Since Google announced that they were shutting down their Google Plus social platform by end of next summer, organizers of OpenSim-related communities on that platform have begun searching for an alternative. Google Plus was particularly attractive for OpenSim users since it allowed avatar names, a welcome alternative to Facebook’s realRead More →

Google has announced today that it is shutting down the Google Plus social network for consumers. The platform has been popular for OpenSim users to share news about the hypergrid. OpenSim Virtual has more than 2,000 subscribed members and there are many other communities serving different cross-grid communities as well as individualRead More →

The Second Life-based Community Virtual Library is opening two branches in OpenSim next summer, on the Kitely and Avacon grids. The two new library branches will be CVL Hypergrid Resource Libraries with content designed to help people navigate virtual worlds across grids with various viewers. How to help Many peopleRead More →

Kristopher Therrien, known as Quill Littlefeather to the OpenSim community, passed away this month. His family will be holding a memorial service on Saturday, September 29 at 11 a.m. at People’s United Methodist Church in Fremont, NH. Littlefeather has been involved in a number of OpenSim grid projects, including SkyLife GridRead More →

Rockcliffe University Consortium Conference to Return to San Francisco on November 9-10, 2018 SACRAMENTO, Calif. — The Annual Rockcliffe University Consortium Conference ‘The Future Present’ is happening November 9-10, 2018 at the Fort Mason Center in San Francisco, California. Educators registering for the conference can expect hands-on and networking opportunities,Read More →

Survey: Enterprise Companies Seeing Strong Return on Investment in VR & AR LONDON – Businesses working in areas such as automotive, construction, manufacturing and retail are seeing a good return on their investment in virtual and augmented reality, according to an industry survey by VR Intelligence. The survey targeted senior-levelRead More →

Breadables creator oYo, formerly based on the now-defunct InWorldz grid, has found a new home — the Tag Grid. The True to Life horses have concluded a successful beta test and will be officially released this Friday, Sept. 14. “We will gather at 8 a.m. for a party and countRead More →

Elf Clan, one of the largest themed communities in OpenSim, has found a new home after the collapse of InWorldz. It will now be headquartered on OSgrid, with hypergrid linked locations on DigiWorlds, Kitely, and other hypergrid-enabled grids. Full list of affiliated locations is here. “After our experience with SecondRead More →

  OSgrid, the largest grid in the OpenSim metaverse, will hold a donation carnival this month, staring on Friday, Sep. 21 and running through Sep. 28. “We are hoping to raise enough this year to do some much needed upgrades,” Koni Lanzius, OSGrid’s donation drive coordinator, told Hypergrid Business. “The wholeRead More →

Pornhub Awards Show to bring Virtual Reality to the Masses Combining live VR streaming and a massively multiuser VR virtual world will deliver two breakthroughs for the premier of the Pornhub Awards Show on September 6, 2018 Vancouver, B.C. – In the latest example of the power of porn to launchRead More →

Beth Reischl, founder and owner of the now-defunct InWorldz grid, is starting a new grid, called Islandz, she told New World Notes yesterday. The new URL has been purchased, islandzvw.com, though there is nothing up on the site just yet. Some filtered content from the old InWorldz grid will be movedRead More →

Citing changes in the social fabric of the hypergrid, Han Held announced in the official AvatarFest Google Plus group that 2018 would be the last year of AvatarFest, the annual OpenSim festival celebrating end user creativity. “VisionZ has folded, Hypergrid Business is decreasing focus on OpenSim, the HG Safari hasRead More →

The 1st Digital Bienniale immersive interactive art exhibit will open to the public on September 20 on the Metropolis Grid. There is also companion physical world event organized by Berlin’s KW Institute for Contemporary Art on September 17 for press and contributing artists. There will also be a OpenSim basics workshopRead More →

Editor: This is a contributed announcement from Tag Grid. The Adult Grid has changed its name to Tag Grid. We can still be reached on our old URL and we are in the process of changing the whole site to reflect the new name. We have changed the name asRead More →

Update: As of July 25, the GoFundMe campaign has been halted, after having raised more than $16,000 — just shy of the $17,000 goal. It’s unclear what is happening now. The official InWorldz announcement page about the issue seems to be the best place for updates. There’s also some discussionRead More →

InWorldz, one of the oldest and most successful commercial grids, is shutting down this week, owner Beth Reisch announced today, citing financial difficulties. According to Reischl, travel-related communication problems, bureaucratic mistakes and other issues resulted in the shutdown of the grid’s PayPal accounts and the calling in of the company’sRead More →

Kitely will soon offer the option of hosting Virtual Private Grids on top of the Kitely grid, the company announced this week. According to the company, this new offering will enable groups and organizations to benefit from Kitely’s stability, performance and ease of use while gaining a new level ofRead More →

Tranquility has unveiled their newest addition, Halcyon, a Gloebit-enabled region with a hypergrid shopping mall. It has more than 20 stores available for creators who wish to sell to the whole OpenSim community. Three different size stores are in place to accommodate small or large needs. There are also larger stores availableRead More →

The gambling-focused, Bitcoin-friendly YrGrid has been down and out lately — and it’s looking like that might be permanent. We did see it online last month, so it’s still on our active grids list, but readers have been emailing us complaining that they can’t get it in, and can’t getRead More →

The public OpenSim grids lost the equivalent of nearly 4,000 regions, for a new total land area of 80,671 standard region equivalents. The number of active monthly users dropped by 2,580, to reach a total of 35,399. Most of the land area losses were due to a regular cleanup on OSgrid,Read More →

The GreekLife grid has been around for eight years, but it has really started to take off in the last two, now reporting thousands of regions and active users. Now the grid owners are turning their experience running their own successful commercial grid into a service for other would-be gridRead More →

OpenSim land area and users rose slightly this month, despite outages and maintenance on several grids. Atek was down for a while before later resuming, as was Virtuality Grid, while Kinky Grid also went under construction temporarily. Tangle Grid is currently still down for maintenance. And Gevolution was doing loadRead More →

With sexism still strong in the gaming industry, a Europe-based 3D model marketplace is looking to create a welcoming place for women developers in the surging virtual reality industry. With almost as many women using virtual reality as men — 14 percent versus 20 percent, according to a study byRead More →

Blockchain — the technology powering Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies — is coming to virtual reality. Today, High Fidelity, the new VR platform from Second Life founder Philip Rosedale, announced the launch of the Virtual Reality Blockchain Alliance, which is dedicated to using the blockchain to create an independent identity systemRead More →

The Atek Grid has launched a new cryptocurrency, which will become the primary in-world currency, grid owner Frank Corsi told Hypergrid Business. The new currency, Dosh Coins, is based on blockchain technology. This is similar to the way Bitcoin works, except that its based on a slightly different cryptocurrency technology, EtheriumRead More →

OpenSim land area continued to increase gaining a total of 3,400 standard region equivalents this month — after gaining more than 9,000 regions last month. The number of active users also increased by 1,300. OSgrid is still the biggest grid with a total of 20,203 standard region equivalents, followed byRead More →

Sinespace, a virtual world platform from OpenSim co-founder Adam Frisby, launched its virtual reality beta last week for Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, and Windows Mixed Reality headsets.Read More →

LSL Editor, software that helps users write scripts more easily for Second Life and OpenSim objects, has been updated with more support for OpenSim functions. With the new version 2.56, users can also create scripts that run other scripts, LSL Editor developer Frank Rulof told Hypergrid Business, and the testingRead More →

OpenSim active user numbers hit a new high of 34,908 users this month. Land area also went up and is now at the equivalent of 80,175 standard regions, reversing a couple of months of declines. However, it still falls short of the 88,225 regions last November. Much of the movement isRead More →

The Sacrarium grid has taken down illegal content after receiving complains from users through emails and forums, and removed users who allegedly engaged in illegal behavior with child avatars. Neustadt, a region in Sacrarium grid and which was selling naked child avatars and had children avatars moving around naked, wearing BDSMRead More →

About a week ago, a social media post accused a region on the Kitely grid of distributing infringing content. Strictly speaking, any infringement complaint needs to be made by the original content creator, through official channels. That wasn’t the case here. It was a pseudonymous user, DMCA GridSkipper, claiming that the FashionistasRead More →

Keng City will open a new museum on Wednesday, February 1 on the DigiWorldz grid to celebrate Black History Month. The museum will showcase African-American accomplishments and events throughout history starting with the slave trade to present day inventors and innovators. Although they will not exhibit everything owing to space limitationsRead More →

OpenSim’s longest-running live music venue – Maritime Club Belfast — is celebrating its tenth anniversary this weekend. The party starts at the club location on OSgrid on Sunday, January 28, at 1 p.m. Pacific Time. The club is a virtual recreation of a blues club opened and run by Van Morrison in 1964 inRead More →

OpenSim land area fell by the equivalent of  8,667 standard regions, and active users dropped by 3,473 due to combination of school holidays and fewer grids reporting stats than in the last couple of months. In addition to InWorldz, Great Canadian Grid, and The Adult Grid, other grids that did notRead More →

Update: The Chamber of Commerce group mentioned in this article has been shut down, according to a source. Merchants on the closed, commercial InWorldz grid are concerned about perceived drop in users and commercial activity, and worry that the grid owners are no longer committed to the success of theRead More →

One of my top sources of OpenSim-related news this year has been OpenSim Virtual and similar Google Plus communities. Many grids also have Facebook pages and Twitter accounts, but I find that Google Plus offers a really convenient way to keep track of what’s going on across the metaverse. So,Read More →

  YrGrid denies allegations that it is refusing redemptions in order to profit from the recent spike in Bitcoin prices. Instead, the problem is caused by their Bitcoin wallet service provider, said the grid, which is a Hong Kong-based commercial gambling-oriented grid with a Bitcoin-based virtual currency. Residents and users haveRead More →

Hypergrid Business Data December

OpenSim’s public grids reached a new high in active users this month, as traffic went up more than 7 percent, or nearly 2,500 actives. There are now 34,881 active monthly users on the grids that report these figures. The OpenSim Community Conference last weekend accounted for 335 of the new actives,Read More →

Second Life, with a much bigger economy than that of OpenSim, also has a much bigger problem with copyright infringement than OpenSim. For instance, copybotters have long been using specialized third party viewers to duplicate creators’ content and offer them for sale, lowering demand for the legitimate versions of theRead More →

OpenSimulator’s core developers said that they’ve gone pretty much as far as they can with the server code, and what the project needs is new people — and a new viewer. “My own kids say that it looks ancient,” core developer Melanie Thielker said at the developer panel that kickedRead More →

The OpenSimulator Community Conference opened this morning. This is the fifth year that AvaCon is running the conference, celebrating ten years of OpenSim. It is being live streamed on YouTube. From 7 to 8 a.m., Pacific time, the developers will discuss the latest 0.9 release of OpenSim. Panel members includeRead More →

OpenSim hosting company Dreamland Metaverse received the highest scores for performance, support, stability and its user interface in this year’s hosting providers survey for the fourth year in a row, followed by  Zetamex Network, DigiWorldz and 3DLES. There were 36 responses total to this year’s hosting survey, which asks grid ownersRead More →

The submission deadline for Tangle Grid‘s Winter Picture Contest has been extended to Sunday, December 17 following an outage that saw the grid offline for more than a week. The previous deadline was December 1. The grid came back up yesterday after a series of technical issues that included aRead More →

Apple has lagged behind in the virtual and augmented reality race so far. Their phones can be used for some low-end VR, via the Cardboard platform from Google, but they haven’t had anything of their own to match the higher-end Samsung Gear VR and Google Daydream View headsets. Its latestRead More →

OpenSim land area grew by the equivalent of 3,905 standard regions last month, a new record high of 88,225 regions. This was despite the fact that several large grids have stopped publishing land area stats, including InWorldz, Great Canadian Grid, and The Adult Grid. The biggest gainer was OSgrid which addedRead More →

With all the latest news headlines about sexual harassment, Los Angeles based startup Vantage Point thinks it can make a difference with virtual reality. The company has developed a training program aimed at universities and corporations, and is now looking for funding to build a virtual reality experience around it. The crowdfundingRead More →

The total land area of the public OpenSim grids fell by more than 1,000 regions this month as ZanGrid shut down and Genesis Metaverse moved its hosting. Total active users numbers continued to rise, however, with about 2,000 new actives. Zangrid, which had 439 regions as of last month, is closingRead More →

Tangle Grid is hosting the Halloween Expo starting this Sunday, October 15 at the Expo Isle region where different creators from all around OpenSim will come show off, sell and promote their Halloween-related items to visitors. It will be the fourth time that the grid is running the event, whichRead More →