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While many OpenSim grids are trying to attract users from Second Life, or other grids, 3rd Rock Grid has decided to reach out to the real world for its latest marketing and outreach campaign, centered around its 3RG Music Village virtual performance space. The campaign will include targeted advertising through music-relatedRead More →

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In a surprising reversal, Linden Lab has decided to allow third-party exchanges to sell Linden Dollars to users, a move that will benefit international Second Life residents who had difficulties using the official LindeX exchange. “We’ve heard from some users outside of the US who are concerned that it mayRead More →

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Update (May 17): Linden Lab launches Authorized Reseller program, five exchanges now live. Linden Lab announcement is here. List of Authorized Resellers is here. The five exchanges currently allowed to sell Linden Dollars to users are  AnsheX, Buildo, VForEx Inc, VirWoX, and Zoha Islands. No third party exchanges are allowed to purchase Linden Dollars from users, however. ——————- WhileRead More →

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Recent outages at two of the biggest, most popular grids in the metaverse — Metropolis and AviWorlds — cut into this month’s active user numbers, but overall the OpenSim metaverse continued to expand. The top 40 OpenSim grids by land area gained 1,173 regions this month, for a new total ofRead More →

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Despite dire warnings from Linden Lab, the Podex, Crossworlds and AnsheX virtual currency exchanges still seem to be operating, with, so far, no ill effects to users. As a result, DXexchange has decided to resume selling Linden Dollars, pointing to the clause in the Linden Lab Terms of Service that saysRead More →

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In the wake of the recent closing of at least 16 third-party Linden dollar exchanges — only AnsheX, Podex, and Crossroads are still up, as of this writing — some Second Life residents have launched petitions to allow third-party exchanges to remain, or asking for more information. A petition on Change.org, Linden Lab: Lets try to openRead More →

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After Tuesday’s surprising announcement by Linden Lab prohibiting third-party trading in the Linden Dollar, some virtual currency exchanges are now fighting for their lives. “It is not only problem for Linden Lab or third party exchanges but also for but a big number of residents, especially from European countries, who will beRead More →

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Today, two commercial grids — AviWorlds and Avination — announced their continued support of third-party currency exchanges. The announcements were in reaction to yesterday’s Linden Lab decision that third-party exchanges would no longer be authorized by the platform. As a result, 11 exchanges have already announced that they are endingRead More →

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Update (May 17): Linden Lab launches Authorized Reseller program, five exchanges now live. Linden Lab announcement is here. List of Authorized Resellers is here. The five exchanges currently allowed to sell Linden Dollars to users are  AnsheX, Buildo, VForEx Inc, VirWoX, and Zoha Islands. No third party exchanges are allowed to purchase Linden Dollars from users, however.Read More →

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Three years ago, I participated in a groundbreaking fitness and lifestyle modification program in Second Life, as a result of which I made long-term changes — and lost 20 pounds. (Read more about my experience here and more about the Club One program here.) It may seem crazy that virtualRead More →

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I love participating in online conversations, so here’s my take on the “Why do I blog?” meme which recently showed up on New World Notes and Journey To The Center of the Metaverse and Daniel Voyager’s Blog after a challenge by Strawberry Singh. How long have you been blogging? I launched HypergridRead More →

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These last few weeks, I’ve felt a feeling of foreboding. Like there were big things looming on the horizon. Big things that would change the world as we know it. These big things are still far off, and even bigger things maybe creeping up behind them, out of our view.Read More →

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During the Spring Semester of 2007, this fool rushed into Second Life, something he felt would not only change education but the world beyond. Virtual worlds looked like a utopian technology with lots of zealous folks ready to evangelize the masses. Six years later, grading what may be my last-everRead More →

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If you rent land or own an OpenSim grid, you can now kick from your parcel or grid using your viewer, like in Second Life, thanks to code donated by Avination yesterday to the OpenSim community and expanded to include hypergrid visitors by hypergrid inventor Crista Lopes. Previously, grids couldRead More →

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Will stick with V1 interface Will add support for mesh, media-on-a-prim, server-side baking and export permissions Will continue to support OpenSim Work is resuming on the Imprudence viewer, the developer team announced this week. Imprudence is a popular old-style viewer for Second Life and OpenSim and uses the old-style interface,Read More →

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The Singularity team released a new version of the viewer today that supports the new “export” permission that was announced in March. The viewer — which is designed to work both in Second Life and in OpenSim — also added Server Side Baking and mesh uploads, among other improvements. TheRead More →

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AviWorlds, a commercial social grid, will be going down on Wednesday as it switches from managed hosting by Dreamland Metaverse to running its own servers. AviWorlds has outgrown the management tools available from Dreamland Metaverse,  grid owner Alexsandro Pomposelli told Hypergrid Business.  The Dreamland Metaverse management panel offers some options,Read More →

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I’ve written about New World Studio before, and just reviewed their Community and Licensed editions. The following are instructions for how to run the Community Edition the first time, and how to configure it without paying for the Licensed Edition. (Though the Licensed Edition makes the configuration a lot easier,Read More →

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MakeHuman, a free, open source software project that creates mesh avatars, has switched to the least restrictive license possible for the avatars created with its product. Content created with the software is licensed as CC0, which means that it can use used in any way, including commercial. Previously, MakeHuman putRead More →

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As a technology journalist, I get to look at a lot of vendor websites. As a former newspaper and magazine editor, I’ve done my share of layout and design. So as I look at OpenSim hosting websites I can’t help think of all the ways they can be improved inRead More →

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The following mistakes are totally and completely a matter of my opinion. I don’t expect grid owners to rush out and redesign their websites because I didn’t like some aspect of it. However, if you’re designing your website for the first time, or planning a make-over of your existing siteRead More →

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The top 40 OpenSim grids lost 634 regions this month, for a new total of 23,411  regions on these grids, mostly due to the fact that ScienceSim reported a loss of almost 2,000 regions. The top 40 grids also reported a total of 17, 591 active users, a drop of 470Read More →

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First impressions of Oculus Rift: Architectural Visualization, Second Life, and beyond I wish I had more time to write out a more extensive review of the Rift, but here are my first impressions: You absolutely feel as if you are transported to another place, to the point where it’s almostRead More →

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Linden Dollar: Another Virtual Currency Affected by FinCEN. Bitcoin has been in the news recently. But bitcoin is not the only virtual currency. Virtual currencies, in one form or another are here to stay. When U.S. Treasury Department’s enforcement arm, FinCEN, issued its interpretive statement, it recognized this much. TheRead More →

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Vivox continues to expand OpenSim support, after offering their voice service for free in December of 2011., when grid owners were asked to personally contact Kamal Jain, Vivox’s director of network operations. Last summer, Vivox set up a dedicated team and email address for OpenSim queries. Now, Vivox has an onlineRead More →

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Last month, Entropia Universe “discovered” a new moon. Today, the company announced that the moon “sold” for $150,000 to a player-led group of investors. This isn’t the first time the company has “sold” virtual property — a virtual setting called “Treasure Island” went for $26,500 in 2004. In 2005, “ClubRead More →

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Adminotech Ltd., a realXtend vendor, began publicly testing its WebRocket browser-based viewer for its Meshmoon virtual world today. The viewer is in its very early stages, however. It supports text chat and basic movement controls, but has no in-world building tools, avatar customization, user inventories, or voice. “This is not aRead More →

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Metaverse security took a big step forward today as Avination donated OpenSim code implementing an “export” permission setting. The company also worked together with Singularity viewer developers to add support for this new permission to the viewer. Today, OpenSim has three permissions — copy, transfer, and modify — that determine whatRead More →

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Avination, a commercial grid running on the OpenSim software, donated its multi-attachment code today to the OpenSimulator project. Avination rolled out the multiple attachment feature on its grid earlier this month. “Avination’s developers worked hard to clean up and test this code for integration with OpenSim and so it’s possible to makeRead More →

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In virtual worlds, the question of free stuff — free content, free software, free land — comes up a lot. Some people love free stuff. Some people hate it. Some people say that all content should be free because there are no distribution costs. Some people say that content should cost moneyRead More →

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As Linden Lab gradually loses landmass in its virtual world, as shown so graphically in Tyche Shepherd’s Grid Survey data, the Lab turns again to a dog it kicked repeatedly in 2010: educators. Hamlet Au broke the story that the Lab is “quietly” reaching out to selected schools and nonprofitsRead More →

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The top 40 OpenSim grids gained 1,458 regions this month, for a new total of 24,040 regions on these grids, the second highest total since we began tracking these numbers in the summer of 2009. These grids also reported a total of 18,061 active users.  A total of 224 gridsRead More →

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Looking for an immersive platform for your company, non-profit, educational institution, or government agency? Start with the following list of vendors, all of which have a successful history of serving enterprise customers. Browser-based platforms Running a virtual world in a browser does impose some limitations on the environment. But, onRead More →

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With PixieViewer, we’re closer to the dream of a Web-based viewer for OpenSim than we’ve ever been before. This particular viewer, which is built using HTML 5 technology, solves the biggest usability problem that OpenSim has. It requires no download — no plugins, no Java, no configuration, nothing. You goRead More →

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PixieTec, a virtual worlds development company based in Germany, released the preview version of its browser-based PixieViewer today, which allows users to visit OpenSim grids without installing any software or plugins. PixieViewer is based on HTML 5 technology, and runs in Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and other modern browsers. It loadsRead More →

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Avination announced support for multiple attachments today, a feature previously available only in Second Life. Avatars can now wear up to five attachments at each attachment point. “We have long heard from our users that this feature was sorely missed,” said grid founder Melanie Thielker. “Especially non-human avatars were severely limitedRead More →

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On Saturday, in the story  OpenSim grids still adapting to mesh, a couple of folks mentioned that OpenSim offers some advantages over Second Life when it comes mesh. According to OpenSim core developer Melanie Thielker, it’s about more than just not having to pay upload fees. “In Second Life, meshRead More →

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The question of avatar rights may seem to simply be a special case of the consumer rights discussion. But the areas in which avatar rights are different from generic consumer rights is where the biggest problems arise. Many consumers feel that they are in an inferior position – they haveRead More →

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Even though OpenSim had mesh support the very next day after Second Life did — and, in fact, one branch of OpenSim, realXtend, had mesh since 2008 — OpenSim users have been slower to adopt mesh than residents of Second Life. One reason is that most grids do not dictateRead More →

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There was a cover story in Wired recently about how robots are going to take all our jobs. Since I started covering virtual worlds, I’ve been wondering what work was going to look like in the future. I had imagined it to look much like the work we do  now,Read More →

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Low costs and ease of use are inspiring educators to use the OpenSim virtual world platform to build historical recreations, several of which were presented last fall in Paris at the European Immersive Education Summit. OpenSim is free, open source server software that allows the creation of Second Life-style virtual environments.Read More →

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The top 40 OpenSim grids gained 1,756 regions this month, the largest one-month increase since last September. It was also the second-largest increase overall, since we started keeping track in August 2008. There are now 22,582 regions on the top 40 OpenSim grids, 269,310 registered users, and 17,602 active users. The number ofRead More →

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Avination, a commercial grid running on the OpenSim software, announced the donation of 800 lines of physics code today, which will help OpenSim users simulate bouncing balls, reindeer pulling sleds, and feathers lightly floating down through the air. The code was pushed to the OpenSimulator core repository on Friday, theRead More →

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OpenSim hosting company SoftPaw Estates announced that it is rebranding as Zetamex, and has launched a new grid running on the Aurora-Sim version of OpenSim. In addition to traditional single-region and mini-grid OpenSim hosting, Zetamex now also offers dedicated server packages. “Dedicated packages are for people who want direct controlRead More →

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There has been some discussion about the practicality of accepting Bitcoin, but many fewer voices have been explaining the reasons Bitcoin may be a useful tool for your grid. There are at least five reasons that Bitcoin may be right for your grid. 1. Fraud mitigation BitPay, the number oneRead More →

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The top 40 OpenSim grids put an end to a two-month slide in region counts, gaining 28 regions. There are now 20,826 regions on the top 40 OpenSim grids. During the previous two months, there were a couple of major cleanups on OSgrid, the largest OpenSim grid, as well asRead More →

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Sex has helped drive many recent technological innovations, from printing to VHS tapes to the Internet itself. Second Life has been a big beneficiary of the interest in virtual sex, as has Utherverse. But  there hasn’t yet been a commercial OpenSim grid dedicated solely to virtual sex. That changes withRead More →

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The number of public OpenSim grids has more than doubled in 2012, from 98 at the start of the year, to 232 grids active this month. Here are some reasons why this is happening. Easier setup from established hosting providers Companies like Dreamhost Metaverse, SimHost, Virtual Reality, and many othersRead More →

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OpenSim hosting company Virtual Reality is taking over support and development of the Phoenix viewer, the company announced today. The previous development team, Phoenix Firestorm Project announced the end of their support for the v1-based Phoenix viewer, earlier this month, so that they could focus on the Firestorm viewer. The PhoenixRead More →