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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Reader Luther Weymann, who was a successful tech exec before becoming a virtual world fan in his retirement, isn't convinced by Neal Stephenson's call for metaverse users to unionize: Any attempt at collective bargaining in a virtual world will require a massive legal department with huge overhead to administer the quirks of the people and failures…
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New World Notes readers all being brilliant, there's a good back and forth on the topic of using Metaverse platforms for real world meetings, both pro and con. First here's the Con case from Luther Weymann, who was a successful tech exec before becoming a virtual world fan in his retirement: People just want to…
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Good conversation over Philip Rosedale’s pretty surprising comments last week, positing that the Metaverse may “never be for everybody”, and that in any case, Meta/Facebook definitely shouldn’t succeed at making the Metaverse. (Well, knowing Philip, that last point isn’t all that surprising.) “What a journey,” Alex D observes, then surveys the current state of things…
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Some like the new search UI… but some not so much. Here's reader David D.'s take: It feels good, but only Linden Lab will be able to tell whether it really helps or not. In my field of higher education, there is a want to make lots of pretty videos and web pages because people…
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"Won't be going to Fortnite if there's no custom [avatars]," writes Juliette Jones in a post on that topic, "but frankly SL's performance issues cannot be 'solved' without expending an immense amount of money on Linden Lab's part to transfer Second Life completely off of OpenGL framework." Here's why, as she sees it: OpenGL has…
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"VRChat has much of the same discovery issues that've plagued Second Life," notes Adeon Writer, a denizen of both worlds, responding to my observation that Nissan's VRChat marketing campaign doesn't seem to attract many visitors. "Mainly, as there are more and more places to visit, it becomes harder and harder to become discovered and retain…
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Here's another clue in the 40,000 people plateau mystery of Second Life, offered by reader lkosov: I sat there with the world map open and watched the green dots on Learning Island 1 for an hour yesterday, from 1235-1335 SL time. From what I can tell the player dots update once a minute, so it's…
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Update, October 18: Many more details from Thor in Comments below. Replying to our open forum call for tablets that can run Second Life, Andabata Thor sent along this screenshot with details: "I am often on SL by tablet CHUWI Hi10X 10.1 inch. 1200×1920 and Clear Linux OS. I think that for a senior like…
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Interesting new comment from Tad Noodle and Jerom Franzic on an older post on Second Life's upcoming iOS app. How about Second Life on consoles? Specifically, Valve's Steam Deck, set for release this December. (Trailer above.) As Mr. Noodle wonders aloud: I wonder if Second Life would run decently on a Steam Deck? I watched…
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In the search for the Metaverse's killer app, here's a possible one proposed by "Kyz", who once made a good living from creating virtual world content before moving to physical items: Probably true that anything digital is the meat of the Metaverse. I don't think car companies in SL or elsewhere managed to sell more…
Wagner James Au / New World Notes 