OpenSim land area is up by more than 12,000 standard regions this month compared to last month, bringing the total land area to a record high of 113,151 standard region equivalents. The growth happened despite some grid outages and closures. In particular, four French grids have shut down over theRead More →
All OpenSim stats are up this month. The total land area of the public OpenSim grids increased by more than 1,000 regions, to 100,880, while the active users increased by more than 3,000, to 43,272. Creatrix World, which reported more than 700 regions last month, is currently recovering from aRead More →
Just like Brandon Sanderson, I, too, have been busy during this pandemic. In fact, I’ve written more than ten new books. Take that, Sanderson! Okay, most of them are really short. His books are 400 pages long. My books are shorter. Krim Deeds, for example, is 150 pages. But, onRead More →
Pavlov Shack is one of the best free VR combat shooter games I’ve seen that you can play on the Oculus Quest 2. I’ve taken some time to search for free realistic and detailed VR combat games without success, but this is a clear winner. This game offers a satisfyingRead More →
The educational play “We Are Going to Lviv” is back for a single performance tonight on the Meta region of the OpenSim Community Conference grid. The trip was originally part of the Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education 2022 conference and is an artistic journey that spans the past andRead More →
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 →
You can join the Hypergrid Hoppers — a club for explorers of the OpenSim hypergrid — as they travel to Ukraine. The trip is part of the Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education 2022 conference and is an artistic journey that spans the past and future of Ukraine with a focusRead More →
“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 →
The total number of active users was up quite a bit this month, but total land area and registered users dropped slightly. The loss of 144 standard region equivalents and 1,141 registered users was more than accounted for by the fact that FrancoGrid had server issues and didn’t report itsRead More →
The developers of Firestorm Viewer say it’s not affecting other apps after closing — but they’re also offering troubleshooting tips for people who say they’re having issues with other applications slowing down on Windows or Linux systems. Whirly Fizzle, one of the developers and support staff, has denied there’s a bugRead More →
Most OpenSim grids have not given an official statement regarding Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but quite a few are standing with Ukraine.Read More →
If you haven’t heard about the metaverse, or you think it’s just something Facebook invented, you’re not alone.Read More →
The 29th edition of Sheffield DocFest, the United Kingdom’s biggest documentary and digital media festival, will take place from June 23 to June 28 this year — and it’s looking for submissions. Sheffield DocFest’s Alternate Realities program has some upcoming deadlines if you’d like to apply, and applicants from theRead More →
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 →
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 →
Strapping on an Oculus Quest 2 to explore the vast game options on the Oculus store and all over the internet is thrilling, and some of them are sure to give you an adrenaline rush. I searched around and tried several games on my new Oculus Quest 2, thanks toRead More →
Virtual reality headsets are bulky and two companies have collaborated to take the weight off your head for augmented and virtual reality — and put it around your neck instead. Motorola yesterday announced a 5G neckband that’ll put connectivity, processing, and the battery in a collar and leave your heads upRead More →
Plagiarism and scams are a serious problem in the NFT space — and it’s gotten so bad that one NFT marketplace has suspended almost all NFT sales on its platform. Cameron Hejai, founder and CEO of Cent NFT marketplace, announced in a statement that Cent is removing the ability toRead More →
This year, metaverses and NFTs are all the rage, and one company’s doing both. MultiNFT, a company that provides live shows and festival experiences to fans, launched a presale for its native token, $MNFT, and set up a club called Rage at Decentraland’s festival district. The club will host in-world virtualRead More →
OpenSea, the largest marketplace for non-fungible tokens openly admitted last Thursday that over 80 percent of the items created using their free minting tool were plagiarized works, fake collections, and spam. In Twitter last Thursday, the company said that creating NFTs on its platform was too easy. “We’ve recently seenRead More →
We could end up with a metaverse that is inherently hard to control, will eventually fail, and collapses society, controversial podcaster Joe Rogan said in an interview with Inner Vision on Saturday. The metaverse should be restructured right from the start to get the right design criteria instead of  basingRead More →
Phillip Rosedale is returning as a strategic investor and advisor to Second Life, a company he founded 19 years ago, but it is unlikely that Second Life is going to change much given the tough company culture, closed nature of the platform, and the fact that High Fidelity is itselfRead More →
Steve Gray, former executive at Tencent Games, the world’s largest gaming studio, is getting into the metaverse. His new company, Meta Music Studios, launched The Apollo Project last week, a blockchain-based gaming platform for music and games, with its first game TAP Stars, an avatar growing game, set to launch next month.Read More →
Microsoft‘s purchasing of Activision Blizzard was the largest sale in the history of video games at US$68.7 billion dollars making the company the third largest gaming company after Sony and Tencent. The acquisition could solidify the company’s position in the overly hyped metaverse because of the large gaming user baseRead More →
While we still don’t have the flying cars, time machines, and holographic movies that sci-fi has long offered us, though other predictions have come to life, such as the Star Trek communicators that became Motorola flip phones. Today, virtual fiction is having its moment in the spotlight as the tech world leans into the metaverse.Read More →
It’s too expensive and it’s not available yet, but there’s a startup company that says we’ll be able to walk in VR. Ekto VR, a VR hardware startup, has invented a pair of boots that allow realistic walking in virtual environments with no risk of running into a wallRead More →
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 →
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 →
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 →
Christmas is coming up and so are the other winter holidays, and OpenSim grids have a lot of holiday-themed events, Christmas hunts, contests, freebies, shops, and winter activities for you. Christmas Ball Hunt kicks off next week in Tangle grid Tangle Grid is hosting a Christmas Ball Hunt adventure thatRead More →
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 →
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 →
More than 300 valid responses came in for the 12th Annual OpenSim Grid Survey, and Wyldwood Bayou and Utopia Skye, two write-in grids, received the highest scores from their residents. Most years, there’s at least one smaller grid that does well in this user survey, because small startup grids typically haveRead More →
In a Thanksgiving mode this week? These ten headsets will help bring you closer to your family — or help take you away. And they all make great Christmas gifts. 1. Oculus Quest 2 Use case: Untethered high-end VR experiences. The Oculus Quest 2 standalone virtual reality headset is theRead More →
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 →
The impending loss of Vivox voice in OpenSim is putting stress on educational institutions and other groups and organizations that need in-world voice. Vivox was integrated into the viewer and required no additional work on the part of the users. Other systems, such as Skype or Discord, typically require thatRead More →
After a slow start in the fourth quarter of 2021, most OpenSim stats are fully recovered with 3,710 new active users this month and 3,511 new standard region region equivalents. The total land area of OpenSim’s public grids is now over 100,000 again after three months below that threshhold, andRead More →
AviTron has published four non-fungible tokens — NFTs — on the OpenSea NFT marketplace, the first OpenSim grid to officially do so. Potential buyers have until May to bid on these items. AviTron is also supporting residents in creating and selling their own NFTs either in-world or external marketplaces suchRead More →
One of the former owners of Enchanted Grid, Dawn Gemma Sian Rhys-Owain, says that legal action has caused the loss of the grid’s servers. The grid has been down for a couple of weeks due to a management shakeup in which Rhys-Owain and her partner, Dai Rhys-Owain, gave up theirRead More →
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook changing its name to Meta in order to focus on the metaverse. Facebook itself will remain, but will now be just one brand in the Meta portfolio, alongside Instagram and WhatsApp. Read More →
Update: As of Wednesday afternoon, the new sole owner of Enchanted Grid says that she has no access to the grid servers to restart them and that she is told “there are no grid servers to restart.” Enchanted Grid, a mid-sized private grid with a few hundred regions and registeredRead More →
Facebook’s announcement of a $50 million research fund and plans to hire 10,000 employees in U.K. to help build the metaverse, clarifies that the company will be using massive resources to push the technology adoption for VR and gain a huge market share to become the central hub of theRead More →
I just ordered my Oculus Quest 2 headset this morning — and it already came this evening. Initial impression is that it’s the easiest-to-use headset I’ve tried so far. Very comfortable, very lightweight, and I didn’t even need to charge it up when I took it out of the box.Read More →
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 →
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 →
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 →
AvaCon is delighted to announce the ninth annual OpenSimulator Community Conference 2021 to take place virtually on the OpenSimulator Conference Center grid on December 11 and 12, 2021. The OpenSimulator Community Conference is an annual conference that focuses on the developer and user community surrounding the OpenSimulator software. Join us and showcaseRead More →
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 →
It’s been ten days since AviTron first reported Gloebit payment problems, and more than a week since Gloebit acknowledged the issue, but Gloebit purchases are continuing to fail across the hypergrid and grid owners complain that they haven’t been able to reach Gloebit CEO Chris Colosi for help. There alsoRead More →
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 →