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- 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!
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Category: Making the Metaverse
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"[My boyfriend] went to try one of those other metaverses and ever since, he hasn't been the same… down there." Pretty well-played, Linden Lab! I guess you could say "other metaverses" include equally leg-less Rec Room, but Meta's Horizon Worlds is the clear target. Wonder if Philip Rosedale, who recently returned to helping develop Second…
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Infographic via Forrester Research The well-reputed tech analyst Forrester Research just published this extensive report on the Metaverse, "The State Of The Metaverse: Look Beyond The Hype To Uncover The Real Opportunities". As the title might suggest, I was one of the many SMEs they interviewed for it, and it's nice how much it aligns…
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In the lead-up to my interview in The Atlantic last week, this recent blog post by veteran Internet thinker Anil Dash helped crystallize my thoughts around community and the Metaverse. Because while it's not specifically about the Metaverse, Anil's insights very much apply to metaverse platforms, especially around fostering community and user content creation. Here's…
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Lessons From 19 Years in the Metaverse is a gratifying deep dive interview with me in the Atlantic, for Charlie Warzel’s Galaxy Brain free newsletter. Charlie and I plumb into the virtual world/metaverse topics I’ve felt strongly about in recent years, and it’s wonderful to get a chance to have the space to explore them…
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Back when he was leading metaverse development at Meta last year, Linden Lab veteran Jim Purbrick kept telling Meta staffers to read My Tiny Life, Julian Dibbell's pioneering tale of a virtual world community and a trollish abuser within it. But the Meta team didn't prioritize his advice, and the inevitable happened: When Meta launched…
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Of all the current metaverse platforms on the market, the smallest in terms of active users continue to be based around blockchain, cryptocurrency, and NFTs. As I wrote last month, platforms like The Sandbox, Decentraland, Cryptovoxel, and Somnium Space have extremity low user rates, with peak concurrencies in the four figures at most (but usually…
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Is "the Metaverse" as we typically understand it mainly made as a literary device, i.e. to tell a cool fun story? On that theme, here's an interesting couple of reader comments inspired by Gabe Newell's skepticism over the Metaverse (at the least in its current incarnations) — first from Caltech astrophysicist George Djorgovski, who helped…
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Remember Libra and Diem, the virtual currency project launched by Facebook/Meta in 2019? (Here's what I wrote about it back then.) The Financial Times has a great inside story of what happened to cause that project to collapse. Basically, Facebook happened: What emerges is a picture of Silicon Valley executives who thought they could charge…
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I've seen some insanely ambitious VRChat projects but good god just watch this video already. It's from "Dream Drive" , a Japanese inventor who is creating an 8 foot tall Transformers-type robot in the real world… that is controllable from within VRChat. That's possible, he tells me, by virtual serial communication between VRChat and Raspberry…
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Why does Valve seem so bearish about making the metaverse when it has everything it needs to do so? Reader Martin K. proposes this pretty good analysis: It might be useful to break down the most popular ideas of what today's metaverses are. Partly, Newell appears to refer to the crypto bros' metaverses, which were…
Wagner James Au / New World Notes 