Update: The data and chart have been updated to include the full 2016 calendar year. Almost every month, at least one person complains about why InWorldz is listed in our stats, or included in our surveys. Some people complain that InWorldz is not on the hypergrid, meaning that people can’tRead More →

The public OpenSim grids added 1,655 new regions this month, registered more than 10,000 new users, and grew active monthly users by 512. Meanwhile, Avination and AviWorlds are still down for the count, Logicamp suffered a devastating loss due to a ransomware attack, and SkyLifeGrid was folded up into Sinful Grid. AtekRead More →

Finally, in these dark and tumultuous times, some good news — Linda Kellie is back, and creating new content. Outside of the core developers themselves, Linda Kellie is the most valuable member of the OpenSim community. Her collections of free content have long been staples for many users — schools,Read More →

The Belgium-based Logicamp grid has suffered a catastrophic ransomware attack, and has lost some content due to a lack of current off-line backups. “I know that it is unforgivable but I am alone to manage everything and I can not do more,” grid owner Didier Preudhomme told Hypergrid Business. Logicamp is aRead More →

SkyLifeGrid, launched after the most recent collapse of AviWorlds, has now merged with the Sinful Grid. However, SkyLife will continue offering hosting services, owner Josh Boam told Hypergrid Business, on the SkyLifeHosting.com website. SkyLifeGrid originally launched as Digitaleisure in late August with a controversial offer to migrate content from the AviWorldsRead More →

A number of grids are hosting Halloween themed events, destinations, parties and hunts this month. Halloween Dance at Littlefield Grid Littlefield Grid has dedicated the Halloween Themed region to host the event for the entire month of October. There will also be a costume party and Halloween Dance at 8Read More →

Nearly 800 responses came in for this year’s Seventh Annual OpenSim Grid Survey, and after 31 were deleted as invalid, DigiWorldz came out with the most responses, while AllCity received the highest scores, followed by FrancoGrid, Virtual Highway, DigiWorldz and Lost Paradise. People rated 51 different grids, of which 19 made it pastRead More →

The public OpenSim grids added more than 4,000 new regions this month, registered more than 4,400 new users, and grew by 735 new active users after maintenance and other outages depressed the numbers last month. ZetaWorlds, an open grid that allows resident to connect regions that they host on their own computers, forRead More →

Press release: VisionZ October issue hits stands on Saturday Halloween is the focus of this month’s issue of VisionZ Hyperverse Magazine due out on Saturday, October 15. Typically, after a few days, the racks can be found all over the Hyperverse, here are a few key locations, including at 3rdlifegrid.com:8002:EyE eMagine, hypergrid.org:8002:yesRead More →

DigiWorldz and the Great Canadian Grid are back up after a nerve-wracking week when Hurricane Matthew threatened to cut off power to the grids’ Florida data center. “DigiWorldz is back online and no damage at all,” DigiWorldz founder Terry Ford, also known as Butch Arnold in-world, told Hypergrid Business. DigiWorldz alsoRead More →

DigiWorldz and the Great Canadian Grid have gone off-line as Hurricane Matthew took down power lines in the area, set transformers on fire, caused power surges, and inflicted other damage. That caused unstable power situations for some of the power circuits feeding the data center where those two grids are hosted,Read More →

AviWorlds is back, and the company has its original domain back as well. This is the ninth time that the grid has come back up after it had closed. “Since I’m back in New York now I’ve had time to start a smaller project,” grid owner Alexandro Pomposelli — also known asRead More →

  The Kokua Viewer team has released an OpenSim-friendly version of their viewer this week, and 3rd Rock Grid is set as the default grid in the grid manager. Other grids included are Craft, InWorldz, Kitely, FrancoGrid, OSgrid, SirinHGpole, Spellscape, and Tangle. Users can also add their own grids, asRead More →

Kroatan, a new social OpenSim grid, is hosting a Halloween Hunt from October 8 to November 8 at the Silent Meadow region. The hunt features the story of Frank Inglewood, an England citizen who disappeared from his car and mysteriously turned up at the spooky Alchemilla Hospital. The hunt entails finding Inglewood’s writing pads,Read More →

OpenSim developers are getting ready to release OpenSim 0.9.0, and some grids are already experimenting with the new features by downloading the experimental version of the new release — and they are running into some problems. The problem is specific to grids using the new ubOde physics engine, which is includedRead More →

Editor: The U.S. Army’s MOSES grid has long been making cutting-edge contributors to OpenSim, building a grid management system, running scalability tests, and donating content to the OpenSim community. Now they are in the process of moving to a branch of OpenSim called Halcyon, open-sourced last year by InWorldz, OpenSim’s most popular grid, and areRead More →

The community-focused AvatarFest event kicks off on Friday, accessible to all OpenSim hypergrid users. There are about two dozen exhibitors already participating, and more than a dozen performances are scheduled, including those by OpenSim celebrities Truelie Telling, The Fabulous Wailers, Rosie O’Grady, and many others. There is also a performance of “Two GentlemenRead More →

The tenth annual Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education conference will be held March 29 through April 1 of next year — and is currently accepting proposals. Conference organizers are looking for presentations about new projects, research, services, or tools that benefit educators, or retrospectives about previously-presented work. Academic papers should beRead More →

The average price of a region on an OpenSim grid is US $20.39 per month for a region with 15,000 or more prims. Hypergrid-enabled grids are a little bit less expensive, with an average price of $18.86 per region. Closed grids tend to cost more, charging on average $30.28 perRead More →

Alife Virtual reported a dramatic increase in active users this month, to 1,576 unique monthly visitors, but those stats may not be accurate, according to technology expert Magnuz Binder, who has previously submitted patches to OpenSim. In his non-OpenSim life, Binder is a former academic focusing on technology and now works asRead More →

Update: I missed a couple of grids in the first version of the story, AllCity updated their stats, and I removed Alife Virtual’s stats from the report because of questions about their accuracy. Read full story here. Only a small handful of grids had problems this month, while the restRead More →

The 2016 OpenSimulator Community Conference, to be held in December, is now accepting proposals for presentations and activities. “We are particularly interested in speakers that can dramatically tell the story of their work and employ great props and graphics,” the organizers said in the announcement. This year’s conference is organizedRead More →

In getting ready for my monthly stats report, I’m checking to see whether the grids I’m listing in my directory are up and running, and collecting their terms of service pages and other links. And I just came across the land sales page of Genesis Global Journey, a small commercial gridRead More →

Carlos Loff has moved his Virtual Lisbon and Space Life projects to DigiWorldz, with plot rentals available for interested residents. He was previously hosted by AviLabs, the hosting company behind AviWorlds, which imploded messily and publicly last month. Even before AviLabs fell apart, Loff said he was having trouble attracting residents.Read More →

The next OpenSim Treasure Hunt has been scheduled, and it will rum from October 3 to November 7. The hunt, the fourth so far this year, is an opportunity for grids and venues to promote their destinations to hypergrid travelers, and for designers and other content creators to promote theirRead More →

Editor’s note: This article was updated on 1/27/2023 to remove dead links and  links to malicious sites. An OpenSim viewer that runs in a regular web browser has long been at the top of most-wanted lists for OpenSim users. And the U.S. Army is stepping up. This fall, the U.S. Army’sRead More →

Digitaleisure, one of the new grids created in the wake of AviWorlds’ latest flame-out, has been forced to rebrand as SkyLifeGrid due to legal issues. The original name and domain was too close to that of Digital Leisure, an online gaming company. Digital Leisure paid for the domain transfers, said SkyLifeGrid owner JoshRead More →

The 2016 Fest’Avi event begins today, the third year that FrancoGrid is hosting the avatar exhibit. The event begins at 6 p.m. Paris time, or 9 a.m. Pacific, at hg.francogrid.org:80:FestAvi 2016. The event features an exhibit of 19 new creative avatar designs, theMorlitaM live concert, and the FestAvi party. The theme of thisRead More →

Google Plus continues to be the social media destination of choice for OpenSim users, due its usability, sharing features, and support for identities based on avatar names. I currently track 175 virtual communities that have some relation to OpenSim, and just collected the members counts of each group. See theRead More →

Adapting OpenSim to work on virtual reality headsets will require a substantial amount of work on both server and viewer code. Is this something that OpenSim users want to see happen? According to a survey conducted on this site this week, 79 percent of OpenSim users think that VR isRead More →

OutWorldz founder Fred Beckhusen has posted his collection of 1,000 OpenSim scripts on the open source collaboration site GitHub, as well as the code for his one-click OpenSim installer, called DreamWorld. Like New World Studio before, DreamWorld makes it easy to install a mini-grid on a personal computer, together with the FirestormRead More →

I got into writing about OpenSim back in 2009 because it seemed to be, at the time, the best path to an open-source, peer-to-peer metaverse. I want to see a future where anyone could put up a virtual environment, and have people teleport in and out from other people’s environments. ARead More →

A complex mesh object can significantly slow down the loading of a region — as much as ten minutes, in some cases, according to Oren Hurvitz, co-founder and VP of R&D at Kitely. That’s a significant problem for Kitely in particular because the grid’s regions are all loaded on demand. TheyRead More →

So your grid has been hit by a denial-of-service attack, or a server has crashed, or a hacker got in, or things just mysteriously stopped working. Or maybe you’ve had a customer service disaster, or your owner said something horrible on social media, or you’ve got management or partner problemsRead More →

Despite the the absence of the Virtual Life grid and Avination in this month’s statistics, region counts, registered users, and active users all increased this month. Virtual Life grid shut down without notice, and Avination is in the process of moving to a new hosting provider and could be downRead More →

Editor’s note: This article was updated on 1/27/2023 to remove dead links and links to malicious sites. Editor: The team behind U.S. Army’s MOSES grid have long been cutting-edge contributors to OpenSim, building a grid management system, running scalability tests, and donating content to the OpenSim community. Now they are inRead More →

A lot of folks are interested in getting a career in virtual reality these days, and I don’t blame them. The industry is exploding. So I’m getting emails from folks asking me for advice in how to get started. My standard advice is to go to college for a degreeRead More →

Avi-Labs is offering free regions on the AviWorlds and AviBrasil grids, but will no longer be accepting new grid hosting companies, Nearly 200 free regions have already been given out, company owner Alexsandro Pomposelli told Hypergrid Business — 65 on AviWorlds and 117 on AviBrasil — and the infrastructure for theRead More →

Atek Grid, formerly owned by the company behind the CloudServe OpenSim hosting company, has been bought by the Tampa-based Florida Web Council, Inc. CloudServe will continue to run the back-end technology for the grid and manage the hosting. Atek Grid is large in land area — the equivalent of 4,447Read More →

There are grids whose welcome areas are always full of people hanging out, with mentors on hand to help newcomers and answer questions from residents and visitors, even grid owners stopping by to press the virtual flesh. Kitely has not been one of those grids. In the past, its welcomeRead More →

Update: Genesis Grid has since been rebranded as Genesis Metaverse. The Genesis Grid, formerly hosted by Avi-Labs, has left that hosting company in the wake of recent problems and launched its own OpenSim hosting service. It will be hosting its own grid, as well as that of another former Avi-Labs customer,Read More →

Kitely’s user community is celebrating History Month this August to celebrate history-inspired builds and encourage people to build more. It will also feature a number of events each week including live music and dance. Visitors can pick up landmarks and a HUD — heads-up display — at the History Month Hub eachRead More →

If you want to share your OpenSim build online so that people can explore it with a virtual reality headset, consider Sketchfab. The platform, which has half a million registered users and nearly a million VR models, claims to be the largest 3D content sharing site on the web. For example, theRead More →

Avi-Labs, the hosting company behind the AviWorlds grid, has been hacked, according to Josh Boam, the company’s technology manager, but grid data should be recoverable. “Everything is saved,” he said. According to Boam, company founder and owner Alex Pomposelli has been out of touch for the past few days. “IRead More →

OSgrid celebrated its ninth birthday this weekend, but the events did not go smoothly on OpenSim’s largest and oldest grid. OSgrid has had some technical issues over the past few days, grid president Dan Banner told Hypergrid Business, starting with login in problems on Friday. Users were still able toRead More →

Tangle Grid is hosting the Steam Expo starting from August 1 to September 25 where creators can showcase their items and visitors can see items being displayed. In addition to the exposition for creation, the grid hosts live DJing every Friday at the exposition from 10:30 a.m. to 1 p.m.Read More →

Several grids did not report numbers this month, resulting in a drop in active users of 3,209. Avination was down this month, as were Virtual Dream, My Virtual Community, and Cyberface. Some grids, such as Activity Ds stopped providing active user numbers. In addition, eight of the top ten most popular grids lost activeRead More →

The number of non-exportable items on the Kitely Market dropped this week, while exportable products continue to rise, according to statistics released today by Kitely. The difference between the two was the second highest in history. The first, in November of 2014, came after Kitely significantly improved market functionality andRead More →