if you have a spare $50,000 to $100,000 you can forget about the mouse and space navigator and actually get some exercise when you are in-world! the Virtusphere is a nifty hamsterball device that can be used in conjunction with Second Life, OpenSim, Unity, and just about any virtual world that lets you walk around [...]

i had an email, via LinkedIn, asking how to stream an avatar into an elementary classroom. the teacher has experience in Second Life but knows that his elementary students won’t be able to access it. of course i suggested OpenSim! (Ener “OpenSim” Hax at your service) =p at first i was thinking of streaming screen capture like [...]

in a non-exclusive post, i am pleased to announce that Kitely isn’t free anymore! =) Kitely has finally rolled out their true commercial OpenSim-on-a-cloud offering. read their blog post with all the details: Billing System Finally In Place if you can’t tell that i’m excited, i am! =) their billing system even lets you allow [...]

yesterday’s post about uncovering the hidden grids of the metaverse received many good suggestions and is clearly something important and frustrating it’s important because OpenSim grids can be used to do more than you can with Second Life. Second Life has a very specific purpose that revolves around land ownership and rental. OpenSim grids can [...]

“What I want to see is a way to help the hidden Metaverse of sims and grids to find a common gateway right in a popular viewer. Something that is easy for new sign-ups to fathom and of course easy for grid owners to add themselves.” Gaga Gracious wrote that in a comment to me [...]

OpenSim can be many things from a walled garden to a hypegridded hippie-fest of communal grid hopping and open love. well, maybe that second point is a bit jaded! the options are many (with over 80 commercial grids and a potpourri of thousands of regions on OSGrid, and then grids like Enclave Harbour which one [...]

as much as i blab about OpenSim and considering it’s been almost two years that i’ve been out of Second Life, you’d think that my SL-centric perspective would have been reshaped by now today i had to admit that either i have a seating fetish or that i still think in terms of 55 avatars per sim and that [...]

last October i wrote about a creative use of sim-on-a-stick as an art catalogue. Beacara, the creator of the concept, was overwhelmed by requests and not only ran out of the OpenSim loaded USB sticks but the town hosting the art event did too! Beacara now has a video of her art catalogue on a stick (below) and [...]

Enclave Harbour’s website will serve up additional content for its workbook such as videos to act as alternatives/supplements to going in-world and current event links for each activity. the site is now set up as a “networked” multisite WordPress blog. up until a few month’s ago, those were called multi-user blogs. sites like the Huffington Post are [...]

last night in Mr Obama’s State of the Union address (PDF transcript) he mentioned something that has bothered me about secondary education – the No Child Left Behind Act. one of the issues that many feel is negative about that programme was directly mentioned: To teach with creativity and passion; to stop teaching to the [...]

machinima – that word intimidates me a little and it shouldn’t – it’s just a word. when i think of machinima, i tend to think of a video that is really nicely polished, has great post-production effects, epic soundtrack, clever acting, and a production crew of several people machinima can be a little more technical [...]

yesterday i mentioned making videos for media-rich eLearning. in this case, OpenSim acts as a 3D animation application to create video for illustrating middle school science activities planned and written sripting would help make a better video than below to make sure key elements are in frame long enough to be meaningful (adding narration and closed [...]

both subQuark and i have written about the need for OpenSim (and Second Life) to run on an iPad. that in itself is a no-brainer – the iPad is becoming ubiquitous in general and especially in education there are many K-12 schools and universities who use iPads and even some that distribute them as a [...]

CARI.net and Limestone Networks are data centres with top servers, great customer service, and they host lots of OpenSim deployments. either one is a good choice and i am biased because we have been on Limestone for 17 months without a hiccup every now and then i go on their sites and build my fantasy server [...]