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Simple curiosity and the pioneering spirit are driving the growth in hypergridding, despite technical challenges. According to data from The Hypergates, the total number of travelers using their teleport gate system has more than tripled from 133 a month in May of 2009 to 471 last month – and theseRead More →

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As the number of new grids proliferates, grid owners need to look beyond “cheaper than Second Life” as their key marketing ploy. Instead, why not try one of these time-tested strategies? 1. Limited time offer! You see these all the time — because they work. The limited offer could beRead More →

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An educator has released a free, 160-page “quick start” guide this week. The guide is a complete instruction manual for schools — or other institutions — looking to set up OpenSim-based environments from scratch. The guide was created by David Deeds, IT manager and teacher at the Changchun American InternationalRead More →

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Kitely CEO Ilan Tochner told Hypergrid Business this week that the Second Life and OpenSim viewer can be ported to HTML 5 and Web GL in a matter of months — and he’s looking for people to help accomplish that. Tocher said that’s he’s received a commitment from Alon ZakaiRead More →

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Washington, D.C.-based grid SpotOn3D is looking for developers to work on gambling-related projects, now that online gambling has been legalized in the nation’s capital. “This opens up many opportunities for metaverse developers,” Philippe Pascal, the company’s developer program manager, said in an announcement today. “SpotON3D is currently on the look-outRead More →

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Press release: Brandman University Research Study Shows Companies Can Better Embrace Virtual Work Force as a Competitive Advantage Managers eager for workers to understand collaboration tools, but still rely on face-to-face contact for building trust IRVINE, Calif. — While businesses increasingly play on a global stage and a work forceRead More →

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Kitely, a popular cloud-based OpenSim hosting provider, rolled out two frequently requested features today — the ability to export regions, and the ability to choose viewers. These two changes should make it much easier for virtual designers to use Kitely for building and design projects. In addition, the Kitely pluginRead More →

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Intel will release the code for its Distributed Scene Graph 3-D — which allows thousands of avatars on a single OpenSim regions — at the end of June, the company told Hypergrid Business today. The DSG code will be available at OpenSimulator.org/wiki/Download And there will be documentation about the code, asRead More →

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Club One’s two virtual weight-loss programs last year were a clear success — participants lost as much or more weight as in a similar program held in a real gym, and made more positive lifestyle changes. (See How Club One lowers your weight and BP virtually and Study: Virtual health club deliversRead More →

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Press release: VastPark Launches OpenAvatar for Virtual Worlds and Games Washington, DC & Melbourne, Australia — VastPark, an industry leader in virtual worlds, launches OpenAvatar to create an open source standard generator for avatar development for the virtual world and gaming industry. Frustrated by the lack of high quality 3D avatarRead More →

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Press release: UtherConvention Trade Show Will Showcase Best of 3D Web and Demonstrate Breakthrough Convention Concept Convention highlights: Session with attorney Greg Piccionelli about intellectual property rights in virtual worlds Educational sessions on PhotoShop, running a virtual business, becoming a virtual DJ, and using the Utherverse marketplace Vancouver, BC – UtherverseRead More →

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Press release: Intel Announces New Research and Partnership Efforts at Annual R&D Event Will release open source packages: To increase avatar capacity on an OpenSim region 20 times, allowing thousands of simultaneous visitors To accelerate rendering of photo realistic images by 100 percent on Intel systems MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. –Read More →

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Press release: InteSolv Announces Virtual Show Partnership with ON24 InteSolv will deliver ON24’s Virtual Show and Virtual Briefing Center products into several key markets, including government, manufacturing, high tech, healthcare and multi-level marketing organizations, just to name a few. Visalia, CA – InteSolv, a leading national virtual business solutions and servicesRead More →

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We all remember the Microsoft-Netscape battle. Okay, maybe some people don’t, so here’s the summary: Netscape was a company that made a free Internet browser and and a not-free commercial Web server. (The latter has since been bought by Sun, and open sourced.) Microsoft built their own version of aRead More →

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I am looking for volunteers for an OSGrid Academic Consortium — somewhere between four to eight schools who want to have free regions in an education-oriented community located near to one another on the non-profit OSGrid. Here is how it will work. I will take care of the setup —Read More →

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Hypergrid inventor Crista Lopes, professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine called today on big public grids to begin a mass migration to lower regions. The reason is that Second Life-compatible viewers don’t handle jumps of more than 4,096 regions in any direction — causing problems both forRead More →

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Press release: ACSM: Weight loss success in a 3-D virtual world Bloomington, Indiana — Participants in two weight-loss programs — one involving traditional health club sessions and the other delivered online in a 3D virtual world — lost similar amounts of weight and body fat, but the online contingent reportedRead More →

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Press release: Immersive Virtual Classrooms Boost Engagement and ROI for Instructor-Led Training: VenueGen Execs to Discuss at eLearning DEVCON and ICELW VenueGen CEO David Gardner and President Jeff Crown will explore the potential of virtual environments to make enterprise distance education as powerful as face-to-face instruction Research Triangle Park, NCRead More →

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What’s the fun of teleporting to other grids and meeting new friends, if you can’t keep in touch with them afterwards? That’s not going to be a problem for long, hypergrid inventor Crista Lopes, professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine in an announcement Friday. The new functionalityRead More →

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People who remember the last dot-com boom, and are thinking of launching a virtual worlds business so that they can take part in the next one, need not worry that their memories of the 1990s mean that their too old to succeed. In fact, according to a new study, olderRead More →

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You cannot compare Second Life and OpenSim. One is a social world. The other is an open source piece of server software. You can’t even compare Second Life to individual grids using OpenSim as their backend software. Second Life has around a million users logging in each month, while theRead More →

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Press Release: Designing Digitally, Inc. Wins 2011 Air Force Research Lab Virtual World Contract FRANKLIN, OH– Teaching students how to build airplanes, robots and simulations is serious business, but Designing Digitally, Inc. plans to make it a game — literally. Designing Digitally, Inc., the web-based training firm that specializes in e-learning, virtualRead More →

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Many people view virtual online currencies; the kind used in online websites such as Second Life for example, as being wholly different from their real life counterparts. Many online games have their own currencies with their own currency conversion rates but until now they have not been viewed in anyRead More →

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Press release: Virtual Edge Institute and ROI of Engagement’s Multi-Year Study Reveals Effectiveness of Hybrid Events Survey Reveals Different Motivations for Attending Events In Person or Online Virtual Extends Attendance: If no virtual option was available, 93 percent of virtual attendees would not attend the in-person event whereas 78 percentRead More →

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[Editor’s note: We encourage groups using virtual worlds to tell us about their experiences — both good and bad — in order to educate the public about this new industry segment, and to encourage platform and hosting vendors to improve their services. If you would like to contribute a review,Read More →

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Developers of the Aurora Sim version of OpenSim are building a hypergrid bridge to mainline OpenSim, said Enrico Ranucci, head of New Voice, d.i., an Italian technology company that’s been in business since 2005. Aurora Sim uses a different version of hypergrid, called IWC — InterWorldConnector — to allow teleportation betweenRead More →

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Hypergrid Business is one of the very few publications you can safely categorize as virtual world platform agnostic. Editor Maria Korolov has visited our Avaya Web.alive environments from the earliest “MellaniuM Dome” with the dinosaurs and Spitfire replica to the latest Trainspotting and Medieval replete with “Helms Deep”-esque bridges andRead More →

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There might be a role for new kinds of exchanges in our virtual future, just as the Internet spurred the growth of online trading and alternative trading networks. But there aren’t going to be any happy endings for investors in todays in-game virtual stock markets. Virtual shares on the CapExRead More →

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Second Life “financial institutions” such as virtual banks and stock exchanges have historically been magnets for fraud and mismanagement. But the Capital Exchange — formerly the SL Capital Exchange, now under new management — promises to change that. Carmen Dubaldi, who bought the exchange this January, has actual business experienceRead More →

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With OpenSim hosting prices dropping fast and features and stability improving, it surprises to me that people still ask why anyone should pay for OpenSim. Yes, OpenSim is free. You can go to OpenSimulator.org and download the software and run your own world, at zero cost. But, like much openRead More →

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The closed, commercial social grid AvWorlds has abandoned its high price strategy — at least for now. When the grid was launched earlier this spring, a single region was priced at $145 a month. (See full story here.) While a bargain compared to Second Life, this price made it theRead More →

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Customers looking for a high-end grid management service for their OpenSim worlds similar to that offered by PioneerX Estates now have another hosting option — Germany’s TalentRaspel virtual worlds Ltd. has licensed the RCI grid management technology from PioneerX and is now offering it to its customers. “We have finishedRead More →

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Netflix now accounts for the largest share of Internet traffic. According to a new report from Sandvine, Netflix movies and television episodes are now more than 22 percent of the stuff traveling through the Intertubes — finally knocking peer-to-peer filesharing networks out of first place. The reason isn’t that peopleRead More →

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Press Release: Virtual Obama, Palin & Trump Set Stage for Most Entertaining Political Season Yet Utherverse Re-Creates Popular Political Figures As 3D Characters For Fun & Free Speech On Virtual Wide Web Vancouver, BC – If the recent friction between President Obama and Donald Trump is any indication, the 2012 political season promisesRead More →

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Press Release: Avatar Meets Superman At Miami Science Museum NASA Astronaut Leland D. Melvin to lead presentation in Miami Science Museum’s NASA funded Youth EXPO Virtual World Island Sat., May 21st at 10 a.m. Presentation will be projected in the Museum Theater so that the public can observe & participate.Read More →

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Press Release: Daden creates World Finder, a virtual world selection tool Birmingham, U.K. – A simple virtual world selection tool, World Finder, has been created by virtual world specialist’s Daden Limited to help businesses and organisations choose between competing platforms for their projects. World Finder is based around 12 key virtualRead More →

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The last four months have been tumultuous ones for our university. With the end of educational discounts for our island in Second Life, we faced a tough decision. Second Life’s steep learning curve and our local system of incentives and rewards for faculty had discouraged any use of virtual worldsRead More →

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I’ve been reading lately about how great mesh will be for Second Life. But I’m wondering whether it won’t actually be better for OpenSim, instead. Off-world content versus in-world content In Second Life, the most common imported content is textures. But it costs money to bring them in — anRead More →

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The experiences people have in virtual worlds such as Second Life influence their behavior in real life, according to a new book. “There are consequences of spending 20 hours weekly using an avatar in a virtual reality,” said Jeremy Bailenson, co-author of Infinite Reality: Avatars, Eternal Life, New Worlds, andRead More →

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The top 40 OpenSim grids gained a total of 1,199 new regions over the past month, for a new record total of 15,765 regions. The biggest growth was on OSGrid, the non-profit grid which allows people to connect regions for free — or rent them from hosting companies for asRead More →

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Educators looking for OpenSim alternatives to Second Life are currently limited to ReactionGrid or Jokaydia Grid, which is operated by ReactionGrid — unless they want to set up their own grid or join a multi-purpose grid that’s about more than just education. That changed this week when Houston-based FireSabre Consulting,Read More →

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Press Release: Huzutech’s Paperworld Takes Social Gaming To New Virtual Worlds HuzuVirtual is a new technology which takes social gaming and community into whole new virtual worlds. GLASGOW —  HuzuVirtual is a brand new technology from HuzuTech, which promises to revolutionize the rapidly evolving social gaming market. The technology allowsRead More →

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Virtual worlds like Second Life can successful be used for creative learning activities but only if the students understand the purpose of their activities in the virtual world, and aren’t overwhelmed by the learning curve, according to a researcher at Indiana’s Ball State University. Otherwise, students will feel frustrated withRead More →