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!
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Category: Making the Metaverse
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Update, March 4: Game is now live here. This really is a triumph. Playable tomorrow on ROBLOX — follow the creator’s Twitter for updates — “Tunneler” is a full-fledged, fully functional tribute to Valve’s classic game Portal, including the original’s groundbreaking physics and teleporting mechanic. (Watch above if you don’t believe me, or watch the…
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Acclaimed tech podcast Lex Fridman recently did this in-depth interview with Mark Zuckerberg, much of which was devoted to Meta's metaverse plans. (Watch above, with the metaverse conversation between 5;36 – 37:44.) While I'm sorely tempted to editorialize on his comments, for now I'll just summarize some of highlights that stood out to me most:…
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Above: Valve's Steam VR Home in 2017 It's one of the metaverse's biggest mysteries: With so many major tech companies announcing metaverse strategies or full-fledged platforms, where the hell is Valve? With its Steam distribution platform for gaming content that counts over 120 million active users, an array of VR devices, and now Steam Deck,…
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Here's Meta's latest Metaverse technology announcements dealing with AI solutions. To no one's surprise, the company is fully open about their plans to leverage highly personal data of what people see how and they use their bodies while in their metaverse platform. (A coming crisis people like Avi Bar-Zeev have been screaming about for years.)…
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Rec Room's Shawn Whiting tweeted this tantalizing (and teasingly unmarked) concurrency chart as a response to ROBLOX's extended downtime last weekend, saying: "@Roblox goes down, @RecRoom concurrent players goes up." And quite a lot, to judge by that hockey stick! "Mostly mobile [users] but also console and Steam/PC," Shawn told me today, "not as much…
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For everything you hear about Facebook's metaverse, @slhamlet has heard it before with Second Life.@parmy will be chatting with him about the future of the metaverse and whether it'll replace the real world at 12pm ET https://t.co/uhRqpdd7sF — Bloomberg Opinion (@bopinion) February 23, 2022 https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js Update, 10:55AM: Click through to hear our recorded chat above,…
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Longtime metaverse analyst and developer Gwyneth Llewelyn recently posted a good reader comment analyzing Meta's early efforts in the space. And I do mean "longtime" — this is her avatar from 2006 when she was in a trademark dispute over a collectivist utopia in Second Life. (Yes, that's a thing.) Leaping off from my observation…
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The Verge's Alex Heath has a good scoop on Horizon Worlds which finally gives us a concrete number around its Metaverse efforts to date: [Meta's] chief product officer, Chris Cox, gave employees a previously unreported update on Horizon’s user growth. He said that since Horizon Worlds was rolled out to all Quest users in the US…
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Above: Merlin's home office working for VRChat Inc. Great update to UdonSharp, the hugely popular user-made compiler that converts C# to VRChat's Udon scripting language: Recently, VRChat the company officially hired "Merlin", UdonSharp's creator, to work directly and full-time for the company, and implement his code into the official development software. "In the near future,…
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Here we go again (again) with yet another "metaverse real estate boom" story: The virtual real estate boom is turning the metaverse into the Wild West… It wouldn’t be until the modern crypto movement began accelerating in the last few years, with the popularization of NFTs [LOL it's not "popular"— WJA] and more recently the…
Wagner James Au / New World Notes 