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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In case you missed MTV's Video Music Awards last weekend, BLACKPINK won the Best Metaverse Performance prize for a show the KPOP group put on in PUBG Mobile, a metaverse platform with 30 million daily active players, while Snoop and Eminem performed in Otherside, a new NFT-driven metaverse platform launched last April. Despite a heavy…
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Despite all the dune buggies in the teaser trailer, it's not There, but Everywhere. However, detailed information about it exists nowhere — except, that is, in the studio of Build A Rocket Boy, founded former Rockstar North head Leslie Benzies. The montage video shows glimpses of many environments and some Fortnite-type combat, and from what…
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Scrambling in response to much Internet snark, Mark Zuckerberg recently updated his Keane-eyed Horizon Worlds avatar that he posted to Facebook last week (above left) with a much more detailed and realistic version (above right). Writing: I know the photo I posted earlier this week was pretty basic — it was taken very quickly to…
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In case you're wondering, there's roughly a dozen Paris-themed worlds in VRChat, the metaverse platform that's accessible through Steam and Meta's Quest platform — including this one, "Paris Tour", an explorable portion of the City of Lights including the Eiffel Tower. It even comes with classic French music and a racing game! I note this…
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Anthropologist Tom Boellstorff has a new thought-provoking essay on The Conversation, pointing out the importance of learning from metaverse/virtual world history. For instance, what Second Life's real estate management policies can teach new metaverse platforms like The Sandbox: Second Life originally had “point-to-point teleportation” (P2P). You could arrive anywhere in an instant. But in 2003…
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What Is the Metaverse? And Why Should the Art World Care? is a new-ish episode from The Art Angle, the podcast from acclaimed art world news site ArtNet. I had a great time (despite an allergy flare-up) talking with host Tim Schneider, who interviews me alongside art curator Tina Rivers Ryan and artist Sara Ludy,…
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Yesterday I mentioned that "nearly all" metaverse platforms built around web3 features (blockchain, NFTs, crypto) have little or no active users. I qualified it that way because I recently found out about a possible exception: Upland, the mixed reality real estate acquisition game (and the first customer for Linden Lab's Tilia payment service), sells NFTs…
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Above: Within's Supernatural on the Oculus store with nearly 10,000 user ratings Fairly big bombshell just dropped: The Federal Trade Commission on Wednesday filed for an injunction to block Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook, from buying a virtual reality company called Within [producer of the highly popular fitness app called Supernatural], potentially limiting…
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Update, July 22: Bumped up for weekend reading/conversation! Read Part 1 of our Q&A here. In his book The Metaverse, Matthew Ball touches on Second Life and even speaks with the late, beloved CEO Ebbe Altberg about the dangers of breaking user-generated content through platform updates. During our Q&A this week we had a chance…
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Matthew Ball's The Metaverse: And How it Will Revolutionize Everything is now available in bookshelves and online. (Get it on Amazon here, on Apple Books here, or on Bookshop.org here, which contributes a cut to indy bookstores.) I've been avidly reading my review copy of The Metaverse over the last couple weeks, and while I feel way…
Wagner James Au / New World Notes 