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: Grotesque Self-Aggrandizement
-
Wagner James Au · What the Metaverse is — and what it's not. (Excerpt, "Making a Metaverse That Matters".) The audio version of Making is ideal listening for long Summer trips/vacations (in my very totally humble opinion), and it's now 60% off at Audiobooks.com until July 11th here! Listen to a sample above, read the…
-
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…
-
Thanks to host Tim Verheyden, here's my segments on The Digital Dilemma, a TV series from Belgium's public TV network. Most of it's in Dutch, but hopefully the YouTube subtitle AI works. (Belgians can watch the whole thing here.) I'm at the start of the episode, walking on the beach in Malibu, comparing Internet dangers…
-
Courtesy the lovely people of Remote Daily, an online talk show that launched during the pandemic (with live music and everything), here's my recent appearance with award-winning VR creator Athena Demos, where we talk about creating community within XR platforms. My favorite passage is around 17:00 minutes in, where I explain my argument for why the…
-
RSVP here! Joined by award-winning VR creator Athena Demos, here's the roundtable summary: XR (Extended Reality) has transformed industries from gaming and entertainment to healthcare and education through immersive technologies that alter reality like VR, AR, and MR. How does community building work in a virtual world and what can community builders learn from the…
-
Stream starts at 4pm PT today! Watch on YouTube, or join us in-world: Teleport link: VWBPE Auditorium – Canopy Waterfall Teleport link: VWBPE Auditorium – Floating Gallery We'll take as many audience questions as possible, just post them in text chat. Also! Thanks to my publisher Wiley, there's a special 35% discount on the print…
-
"With Vision Pro launched, companies must talk about XR, nausea and gender" is a new Gamesbeat editorial that's an expanded excerpt of my new book, highlighting the most shocking thing I discovered while writing Making a Metaverse That Matters: Meta, from what I can tell — and I've brought this up with several senior executives,…
-
Excerpt, Making a Metaverse That Matters: Floundering with little user growth after its official launch in June 2003, Second Life finally hit escape velocity when it explicitly adopted an essential facet of the Metaverse: Integration with the real world economy. Around the start of 2004, the company announced that the virtual world’s currency, Linden Dollars,…
-
With Meta's latest earnings report published this week, we find out the company has now burned invested $42 billion on building the Metaverse, with little to show for that: Its metaverse platform Horizon Worlds has less than an estimated 500,000 monthly active users, while sales of its Quest VR headset line (a metaverse peripheral) remain…
-
I'm tardy in noticing, but am overjoyed to find my book on Goodreads, including this lovely review by longtime virtual world denizen Lorelei Armstrong: I debated calling this review "The book that could have saved Zuckerberg billions" because it offers terrific guidance to the industry and those in the position to spend billions creating virtual…
Wagner James Au / New World Notes 