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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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This is one of those surprised/not surprised news items: Microsoft Corp. plans to acquire Activision Blizzard Inc. in its largest deal yet as it looks to boost its gaming business and capture opportunities in the metaverse… “Gaming is the most dynamic and exciting category in entertainment across all platforms today and will play a key…
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Click here to listen and read the article summary, my chat with Nora of "Sparks", a tech show on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (basically the NPR/PBS of Canada) about Second Life and the Metaverse. Some of my answers seem a bit stumbly to me (I blame my morning coffee for not kicking in soon enough),…
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Update, 8:05pm PT: For context on this move and what Philip might advise on the future of Second Life, here's a recent interview with him suggesting Meta shouldn't be the one making the Metaverse and that it's not for everyone anyway, my post on how he started integrating High Fidelity spatial audio in virtual worlds…
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Update, Jan. 12: This demo by @TheRealKoolala is part of an Open Metaverse Interoperability Group project led by longtime Metaverse evangelist Evo Heyning — follow the group on Twitter @open_metaverse. Here's a fun experiment in Metaverse teleportation from "Koolala" on YouTube, who's created "portals" that enable him to seamlessly travel from XR-based virtual worlds/online games…
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Better publish them now before we get even deeper into 2022: Apple will not announce AR/VR products this year. I still fail to see why Apple would risk its brand on a still-niche product as yet. Also, look at the lame prototype. Second Life finally gets an official mobile app. Risky prediction, given a previous…
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Here's ten New World Notes posts from 2021 highlighting noteworthy trends, features, controversies, or challenges that we're very likely to see come cropping up in various forms in 2022 and for that matter in years to come: ROBLOX Reportedly Pressures Journalist Covering Platform's In-Game Market "In Which Children Are Encouraged To Gamble Real Money" (December…
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The team at Blind, the anonymous social messaging app for tech employees, just passed along the results of a user-driven survey, asking the somewhat ambiguous question, "Are you buying land in the metaverse?" Since it was posted December 17, 1400+ users have responded, with the most responses coming from employees with Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta…
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Image credit: Klaus Reinherz, "Socially Distanced New Year 2020/21" Time to take a look at the predictions I made late last December: There will be a departure in Linden Lab's C-suite, i.e. CEO/COO/CFO/CTO. This prediction, sad to say, turned out to be correct in the most tragic way possible. Both VRChat and Rec Room will…
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Reader Luther Weymann, who was a successful tech exec before becoming a virtual world fan in his retirement, isn't convinced by Neal Stephenson's call for metaverse users to unionize: Any attempt at collective bargaining in a virtual world will require a massive legal department with huge overhead to administer the quirks of the people and failures…
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Great news for Rec Room: Rec Room, a free to download and play cross-platform social gaming company, has raised $145 million, funding that it will use to continue building out its tools and audience of gamers using them to create their own experiences across mobile devices, game consoles, PC and VR headsets (operating systems/platforms supported…
Wagner James Au / New World Notes 