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£5 (US $6.50) for a 15,000-prim region on the hypergrid-enabled BritGrid. Variable-sized regions and additional prims also available.Read More →

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Update 10/25: The new grid, now called AviTron, has changed its prices yet again today. For some reason, though this is a commercial grid, Pomposelli is calling the rents “donations” and it starts at $10 per month for a 15,000-prim region and goes up to $200 a month for upRead More →

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Update 10/15: Alex Pomposelli just sent out an email saying that Virtual Ville was back up and asking for financial support. “The grid is online now and if we will do this I am going to need your help and support,” he wrote. “The estate of my finances is critical afterRead More →

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A new virtual reality camera was successfully delivered to the International Space Station today. It’s not the first VR camera on the ISS, but this new one will allow the astronauts to film spacewalks in virtual reality. According to NASA, The International Space Station Experience is creating an immersive virtual reality seriesRead More →

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Metastellar, a new online magazine dedicated to speculative fiction, is now accepting submissions of flash fiction stories for paid publication. They’re looking for original, never-before-published fantasy, horror, or sci-fi stories and are absolutely open to publishing stories about virtual reality of virtual worlds. The stories need to be less thanRead More →

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OpenSim grew by more than 1,700 regions over the past month while active users increased by more than 1,400. There is usually a seasonal uptick in the fall as students and teachers return back to school. This year, that may have been accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, as well. OpenSimRead More →

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“Garden of Eden,” the first in a series of three live VR art explorations, concerts, and shows organized by HBO, kicks off today at 10 p.m. Eastern time on VRChat, a social VR platform. Those without a VR headset can watch the “Garden of Eden” livestream on YouTube and will beRead More →

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The Fire and Ice Opensim grid is running an abstract art competition to celebrate hitting several milestones this month. “The theme is abstract art, beyond this, the scope is very open,” grid owner Sara Payne told Hypergrid Business. “Entries can be your own art. Additionally, they can also be anRead More →

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Multi-grid payments provider Gloebit has been experiencing technical difficulties these past few months, resulting in processing details. But the core problem has been fixed, company founder and CEO Christopher Colosi told Hypergrid Business “I’m still waiting to hear from more people,” he said. “But in my own testing, I completedRead More →

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Virtuality Grid halted new user registrations in July and will wrap up all operations at the end of this month. Region archive files — OARs — and cash refunds are being distributed now. “Once that is done, all DNS will be shut down,” grid founder Candi Infiniti told Hypergrid Business.Read More →

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AOs — Animation Over-riders — are popular scripted items in Second Life and OpenSim that replace the built-in system animations for walking, running, sitting, and other basic motions, but they usually bog down servers. I have written a drop-in replacement script that uses a feature of OpenSim to make theseRead More →

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Kay McLennan, OpenSim educator and professor at the Tulane School of Professional Advancement is holding a survey to determine how educators are changing their use of virtual worlds and virtual reality during this coming academic year in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. “As evidenced by educator participation in annual OpenRead More →

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OpenSim stats are down this month by a little over 1,000 active users — but Tag Grid, OpenSim’s largest closed grid, did not report stats this month, and had over 1,500 active users this month. Active users are expected to increase again next month, as students return to school. CraftRead More →

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Craft World has seen a 25 percent increase in the number of school regions and more teachers attended lessons in immersive education at the grid as a consequence of the coronavirus lockdown, grid owner Raffaele Maci told Hypergrid Business. “At the moment, we have about 140 teachers, 350 students —Read More →

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Virtual reality use cases have greatly matured over the past few years. VR has gone from an experimental technology to something that’s transforming the way enterprises work. A large portion of the industry has moved past proof of concept into real world applications. A Grid Raster survey this spring foundRead More →

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Discover.film will be holding its short film festival in virtual reality this Friday on the VRChat virtual reality meeting platform. The event will start at 8 p.m. British time — or noon Pacific, following by a second screening at 1 a.m. British time, or 5 p.m. Pacific. The screenings willRead More →

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VRCollab, a remote meeting and collaboration app that lets users in the construction industry coordinate and collaborate on projects in real-time from different construction sites and offices, has witnessed a twice-and-a-half increase in monthly signups during the coronavirus pandemic related lockdowns. Because many people have been unable to go toRead More →

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The Firestorm viewer developer team has created a quick, three-question survey to help them determine their user base on OpenSimulator and what problems they have with viewer compatibility. According to the developers, if they know what operating systems and grids their users use most, they can try to make theRead More →

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The number of active users on OpenSim dropped by around 3,500 users this month, mostly due to stats problems on the adult Brazilian 3D Love grid, which reported more than 3,000 active users last month but none this month. Another big drop was a loss of over 1,000 actives onRead More →

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It is four times faster to train employees soft skills when using virtual reality than when using traditional in-person classroom or online training, according to a new study by PricewaterhouseCoopers. And it’s cheaper, too — organizations spend about $195 per trainee when using virtual reality, compared to the $207 to $265Read More →

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The coronavirus pandemic is accelerating the use of virtual reality and augmented reality, experts say, especially in retail, education and health. “The trajectory is clear that this technology is set to become the next ubiquitous computing platform, much like we saw with mobile devices and personal computers,” Taylor Freeman, founderRead More →

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The number of active users on OpenSim increased by more than 3,000 this past month, and land area grew by over 2,000 regions as people continue to wait out the pandemic. Meanwhile, if OpenSim users are wary of attending real-world Fourth of July events, OpenSim grids, including Tag Grid and Littlefield,Read More →

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A new pop-up marketing will open on June 19 and run through July 5 at the Seattle Space Needle. The virtual Seattle Space Needle, the one on the Seattle region of the Discovery grid. “The previous pop-up markets were  highly successful with over 200 visitors from throughout the metaverse,” saidRead More →

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A sonic art exhibit title “Synapse” will have its grand opening at the Nuna Art Gallery on 3rd Rock Grid  This Sunday, June 14, at 11 a.m. Pacific Time. This exhibition is an interactive sound installation where viewers are part of the work. Created as a collaboration between Lorin Tone,Read More →

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For the past few years, virtual reality meetings, events, and classrooms haven’t taken off the way that proponents expected, due to inconvenience, usability issues, bandwidth requirements, the need for high-end computers, and expensive headsets, new software, and more. Nothing works right — it’s easier to have a phone call orRead More →

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Today, Craft World will hold a grand opening of a group exhibition of eight artists. The exhibition will last for three weeks, and the artists are Eva Kraai, Paola, Bianchi Mills, William Nessuno, Tosha Tyran, Adriana Midni and WizardOz Chrome, and Art Blue — also known as Reiner Schneeberger in-world.Read More →

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The multi-grid Gloebit payment system has recovered from a major outage it suffered earlier this month, company CEO Christopher Colosi told Hypergrid Business. The platform is based on Amazon’s Web Services cloud hosting platform. “It seems like our AWS servers got into a really bad state and wouldn’t recover onRead More →

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The Oculus Quest headset has been sold out almost everywhere since the start of the epidemic, but it’s available now from the company itself., for $400 for the 64GB version and $500 for the 128GB version. Once it runs out, however, there are still second-hand versions available on Amazon startingRead More →

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3rd Rock Grid‘s third annual No Borders Festival of music and arts at the end of March raised 1,996 Euros — about US $2,160 — which the grid donated to Doctors Without Borders, an international non-profit that helps with emergencies around the world. “The hard work of board member Rhia Bachman,Read More →

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All stats — area, registered users, active users — went up this month on the public OpenSim grids. In addition, we have hit the highest number of active grids in the history of this report, 365, as well as the highest number of grids reporting stats, at 293. Many ofRead More →

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Due to unprecedented demand resulting from the COVID-19 epidemic, Linden Lab is having trouble getting enough server capacity to create new Second Life regions. “Our current server systems cannot accommodate unlimited growth without adversely impacting that stability and performance,” the company said in an announcement Thursday. “This means that regionRead More →

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Sinespace, a Unity-based virtual world platform from former OpenSim core developer Adam Frisby, has a new ready-to-go virtual world for meetings and education, called Breakroom. The world requires that users install desktop — mobile versions are in the works. The platform starts at $500 a month for up to 50Read More →

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OpenSim users have purchased more than a quarter million dollars worth of virtual goods on the Kitely Market since its inception in 2013, Kitely announced yesterday. In that time, it has grown from fewer than 1,000 listed items to nearly 34,000. When it launched, it only delivered to one grid,Read More →

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With the pandemic, educators around the world are finding out first-hand that most virtual meetings don’t provide the same kind of educational benefits as in-person classes. Students don’t have the sense of being together that allows them to learn collaboratively. So when a group of teaching colleges in Israel wasRead More →

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Yesterday afternoon, I got a preview of the new HCT Vive Sync virtual meeting platform from HTC Vive, and it’s the best one I’ve seen yet — and I have seen a lot of these platforms. But I’m still not sure that it’s worth spending several hundred dollars, or more,Read More →

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OpenSim land area continued its four-month growth streak this month, and the number of active users in OpenSim is up this month by over 2,400 users, mostly due to the fact that the Tag Grid released numbers this month, but not last month. But some of the increase could alsoRead More →

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Two weeks after its latest — and supposedly final — shutdown, the much-troubled AviWorlds grid is back up and running again, this time under new management. “I’ve liked AviWorlds ever since I first started working for it,” new owner Josh Boam told Hypergrid Business. “I’m excited to be able toRead More →

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In another blow to the viability of VR-based virtual worlds, Linden Lab has sold off its next-gen Sansar virtual world to an unknown startup called Wookey Project Corp. Wookey has no information on its website except for the names of three employees. In a press release late last month, Linden LabRead More →

WorkLink usecase

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Enterprises are optimistic about the potential of virtual and augmented reality, according to a recent report by Perkins Coie in collaboration with XR Association trade group and venture capital firm Boost VC. Two-thirds of companies expect to increase spending on immersive technologies this year compared to 2019, the report said, withRead More →

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The on-and-off AviWorlds grid is off again. By my count, this is the 13th time that the grid has officially closed. And, as usual, grid owner Alex Pomposelli says that this time it’s for good. “This is it,” he told Hypergrid Business. “I’m no longer going to open AviWorlds. The domainsRead More →

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$16 per month for a single island up to 16 standard regions in size, first month free from OpenSim Projects, an independent hosting company.Read More →