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If you’re a writer, or an artist you may cringe at the idea that computers are coming for your jobs. If you dig into how the content for AI art and poetry and stories are generated, you’ll breathe a little easier. I’ve done just that using tutorials I found online and collaborativeRead More →

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I miss having my own OpenSim place. I didn’t use it much when I had it, but now that it’s gone, I want it back. So, of course, since I don’t want to have to keep a computer up and running all the time to do my own hosting, andRead More →

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Closed grids — where users can’t teleport over to other grids — have been losing ground in OpenSim lately and suffered a big hit last year with the closing of InWorldz. But some people prefer closed grids, where grid owners have more control over who can access the grid, andRead More →

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OpenSim has suffered a number of shocks in the past year, with several significant grid closings in a row. OpenSim’s largest closed grid, InWorldz, shut down last summer. Its successor, Islandz, closed earlier this year. Virtual Highway shut down in December. We lost both Lost Paradise and its owner thisRead More →

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In its ongoing quest to find a sustainable business model, the commercial AviWorlds grid is giving the no-hypergrid approach another go. “AviWorlds needs to be a private community now,” grid owner Alexsandro Pomposelli told Hypergrid Business. “Avi-Labs needs to create value and also a distinguishing characteristic from all these other gridsRead More →

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The Kitely Market, OpenSim’s largest commercial content marketplace, has passed the 30,000 item milestone this month. The market currently delivers to 345 different grids, both hypergrid-enabled and closed, private grids. (Instructions for how to configure the Kitely Market for closed grids are here.) According to Kitely co-founder and CEO IlanRead More →

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If you haven’t done enough this week to honor our planet you can get some belated Earth Day action this weekend at the annual EarthX conference in Dallas, Texas — and, if you can’t get there in person, streaming online and on its YouTube channel. The event, which is taking place onRead More →

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If climbing Mount Everest in real life is too expensive or dangerous, but you still want to find out what it’s like, virtual reality may have the answer. EverestVR is an immersive experience for the Vive and Oculus Rift headsets, available on the Vive Infinity platform. Set amongst the world’s tallestRead More →

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A couple of readers — okay, several readers — have written to me complaining about the outages on the Hypergrid Business website, so this morning I’ve been following up with tech support at my hosting company, Dreamhost. One of the things was trivial — the https:// security was in place,Read More →

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This Friday, New York City-based multimedia startup Walk In My Shoes Media is launching a VR platform that uses immersive storytelling to make a social impact and promote inclusivity. Company employees, or members of academic communities, will be able to experience the consequences of prejudices first-hand. The idea for theRead More →

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The  VR Airway Lab training application for medical professionals was recently put to the test in a study that found VR simulation to be on par, if not better than expected, when compared to a traditional teaching lab environment. Key Findings Faculty that took the VR training overwhelmingly felt it was aRead More →

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John Skakandy, known to OpenSim users as Cloneu Inglewood, died of cancer last month in Florida. Skakandy was the owner of the Lost Paradise grid, which he founded in 2011. The grid received the top rankings in our 2012 reader survey, with perfect scores for community, content, support, and technology, thoughRead More →

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The first annual OpenSim Fest officially opens its doors tomorrow, with musical performances tomorrow and this weekend, then a showcase of exhibits from 45 different grids in the OpenSim community running through April 6. This is an event to give exposure to our fellow OpenSim neighbors and revel in theirRead More →

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US $5 (R$25) for a 15,000-prim region on the hypergrid-enabled, Portuguese-language Vida Dupla grid.Read More →

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You know the scene. You’re walking down the street in a town, maybe your hometown, on a quiet Tuesday afternoon. The sun is shining, people are sitting outside a coffee shop chatting and browsing, and you can hear birds chirping and the drone of distant traffic. You turn the cornerRead More →

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  Keng City, OpenSim’s only major African-American grid is working to promote awareness and inclusivity on the hypergrid, and to battle prejudice, with exhibits, events, and destinations of interest. Even simple things, like finding appropriate avatars, can be a challenge for OpenSim’s users. “We struggle finding culturally related items for our avatars,”Read More →

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  Gloebit is a virtual currency accepted on about forty different OpenSim grids, and is the most popular currency on the hypergrid by a very large margin. Gloebit works roughly similar to PayPal. Users create a Gloebit account on the website, transfer money into it, and can they spend that money as theyRead More →

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As many of you pointed out in emails to me, Hypergrid Business has been down since Friday morning. There was an infection on the site, and it took Sucuri, our security service, and DreamHost, our hosting provider, four days to resolve the issue, which included three different rounds of cleaning outRead More →

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Metropolis, one of the oldest non-profit OpenSim grids, and the second most popular grid (after OSgrid) announced that it will be upgrading to the latest version of OpenSim at the end of the month. Read the full information document here. Users will need to pay 5 Euros to transfer theirRead More →

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Sony Pictures announced that it’s making a sequel to the hit Bill Murray movie Groundhog Day. But it’s animated. And it’s in virtual reality. Groundhog Day: Life Father Like Son takes place in the same setting, but this time the hero is Phil Connors, Jr., the son of Phil Connors,Read More →

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As a person of color and a woman, I’ve become aware with the lack of representation expressed outside of the entertainment or sports world. That is even more prevalent within the Virtual Reality community. Even though African Americans are strong consuming anything tech related us making up less than 20Read More →

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Exhibitors can already start setting up for February’s Sci-Fi Expo on Tangle Grid. The month-long exposition, accessible to hypergrid visitors, officially opens on Tuesday, February 5 and runs through March 5. The hypergrid address is tanglegrid.net:8002. (Learn how to hypergrid here.) Visitors will be able to get freebie items, and alsoRead More →

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    Islandz, the official successor to the InWorldz grid, is shutting down, owner Beth Reischl announced today on the grid’s Discord channel. Residents will have ten days to wrap up any current projects. Reischl, who is also known as Elenia Llewellyn  in-world, cited financial difficulties. “I’m not working for free for anotherRead More →

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There’s a lot of OpenSim stuff out there. Last year, for example, there were 380 different grids for the public to explore, and an unknown number of personal, business, and educational grids that didn’t make the Hypergrid Business lists but were open to visitors. It’s hard enough for long-time OpenSimRead More →

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Jan. 20 Update: First, thank you, everyone, for helping put the book on the Amazon best-seller list for Science Fiction and Fantasy Short Reads last week. It was amazing — we broke the top 50! You guys rock! Second, it turns out that I’m not allowed to offer the bookRead More →

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  Kitely rolled out their new private grid service yesterday, and there’s a lot of information there to take in all at once. It’s not a full separate OpenSim grid, like you’d get from DigiWorldz or Dreamland Metaverse. Instead, it seems more like something halfway between a Kitely region and yourRead More →

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Kitely  is now offering private grids for organizations, the company announced today. For more information, check out this Kitely support thread. There are a lot of questions about how this will work. I will be posting a longer article tomorrow. If you have any comments or questions, add them below,Read More →

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A group that claims to be affiliated with the Anonymous hacktivist collective announced the launch of a new OpenSim grid on Saturday. “Anonymous began to a great degree in a virtual world called SecondLife,” the grid said in a message on its website. “We hope to bring back this foundational platformRead More →

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Virtual reality is a hot topic in the field of science and technology. It is assumed that the cost of hardware and the complexity of production are the obstructions for the massive adoption of virtual reality. However, experts from the VR industry have different opinions. Virtual reality is an underestimated field thatRead More →

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More than 300 responses came in for this year’s Ninth Annual OpenSim Grid Survey, and Sacrarium received the highest overall scores, followed by Virtual Brasil, Utopia Skye, Kitely, Tranquility Grid, DigiWorldz, Discovery Grid, OSgrid and DreamNation, in that order. Between them, the respondents had visited nearly 200 different grids, andRead More →

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The 2018 OpenSim Community Conference. started off with a bang this morning with an announcement of a new virtual reality viewer for OpenSim. OpenSimulator core developer Melanie Thielker — also known as Melanie Milland in-world — announced that she is releasing her virtual reality OpenSim viewer to the open sourceRead More →

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From The Ashes Of AvatarFest, OpenSim Fest Rises AvatarFest has been a creative effort which has celebrated the people of OpenSim for years, and AvatarFest 2018 was its final year. In the spirit of this incredible yearly festival, OpenSim Fest begins with our first festival starting in March 2019. WhatRead More →

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Update: I’ve added numbers for more than 40 additional grids since this article first run, and now the active user numbers show an increase of more than 2,000. I’ve run the stats for OpenSim this weekend, and here are the results: Full monthly stats Active grids list Hypergrid destination listRead More →

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The 2018 OpenSim Community Conference is this weekend, and you can check out the schedule here. Registration is free, and you can still register here. In previous years, the conference was also broadcast via the web, for those who couldn’t attend in-world. Follow OSCC on Twitter at opensimcc.  Read More →

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AviWorlds, the grid that’s up and down more than a yo-yo, is back again — this time offering 100 free full-sized regions. Owner Alexsandro Pomposelli has shut down the grid more than a dozen times over the last seven years, and has attempted multiple different business models. It’s had free land,Read More →

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Tangle Grid’s Winter Expo opens its doors this Saturday, inviting hypergrid travelers from any OpenSim grid to come and check out the exhibits and shopping opportunities. The hypergrid address is tanglegrid.net:8002:expo isle. For folks new to hypergrid travel, type Ctrl-M to pull up the map, cut-and-paste the address into the map’s addressRead More →

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Registration is now open for the Mainstreaming Virtual World Learning Colloquium. This Colloquium is a free event — held on December 1, 2018 from 9:00 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. Central Time – in the AvaCon Grid Quaternary Stadium, and is also a community event affiliated with the upcoming Open SimulatorRead More →

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Islandz, the successor to InWorldz, officially opened for business last week, writes Ryan Schultz. InWorldz, one of the most successful and longest-lasting commercial grids in the OpenSim ecosystem, closed in August due to financial problems. InWorldz was one of the last remaining closed grids. Almost all other OpenSim grids allowRead More →

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“We estimate that on average 1.5 new VR studios open for business somewhere in the world every day.” “Regardless of what you or I may think about it the big brands are the ones sitting on the money to pay for top notch VR. And they are very much incentivizedRead More →

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In case you’re wondering what I’ve been doing with myself now that I’m not blogging about OpenSim as much, here’s an update. First, I’m super busy at my day job. I’m covering artificial intelligence for IDG’s CIO magazine and cybersecurity for CSO. I’ve also been getting my new blog, Upsider,Read More →

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Augmented reality endorsement picks up pace, according to a recent market forecast. The AR market volume is expected to hit $30 billion by 2023, growing at 39 percent CAGR. This growth is rooted in AR’s utility. Augmented reality proves itself a multi-purpose technology, being eagerly adopted across different domains, such asRead More →

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As the November 1 opening of the Santorini 1st Digital Bienniale art festival approaches, organizers have made available the 28-page preview book free exclusively for Hypergrid Business readers: download it here. Read the original festival announcement here. #Neighbourhood: Art is a political act Digital and real worlds will handshake at Santorini onRead More →

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Earlier this year, I wrote about how I’m ready to start winding down Hypergrid Business and move on to the next part of my life. My kids are out of the house, I’ve rented a new office, and I’ve been disentangling myself from old commitments. At my day job, covering technologyRead More →

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Since Google announced that they were shutting down their Google Plus social platform by end of next summer, organizers of OpenSim-related communities on that platform have begun searching for an alternative. Google Plus was particularly attractive for OpenSim users since it allowed avatar names, a welcome alternative to Facebook’s realRead More →