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A lot of folks are interested in getting a career in virtual reality these days, and I don’t blame them. The industry is exploding. So I’m getting emails from folks asking me for advice in how to get started. My standard advice is to go to college for a degreeRead More →

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There are grids whose welcome areas are always full of people hanging out, with mentors on hand to help newcomers and answer questions from residents and visitors, even grid owners stopping by to press the virtual flesh. Kitely has not been one of those grids. In the past, its welcomeRead More →

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Kitely’s user community is celebrating History Month this August to celebrate history-inspired builds and encourage people to build more. It will also feature a number of events each week including live music and dance. Visitors can pick up landmarks and a HUD — heads-up display — at the History Month Hub eachRead More →

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The number of non-exportable items on the Kitely Market dropped this week, while exportable products continue to rise, according to statistics released today by Kitely. The difference between the two was the second highest in history. The first, in November of 2014, came after Kitely significantly improved market functionality andRead More →

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Littlefield Grid, DigiWorldz and ZanGrid are holding big bashes to celebrate this year’s Fourth of July holiday, America’s Independence Day. Littlefield Grid party on Stonehaven Party Isle Littlefield Grid’s Fourth of July party started Thursday, with a beach barbeque, dancing, live music and DJ, food, swimming, rides, fireworks and free party favors.Read More →

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The Kitely Market is now delivering content to 138 different OpenSim grids and mini-grids and merchants are continuing to increase the amount of exportable content available on the platform. There are currently 7,486 product listings in Kitely Market containing 14,134 variations, of which 9,237 are sold with the Export permission.Read More →

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Since it first launched in early 2011, Kitely has been the only major grid not to publish its stats, instead providing them by email to Hypergrid Business on request. That changed today, as the grid began publishing its land area and total registered users on its login page. This isRead More →

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The Kitely Market reported a new high in the number of product listings, and the share of those listings that are exportable to other grids was also higher than ever. The Market currently offers 13,703 different variations on 7,201 products. Of those variations, 8,909 are exportable to other grids. ExportablesRead More →

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Merchants who sell virtual goods on the Kitely Market can now automatically share the revenues they receive with third parties, both for individual listings and for individual variations of those listings, the company announced this week. “Merchants have been asking us to add support for automatically splitting marketplace store revenue betweenRead More →

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Press Release: Seanchai Library Announces new EXPLORE in Kitely EXPLORE, Kitely – Seanchai Library pleased to announce the next phase of its EXPLORE program in the OpenSim metaverse, and its real world-virtual world partnership with Tacoma Little Theatre. After the great success of last year’sEXPLORE The Great Gatsby, the partnersRead More →

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Today, many virtual reality applications and experiences are distributed as stand-alone downloads, which makes sense for many types of content and particularly for mobile-based virtual reality headsets with slow connections. But as broadband speeds improve, cloud delivery offers a number of benefits to virtual reality projects, including scalability, monetization, reducedRead More →

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I regularly get emails from new grid owners looking for publicity but very few grids can answer the first question I ask: “What makes your grid different?” Instead, I get generic answers, which could apply to any of the 300-plus active grids I’m currently following. Such as community, support, lowRead More →

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The Kitely Market is now offering more than 12,500 different items, 64 percent of which are exportable to other grids, with exports growth continuing to outpace Kitely-only content. “We’re very happy with Kitely Market’s current growth,” Kitely CEO Ilan Tochner told Hypergrid Business. “Last month we reached a record highRead More →

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Kitely released a new starting template for customers renting land, the Kitely Evergreen Island, optimized for virtual reality viewers. “Virtual reality requires a high frame rate to maintain the feeling of presence without causing the user to start feeling VR sickness,” Kitely CEO Ilan Tochner told Hypergrid Business. VR sickness, similarRead More →

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While most OpenSim hosting companies are cautiously optimistic about the new Gloebit currency, currently in beta testing on Hyperica and ZetaWorld grids, grid owners themselves are split on how they want to see payments evolve. Dreamland, Zetamex testing platform Dreamland Metaverse was one of the early testers of the GloebitRead More →

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By all indications, the hypergrid is hopping. As of mid-January, 68 percent of all active users, 75 percent of all public OpenSim grids, and 93 percent of all regions were on the hypergrid, and the number of hypergrid events and communities is exploding. The Kitely Market now delivers to moreRead More →

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Last Sunday we reported that Kitely Market‘s top-selling merchant, Ozwell Wayfarer, has made all this content exportable to other grids and has seen no evidence of bootlegging. I have long been reminding content creators that closed grids don’t provide any additional security for content, except for scripted or rigged content, becauseRead More →

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A treasure hunt involving 16 different grids begins today and ends March 1, with prizes ranging from virtual content, to small cash awards, T-shirts and MP3 players, to a $130 Fibrum virtual reality headset. Sponsors include TanGLe Grid, TanGLe Builders , Fix Meister, Selby Evans, Sunbeam Magic, Tmac Entertainment and Hypergrid Business. Participating grids include 2Open, Craft World, Dreamscape Grid, GreatRead More →

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Merchants continued to expand the number of exportable items listed on the Kitely Market this month, showing an increasing tolerance for selling to the broader metaverse. Meanwhile, the number of items limited to just being used on the Kitely grid shrank for the second month in a row. There areRead More →

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The Adult Metaverse community was the fastest-growing this year, reaching 1,255 members by the end of 2015, followed by OpenSim Virtual, which reached 1,649 members and retained its spot as the top OpenSim-focused community on Google Plus. Four grids made the top-fifteen list growth list: Kitely, OSgrid, DigiWorldz, and the GreatRead More →

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The Kitely Market saw the first downturn in its listing numbers this month, a result of some housekeeping on the part of management. “We were forced to remove the listings of several merchants who repeatedly failed to follow our product listing guidelines despite our detailed instructions on what needs toRead More →

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Kitely, OpenSim’s largest commercial grid by land area, announced today that it will switch all multi-region islands to varregion mode. Currently, customers renting these larger islands on the Kitely grid can choose to have them arranged as a simple group of regions, or in Kitely’s version of the megaregion format, which doesRead More →

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With Halloween slowly encroaching on us like a spooky ghoul, there are parties, hunts and games all over the metaverse for this special and scary season. Here’s a list of more than a dozen events, all just a short hypergrid hop away. 1. OSgrid Halloween Dance The most popular grid on theRead More →

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Storytelling is a valuable form of human expression that has been around since the very ancient times. Story itself is essential to so many art forms, and theater is one of them. We have written before about how virtual reality could be applied to journalism and immersive storytelling. Theatrical “storytellers” are yetRead More →

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Kitely, the largest commercial OpenSim grid, has rolled out a new region monitoring tool for its users, and published a new guide for detecting and fixing world performance problems. The grid has also added a Web-based option to manually stop a running world, the grid announced earlier this week. “As aRead More →

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The Kitely Market hit another milestone this month, with a new total of 10,162 different item listings grouped into 5,030 different products. This is up from 9,971 different listings a month ago. Of the listings, 6,080 are exportable, or 60 percent. Kitely groups items together, so that, say, a red versionRead More →

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There are many reasons why a region might be slow to load, but one of the hardest to address has been that of slow scripts. OpenSim doesn’t make it easy to discover which particular scripts are contributing the most to lag — but that is about to change. Kitely hasRead More →

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Most people who’ve traveled the hypergrid have had the experience of not being able to bring stuff back home, or of mysteriously not being able to take content to other grids. Recently, a number of different OpenSim developers have taken on the fight, and have been reporting progress. Crista LopesRead More →

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The Kitely Market has successfully delivered purchases to customers on 96 different grids, including both hypergrid-enabled grids and closed grids. “Our marketplace’s reach is continuing to grow,” Kitely CEO Ilan Tocher told Hypergrid Business. “By now it has become quite clear that merchants who take the time to create highRead More →

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Correction: Due to an error in collecting data from OSgrid, land area was undercounted this month. In fact, OpenSim’s land area actually increased by the equivalent of 828 regions. OSgrid did lose some land area, but only 395 regions — not 2,500 as reported. “Many people — including myself – have consolidatedRead More →

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The Kitely Market gained almost 700 new listings this month, its biggest growth month since the market first launched two years ago. More than two-thirds of these listings were for exportable items, available for purchase on almost any hypergrid-enabled grid and some closed grids. The market now has 9,392 differentRead More →

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Kitely has cut prices by 60 percent for its two top plans by more than half today and officially eliminated metered pricing for new customers. Previously, the most expensive plan was around $100 a month, for an island that could be configured as a megaregion as large as 16 standard regions,Read More →

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Customers have been able to shop on the Kitely Market and get the products delivered to other grids for over a year, But adding a new grid to the delivery list meant that the customer had to know the grid’s loginURI and add it through the grid manager. With hundredsRead More →

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OpenSim’s land area and active users hit new record highs this month. Land area passed 4,000 square kilometers for the first time, and 60,000 regions, while active users crossed the 32,000 mark. At 4,015 square kilometers, OpenSim’s public grids added together are now bigger than the state of Rhode Island.Read More →

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Kitely‘s pricing options have long been a confusing mess for customers, with people having trouble understanding their metered billing in particular. To address this issue, Kitely first rolled out flat-rate regions back in 2012, but the various pricing options just confused customers more. It didn’t help that Kitely was theRead More →

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Kitely users on a flat-rate plan can now change the size of their megaregions for free via the Web interface. Those on premium plans have a fee of 150 KC, or about $0.75, to resize their megaregions. Kitely offers several flat-rate megaregion plans. For around $50 a month, customers getRead More →

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The Kitely Market has passed the 8,000 item milestone, with a new total of 8,300 different items, grouped into 4,116 product listings. Unlike the Second Life Marketplace, where, say, different colors of a dress would each be listed separately, Kitely Market counts these as variations of a common product listing.Read More →

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The exportable content on the Kitely Market grew ten times faster than non-exportables over the past month, continuing a trend that began late last summer. The market added 245 new exportable items, compared to 23 non-exportable ones, for a new total of 7,950 different variations of 3,898 products. A singleRead More →

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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 →

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Growth in the Kitely Market‘s exportable products continued to exceed that of non-exportables this month, as Kitely rolled out several new features for merchants in recent weeks. The Kitely Market currently contains 7,213 different items or “variations,” grouped into 3,449 product listings. On the Kitely Market, like on Amazon andRead More →

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The on-demand, cloud-based Kitely grid has had hypergrid connectivity on its to-do list ever since it first launched in the spring of 2011. Actually enabling hypergrid, however, took quite a bit longer than expected — but the wait is finally over. Last night, the first group of users tested Kitely’sRead More →

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Plenty of events happening around the OpenSim metaverse this month. The big social grids have packed events calendars. Check out the InWorldz Events Calendar and the InWorldz Event Announcements Forum Page. 3rd Rock Grid and Virtual Highway also have the month of May packed full of music and other community events,Read More →

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This month has the usual music events and parties across the grids, the Robstock Festival, and Easter-themed activities. Robstock Festival crosses grids Robstock 2014 is on three different grids this year — 3rd Rock Grid, Second Life, and, now, Metropolis. It’s three days of music, art, and other activities. KitelyRead More →

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The top 40 OpenSim grids gained 1,458 regions this month, for a new total of 24,040 regions on these grids, the second highest total since we began tracking these numbers in the summer of 2009. These grids also reported a total of 18,061 active users.  A total of 224 gridsRead More →

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Looking for an immersive platform for your company, non-profit, educational institution, or government agency? Start with the following list of vendors, all of which have a successful history of serving enterprise customers. Browser-based platforms Running a virtual world in a browser does impose some limitations on the environment. But, onRead More →

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Update Aug. 2016: DigiWorldz is now registered. Do you own a grid? Do you allow other users to upload content to your grid? Do you have legal license agreements on file for every script, texture and object on your grid? If your answers are yes, yes, and no, then get outRead More →