Given the choice between selling to Kitely‘s 1,003 local active users or to the 14,075 on the hypergrid, it makes sense that more and more Kitely Market merchants have gone the hypergrid route. In fact, exportables have long been growing at a faster rate than non-exportables for the past eightRead More →

Press release: Open Source Virtual Reality platform gains traction with 13 new partners VR ecosystem is now supported by 38 members; Academia Support Program announced to support developers worldwide CARLSBAD, Calif. – Razer, a world leader in connected devices and software for gamers, and Sensics, a leader in high-performance virtualRead More →

The Adult Metaverse Google Plus group was the fastest-growing OpenSim-related virtual community over the past six weeks. The community, as it sounds, is dedicated to adult content and events on the hypergrid, and has grown from 282 members on January 1 to 444 members today, a growth of 162 members.Read More →

This was another record-breaking month for OpenSim, with new highs in regions, users, and active users on the 303 active worlds. For those who are new readers, OpenSim is a free, open source virtual world platform that’s compatible with the Oculus Rift. It allows people with no technical skills toRead More →

OSgrid has been able to restore the rest of the assets from the recovery disk, OSgrid grid administrator Allen Kerensky announced today. However, he did not provide an estimated date for when OSgrid will be coming back up. He did say that the grid was now working on setting up the networkingRead More →

Immersis, a project from the French VR company Catopsys, has hit its $100,000 Kickstarter goal for a virtual reality projection system. The technology adapts the image, in real-time, to the shape and size of the room you’re in. Watch the video below.Read More →

DX Exchange, one of the oldest exchanges trading Linden Dollars, has now entered the OpenSim payments space. The exchange is now providing the currency infrastructure for Sunlight Grid, with four other grids in beta testing. Currently, there are two main exchanges providing currency services to OpenSim grids. Virwox operates theRead More →

Mattel has updated its View-Master toy, this time, for the smartphone-owning virtual reality generation. The headset, which is scheduled to hit the market in the fall, is made in bright primary colors and works the same way as any other Google Cardboard-compatible headset — it breaks up the cellphone screenRead More →

In the past, several grid owners have discussed using Bitcoin, the peer-to-peer cryptocurrency, for in-world payments but, until now, no grid has done so — Bitcoins are typically too volatile to be used within a grid. To read more about coins and gambling legislation read on https://www.bestuscasinos.org/legal/new-york/ about what mightRead More →

Press release: LG G3 AND GOOGLE CARDBOARD BRING MOBILE VIRTUAL REALITY TO EVERYDAY LIFE More Consumers Get Access to Affordable and Powerful VR Experience with LG’s VR for G3 Giveaway SEOUL & MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — LG Electronics (LG) and Google are making virtual reality (VR) more accessible to mainstream consumers. LG todayRead More →

Virtual reality technology is going to radically change what it means to attend church in the next fifty years — and maybe much sooner. While the technology is still in its infancy, however, virtual churches are limited experiments rather than significant outreach efforts – but this will change. “Numerous persons andRead More →

Ireland’s Immersive VR Education Ltd., has launched a Kickstarter to raise funding for its Apollo 11 virtual educational experience for the Oculus Rift. The Kickstarter launched yesterday and is already more than €3,000 towards its €30,000 (US $34,000) goal. Watch the video about the project below. You can also watch an RTERead More →

Its not just cars, movies, and hotels using virtual reality for marketing. Outdoor-apparel brand Merrell showed off an Oculus Rift experience at the Sundance Film Festival last month and said it will do more virtual reality promotions. Watch the video below. Read the full story at AdAge.Read More →

Are you launching a new grid? I bet you’re looking for some combination of “virtual,” “paradise,” “life,” “world,” and “avatar” that haven’t been used yet. Stop! If you use a grid name that reminds people of other OpenSim grids then you will have triple the branding challenge you would have otherwise.Read More →

Press release: VirtualTourCafe Offers 3-D Virtual Reality Alternative to Traditional Real Estate Virtual Tours and Open House Online service embraces new 3-D technology developed by Matterport to offer international and out-of-town buyers an alternative to the traditional real estate virtual tours and being there in person. Pleasanton, CA  – VirtualTourCafeRead More →

I Am Cardboard — known for their Google Cardboard virtual reality smartphone cases made out of cardboard or EVA foam — is moving up-scale. Its latest design, XG VR, has already raised $70,000 on Kickstarter, well past its $20,000 goal with 22 days left to go. It’s certainly one ofRead More →

DodoCase, one of the earliest and best known of the many companies that offer Google Cardboard kits, is now offering a design-your-own case for $30. According to the company, volume designs are available for quantities over 50. A plain pop-up viewer is $25, a little on the pricey side forRead More →

The initial batch of companies in what could be the first virtual reality accelerator have been announced. Among the projects selected by Rothenberg Ventures’ River are a system that creates 360-degree VR imagery, a headset that uses eye-tracking to build immersive experiences, and an embedded-in-VR journalism project. Each company got $100,000, office space and regular adviceRead More →

Press release: NextVR Completes First Live Broadcast Quality Virtual Reality Patented Technology Ushers in a New Era for TV, Film, Events, and Communications  Laguna Beach, CA – NextVR, a technology company that captures and delivers live and on-demand virtual reality experiences, last Friday announced they have successfully conducted the first ever live, broadcastRead More →

Running your own virtual world? Considering registering a dot-world domain name for it. For example, Sunshine.world is available for $28 from GoDaddy and $25 from NameCheap. The first grid to take advantage of this — ZetaWorlds — has already grabbed the domain Zeta.world, grid owner Timothy Rogers announced today. ICANNRead More →

OSgrid has been able to restore 25 percent of assets from the recovery disk, OSgrid grid administrator Allen Kerensky announced yesterday. He said that Melanie Thielker, an OpenSim core developer and owner of the Avination grid, has been helping with the recovery effort. “With Melanie’s cluster replication design, the assets are importingRead More →

The preview release of OpenSim 0.8.1 is out, with improvements to teleports, physics, varregions, scripting, and more. For large commercial grids, this is an opportunity to check out the new release on their beta grids, so that they are ready for the final release when it comes out — andRead More →

Zandramas — an invitation-only closed grid — will become ZanGrid tomorrow, where anyone is welcome to join. In addition, hypergrid visitors will be able to come in and get a preview of the grid on the hypergrid-enabled Club Zandramas region. According to manager and co-founder Suzan De Koning, the grid decidedRead More →

We seem to be hitting the inflection point on the old hockey-stick curve when it comes to the adoption of virtual reality technology. Consider these headlines, from just the past few days. First, the media-related news, since I’m in the media, and pay more attention to this than pretty muchRead More →

The Silicon Valley VR group has just announced dates and venue for their second annual conference and expo, May 18 and 19 at the San Jose Convention Center. According to Road to VR, organizers Karl Krantz and Nana Usui are expecting 1,200 attendees and 100 of virtual reality’s top innovators on the expoRead More →

Update: More supporters pledged funds to the effort, bringing the total to $2,000. Members of the OpenSim Virtual Google Plus community have pledged $1,550 to improve vehicle scripting by fixing bugs with the way llLookAt and llMoveTo commands are implemented in OpenSim. “Today I’m making a personal pledge of $200Read More →

Microsoft has unveiled a prototype of HoloLens, its most intriguing product in years, as part of a pre-launch of Windows 10. HoloLens gives a new dimension to the ‘holographic method’ invented by Hungarian-British physicist Dennis Gabor, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1971. It is a head-mounted holographic displayRead More →

Platform offers synchronized videos, hand gestures AltspaceVR has opened up applications for a closed beta of what it claims to be the world’s first immersive social virtual reality platform. The Redwood City, CA-based company’s social and content sharing platform connects friends and enthusiasts in shared virtual spaces and lets them interact online. ItRead More →

All OpenSim stats increased this month but the most dramatic increase was on Atek Grid, which more than quadrupled its land area this month with nearly 400 new regions. There are now a total of 56,011 standard region equivalents on the 217 public OpenSim grids that released their stats, 418,293 registeredRead More →

A week ago, I asked: Can AviWorlds find stability under new management? We got the answer today, and the answer is, “No.” “After many weeks of thoughtful consideration, as well as viewing the many comments on Google+, Facebook, and in private emails, we’ve decided to end the battle and closeRead More →

The number of exportable items sold on the Kitely Market has exceeded non-exportables for the first time since the company enabled delivery to other grids early last spring. When Kitely Market merchants add products to their online stores, they can sell those products in a number of variations — differentRead More →

GE has created a virtual experience that uses the Oculus Rift headset to provide an immersive 3D trip to an oil factory on the seabed one mile down off the coast of Brazil, as seen from the pilot’s seat of the virtual Nautilus 1 submersible. Watch the video below, and readRead More →

US $19.95 for a 15,000-prim region on the closed, commercial German-language GerGrid. No hypergrid.Read More →

Rethink Communications, a Vancouver-based advertising agency, recently approached my company, AC+A with an interesting project to raise awareness for the #NoTankers campaign. The campaign is run by Rethink’s clients, the non-profit Dogwood Initiative, to stop the increase of oil tanker traffic in Vancouver’s Burrard Inlet. Rethink wanted to create aRead More →

Virtuix Omni, the leading omni-directional treadmill for the Oculus Rift and similar virtual reality devices, unveiled its sleek final design this week at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. The Virtuix Omni raised over $1,000,000 in a Kickstarter campaign last July, and then raised another $2.7 million in fundingRead More →

The name-calling and blame-throwing seems to be settling down, and it looks like AviWorlds is starting to find some stability under new management. Mike Hart is now the owner of the AviWorlds grid, and of the associated domain name AviWorlds.com. “We don’t have any paid staff, but we do haveRead More →

If 2014 was the year of the hypergrid — and it was — then it should also have been the year of the OMC. After all, the OMC, or Open Metaverse Currency, is the only currency which works on the hypergrid and is backed by a trusted exchange, Austria’s Virwox. IfRead More →

A new data replication has successfully passed its first round of testing, OSgrid grid administrator Allen Kerensky announced on Monday. However, there was still no word as to when the grid will be coming back up. In addition, the grid still hasn’t received its recovered data drives from the companyRead More →

The “dark metaverse” of private OpenSim grids gained regions at four times the rate of public grids, according to Hypergrid Business projections based on a survey of hosting providers. Last year, private grids accounted for an estimated 60 percent of all grids, adding up to 50,070 regions in the “darkRead More →

Zetamex, a Las Vegas-based OpenSim hosting company, has opened its doors to new customers yesterday, and published their new price schedule for region rentals. The regions are available on ZetaWorlds, Atek, WestWorld, Metropolis or any other open grid. Prices start at $15 a month for a single region capable ofRead More →

Samsung has launched a new website, Milk VR, a dedicated portal for 360 degree virtual reality videos that people can view using the new Gear VR virtual reality headsets. For those without Gear VR headsets, they can still watch the videos on the website.Read More →

Someday soon, we will have a virtual reality metaverse. A fantastical place, limited only by our imaginations, where time and space mean nothing and experiences are shared as easily as bit and bytes are today. What technology will form the basis of this metaverse? Will it be created by Facebook?Read More →

I think, looking back, we’ll see 2014 as a pivotal year in the growth of the metaverse. This was the year that early adopters realized that virtual reality was on its way, the hypergrid came into its own, Google Plus became the social platform of choice for metaverse residents, theRead More →

This past year has been a growth year for OpenSim. Over the previous twelve months, 22,409 regions, 71,442 registered users, and 2,189 active users. But some grids did better than others. User growth Metropolis gained the most active users this year in absolute terms. The open grid, based in Germany,Read More →

First of all, if you despise Kim Kardashian and all that she stands for and have no appreciation for her business model, I’m telling you right up front you’re not going to appreciate this article. Also, if you don’t like it when people look at you, point their fingers andRead More →

Virtual reality is about to make a huge impact on everything from gaming to business. But virtual reality may be changing our homes as well. Here are five ways that virtual reality is impacting architecture and interior design. 1. Offering a new tool for visualizing design Virtual reality interfaces allow for testing newRead More →

A third grid also offers the ability to upload and download avatar inventories — the Atek Grid, backed by  3D Virtual Web, Inc. and CloudServe, an OpenSim hosting company. The other two grids are the UK-based magic-themed grid Spellscape and Metropolis, an open grid based in Germany. An inventory backup, also knownRead More →