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: Augmented Reality
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Above: Me in a more innocent time (by which I mean 2024) Tech giants are still insisting XR headsets will go mass market, and now, in the latest version of this article of faith, that they'll somehow be integrated into personal superintelligence. While HMDs have many great niche applications, especially for short term use, I'm…
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"The biggest barrier to market adoption is not perfect realism, but use case matching. The technology companies are trying to foist a model of all day use upon VR, whereas my research indicates that it is not a medium for daily use, but best one reserved for special experiences." Find out who said that and…
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While Apple Vision Pro is impressive technology, sales have been slow, and I've grown skeptical that it'll ever gain mass market adoption for various reasons. For one thing, sales remain slow, and for another, even most early adopters who have bought one aren't using it on a daily basis. But my longtime friend and colleague…
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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]…
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Via Julian Reyes of the Virtual Worlds Museum, this site here has a whole huge library of virtual world/XR tech being used in many various real world use cases. Most are decidedly on the dry/corporate marketing side, but that's very much the point: This is tech usually associated with gaming applied to an enterprise context.…
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Interesting post from XR influencer Gabriele Romagnoli, summarizing the results of a survey he took of Vision Pro users. Among the 108 owners of Apple's headset he polled — actually a pretty good data sample, for a device with a user base roughly under 250,000 — a strong majority of almost 60% report using the…
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Scaniverse, a new-ish app from Niantic (they of Pokémon GO fame), is one of the cooler products I got to play with at AWE last week. It's a consumer model version of gaussian splatting, an annoyingly obscure term to describe a new process of quickly converting real world objects into usable 3D file data. What…
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Join my Patreon to read this free excerpt to Making a Metaverse That Matters, delving into myths around the necessity of VR and AR for the Metaverse. And while you're there, please consider subscribing for premium content and special bonuses, including free copies of my books and ads here on New World Notes!
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Augmented World Expo 2024 is happening next month in June in sunny Long Beach, and I'm excited to say I'll be attending the world's largest XR/AR/VR conference, signing Making a Metaverse That Matters and roaming the conference as a blogger/consultant/etc. Hope to see you there! Speaking of which, the team at AWE gave me this…
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Meta just announced Meta Horizon OS, which despite the name is not specifically about its metaverse platform Horizon Worlds, but actually its mixed reality operating system for Quest devices which is now running on other upcoming XR headsets: Developers and creators can take advantage of all these technologies using the custom frameworks and tooling we’ve…
Wagner James Au / New World Notes 