Hypergrid Business

OSFest 2026 will run October 12 through 26 across the hypergrid, organizer Lisa Laxton told Hypergrid Business, and the community is now voting on the festival’s theme through a custom ranked-choice platform she built for the occasion. Voting closes on May 31. The community submitted 18 theme suggestions this year,

I’m going to tell you something the tech press missed. OpenSim is more alive now than it has been in a decade. And the reason is AI. The platform that was declared dead is about to become indispensable — not nostalgic, not marginal, indispensable. Because everything AI needs to do

While the total number of registered OpenSim users increased by 2,528 this month, both land area and active users were down by 271 regions and 803 actives, respectively. However, Darkheart’s Playground‘s website was down this month and I couldn’t get its numbers — and, last month, that grid reported more

OpenSim creators Dirty Helga and Spax Orion released a free NPC management station to the community last week, giving world builders a streamlined way to create, preview, and manage non-player characters from a single in-world object, according to a post by Spax Orion on OpenSimWorld. The IMAGE-NPC Machine is a

From 2010 to 2015, I ran Meet3D — one of the largest OpenSimulator grids in the world, with 309 regions. Educational institutions, businesses, and communities used it for training simulations, virtual events, and live collaboration. It was one of the most active grids outside Second Life, and building it taught

Time really does fly. Six months later, The Wrong Biennale is coming to a close on March 31, 2026. The Wrong Biennale is an international digital art exhibition that takes place both online and in physical galleries and is seen by millions worldwide. The seventh edition, running from November 1,

Rec Room, a Seattle-based social virtual world that raised $294 million and briefly reached a $3.5 billion valuation, will shut down on June 1, 2026, the company announced yesterday. Snap Inc. confirmed the same day that it has acquired select assets from the company. “Despite this popularity, we never quite

Update Mar. 19:  Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth said on an Instagram AMA that Meta has reversed its decision. The link to the Instagram post is dead, but he also posted an update on Threads, which is still up.  “We’ve decided to retain existing Horizon Worlds in VR for the foreseeable

OpenSim’s public grids gained the equivalent of more than 1,000 regions this month. That’s more than 70 square kilometers of land. The grids have also reported more than 1,000 new user registrations. However, active users were down by just over a hundred. That’s all due to the Watersplash grid being

In the late 1990s and early 2010s, virtual worlds were vibrant social spaces where people gathered to build, celebrate, and create communities online. Platforms such as Second Life and several Open Sim-based grids—including InWorldz, Kitely, and OSG. Over time, however, participation in many of these worlds has declined dramatically. For