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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Interesting comment from Luther Weymann, a veteran tech exec who plays and thinks a lot about Second Life, apparently responding to Katharine Berry (former teen SLer who's now an engineer at Google) and her observation: "Second Life feels to me like it has stagnated, and I do not know whether you could fix that without…
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Quick: Before pressing Play on the video above, which set of SL mesh shoes and shirts are more detailed, and which have more triangles? The answer, as they say, May Just Surprise You. This video demo via reader Nadeja, who posted them as a response to last week's post, "Does The SL Community Care Enough…
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Pictured: Slink Redux body bundle, a rare example of popular SL mesh avatar content that's also well-optimized Last Friday I wrote about the new Black Dragon viewer update which checks whether a mesh avatar is well-optimized or not. Reader "Down With Underboob" (LOL) tried it out in SL over the weekend, to see how much…
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My "How avatars change who we are" article for Samsung EDGE's Components mentioned a study suggesting that being Einstein in VR seems to improve a user's IQ, and longtime reader Luther Weymnn notes that this phenomenon also seems to happen in non-VR virtual worlds: Over the past decade, I've chatted with dozens of SL content…
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] Great comment from reader madeline blackbart bringing much needed nuance to the eternal "Is Second Life a game" conversation: The whole "SL is not a game" or getting mad at that comparison always bothered me. It's rooted in the outdated concept that video games are toys and not the legitimate form of art that…
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I mentioned how there’s a growing real cash economy for VRChat-based content on Gumroad, an online marketplace for digital content, and reader Joey1058 explored the site deeper, then came back with this brief report: I took a look at Gumroad. This site is awesome. It’s not tied specifically to a particular VR world. This means that…
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Pictured: A nightclub experience… in Grand Theft Auto V Online While the "Is Second Life a game?" argument has basically gone since SL launched, reader "0xc0ffea" (who also co-hosts the largest SL community on Reddit) posts a fresh perspective: Whatever SL is on an ontological level, not treating it as a game has contributed to…
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Last week reader " irihapeti " argued that an essential facet of the metaverse is "[the] ability to deposit and withdraw my money safely and securely, so that I can buy stuff/experiences for any particular world/game/viewport of the metaverse and/or get paid for stuff/experiences that I provide in any of the different offerings/views." Some other readers…
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Black Dragon viewer creator NiranV, who has been ranting about the utter environmental disaster that most SL mesh bodies are, has rare words of praise (along with some advice) for the Slink mesh bodies created by Siddean Munro: The body being 15k triangles is pretty good. That's really good optimized, although the hands and feets…
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Really great comment from " irihapeti", responding to Jim Purbrick's thoughts on making a metaverse that operates like a system of links between different 3D platforms and experiences: I think that we have to get away from stuff (rendered objects) as the driver of how we think about the metaverse. As while we do this…
Wagner James Au / New World Notes 