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Last month, Rec Room — a virtual reality app that lets users build virtual environments and games which they can play virtually with others across mobile and PC platforms — became the latest virtual reality startup to achieve a unicorn status,  which means it reached a $1 billion valuation. ExpertsRead More →

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Littlefield will celebrate its eight year anniversary since it started as a standalone grid on Saturday, April 10 with music and an exhibition of in-world creations. The event starts at 3 p.m. Pacific time on the Anniversary region with a live performance by Terry Wildman, followed by a dance partyRead More →

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Interested in seeing the evolution of metaverse art? The Craft World grid will be hosting an exhibition on Friday, March 19 on the Uqbar region, of photographs and 3D builds from Second Life created between 2006 and 2012. Voxel 1 is only the first event in the Retrospective Exhibition series, saidRead More →

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Microsoft showed off its new “holoportation” technology at its  Microsoft Ignite 2021 Keynote earlier this month. The technology combines avatars and augmented and virtual reality to allow people to virtually “teleport” themselves to meetings. For better immersion in digital worlds, holoportation allows a user to use a full digital 3D versionRead More →

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  Signal Theory has built an immersive and interactive app that lets you take a selfie of yourself on Mars and share it on Instagram. Plus, the app lets you explore the red planet through the eyes of the Perseverance Rover. The app is built using the National Geographic Mars 360Read More →

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Story telling is increasingly blurring the line between the physical and virtual worlds, according to presenters at the just-concluded this year’s  Technology + Storytelling: Engaging The Immersive Future event organized by NYC Media Lab. We’re already seeing this happen on the production sites in series like Disney’s The Mandalorian, as youRead 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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Smartphones have radically transformed how we communicate with each other, learn, shop, get the news, get driving directions — they touch nearly every facet of our lives. The transformative effects of smart glasses, also known as augmented reality glasses, can be equally dramatic. Instead of looking down at a screen,Read More →

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Our sister site, the speculative fiction magazine MetaStellar, is accepting original flash fiction stories this month. If you have an original, never-before-published sci-fi, fantasy, or horror story of 1,000 words or less, you can submit it here. Authors whose stories are accepted will be paid 8 cents a word forRead More →

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Tangle grid offers free skypads on the Skylife Properties region for people who want to set up private homes, private clubs, and other services. A skypad is a small island floating in the sky above a region, allowing users a plot of land with more privacy than traditional home plotsRead 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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  Gay Nation, which is an area on the AviWorlds grid dedicated to the LGBTQ+ community, is offering free spaces for shops, businesses, venues, recreational activities, and hypergrid travel agencies. Anyone can request space, including residents of other grids, as long as their offerings are of service to the LGBTQ+Read More →

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Tranquility grid has now been sold to the owners of Little Breath grid and is now part of the Little Breath grid. The old Tranquility grid was previously scheduled to shut down on February 28, but was closed earlier. Region owners who move their regions to the Little Breath willRead More →

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Craft World grid will be celebrating their 11 year anniversary tomorrow, Wednesday, January 27 starting at 1 p.m. Pacific  time at the Jubilee Expo facility on the Jubilee region of the grid. The hypergrid address is craft-world.org:8002:jubilee. DJ Arianna, Dancegroup, and VJ Josina Burgess will host the event at 1Read 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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Apple’s first entry into virtual reality could be an expensive VR headset with limited AR capabilities, according to a Bloomberg report. “Apple Inc.’s first crack at a headset is designed to be a pricey, niche precursor to a more ambitious augmented reality product that will take longer to develop, accordingRead More →

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Wouldn’t it be cool to fence with a real sword in VR? Russian VR studio Boxglass has released Fencer, a VR fencing trainer designed to help new players learn the sport of fencing while using a real fencing weapon. Fencer uses the Oculus Quest headset and controllers attached to aRead 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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OpenSim land area grew the equivalent of 2,270 standard regions and OpenSim grids reported more than 4,000 new registered users this month compared to last month. However, the number of active users dropped by 646. This loss — and then some — could be attributed to Foundation Grid and VirtualRead More →

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Darkmoon Breedables is celebrating its one year anniversary as the first horse animesh breedable OpenSim and the first breedable in DigiWorldz. “Breedables” are in-world pets users can breed for a variety of traits. Darkmoon’s low-lag breedable horses can also be trained for racing and riding when they become mature, DarkmoonRead More →

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Artificial intelligence is increasingly becoming a part of our daily lives, both in the workplace and at home. Some AI experts are stressing the need to focus on making AI ethical and keeping it human friendly. Bias in programming, security concerns, and a lack of public knowledge about how AIRead More →

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Imagine you’re driving to work, get pulled over, and told you’re being arrested for a felony. This happened to Michael Oliver. Last year, he learned that the police had profiled him from one grainy cellphone video that didn’t look like him at all. Fortunately, his case was dismissed but evenRead More →

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A new VR glove could be coming that tracks the motion of each finger and thumb bone. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office just published a patent application from Apple for a VR glove made with smart fabric that will be capable of this fine-level motion capture. The glove shouldRead More →

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Around 35 percent of businesses plan on implementing virtual or augmented reality technology in 2021 according to a recently published research report by GetApp, involving 700 small and medium business leaders from around the world. According to the new report, small businesses will adopt virtual technologies to respond to newRead More →

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Most of us will be stuck at home for New Year’s Eve, but that doesn’t mean we can celebrate at a concert in Iceland — virtually, at least. Iceland has announced Polar Beat, a live and fully virtual New Year’s Eve concert experience, with Northern Lights and fireworks guaranteed. Icelandic techRead More →

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You can now join virtual meetings in any location and see avatars of coworkers or friends. The VR and AR collaboration platform Spatial released a free AR app for iOS and Android last week. Instead of using a bulky and expensive VR headset, the platform now works with just aRead More →

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No need to socially distance in OpenSim this holiday season. Grids are going all out with hunts, songs, dances and parties. Here are a few places to start and things to do. Shop, party and hunt on Virtual Dream grid The French Virtual Dream grid‘s Christmas market is now openRead More →

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More than 5,000 new users signed up on OpenSim grids in the last 30 days, the largest gain in four months. In addition, the public OpenSim grids added the equivalent of 367 standard regions and 548 new active users. Kitely gained the highest number of regions this month with 189Read More →

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Tangle grid is closing down its expo series after six years of events. “I want to thank all that have participated and visited us at the Expo over the years,” grid co-founder Leslie Kling told Hypergrid Business. She explained that there wasn’t enough interest to keep the program going. TheRead 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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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 →