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: Making the Metaverse
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Click here to participate in a Q&A about Making a Metaverse That Matters on Inkwell, the public conference on books for The WELL, the legendary online community forum. (Starting now and for the next two weeks.) It's viewable to everyone online, but if you want to pose questions and aren't a WELL member, you can…
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If talk of "The Metaverse" seems a bit obscure or confusing, it's helpful to compare it to a buzzy expression from ancient times (by which I mean the 1990s): The information superhighway. Often touted by Wired magazine and celebrities (along with Vice President Al Gore) throughout the 90s, it was a common buzzword and late…
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In case you don't know any 3D graphics developers, roughly the entire community has been roiling over an unexpected price increase for using the graphics engine: With Unity's new plan, developers who use Unity's free tier of development services would owe Unity $0.20 per installation once their game hit thresholds of 200,000 downloads and earn…
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If you missed the recent whirlwind of Roblox announcements, they read like the company's concerted attempt to the cross (in a single leap!) the Metaverse Age Cliff, that point in the lifecycle of a platform where usage tends to drop sharply as the user base reaches adulthood: Coming later this year in early release, Roblox…
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With news that Meta's Horizon Worlds metaverse platform is finally coming to mobile in the run-up to next month's Meta Connect developer conference, here's an excerpt from Making a Metaverse That Matters on the fundamental mistakes Meta is still making in its approach to avatars — including insights from Second Life co-founder Cory Ondrejka, who…
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Linden Lab has a new job opening that's been up on the website for at least the last several weeks: Senior Product Manager at Linden Lab We’re looking for a Senior Product Manager (remote) to elevate multiple facets of our Second Life product. This person would also enable growth and scale by shipping features that…
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Here's an interview about Making a Metaverse That Matters on the Plutopia News Network, hosted by Internet OG Jon Lebkowsky with fellow OGs Wendy Grossman and Scoop Sweeney. Watch above, though please disregard my disheveled look — I realized only at the very last moment that this was an on-camera interview! One spicy topic we…
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Watching Philip Rosedale and Avi Bar-Zeev talk about early days in metaverse development, reader "Nadeja" points out another early milestone that's often under-appreciated — the launch of pioneering game Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss: Another interesting thing is that in March 1992, just a few months before the publication of Snow Crash (June 1992), another…
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Watching Philip Rosedale and Avi Bar-Zeev talk about early days in metaverse development, reader “Nadeja” points out another early milestone that’s often under-appreciated — the launch of pioneering game Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss: Another interesting thing is that in March 1992, just a few months before the publication of Snow Crash (June 1992), another…
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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…
Wagner James Au / New World Notes 