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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Reflecting on the Wall Street Journal's podcast series on the rise and fall (and rise) of Second Life, along with my own chats with him for the upcoming book, Second Life's founding CTO Cory Ondrejka recently posted a thoughtful analysis on the topic in social media. With his permission, here it is in full, reflecting…
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Update, October 17: Carmack later acknowledged that Rec Room and VRChat do make money for Meta via 30% commissions on in-app payments. However, as most free-to-play multiplayer games/worlds monetize at under 10% (usually much less), it's still likely the case that the vast majority of Rec Room/VRChat players on Quest aren't paying Meta anything through…
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With episode three of the Wall Street Journal's podcast "How to Make a Metaverse" dropping tomorrow, Linden Lab/CCP Games/Meta developer veteran Jim "Babbage" Purbrick (who spoke with the podcast team for the show) has thoughts on Episode 2 (listen to it here), and the disasters which were unleashed when Second Life's early community management policy…
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In case you missed it, Neal Stephenson's Lamina1 is hosting an inaugural Open Metaverse Conference featuring the author, Philip Rosedale, and other metaverse luminaries next February in Los Angeles — sign up for updates here. While the jury is very much still out on just how much web3 has anything to do with the Metaverse…
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At long last, Dual Universe has officially launched on Steam for PCs. While on the surface it may seem mainly like a sci-fi MMO of the Eve Online/Star Citizen variety, the breadth of its creative possibilities and scale does make it a contender for arguably becoming the Metaverse. Originally crowdfunded and developed by Novaquark ("Building…
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Sooner than you might have expected and probably quicker than you were planning, NVIDIA just announced GET3D an AI model for generating virtual world objects — think Midjourney meets the Metaverse: NVIDIA is looking to take the sting out of creating virtual 3D worlds with a new artificial intelligence model. GET3D can generate characters, buildings, vehicles and…
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Been looking forward to this for months (it's been that long in the making, I did my 2 hour recording with the podcast team in July) — The Wall Street Journal's podcast on the founding of Second Life: We’re in a metaverse déjà vu moment. Companies are spending billions of dollars creating new metaverses, imagining…
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Lamina1, the Metaverse-as-a-Service startup co-founded by Neal Stephenson, just published a white paper adding much more detail to the platform that they are building — join their Discord to get it. The core announcement, however, is this: Neal Stephenson himself is making a virtual world: Neal Stephenson’s THEEE METAVERSE Under active early-stage development,…
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"Created in Fortnite" is a really beautiful and moving YouTube series from Epic Games, mini-documentaries of diverse individuals whose lives have been transformed by becoming builders in Fortnite Creative. Here's one above on GQuanoe, who created the much-shared tribute to MLK's "I have a dream" speech in Fortnite. Also cool: Grace Lind Hubbell at Epic,…
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Neomance is another great VRChat explorer. Like Bradlee, he explores the platforms' many worlds, takes breathtaking photos of his favorites, and posts them in a dazzling cascade on his Twitter. Like many — most? nearly all? — of the active VRChat community, he discovered VRChat through "random YouTube videos, and I got on to socialize…
Wagner James Au / New World Notes 