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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As a fun companion video to two themes discussed last week, the future of art in the AI era, and the future of 3D creation on next gen metaverse platforms, here's both at the same time: A guy creating builds in Fortnite Creative based on images suggested by Dall-E mini. The images themselves are pretty…
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Philip Rosedale has a pretty fascinating new Medium post based on a presentation he recently made at an unnamed Metaverse work group, laying out a vision for value creation in next gen platforms, primarily based on what worked well (more or less) in Second Life — Clear Property Rights, Collective Ownership and Participation, a Stable…
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Wagner James Au · The Metaverse & Music — Wagner James Au w/Water & Music Starting around 7 minutes in, here's audio from my Twitter Spaces chat last week on the Metaverse and music with Water & Music, a music business research DAO collective, spinning off on this huge research paper they just published on…
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VRChat/metaverse lovers, pencil in July 27 on your calendar, because that's when HBO is premiering "We Met in VR", Joe Hunting's feature length documentary devoted to the VRChat community. Watch the trailer above, featuring some VRChat worlds that have also been covered here, including the deaf community which teaches sign language in VRChat, and Udon…
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Matthew Ball's much-anticipated book The Metaverse: And How it Will Revolutionize Everything is launching on July 19th, and my preview copy finally arrived. (Links to buy it below.) I've already started delving into it, and even after just a couple chapters in, have roughly two dozen follow-up questions I can't wait to discuss with him. …
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Dual Universe, the single-shard MMO that some experts say is the best candidate to become the Metaverse, just announced a huge expansion to their beta release, code-named Mercury. (Teaser above.) That includes a new first-time user experience, so this long weekend is a good time to give it a try, or a revisit. "Take time…
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Reuters is having a free webinar tomorrow on the future of the Metaverse featuring several esteemed panelists, which you can register for here. But wait a minute: If we're so excited about the Metaverse, why are we talking about it… on the web? Especially when there are a number of metaverse platforms on the market…
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Core, the upcoming Unreal-based, Epic-backed, user-generated game development platform, just announced (somewhat unexpectedly) that it's adding NFT integration to its platform: Today we’re excited to announce Core is expanding to include blockchain technology, starting by integrating with the largest crypto wallet, MetaMask, and the largest NFT marketplace, OpenSea, for a first-of-its-kind API that enables creators to make…
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Really good essay from Tom Boellstorff, a professor at UC Irvine and a longtime researcher of virtual worlds. While the definition of the Metaverse might seem, well, academic, Tom points out how corporate and moneyed interests are already trying to define it to conveniently suit their own interests: For instance, many pundits define the metaverse…
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The Washington Post recently ran this great article on the power and influence of the YouTube channel People Make Games, which ROBLOX reportedly "pressured" to make a retraction when it started looking into serious allegations about the metaverse platform. The Washington Post confirms that the company did request a retraction, and gets what People Make…
Wagner James Au / New World Notes 