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Press Release: Starting Today: 3Di, Inc. Enables 3D Virtual Internet Shopping Experiences by Deploying 3Di OpenSim Enterprise to SANWA 3D INTERNET LAB TOKYO — 3Di, Inc., which develops and offers 3D Internet solutions, is proud to announce that 3Di OpenSim Enterprise, 3Di’s server software for construction of 3D virtual worldsRead More →

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ReactionGrid has joined a very short list of OpenSim grids offering online shopping, with an e-commerce site open to all OpenSim users, not just ReactionGrid members. Two other grids have online commerce platforms, but their products are only available to grid members (though grid membership is free). The largest isRead More →

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Just as colleges and universities were among the first to embrace the World Wide Web, educational institutions are now in the forefront of those embracing innovative uses of OpenSim and other virtual worlds platforms. For example, the CSI project from the Kansas-based Greenbush Education Service Center is an interactive crime-solvingRead More →

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I’ve been talking to a few virtual world operators lately that are trumpeting their particular virtual world as the next “Web 3D standard.” They’re the biggest, or the best, or the prettiest, or the fastest, or the cheapest, or whatever — and everyone is going to leave the other worldsRead More →

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It will take at least six months to get the Xenki OpenSim viewer ready for public use, according to the new lead developer on the open source project. Kevin Tweedy, founder and head of Philadelphia-based Extreme Reality, a virtual reality technology company, said he took the project over in March.Read More →

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Japan’s 3Di Inc. has been working hard lately on making OpenSim more appealing to business customers — at least, to business customers in Japan. This spring, they came out with a Web viewer for OpenSim worlds designed to intergrate with the firm’s back-end OpenSim-based server software, and a demo websiteRead More →

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Glasgow Caledonian University in Scotland will become the first UK university to offer a comprehensive virtual world creation course, the institution announced this summer. The course, available to fourth-year computing students, will cover the design and development of 3D virtual worlds, using the OpenSim and Second Life platforms. Creative computingRead More →

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The $50,000 price tag might scare off smaller customers, but IBM’s Lotus Sametime 3D product is designed to help large enterprises start holding virtual meetings. The product – released at the end of June — includes integration with corporate directories, with the Lotus Sametime chat service, and includes conferencing toolsRead More →

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When you first open up an OpenSim browser – Hippo, for example — it seems pretty straightforward. Logging in is a snap, just type your name and password. But once you log in, it’s a different story. You start out as some faceless person in ugly clothes, although it canRead More →

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My first time in OpenSim was on May 22, 2009, when my internship program put me in contact with my new boss. She suggested that I download Hippo so that we could meet at the company’s virtual offices and discuss my internship. I was studying in Madrid and she wasRead More →

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IBM officially released its Lotus Sametime 3D collaboration product this week. The product is based on the OpenSim opensource virtual world server software, an IBM spokeswoman confirmed to Hypergrid Business today. This is the first serious use of the OpenSim platform as part of an established and popular enterprise productRead More →

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An unknown hacker took down more than a hundred OpenSim regions this weekend, as well as over a hundred thousand websites. This is bad news for some OpenSim hosting companies who relied on low-cost virtual shared servers to host their regions. Chris Greenwell, for example, lost 41 regions total, includingRead More →

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Update: Full, up-to-date list of OpenSim hosting providers is here. The choice of OpenSim hosts is still very limited, due to the fact that the OpenSim platform has only become stable — and grids hyperlinked — in the last couple of months. In theory, anyone can host their own OpenSimRead More →

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When I show people around OpenSim, the first question they ask is: “So this is like Second Life? Only worse?” Which is a valid question. Any particular OpenSim world — like, say, OSGrid, or OpenLife, or ReactionGrid or WorldSimTerra — is small and puny in comparison to SecondLife’s grid. ImagineRead More →

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These last couple of weeks have been problematic for many of us using OpenSim. The OSGrid, in particular, has had more than its share of downtime as a result of ongoing software upgrades, and links between regions break frequently because of incompatible software versions. So in planning the location ofRead More →

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One of the biggest obstacles to enterprise adoption of the OpenSim virtual worlds platform has been the lack of a decent behind-the-firewall solution. There are some hosting companies running OpenSim projects, but if you wanted to install it and run it yourself, you would need to invest serious time andRead More →

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Grid A horizontal map composed of one or more regions, similar to the way that a chessboard is made up of individual squares. A grid is normally identified by a URL and a port number, for example, the OSGrid is located at osgrid.org:8002. Hypergrid All grids that are linked toRead More →

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Unlike Second Life, the open source virtual world platform OpenSim does not have a built-in currency system. To users, this is a significant lack of functionality – but developers see it as a feature. The reason? OpenSim is not a clone of the Second Life game – that multi-user virtualRead More →

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Mike Joyce – that’s Michael R. Joyce on imdb.com – is a Hollywood producer. You may have heard of him from such projects as “Battlestar Galactica” and “Jewel of the Nile.” “The kind of work I did was line producing,” he said. “I did whole shows right from scratch. IRead More →

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Update: Full, up-to-date list of OpenSim hosting providers is here. Running an OpenSimulator instance is a challenging prospect for many — there are a number of important criteria you should be looking at before purchasing, but the single most important question is: “Will I be managing this myself?” “Do itRead More →

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When it comes to virtual world real estate and design, DeepThink has been a big player, operating one of the largest continents in Second Life. But in recent months, the Shanghai-based company has been refocusing on OpenSim, the open-source platform that’s rapidly becoming the standard for enterprise virtual worlds. OpenSimRead More →

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According to OpenSim core developer Charles Krinke, there are 330 key functions in Second Life – and 300 of them have been fully implemented in OpenSim. Of the remaining 30, half have to do with vehicle physics, he said. These are the functions that allow virtual passengers to ride inRead More →

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Charles Krinke joined the OpenSim core development team a year and eight months ago. In that time, he saw the project go from being a collection of 600 messages – packets – used by Second Life browsers to communicate with their servers – to a fully-fledged platform for building hyperlinkedRead More →

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Many people think that the OpenSim platform was reversed engineered from Second Life’s browser — but this is not actually true. It was actually built based on eavesdropping. No, not on company phone calls — on the communications between the Second Life browser and the Second Life servers. Servers areRead More →

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Gwyneth Llewelyn actually posted this article “OpenSimulator: The Choice for 2010 back in January, but it still remains one of the best overviews of what’s happening in the OpenSim worlds that I have read so far. She talks about how OpenSim was developed, and how its modular approach makes itRead More →

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If you want to see how the OpenSim platform works in practice – and who doesn’t want a glipse of the next generation of the Internet? – you might be tempted to come to the OSGrid, the largest public OpenSim deployment that’s out there right now. Don’t. If you want to see a nice, stable OpenSim project, go to the Folk Cafe at Grid4us.Read More →

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If you’re looking to see what a good OpenSim deployment looks like, I strongly recommend the Folk Cafe and the surrounding German village region on the Grid4us OpenSim grid. How to get in: If you already have an OpenSim account, see below. If you are new to OpenSim: Step One:Read More →

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[Update: You can browse all hypergrid-enabled public OpenSim grids with Hyperica, the directory of hypergrid destinations. Directory indexes more than 100 shopping and freebie store locations. Updated hypergrid travel directions here.] Today I stepped through a StarGate — several times — to travel between different grids in the OpenSim universe.Read More →

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Today was the last day of 3rd Rock Grid, one of the oldest grids in OpenSim. The grid announced that it was closing back in March, and, since then, many of the former residents have found their way to other grids, with ZetaWorlds being a popular destination. Start at Sirocco,Read More →

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I have a new OpenSim grid stats report coming out tomorrow, so I’ve been surfing OpenSim grid websites these last couple of days, looking for errant stats pages. And that means that I’ve been looking at a lot of grid home pages. And there are some really pretty ones outRead More →

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One of my interests is the relationship between the real world and the virtual. If the virtual can inspire or inform the real, it then transcends its technical isolation. Curating an art exhibition is just such an opportunity. In the physical realm, curating is labor intensive, so decisions on placementRead More →

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So. You have some thoughts about where OpenSim is going. Or there’s a cool new fashion designer in OpenSim you want to tell people about. Or there’s a feature you’d really like to see implemented. You’ve been thinking for a while about writing it up and sending it to HypergridRead More →

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So, I’m back home — after flying to Lima, Peru for an AI conference last week. I was there to give a keynote speech about AI. The whole flight over I was worried that Nvidia or OpenAI or someone else would announce news of such major importance that I’d haveRead More →

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I cover artificial intelligence at my day job. Every week, I talk to the experts building the technology and deploying it, and to companies already finding value in it. The AI-powered transformation is bigger than anything I’ve ever covered before, in my two-plus decades of technology journalism. And it’s movingRead More →

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The organizers of OSFest 2024, an annual festival that will be held this coming October, recently opened voting for this year’s theme to their Discord community. Festival participants can vote by reacting with a specific emoji to indicate their preferred theme from a selection of options, either via the OSFestRead More →

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I’m giving two presentations tomorrow at the OpenSim Community Conference. First, I’m giving my usual state of the hypergrid talk at 3:30 p.m. Pacific time. I’ll be doing a roundup of this year’s top news and OpenSim statistics. Then, at 4 p.m. Pacific, I’ll be talking about how generative AIRead More →

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This year’s Hypergrid International Expo kicks off at 11 a.m. Pacific Time on Friday, October 6 at the HIE’s Auditorium on Craft World, featuring an opening party with music from Zoree Jupiter at 11 a.m., Arianna Nightfire at 1 p.m., and Forest Azure at 10 p.m. Pacific Time. “The three artistsRead More →

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The annual OpenSimulator Festival, known as OSFest, takes place September 15 through September 30 inside the OSFest virtual world grid. The sixteen-day event features live music, exhibits, talks, tours, social spaces, and shopping for attendees across the Hypergrid metaverse. This year’s OSFest offers 94 hours of non-music events at free,Read More →

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  AviTron owner Alexander Pomposelli has a long history of closing grids without warning. Back when he ran AviWorlds, I counted more than a dozen times that he closed that grid, often without any warning. Residents complained of losing access to regions, inventories, and in world-currency balances. At one point,Read More →

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The Discovery Grid will host its seventh anniversary party on Saturday, July 1 at the Louisville region, featuring a virtual Thunder Over Discovery 2023 aviation event which will coincide with the real-life Thunder Over Louisville aircraft event, showcasing vintage and modern aircraft in action. Both grid residents and hypergrid visitorsRead More →

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New research reports and surveys released this month show that interest in virtual and augmented reality is continuing to drop. According to an EY Consulting survey released earlier this month, only 24 percent of people said their company has started using VR and AR technologies, putting it in last placeRead More →

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AvatarLife grid will host a virtual Pride Week for residents and visitors from other grids starting at 11 a.m. Pacific Time on Saturday, June 24, with events running through Friday, June 30. The Pride Week, which coincides with and has events that match those held during the United Nation’s PrideRead More →

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In April, I wrote that I had high expectations for Apple’s new augmented reality headset — and that I was looking forward to switching back to the iPhone if it was what I hoped for. I was very much disappointed by the actual announcement of the Apple Vision Pro onRead More →