Lab is working on a new virtual world, Linden Lab has confirmed, but urged users not to panic. “Linden Lab is working on a next generation virtual world that will be in the spirit of Second Life, an open world where users have incredible power to create anything they canRead More →

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It was more than a year ago when developers from the Avination grid and the Singularity viewer got together and created a new permission for OpenSim, the export permission. Since then, no major grid has adopted it, not even Avination itself. Until now. But it’s not Avination rolling out the exportRead More →

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Press release: Science Fiction Inspires Lowe’s Holoroom and Home Improvement Innovation Augmented reality project planning experience is first concept from newly-formed Lowe’s Innovation Labs MOORESVILLE, N.C. – On Wednesday, Lowe’s underscored its commitment to advancing retail innovation as it introduced Lowe’s Innovation Labs and the first concept to come outRead More →

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Linden Lab founder Philip Rosedale offered insights into his new company’s business model and technical architecture yesterday in a talk and question-and-answer session about High Fidelity on the MOSES OpenSim grid yesterday. Of particular interest from a business perspective is that the High Fidelity software will be open source, similar toRead More →

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As of today, the only Kitely users who can create new metered regions are those with premium accounts. As part of this change, the metered regions will also be renamed to “Premium” regions. In addition, all existing metered regions owned by free users will no longer be accessible by their ownersRead More →

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Do you think your design for a virtual Mars base is good enough to live in? Then you’ve got three days left to submit it to NASA. That’s right, the 3D content sharing site Thingiverse from MakerBot Industries LLC is teaming up with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory on the MakerBotRead More →

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Press release: MellaniuM creates 3D museum art 100 times more detailed than Second Life HAMILTON, Ontario — Virtual design firm MellaniuM has developed a process to to import extremely detailed objects into spaces running on the AvayaLive Engage browser-based virtual world platform. As a demonstration of this process, the company hasRead More →

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Press release: Announcing the 2nd Annual OpenSimulator Community Conference 2014 June 3, 2014 – AvaCon and the Overte Foundation are pleased to announce the second annual OpenSimulator Community Conference 2014, to take place virtually on the OpenSimulator Conference Center grid on November 8-9, 2014. The OpenSimulator Community Conference is anRead More →

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The on-demand Kitely grid has fixed a minor but annoying hypergrid bug and will be donating it to the OpenSim community. The bug fix was part of a bigger collection of bug fixes and site design changes announced today. Usually, to teleport from one grid to another, users type aRead More →

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According to the latest Google Analytics report, the number of unique monthly readers on Hypergrid Business passed 19,000 this month. Readership normally goes up and down a bit every month, depending on the season, breaking stories, and how much time I have to spend on the site, but typically hoversRead More →

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BOSTON — The Immersive Education Initiative today announced that all official Immersive Education events will now accept Bitcoin starting with Immersion 2014 in Los Angeles next week, followed by the European Immersive Education Summit in Vienna this fall and the Immersive Researcher’s Summit in New York City next spring. To encourageRead More →

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The much-troubled AviWorlds grid is down again. The grid has been a target for controversy since its first launched in early 2011 as AvWorlds with a plan of being the most expensive social grid. Since then the grid has changed business models numerous times, changed hosting providers, and repeatedly changedRead More →

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Las Vegas-based OpenSim hosting company Zetamex will stop hosting minigrids on June 1, company CEO Timothy Rogers announced yesterday. Zetamex will continue to provide hosting for individual regions and full grids. A minigrid — technically known as a standalone — is a grid that runs entirely within a single server.Read More →

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Sarah Kline, moderator of the OpenSim Google Plus community, posted a note today that the grid is now accepting reservations for the festivities. The event will be held on July 26 and 27, and two 512-meter-square variable regions have been created for it — a land area equivalent to eightRead More →

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Vancouver-based Utherverse Digital Inc., a proprietary virtual world platform known for its adult content, is developing a new generation of its software that will not only be Oculus Rift compatible right from the start, but can also replace your current Web browser. According to Utherverse CEO Brian Shuster, the new Curio browserRead More →

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Las Vegas-based OpenSim hosting provider Zetamex has announced a new inventory system that promises to be faster and more scalable than the default OpenSim infrastructure, with the ability to heal itself automatically if data is corrupted. The system is currently in preliminary testing and available exclusively to Zetamex customers. There isRead More →