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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Photo copyright Om Malik — see original and others on his site Writer and venture capitalist Om Malik, who tutored me on the tech world as my editor at GigaOM, just wrote one of the most interesting takes on Vision Pro I've come across. Because Om also happens to be excellent photographer (evidence above and…
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The Meta Quest 3 is here, with a starting price of $499, and before I begin ranting, let me start with the positive: It’s launching right out the gate compatible with Roblox (along with Quest 2 and Quest Pro), so it’s immediately metaverse friendly. That’s good! Now to rant — or maybe “stand there, utterly…
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Philip Rosedale's latest vlogcast interview is with Avi Bar-Zeev, an XR/metaverse pioneer who's been doing this so long, he was working for a virtual world company in the 90s which Neal Stephenson used to visit shortly after Snow Crash came out — when Stephenson first reportedly looked into creating the Metaverse himself. (At least that's…
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Where it started for Meta (last February): Ray-Ban Stories let you capture video and photos, share your life’s moments and listen to music or take calls hands-free… We see smart glasses as a stepping stone to true AR glasses, and an important element of this is building something you’ll want to wear regularly for extended…
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Apple Vision Pro’s High Price is Not a Problem Because It’s a COMPUTER, not a Peripheral — Jeff Yang
Before we close out this week of Apple Vision Pro, here’s a really good point that’s not being covered much (at all?) from my colleague and IFTF research head, Jeff Yang: Still can’t get over how much people miss the point of Apple Vision Pro. It isn’t a peripheral like Quest. It’s a FULL COMPUTER.…
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Avi Bar-Zeev led Experience Prototyping for Vision Pro at Apple, where he was most recently a Senior Manager; he just shared some intriguing observations on Apple's Vision Pro reveal: The word "Metaverse" didn't appear once in Apple's WWDC thus far. 3rd party apps may espouse that next-gen internet vision later. But I'd argue it's much…
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Screengrab via Rec Room's Shawn Whiting Update, 4:00pm: Shawn tells me he can't comment beyond the tweet featuring Rec Room in the VisionPro menu, but then adds: "might be more tomorrow too :)" While Apple VisionPro may not be primarily targeted at or architected for VR/virtual world/Metaverse usage, it may still become an interesting niche…
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After being developed since at least 2015, Apple finally unveiled its AR headset, the VisionPro. As the "Pro" in the name suggests, it's very much targeting a niche of high-end enterprise power users, and is significantly pricier than rumors suggested, at $3499. For me the big reveal is VisionPro has little or no VR capabilities…
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There was a good if unsurprising story from the New York Times last weekend which helps explain why Apple is constantly rumored to be putting out an XR headset soon… only for us to then get subsequent reports that the release has once again been delayed. As it turns out, there’s quite a lot of…
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Intriguing new job opening from Apple for a AR/VR Network Engineer stating "In this role you will work closely with other developers and build tools and frameworks to enable connected experiences in a 3D mixed-reality world." I found the job listing via this Bloomberg story which interprets it in the broadest way possible: The most…
Wagner James Au / New World Notes 