Relay for Ukraine presents grand opening of Kisma in Ukraine
Relay for Ukraine is having the grand opening of its Kisma in Ukraine art installation in Craft World next Wednesday, November 9, at 1:00 P.M. Pacific time.Read More →
New funding round takes play-to-earn games grid AvatarLife to $7.5mil valuation
Sushant Chandrasekar, a renowned gaming developer at Second Life, and Gaurav Gupta, a former high-profile consultant at Bain & Company, have completed a seed funding round of $1.5 million with InfoEdge Ventures to develop AvatarLife grid with skill-based play-to-earn games, community content building, marketplace, freebies, and in-world currency. ThatRead More →
Neuralink pushes back public demonstration of its brain-computer interface
Neuralink still hasn’t received FDA approval to test its brain-computer interface on humans, even though Musk had predicted the company could begin human trials as early as 2020.Read More →
Virtual merchants in OpenSim
There are a variety of businesses that exist only — or at least mainly — inside OpenSim worlds. Those businesses are often run by creative artists who use their talents to make digital art which they market as products to customers in OpenSim.Read More →
OpenSim prices drop to lowest average ever, under $13 per month
As OpenSim technology continues to improve, prices are dropping. The average 15,000-prim region in OpenSim is now $12.89 a month. The median price is now $10 a month, unchanged from what we had in 2021, but the average has fallen more than $2, from $15.18 last year. And that numberRead More →
OpenSim land area hits new record as all stats up this month
The public OpenSim grids now have the equivalent of 120,044 standard-sized regions, a new record high, and more than four times the land area of Second Life, according to the latest Grid Survey numbers. OpenSim land is very attractive because land prices are dramatically lower than in Second Life. InRead More →
Zuckerberg announces Meta Quest Pro and more
In a live – actually, it was prerecorded – keynote address, Zuckerberg announced the Meta Quest Pro, a new, business-focused advanced virtual reality headset the company’s been teasing for the past year.Read More →
Apple and Meta set to release high-end VR headsets
Apple and Meta will soon be going head-to-head in the high-end virtual reality headset arena — and at enterprise price points. According to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, the new Apple augmented and virtual reality headset could be called Apple Reality Pro and will be released sometime in January 2023. Apple’s headset may shipRead More →
User authentication for ToS and GDPR compliance not a walk in the park for OpenSim grids
There currently is no easy way for OpenSim users to agree to a grid’s privacy policies and terms of service or give data use consent as required by the General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR.Read More →
Lenovo releases ThinkReality VRX headset for enterprise metaverse training
Lenovo just released ThinkReality VRX, a new mixed reality headset meant for improving virtual 3D immersive enterprise remote training, collaboration, visualization, and meetings.Read More →
Tenth Annual OpenSimulator Community Conference set for December
The tenth annual OpenSimulator Community Conference is scheduled for December 10 and 11, and the call for proposals is now open. “We’re interested in your wonderful content, insights, and accomplishments. We hope that you can join us for our tenth year celebrating the current and future use of open sourceRead More →
Kitely celebrates 14th birthday
Kitely celebrated its 14th birthday, its founders, and its community with a huge party this past weekend.Read More →
How humans and AI can learn to work together for the planet
The advent of digital solutions that employ artificial intelligence, internet-of-things, and machine learning technology has dramatically changed how humans and even entire cities operate.Read More →
OpenSim land area and active users up as grid actives decrease
OpenSim metaverse added 2,349 active users while its land area grew by 806 regions this month despite the number of grids with stats lessening by 11 this month. It also added nearly 3,000 new registered users. Some of the most notable grid outages that affected the stats this month includeRead More →
Companies are getting it wrong when investing in metaverse tech
Many companies are following the hype and rushing to invest in the metaverse. According to a July survey by PricewaterhouseCoopers, 66 percent of 1,000 business executives reported their company is actively engaged in the metaverse — but what these companies are developing and what their customers want to do with theRead More →
Craft World hosts Ukraine war art project
A new art installation has its grand opening today, Monday, Sep. 12, at 1 p.m. Pacific time on the Craft World grid, the second contribution to the Ukraine Borderland Art Project. The installation, Ukraine Victory 2025, is by artist Rage Darkstone. The hypergrid address is craft-world.org:8002:Ukraine The installation is a “lyricalRead More →
HP Reverb G2 VR headset is now $200 off
If you want to try high-end consumer virtual reality headset, one that’s not part of Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta ecosystem, the best options are the headsets that you tether to a PC. One that I haven’t tried yet is the HP Reverb G2 VR headset. And it’s discounted today, from $599Read More →
Shanghai plans to spend big on the metaverse
Shanghai, China’s largest city, is about to invest billions of dollars in the metaverse. Though its exact definition is unclear, the metaverse is basically supposed to be a 3D version of the internet where people can live their digital lives and interact with each other through avatars. The metaverseRead More →
OpenSim reverses last month’s hefty decline in land area and user numbers
OpenSim added a total land area of 2,436 regions this month, reversing some of last month’s dramatic drop. The active users tally dropped by 579 users and registered users fell by 6,155 but both are much smaller than last month’s drops and are fully accounted for by outages and statRead More →
Three reasons people love VR — from psychology
According to psychologists, three reasons people love VR are that it reduces stress, helps us face our fears, and lets us have fun by warping our normal sense of time. As the VR industry takes off, VR headsets have become more affordable and accessible, leading to even greater adoption amongRead More →
Ukraine 2025 art installation opens August 5
Ukraine 2025 is having its grand opening on Friday, August 5 at 1:30 p.m. Pacific time in Craft World on sim Ukraine. The hypergrid address is craft-world.org:8002:Ukraine The event features an art installation and concert by Terra Merhyem. Ukraine 2025 is the first contribution to the Ukraine Borderland Art project, runRead More →
OSgrid birthday celebration starts July 25
OSgrid, the largest grid in land area and active user numbers, will celebrate its 15th birthday starting on Monday, July 25. The celebration will run through July 31. “We’ll have live music and DJs to entertain us as we celebrate everything that is OSgrid,” grid president Wizard Atazoth. Former presidentRead More →
OSFest 2022 sees record attendance
OpenSim Fest 2022 still has three days to go, and it’s already breaking attendance records. “Since we opened the OSFest 2022 grid at the beginning of June, there have been a record 763 unique avatars on the grid from 158 hypergrid-enabled grids on the OSFest 2022 Grid,” OSFest 2022 director ShelennRead More →
OpenSim numbers fall as Metro closes
The public OpenSim grids lost more than 4,000 active users and nearly 2,000 regions since this time last month for a combination of reasons, the biggest being the closure of the Metropolis grid. Metropolis closed at the end of June so that the owners could focus on educational projects. TheRead More →
OpenSim grids getting better at handling griefers
Griefers can be a real nuisance in OpenSim. Also known as bad faith players, they can fill a world with various self-replicating items to deliberately irritate other users. There are a number of ways to do away with the objects left by griefers, including automatic detection, shutdown, and restarting ofRead More →
OSFest 2022 has successful first weekend
OSFest 2022 had a well-attended first weekend with 36 hours of performances in genres ranging from poetry and prose to techno music. “OSFest 2022 kickoff weekend was both a success and a lot of fun,” said OSFest director Shelenn Ayres in a blog post. “Attendance was excellent with no oneRead More →
Facebook’s latest AI attempts to understand the world still fall short
Facebook parent company Meta released a set of papers last fall in which the company erased big chunks from photographs or videos — then used artificial intelligence to fill in the gaps. This required the AI models to have some type of common sense understand of how the world works,Read More →
Snoot Dwagon’s OpenSim Fest 2022 exhibits
I’m Snoots Dwagon, head of greeters, exhibitor, and a performer at this year’s OpenSim Fest. It’s my first OpenSim festival, and I’ve got two parcels you might want to check out, Rascal Flats and Replicant City. In the case of both exhibits, the entire purpose is to provide some funRead More →
OpenSim Fest 2022 kicks off this Friday
This year’s OpenSim Fest 2022 kicks off at 9 a.m. Pacific time on Friday, July 8 with pomp and color and goes until Monday, July 25, 9 p.m. Pacific time. The hypergrid address is grid.opensimfest.com:8022. For further information check out the fest’s Discord community page or the official event website. The firstRead More →
Metaverse Museum’s sea-inspired art exhibit featured at Summer Sailstice 2022
The Metaverse Museum — founded in 2007 and one of the oldest and largest virtual museums in OpenSim and Second Life — has a new Sea-of-Blake-inspired art exhibition named Emerald in Water which opened on June 18 and runs through July 8 at the Summer Sailstice 2022 conference in SecondRead More →
Meta shows off four 4 New VR headsets
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg showed off four new headset prototypes a few days ago that, he said, make virtual reality feel almost real. The goal is to invent displays “that are as vivid and realistic as the physical world and much more advanced than traditional computer screens we use today,”Read More →
Discovery Grid celebrates sixth birthday with a bang
Discovery Grid is celebrating its sixth birthday with an air show and a pyro-musical fireworks display. The event, Thunder over Discovery 2022, takes place this Saturday, July 2, at 2 p.m. Pacific time, with an encore event at 6 p.m. Pacific. The hypergrid address is discoverygrid.net:8002:Lousville. You’ll want to arrive earlyRead More →
Diva Distro seals vulnerability, grids need to update
OpenSim customers that use Diva Distro version of OpenSim or its Diva Wifi website interface screen, as in the image above, should install the latest security patch to the software to seal a vulnerability that could render their grids susceptible to crashing. The Diva Distro software is almost as oldRead More →
New play premieres on Metropolis grid
The Metropolis grid will shut down on midnight on June 30. But before one of the oldest OpenSim grids closes for good, it will be the site of the premiere performance of a play by Reiner Schneeberger. The play is titled “The Art Giantess Is The Work: Thea von Harbou,”Read More →
OpenSim users, land area hit record highs
OpenSim reported land area growth for the third month in a row with the addition of more than 1,400 new regions, for a new record high of 114,567 standard region equivalents. Active monthly users went up by 525, for a new record high of 44,061. Logicamp and Creatrix World —Read More →
Metropolis grid closes down so owners can focus on education project
Metropolis, one of the three oldest OpenSim major grids is shutting down on June 30 so that the owners can focus on another project, the educational Yunis grid. In May, Metropolis reported more than 1,600 active users, nearly 20,000 registered users, and the equivalent of more than 800 standard regions.Read More →
Creed: Rise to Glory VR boxing game gets you in the mood for upcoming Creed III movie
You can experience Creed in virtual reality before the release of Creed III, an upcoming boxing movie that premieres in theaters on November 23 and follows blockbuster successes Creed I and Creed II, released in 2015 and 2018. Creed: Rise to Glory is available on the Oculus Quest store for $30, andRead More →
Eduverse to launch in Second Life this weekend
The Virtual Worlds Education Consortium is launching a seven-region virtual education campus called Eduverse, comprising a group of education-focused virtual sims in Second Life. The event starts at 11 a.m. Pacific Time on Saturday, May 21 on VWEC’s VWEC Eduverse region, the group’s welcome sim. The other regions that areRead More →
OpenSim land area hits new record high as all stats rise this month
OpenSim land area is up by more than 12,000 standard regions this month compared to last month, bringing the total land area to a record high of 113,151 standard region equivalents. The growth happened despite some grid outages and closures. In particular, four French grids have shut down over theRead More →
Google offers free AI-powered audiobook narration
Last night, Google sent me a message that I could have one of its virtual AI-powered voices record my audiobooks for me. I wrote an article about for MetaStellar here: Google offers free AI-powered audiobook narration. You can edit the finished file to fix pronunciation mistakes and then download theRead More →
April stats all up despite outages
All OpenSim stats are up this month. The total land area of the public OpenSim grids increased by more than 1,000 regions, to 100,880, while the active users increased by more than 3,000, to 43,272. Creatrix World, which reported more than 700 regions last month, is currently recovering from aRead More →
My third metaverse book is out
Just like Brandon Sanderson, I, too, have been busy during this pandemic. In fact, I’ve written more than ten new books. Take that, Sanderson! Okay, most of them are really short. His books are 400 pages long. My books are shorter. Krim Deeds, for example, is 150 pages. But, onRead More →
Pavlov Shack offers free detailed multiplayer combat gaming for Oculus Quest II
Pavlov Shack is one of the best free VR combat shooter games I’ve seen that you can play on the Oculus Quest 2. I’ve taken some time to search for free realistic and detailed VR combat games without success, but this is a clear winner. This game offers a satisfyingRead More →
Ukraine play returns for encore this morning on OSCC
The educational play “We Are Going to Lviv” is back for a single performance tonight on the Meta region of the OpenSim Community Conference grid. The trip was originally part of the Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education 2022 conference and is an artistic journey that spans the past andRead More →
This year’s VWBPE conference focuses on Ukraine
The 15th annual Virtual World Best Practices in Education conference kicks off on Thursday, March 31 and will run through April 2 at the VWBPE region in Second Life. This year, about 23 exhibitors including universities, non-profits, journals, community organizations, and individuals are set to exhibit at the VWBPE Conference Exhibit Hall,Read More →
We’ve been added to “the list for destruction”
So I just got a warning in my email inbox from a “touche@1studi.ru.” The domain name is associated with a company that runs a couple of Russia-based OpenSim grids. Apparently, the flag of Ukraine is now a “Nazi” flag. Now, I mean sure, there are Nazis in every country —Read More →
The top 10 AI enterprise strategy trends for 2022
CIOs, CTOs and technology leaders agree: AI will be the main driver of innovation across industries throughout the next five years. Nearly half of CIOs say they’ve either already started using AI or plan to implement it in 2022, and two-thirds of workers surveyed recently said they want employers toRead More →
Hypergrid Art Hoppers are going to Ukraine
You can join the Hypergrid Hoppers — a club for explorers of the OpenSim hypergrid — as they travel to Ukraine. The trip is part of the Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education 2022 conference and is an artistic journey that spans the past and future of Ukraine with a focusRead More →
What is the metaverse?
“Metaverse” is a word thrown around a lot lately, and its meaning seems to mean whatever anyone wants it to mean. Here’s a breakdown of the most common definitions. Metaverse as virtual reality The term “metaverse” was first coined in Neal Stephenson’s 1992 science fiction novel Snow Crash. He usedRead More →
OpenSim monthly usage up, land area down on grid outages
The total number of active users was up quite a bit this month, but total land area and registered users dropped slightly. The loss of 144 standard region equivalents and 1,141 registered users was more than accounted for by the fact that FrancoGrid had server issues and didn’t report itsRead More →