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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Free for all Patreon members, I just published a deep dive Q&A with Matthew Ball on the eve of his influential book, The Metaverse, hitting bookstores with a greatly expanded new edition. Matt was one of the key individuals to make the Metaverse mainstream in the business world in recent years, which revived interest in…
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Remember HoloBike from Saga, a new indie project which recently launched a Kickstarter, raising 4x its target goal? It basically integrates a virtual world with an exercise bike — without needing a VR headset. Courtesy founder/lead engineer Samuel Matson (who last worked in Google's VR division), here's some video which shows how Saga intends to…
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Happening right now, enter here. I believe it'll be live until 1pm PT, so hurry! You can enter via your web browser and get the full spatial audio effect with a headset. (I just did that myself, as did about a couple dozen other people that I saw.) The graphics are rudimentary, but the live…
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I just had a long and fascinating interview with Matthew Ball, who has a greatly updated version of his book The Metaverse, now subtitled Building the Spatial Internet, coming out on on July 23. I'll publish that soon, but meantime, here's Matt's interview with two people who've been building the foundation of the Metaverse since…
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Here's a fun recent chat with Dominique Wu of the XR Reality Pro podcast, on Making a Metaverse That Matters. Dominique herself is a recent author (Spatial Design) and was recently a developer on Horizons Worlds, so we're able to delve deep into the weeds on what works and what doesn't with Metaverse platforms. Actually…
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Remember RP1, the upcoming, pretty impressive metaverse platform I demoed and blogged from Augmented World Expo a few weeks ago? The startup is giving a live group demo of the tech (billed as an "AWE afterparty") on July 17 at 11am PT — go here to RSVP. Again, RP1 is claiming they can deliver 100,000…
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Wagner James Au · What the Metaverse is — and what it's not. (Excerpt, "Making a Metaverse That Matters".) The audio version of Making is ideal listening for long Summer trips/vacations (in my very totally humble opinion), and it's now 60% off at Audiobooks.com until July 11th here! Listen to a sample above, read the…
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Stars Reach is an upcoming sandbox sim just unveiled by legendary game designer Raph Koster and his startup Playable Worlds. And while it's very much an MMORPG, Raph tells me fans of open virtual worlds like Second Life and VRChat should find it appealing: "It is a game, not a pure social world," as he…
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Scaniverse, a new-ish app from Niantic (they of Pokémon GO fame), is one of the cooler products I got to play with at AWE last week. It's a consumer model version of gaussian splatting, an annoyingly obscure term to describe a new process of quickly converting real world objects into usable 3D file data. What…
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RP1 is a small new startup which just unveiled its "metaverse browser" at the AWE conference. This demo video above may not look like much graphically, but having explored this virtual world in person, I can say the underlying tech is quite impressive. While its yet to publicly launch (that's happening soon), and actual deployment…
Wagner James Au / New World Notes 