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Analysts at the International Data Corporation are predicting smartphone sales to resume growth in 2020, driven by 5G and emerging markets. Sales declined for the past three years straight, as a result of consumers holding on to their phones longer. “To be clear, we don’t think 5G will be the saviorRead More →

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I should just cut-and-paste that headline every month. Okay, so…. AviWorlds has a new website and new sky-high land prices. A 15,000-prim region is now $65, for a grid with almost no users, not much content, and a history of shutting down and losing user content on a regular basis.Read More →

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Hypergrid Business has had exactly two site designs during its ten-year history. From 2009 to 2014, we were using a WordPress theme called The Stars, and were using it even after the company stopped supporting it. Here’s what it looked like when it first launched: Then, in 2014, we switchedRead More →

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Looking for a VR headset but not sure where to start?  Here’s a short but sweet list featuring five of the most popular VR headsets available on Amazon this fall.  There’s a choice for any budget, from under $20 to over $1,000.  With many satisfied customer reviews and answered questions, each of these units has something good to offer.Read More →

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  If you are in the UK this fall, and are interested in seeing some virtual reality and augmented reality art for free, check out the Alternate Realities touring exhibition that is part of the Sheffield Doc/Fest and will be coming to Brighton in October, Manchester in November and willRead More →

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The sixth annual Tangle Grid Steam Expo is live now and will run until October 1. The expo is fully accessible to hypergrid visitors at tanglegrid.net:8002:expo isle. (Learn how to hypergrid here.) Visitors will be able to get freebie items, and also purchase content using the Gloebit currency. (Learn how toRead More →

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We asked the best and brightest in virtual reality to share their thoughts on what we can expect from VR in 2020. We’re more than halfway through 2019, so let’s get real about what’s happening in virtual reality. Across the globe, VR is a trend that is rapidly exploding andRead More →

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There is now a virtual reality enabled version of the Firestorm viewer, developed by Peter Kappler. Austin Tate, director of the Artificial Intelligence Applications Institute at the University of Edinburgh, has posted an article about how to install and run it here. Also known as “Ai Austin” in-world, Tate runsRead More →

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From the editor: The commentary below is from Sam Adama, owner of Caprica Grid, about the Kazakhstan-based freebie grid Sacrarium, which has been accused of hosting stolen content and inappropriate child avatars and accessories. The opinions expressed below are his own. Do not allow yourself to be misled. What theRead More →

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It took ten years for me to get my first book done, Krim Times. The second one just took eight months! Thank you to all my beta readers who helped make it possible! If you would like to be a beta reader on the next book in the series, “DressedRead More →

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The total number of active users on OpenSim’s public grids dropped by just over 500 active users, which is typical of the summer months. But land area was up by nearly 5,000 standard region equivalents, to 88,512, a record high. OpenSim grids also registered 3,948  new users this month, forRead More →

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The topic of Second Life’s — and OpenSim — default camera offset is an old one. The first Second Life blogger who brought it to people’s attention was Penny Patton, with her seminal post “A Matter of Perspective” from as far back as 2011. Ever since then, various other bloggersRead More →

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A couple of weeks ago, the Firestorm team announced that they planned to split the Second Life and OpenSim versions of their popular virtual world viewer. “This means we can now issue updates for Second Life and updates for OpenSim independently of each other,” wrote Jessica Lyon, CEO and projectRead More →

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Immersive technology means you are able to place yourself inside a world, not just to peer inside it. Like all of the tech industry, extended reality features a diversity imbalance — is this burgeoning XR sector a chance for us to finally build a diverse corner of technology? And isRead More →

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The Encore Escape grid will be celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Woodstock music festival in mid-august. The Woodstock 2019 reenactment will take place in real-time, from August 15 to August 18, on 150 virtual acres of land sculpted using US Geological Society topographic maps from 1967, to reflect theRead More →

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In case you’re thinking that fully immersive virtual reality will require full-body suits of some kind to replicate all the senses, there’s promising research coming out of the medical prosthetics field that shows that we’re well on our way to brain-computer interfaces that will make all that irrelevant. Scientists atRead More →

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All the stats were up this month on OpenSim’s public grids, including land area, registered users, and active users. Land area was up by 49 standard region equivalents, to 83,516. OpenSim grids also registered 6,649 new users this month, for a new total of 421,087 registered users. The number ofRead More →

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One of the first questions every new grid owner must answer is whether to have in-world payment, so that users can buy stuff, or pay for services, or donate money while they’re on the grid. The easiest answer is “no.” You can put up some freebie stores, have residents buyRead More →

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Do you like reading science fiction and telling authors what’s wrong with their books? I need you! The draft of my second story in my Krim series is done and I’m certain that it’s full of plot holes and incomprehensive motivations and other problems that I’m just not seeing becauseRead More →

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If you, like me, are looking to launch a little OpenSim grid of your own — or even a big commercial grid — but you don’t want to mess with all the details of setting up and configuring servers, installing and patching the software, managing the network connections and loadRead More →

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Kitely rolled out its virtual private grid service at the beginning of the year. Today, I finally decided to try it out. The bottom line? It looks like a good option for schools, non-profits and companies that need a way to handle lots of different users and regions, and needRead More →

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If you’re new to OpenSim, you’re probably here because you’ve heard about the ridiculously low land prices. Many grids offer regions for $10 a month — or less — and you can get a whole grid for free by running your own Superlow land prices on commercial grids If youRead More →

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The Utopia Skye OpenSim grid will be holding an art fair this month, and submissions will be accepted until June 15. The Skye Art Fair itself will run from June 29 to July 28, with special events on the opening weekend, June 29 and June 38. There will also beRead More →

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The gaming-themed Mobius Grid has introduced display names for its residents and is working to make the technology wider used within OpenSim, grid owner Roy Corr told Hypergrid Business. The grid rolled out display names last year and was testing them on the hypergrid this spring. “We have been collaboratingRead More →

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$23 a month for a two-by-two or four-by-four 30,000-prim varregion on the hypergrid-enabled Discovery Grid. Includes Vivox voice and Gloebit currency. Read More →

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OpenSim’s average region price has dropped to $15 per standard region, down from $18 last February. The lowest price for a region dropped slightly to $4.90 a month, at Tranquility, while the highest price fell from $60 to $50 a month. The median region price also fell, from $15 toRead More →

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If you’re a writer, or an artist you may cringe at the idea that computers are coming for your jobs. If you dig into how the content for AI art and poetry and stories are generated, you’ll breathe a little easier. I’ve done just that using tutorials I found online and collaborativeRead More →

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I miss having my own OpenSim place. I didn’t use it much when I had it, but now that it’s gone, I want it back. So, of course, since I don’t want to have to keep a computer up and running all the time to do my own hosting, andRead More →

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Closed grids — where users can’t teleport over to other grids — have been losing ground in OpenSim lately and suffered a big hit last year with the closing of InWorldz. But some people prefer closed grids, where grid owners have more control over who can access the grid, andRead More →

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OpenSim has suffered a number of shocks in the past year, with several significant grid closings in a row. OpenSim’s largest closed grid, InWorldz, shut down last summer. Its successor, Islandz, closed earlier this year. Virtual Highway shut down in December. We lost both Lost Paradise and its owner thisRead More →

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In its ongoing quest to find a sustainable business model, the commercial AviWorlds grid is giving the no-hypergrid approach another go. “AviWorlds needs to be a private community now,” grid owner Alexsandro Pomposelli told Hypergrid Business. “Avi-Labs needs to create value and also a distinguishing characteristic from all these other gridsRead More →

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The Kitely Market, OpenSim’s largest commercial content marketplace, has passed the 30,000 item milestone this month. The market currently delivers to 345 different grids, both hypergrid-enabled and closed, private grids. (Instructions for how to configure the Kitely Market for closed grids are here.) According to Kitely co-founder and CEO IlanRead More →

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If you haven’t done enough this week to honor our planet you can get some belated Earth Day action this weekend at the annual EarthX conference in Dallas, Texas — and, if you can’t get there in person, streaming online and on its YouTube channel. The event, which is taking place onRead More →

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If climbing Mount Everest in real life is too expensive or dangerous, but you still want to find out what it’s like, virtual reality may have the answer. EverestVR is an immersive experience for the Vive and Oculus Rift headsets, available on the Vive Infinity platform. Set amongst the world’s tallestRead More →

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A couple of readers — okay, several readers — have written to me complaining about the outages on the Hypergrid Business website, so this morning I’ve been following up with tech support at my hosting company, Dreamhost. One of the things was trivial — the https:// security was in place,Read More →

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US $6 per month for a 20,000-prim standard region on the hypergrid-enabled Breath in Freedom grid. Variable-sized regions and additional prims also available.Read More →

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This Friday, New York City-based multimedia startup Walk In My Shoes Media is launching a VR platform that uses immersive storytelling to make a social impact and promote inclusivity. Company employees, or members of academic communities, will be able to experience the consequences of prejudices first-hand. The idea for theRead More →

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The  VR Airway Lab training application for medical professionals was recently put to the test in a study that found VR simulation to be on par, if not better than expected, when compared to a traditional teaching lab environment. Key Findings Faculty that took the VR training overwhelmingly felt it was aRead More →

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John Skakandy, known to OpenSim users as Cloneu Inglewood, died of cancer last month in Florida. Skakandy was the owner of the Lost Paradise grid, which he founded in 2011. The grid received the top rankings in our 2012 reader survey, with perfect scores for community, content, support, and technology, thoughRead More →

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The first annual OpenSim Fest officially opens its doors tomorrow, with musical performances tomorrow and this weekend, then a showcase of exhibits from 45 different grids in the OpenSim community running through April 6. This is an event to give exposure to our fellow OpenSim neighbors and revel in theirRead More →

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US $12 (R$50) for a 25,000-prim region on the hypergrid-enabled, Portuguese-language Vida Dupla grid.Read More →

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You know the scene. You’re walking down the street in a town, maybe your hometown, on a quiet Tuesday afternoon. The sun is shining, people are sitting outside a coffee shop chatting and browsing, and you can hear birds chirping and the drone of distant traffic. You turn the cornerRead More →

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  Keng City, OpenSim’s only major African-American grid is working to promote awareness and inclusivity on the hypergrid, and to battle prejudice, with exhibits, events, and destinations of interest. Even simple things, like finding appropriate avatars, can be a challenge for OpenSim’s users. “We struggle finding culturally related items for our avatars,”Read More →

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  Gloebit is a virtual currency accepted on about forty different OpenSim grids, and is the most popular currency on the hypergrid by a very large margin. Gloebit works roughly similar to PayPal. Users create a Gloebit account on the website, transfer money into it, and can they spend that money as theyRead More →

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As many of you pointed out in emails to me, Hypergrid Business has been down since Friday morning. There was an infection on the site, and it took Sucuri, our security service, and DreamHost, our hosting provider, four days to resolve the issue, which included three different rounds of cleaning outRead More →

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Metropolis, one of the oldest non-profit OpenSim grids, and the second most popular grid (after OSgrid) announced that it will be upgrading to the latest version of OpenSim at the end of the month. Read the full information document here. Users will need to pay 5 Euros to transfer theirRead More →

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Sony Pictures announced that it’s making a sequel to the hit Bill Murray movie Groundhog Day. But it’s animated. And it’s in virtual reality. Groundhog Day: Life Father Like Son takes place in the same setting, but this time the hero is Phil Connors, Jr., the son of Phil Connors,Read More →

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As a person of color and a woman, I’ve become aware with the lack of representation expressed outside of the entertainment or sports world. That is even more prevalent within the Virtual Reality community. Even though African Americans are strong consuming anything tech related us making up less than 20Read More →

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Exhibitors can already start setting up for February’s Sci-Fi Expo on Tangle Grid. The month-long exposition, accessible to hypergrid visitors, officially opens on Tuesday, February 5 and runs through March 5. The hypergrid address is tanglegrid.net:8002. (Learn how to hypergrid here.) Visitors will be able to get freebie items, and alsoRead More →

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    Islandz, the official successor to the InWorldz grid, is shutting down, owner Beth Reischl announced today on the grid’s Discord channel. Residents will have ten days to wrap up any current projects. Reischl, who is also known as Elenia Llewellyn  in-world, cited financial difficulties. “I’m not working for free for anotherRead More →

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There’s a lot of OpenSim stuff out there. Last year, for example, there were 380 different grids for the public to explore, and an unknown number of personal, business, and educational grids that didn’t make the Hypergrid Business lists but were open to visitors. It’s hard enough for long-time OpenSimRead More →

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Jan. 20 Update: First, thank you, everyone, for helping put the book on the Amazon best-seller list for Science Fiction and Fantasy Short Reads last week. It was amazing — we broke the top 50! You guys rock! Second, it turns out that I’m not allowed to offer the book for freeRead More →

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  Kitely rolled out their new private grid service yesterday, and there’s a lot of information there to take in all at once. It’s not a full separate OpenSim grid, like you’d get from DigiWorldz or Dreamland Metaverse. Instead, it seems more like something halfway between a Kitely region and yourRead More →

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Kitely  is now offering private grids for organizations, the company announced today. For more information, check out this Kitely support thread. There are a lot of questions about how this will work. I will be posting a longer article tomorrow. If you have any comments or questions, add them below,Read More →

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1,000 Gloebits (about US $5) per month for a standard region on the hypergrid-enabled AnonGrid. Free land and varregions also available.Read More →

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A group that claims to be affiliated with the Anonymous hacktivist collective announced the launch of a new OpenSim grid on Saturday. “Anonymous began to a great degree in a virtual world called SecondLife,” the grid said in a message on its website. “We hope to bring back this foundational platformRead More →

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Virtual reality is a hot topic in the field of science and technology. It is assumed that the cost of hardware and the complexity of production are the obstructions for the massive adoption of virtual reality. However, experts from the VR industry have different opinions. Virtual reality is an underestimated field thatRead More →

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If you got an Oculus headset this Christmas — or didn’t, and are planning to buy one — this guide can help you learn about the most important features.Read More →

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More than 300 responses came in for this year’s Ninth Annual OpenSim Grid Survey, and Sacrarium received the highest overall scores, followed by Virtual Brasil, Utopia Skye, Kitely, Tranquility Grid, DigiWorldz, Discovery Grid, OSgrid and DreamNation, in that order. Between them, the respondents had visited nearly 200 different grids, andRead More →

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The 2018 OpenSim Community Conference. started off with a bang this morning with an announcement of a new virtual reality viewer for OpenSim. OpenSimulator core developer Melanie Thielker — also known as Melanie Milland in-world — announced that she is releasing her virtual reality OpenSim viewer to the open sourceRead More →

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From The Ashes Of AvatarFest, OpenSim Fest Rises AvatarFest has been a creative effort which has celebrated the people of OpenSim for years, and AvatarFest 2018 was its final year. In the spirit of this incredible yearly festival, OpenSim Fest begins with our first festival starting in March 2019. WhatRead More →

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Update: I’ve added numbers for more than 40 additional grids since this article first run, and now the active user numbers show an increase of more than 2,000. I’ve run the stats for OpenSim this weekend, and here are the results: Full monthly stats Active grids list Hypergrid destination listRead More →

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The 2018 OpenSim Community Conference is this weekend, and you can check out the schedule here. Registration is free, and you can still register here. In previous years, the conference was also broadcast via the web, for those who couldn’t attend in-world. Follow OSCC on Twitter at opensimcc.  Read More →

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AviWorlds, the grid that’s up and down more than a yo-yo, is back again — this time offering 100 free full-sized regions. Owner Alexsandro Pomposelli has shut down the grid more than a dozen times over the last seven years, and has attempted multiple different business models. It’s had free land,Read More →

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Tangle Grid’s Winter Expo opens its doors this Saturday, inviting hypergrid travelers from any OpenSim grid to come and check out the exhibits and shopping opportunities. The hypergrid address is tanglegrid.net:8002:expo isle. For folks new to hypergrid travel, type Ctrl-M to pull up the map, cut-and-paste the address into the map’s addressRead More →

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Registration is now open for the Mainstreaming Virtual World Learning Colloquium. This Colloquium is a free event — held on December 1, 2018 from 9:00 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. Central Time – in the AvaCon Grid Quaternary Stadium, and is also a community event affiliated with the upcoming Open SimulatorRead More →

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Islandz, the successor to InWorldz, officially opened for business last week, writes Ryan Schultz. InWorldz, one of the most successful and longest-lasting commercial grids in the OpenSim ecosystem, closed in August due to financial problems. InWorldz was one of the last remaining closed grids. Almost all other OpenSim grids allowRead More →

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“We estimate that on average 1.5 new VR studios open for business somewhere in the world every day.” “Regardless of what you or I may think about it the big brands are the ones sitting on the money to pay for top notch VR. And they are very much incentivizedRead More →

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In case you’re wondering what I’ve been doing with myself now that I’m not blogging about OpenSim as much, here’s an update. First, I’m super busy at my day job. I’m covering artificial intelligence for IDG’s CIO magazine and cybersecurity for CSO. I’ve also been getting my new blog, Upsider,Read More →

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Augmented reality endorsement picks up pace, according to a recent market forecast. The AR market volume is expected to hit $30 billion by 2023, growing at 39 percent CAGR. This growth is rooted in AR’s utility. Augmented reality proves itself a multi-purpose technology, being eagerly adopted across different domains, such asRead More →

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As the November 1 opening of the Santorini 1st Digital Bienniale art festival approaches, organizers have made available the 28-page preview book free exclusively for Hypergrid Business readers: download it here. Read the original festival announcement here. #Neighbourhood: Art is a political act Digital and real worlds will handshake at Santorini onRead More →

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Earlier this year, I wrote about how I’m ready to start winding down Hypergrid Business and move on to the next part of my life. My kids are out of the house, I’ve rented a new office, and I’ve been disentangling myself from old commitments. At my day job, covering technologyRead More →

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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 →

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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 →

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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 →

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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 →

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  High Fidelity, the new virtual world platform started by Linden Lab founder Philip Rosedale, now allows its users to convert its virtual currency to real-world cash. “This opens the possibility for people to earn real money creating and selling virtual goods and services within High Fidelity,” Rosedale said inRead More →

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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 →

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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 →

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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 →

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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 →

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  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 →

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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 →

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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 →