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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In this excerpt of Making a Metaverse That Matters, we explore the importance around naming a metaverse platform. Notably, Second Life (now with 500,000+ players) launched only 2-3 years before Roblox (now with 350 million+ users): Another core friction point for Second Life mass adoption is not technical or related to the UX, but perhaps…
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Excerpt, Making a Metaverse That Matters: Shanghai-born game designer Jenova Chen has devoted his career to proving that a game can be as artistically accomplished as Citizen Kane. Many (including myself) believe he's already succeeded, creating a series of acclaimed titles that expand the possibilities of immersive entertainment. Chen succeeded most vividly in his best-selling game…
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Above: Cyberspace as depicted in the Robert Longo/Keanu Reeves adaptation of William Gibson's Johnny Mnemonic (via GNDN) Key problem with the term "Metaverse": While thousands of technologists and game developers have read Snow Crash, the novel wasn't a crossover sci-fi bestseller like, say, Frank Herbert's Dune. Hence the last four years of reporters and tech…
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Excerpt, Making a Metaverse That Matters: Floundering with little user growth after its official launch in June 2003, Second Life finally hit escape velocity when it explicitly adopted an essential facet of the Metaverse: Integration with the real world economy. Around the start of 2004, the company announced that the virtual world’s currency, Linden Dollars,…
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Right: Business Insider's hilariously misguided "obituary" of May 2023 To recap, here's just some of what has happened since Business Insider published that metaverse "obituary" not even 12 months ago: Roblox, which described itself in its IPO filing as the Metaverse, recently gained 350 million+ monthly active users — more people on…
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This announcement came sooner than I'd have guessed — though last December, I did predict that in 2024, a leading metaverse platform would be acquired. Well, Disney now owns 10% of one at least: The Walt Disney Company and Epic Games will collaborate on an all-new games and entertainment universe that will further expand the…
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Matthew Ball has a good long post about the history of terms that attempt to capture the concept of 3D experiences in computing — cyberspace, augmented reality, mirror worlds, and so on (and on). While "spatial computing" is currently the term in vogue due to the Apple Vision Pro and the marketing juggernaut that is…
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With Meta's latest earnings report published this week, we find out the company has now burned invested $42 billion on building the Metaverse, with little to show for that: Its metaverse platform Horizon Worlds has less than an estimated 500,000 monthly active users, while sales of its Quest VR headset line (a metaverse peripheral) remain…
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Virtual Worlds Museum Site Launches XR Resource Page For Metaverse Fans, Researchers, and Developers
There's a new XR Resources page of the Virtual Worlds Museum (a proud sponsoring partner to this blog), expanding on founder Julian Reyes' mission to make the site a central community and information hub for people fascinated with the Metaverse and virtual worlds in general. “Researchers and world builders can visit the VirtualWorlds.museum,” as Julian…
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Matrix Resurrections artwork by Reid Southern (copyright Warner Brothers) Midjourney plans to make some kind of open world “holodeck”, as CEO David Holz confirmed with me earlier this month. But that actually just begs the question: Can it even feasibly do so? The company is already careening toward IP infringement challenges for its 2D image…
Wagner James Au / New World Notes 