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!
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Category: Comment of the Week
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Lots of interesting comments on last week's look into Second Life's shadow mesh economy, including this one from Peter Stindberg, creator and lead scripter of popular SL-to-Discord bridges. As he explains, mesh makers and mesh riggers aren't the only ones whose skill are often subcontracted: The same goes pretty much for scripting: There is a…
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Since writing about Primfeed's survey on whether AI-enhanced images should be allowed on the social media site, the vote continues to lean heavily on No. One challenge, however, is that "AI" is still broadly or loosely defined. As SL creator Jennifer Fluffington comments: We need to define more what is considered 'AI' to be allowed…
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The fact that these two reader comments on my post about Philip Rosedale's promised Town Hall on AI are right on top of each other is a good indication of how divisive the topic is. First up, from Tami, making the case that gen AI is something we can live with in Second Life: AI…
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Above: Radio Remembered How a Father's Lost Art From Second Life was Reborn in Fortnite Good points by "EmptyEyes", reflecting on how algorithms tend to homogenize metaverse platforms: Metaverses are weird beasts, outside of Fortnite, it feels like they refuse to compete with one another. They're like MMOs in that sense. They cater very strongly…
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There's been a good discussion in last week's post about SL creators debating whether they should use gen AI in their content, with a pro-AI position from "SatanicPanic": 1.If someone prefers not to use a ConvAI bot, they are entirely free to make that decision. Forcing others to conform to this preference, however, infringes on…
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Above: From my 2024 State of the Virtual World Economy report Last week's guest post by Maxwell Graf on why we need to decide now how to regulate content that uses AI being sold in the SL Marketplace (and beyond) generated some pretty passionate conversation. It came with this additional comment by Max that's also…
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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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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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The new test ad for Second Life attracted quite a bit of opinions from longtime SL users, including some on-brand snark — and this smart suggest from longtime virtual world explorer Kaylee West: As a regular user of both SL (17 years) and VRChat (6 years), one of the big things that keeps me in…
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Loving these 2025 metaverse-related predictions from readers, starting with: The Lab will purchase Primfeed within the next 24 months. You read it here first. — Peter Stindberg That sounds quite possible! Here's several more from Martin K:
Wagner James Au / New World Notes 