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JokaydiaGrid, the biggest education-focused OpenSim grid, has switched hosting providers, from ReactionGrid to SimHost. Residents will see higher prim limits, better stability, increased concurrency, and Vivox voice, grid owner Jo Kay told Hypergrid Business. ReactionGrid was one of the first enterprise-focused OpenSim hosting providers, and the go-to destination for educators.Read More →

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Kitely announced a flat-rate hosting option today, at $40 per region per month. Kitely is an on-demand, cloud-based OpenSim grid that is best known for charging users for the time they spent in-world. Customers will still be able to use the previous, metered, billing option for their regions. But thoseRead More →

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Press release: Data Visualization Competition launched by Daden Birmingham UK – A competition for the best immersive 3D visualization  using their ground-breaking application Datascape, has been launched by Daden Limited (Daden). Datascape provides an immersive environment in which users can explore and interact with data from almost any source. The competition asks entrants toRead More →

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Kitely, an on-demand OpenSim grid, cut off support for the official Second Life viewer today, as did the Brazilian social grid Meet3D. “We had to take this step because Linden Lab, the creators of the Second Life Viewer, have released a new version that no longer works with OpenSim,” Oren Hurvitz,Read More →

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Last month, Linden Lab decided to cut OpenSim off  from its viewer, and, last spring, to force third-party developers to choose between OpenSim and getting the new proprietary Havok pathfinding code. Viewer developers had three choices — turn down the new proprietary code, stop supporting OpenSim, or fork their viewers.Read More →

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The new version of the Hypergrid protocol is coming soon, hypergrid inventor Crista Lopes announced today. Lopes is also a professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine. It will include controls that grid owners can use to restrict hypergrid travel in and out of their grids, and also to control movementRead More →

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Press release: Daden releases Datascape, a ground-breaking application for 3D data visualisation Free community edition also available Birmingham, UK — Analysts now have the ability to explore and make sense of their data in 3D with the launch of Datascape, a 3D data visualisation application, from immersive environments specialists DadenRead More →

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Press release: Asia Training Consortium Launches Collaborative Cloud Solution Microsoft and ProtonMedia to Help Speed Industry Drug Development and Time to Market LANSDALE, PA. – The Asia Training Consortium (ATC), a Merck-sponsored group of pharmaceutical companies and clinical research organizations that was formed in Shanghai in 2011, has added ProtonMedia andRead More →

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The top 40 largest OpenSim grids gained a record-breaking 2,177 regions since mid-August, the single biggest monthly gain in history. The new regions pushed the grids to 23,952 total regions, also a new high. OSGrid was responsible for almost a quarter of the growth, with 498 new regions, for aRead More →

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Achievements, like badges and leaderboards, are one of the cornerstones of gamification, ways to increase user engagement and loyalty. The are also known as goals or quests. The achievement can be a reward in and of itself, can be used to give recognition to players, or can be combined withRead More →

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Press Release: PPD Named to InformationWeek 500 List of Top Business Technology Innovators Unique virtual learning platform helps earn third consecutive annual ranking WILMINGTON, N.C.  – Pharmaceutical Product Development, LLC (PPD) today announced it has been named to the 2012 InformationWeek 500, an annual recognition of the most innovative usersRead More →

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The Belgium-based Logicamp grid is offering OpenSim region hosting in the Amazon cloud at just 21 cents per hour — or 1 Euro (US $1.29) for six hours. Cloud-based event hosting is a good fit for companies and organizations that need a large number of regions for a short amountRead More →

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As more and more people explore OpenSim, the content licensing issue comes up over and over again. It may be quite a puzzle for folks used to Second Life, where licensing is taken care of by the permissions system. In OpenSim, licensing and permissions are two different things. Permissions —Read More →

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A few friends, colleagues, and fellow creators have a need to band together. Our intention is to gather creators and artists from all “virtual reality” platforms in order to collect, and organize factual information about rights and responsibilities of content creators. By working together, we believe that many of us will be ableRead More →

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A new version of OpenSim was recently released, OpenSim 0.7.4. There’s an upgrade function built into the Diva Distro version of OpenSim and its derivatives, including Sim-on-a-Stick and New World Studio. The updated version of the Diva Distro came out this past Wednesday, and the new Sim-on-a-Stick was released yesterday.Read More →

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“Gamification” is the process of adding game-like elements to something without actually turning the whole thing into a game. Social grids can be gamified, for example, but even grids dedicated to education, non-profits, or business meetings can add gamification elements. The goal of gamification is to increase engagement. For commercialRead More →

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Over my twenty-year-plus career as a journalist, I’ve helped dozens of other writers get started — as an editor, and, prior to that, as an active member of the National Writers Union and the Society of Professional Journalists and other professional organizations. For example, at the SPJ, I headed upRead More →

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The great thing about OpenSim? As much low-cost — or even free — land as you want. The bad thing? You have to have terrains for all that land. Sure, you can go in-world and use the terrain editing tools, but those take forever. And, if you’re anything like me,Read More →

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Japan’s3Di, Inc., best known for their browser-based OpenSim viewers, has set the starting price for their Unity-based, in-a-Web-browser virtual world at around $10 a month. According to an announcement released yesterday, the “personal” 3Di Cloud starts at 9,800 yen a year, or about US $125, and can handle up to 500 simultaneousRead More →

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Want people to come to your grid or region more frequently? Consider this advice from psychologist Susan Weinschenk – Want To Change a Habit? Use Fun, Surprise, and a Crowd. Let’s say that you are the owner of a grid, and you want your users to make visiting your grid a regularRead More →

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Last week, I’ve been following a media storm of coverage surrounding ON24, a virtual events company. A couple of years ago, I covered the company, as well as its competitors InXpo and Unisfair (now InterCall), because — like many — I was confused by the term “virtual events.” So I stillRead More →

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My long-time readers probably know that I pretty much only use virtual worlds for work. I don’t play role playing games. I don’t go to social events. Meanwhile, I keep saying that if you want to see where enterprise technology will be in five years, just take a look atRead More →

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Press release: Spend on Serious Games Growing Steadily; Now a Multi-Billion Dollar Industry Research Debuted at Serious Play Conference Shows Growing Acceptance LOS ANGELES – Aug. 23, 2012 – The serious games market is already a multi-billion dollar industry, growing at a slow, but steady pace as games and simulations designedRead More →

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Note: Vivox now has an online form that OpenSim grid owners and hosting providers can use to request access credentials. Vivox is expanding its support for the OpenSim-based metaverse, with a larger team of employees supporting a growing number of grids. Previously, the only way for OpenSim grid owners to get Vivox voiceRead More →

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Press release: 3Di, Inc. announces “Virtual World Kit for 3Di Cloud”, enabling blog-based creation of avatar social spaces using copy-paste TOKYO — 3Di, Inc., which develops and offers 3D Internet solutions, has begun distribution of its “Virtual World Kit for 3Di Cloud,” which allows immediate creation of an avatar socialRead More →

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Kitely, the only OpenSim hosting company to offer on-demand, low-cost regions, announced megaregion support today. This means that customers can have islands that are one, four, nine or sixteen regions in size. The option is available to all users, including those on an a-la-carte payment plan, and it only takesRead More →

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Today, we counted exactly 200 public grids running on some version of the OpenSim software that were active this month, totaling 23,190 regions, 269,783 registered users, and 18,217 active monthly users.  This does not include regions and users on about a quarter of these grids that didn’t publish any statistics, nor on the unknownRead More →

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Press release: Set-up fees waived for displaced ReactionGrid customers HOUSTON — FireSabre, LLC, which operates Starlight virtual worlds for education, will waive set-up fees for the next 30 days for anyone displaced from ReactionGrid’s OpenSim environment. ReactionGrid recently announced a move away from providing OpenSim hosting services to focus on its proprietaryRead More →

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Virtual Highway — one of the top 20 OpenSim grids by land area and popularity — announced a major new upgrade today that includes new search functionality, an events calendar, Lightshare support, and a redesigned website. “Now creators can post picks and classifieds that can be found in search,” theRead More →

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Congratulations, you have a new grid or hosting company. And you have 200 competitors — and the numbers are only going to keep rising. You need to find a way to get your name out there to your potential customers. There are plenty of channels you should be exploring —Read More →

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Is Second Life a game or a platform? In its early years, the question was answered — loudly and repeatedly — Second Life is not a game, it’s a platform. Lately, however, the company seems to be moving in a decidedly game-ish direction. Here are some reasons why it’s aRead More →

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So you like to build stuff in 3D, maybe do a little scripting, a little animating, and you’d like to get paid for it? And I’m not talking about selling stuff on the Second Life Marketplace. That’s a highly competitive field, with extremely low margins, high stress levels and highRead More →

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Everyone knows I’m a big fan of OpenSim. I want it to grow big, with lots of different things to do, lots of different places to go, lots of people to meet. This requires that it get easier for people to set up their own grids and regions. For theRead More →

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This week, ReactionGrid has all but abandoned OpenSim in favor of its proprietary, Unity-based Jibe virtual world platform. And Linden Lab has also distanced itself from OpenSim, removing support for the “-loginURI” feature which allowed people to access OpenSim grids with the official Second Life viewer. Both of these decisionsRead More →

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This past spring, Linden Lab warned third party viewer developers to drop support for OpenSim if they wanted to get access to new features. Back then, a back door was left open, in that users could modify the command path used to launch the viewer so that it accessed OpenSimRead More →

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Florida-based ReactionGrid, a pioneer in OpenSim hosting for corporations and educators, is scaling back on its OpenSim business in favor of its Unity-based Jibe platform, and considering closing down its namesake grid. “We will focus on very high level OpenSim work only,” ReactionGrid co-founder and CEO Kyle Gomboy told HypergridRead More →

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At first, it seemed to be another publicity disaster in the making. SpotON3D, a grid known for shooting itself in the foot when it comes to public relations, was spotted distributing content by Linda Kellie without crediting her for her work. SpotON3D is a closed, commercial grid that stands outRead More →

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As of today, there are 100 grids in our Hyperica directory, all accessible – at least some of the time — by hypergrid teleport. That’s over 15,000 regions. My researchers and I have visited just a couple of hundred. We try to hit the welcome region of each grid, andRead More →

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Sometime soon, Kitely — the low cost, on-demand, cloud-based grid – will turn on hypergrid connectivity. This may seriously affect the hosting market, as some users will turn to Kitely for low-use residential or educational sims — even while they continue to patronize shops, events, and other facilities elsewhere onRead More →

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I know what I would like to see in a WebGL browser-based viewer for OpenSim — everything that current viewers have but super-easy to use and fast to load and quick to write. Well, I know we’re not going to get that, especially if we’re doing it with a crowdfundedRead More →

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At thr Immersive Education conference in Boston last month, eight Open Wonderland community members from six different countries joined me remotely to show off their work. Here’s a brief summary of the worlds and features presented during the showcase. In all cases, the presenters have agreed to leave their spacesRead More →

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The Phoenix Firestorm team has released its latest update for OpenSim, part of its plans to have two separate builds, one for OpenSim and another for Second Life, according to a press release on the team’s blog. The build for Second Life was postponed because pathfinding isn’t ready and HavokRead More →

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Press release: FedCTE Program Using Avaya Virtual Environment for Cybersecurity Training • Federal Cybersecurity Training Events (FedCTE) uses secure, online access to AvayaLiveâ„¢ Engage. • Collaborative, 3D classroom reduce costs while enhancing cybersecurity learning. FAIRFAX, Va. – Today Avaya Government Solutions announced that the Federal Cybersecurity Training Events Program (FedCTE)Read More →

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PODEX, the Wilmington, Delware-based virtual currency exchange, announced today that it now has a presence in Avination and is offering their services for business and residents of that grid. PODEX, an established Linden dollars brokers began offering their services in Avination on July 12., the company said. Avination is the third-busiestRead More →

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I love Cloud Party. I love the responsive, 3D graphics. The cute tutorial. The in-world building tools. The free house.  I even love the Facebook integration. Most of all, though, I love the fact that it’s WebGL. It runs natively in modern browsers like Chrome and Firefox and Safari —Read More →

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Kitely, the OpenSim grid that charges people for the time they use rather than how much land they have, announced a dramatic price cut today, reducing the cost of its unlimited use plan from $100 to just $35 a month. The company also added a new feature where region ownersRead More →

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Note: See comments below for some warnings. It’s been in the works for a couple of years now, and finally launched quietly last month — now the Free Open Grid project from Free Open University hopes to get 200,000 schools into OpenSim. As part of its initial push, the groupRead More →

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I just checked out the beta test of the 3Di Cloud, a browser-based social world platform. And though the two share some surface similarities, 3Di Cloud is no Cloud Party. In fact, as of right now, 3Di Cloud barely looks like a product. Japan’s 3Di, Inc., best known for their browser-based OpenSimRead More →

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The hypergrid continued to grow this month, with the Hyperica directory now covering 100 grids and dozens more waiting to be indexed. But even as the number of grids continued to grow, the core top 40 grids that we’ve been tracking since 2009 grew as well. There are now 20,637 regionsRead More →