Wagner James Au / New World Notes
Author, strategist, virtual world reporter
recent posts
- Welcome to New World Notes’ 2006-2025 Archive!
- Virtual World Usage Stats from S&P Global Market Intelligence — Plus VRChat & Second Life Specifics!
- Top Five Posts Including: Huge Rec Room Layoff & Meta Boots Neal Stephenson Off Facebook (Briefly)
- Four Glorious Second Life Sims to Explore — After Watching Sabina Valeska’s Machinima Tributes to Them!
- Virtual World Usage Stats from S&P Global Market Intelligence — Plus VRChat & Second Life Specifics!
about
Category: AI
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In case you missed the Oscars last weekend, the Best Animated Feature award went to Flow, an amazingly beautiful, even heartbreaking movie which beat out big budget entries like Disney/Pixar's Inside Out 2 and Universal Pictures' The Wild Robot. Even more amazing, Flow was made by a small team of artists using Blender, the free…
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Originally published on Patreon here. Days after I wrote about the controversial Second Life ads A/B testing various messaging using mock-up Gen AI and stock imagery — a program Linden Lab head Brad Oberwager told me was paused last week — some SLers reported still seeing these dummy ads on Facebook. So today, I asked Oberwager about this.…
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Originally posted on my Patreon here UPDATE, March 4: This story continues here. If you've visited Facebook recently, you may have noticed new official ads for Second Life which incorporate video and images that are AI-generated. (And at least in one case, uses an Adobe Stock image.) After seeing complaints about this from SL creators…
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Flying in VR can help induce lucid dreams, says researcher With Quest headset sales slumping last holiday season, and their overall active usage dipping down to 1 in 3 active owners, there's a good chance your VR rig is gathering dust. Or maybe you're still enjoying it for games and virtual worlds like VRChat and…
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Linden Lab unveiled the latest version of its AI Character Designer late yesterday (website here, login required), created in partnership with Convai AI — watch the demo on YouTube above. To judge by social media, the SL community reaction has been, well, contentious. Here's a sample of YouTube comments: So this looks like a nice…
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Max at his mainstore/sim, Rustica [direct teleport here] Last week's post on how AI-based image-to-3D mesh conversion will impact virtual world economies dependent on mesh content has inspired quite a lot of conversation across Second Life social media. Indie creator Tim Hannan demonstrated how it's now relatively easy to generate an SL-based shoe from a real world…
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Just posted: Nyric is an upcoming game (on Steam here, watch the trailer above) that blends sandbox/virtual world creativity, survival/crafting gameplay, and generative AI in an ambitiously fresh way — so much so, it's almost a new subgenre. ("Minecraft meets Midjourney" might be a fair elevator pitch.) The lead developer, Kayla Comalli of Lovelace Studio,…
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Tim Hannan, an indie creator who's been doing some interesting experiments blending Second Life video/images with gen AI (as here), recently sent me these two fairly alarming — but actually not that surprising — images. The image on the left is the photo of high end basketball shoe. The image on the right is the…
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I recently saw someone on social media wondering whatever became of Blueberry in Second Life, and in case you missed it, I told that in-depth, highly personal story of Blueberry / KiwiCo creator Gizem Mishi Akin on my Patreon a few months ago. I continue to be grateful Gizem was so willing to share so…
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With news breaking that Meta is now laying off thousands of employees to focus on its AI products, this comment from reader Martin K last Thursday sure seem sadly prophetic: Since Quest headsets and Horizon Worlds cannot succeed on the scale of Meta's ambitions (and certainly not in 2025), I'm reading [Meta CTO's internal memo]…
Wagner James Au / New World Notes 