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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What you’re looking at above (on the surface at least), is a VRChat furry wiggling its ears. But here’s the thing: The avatar's real life own, Rantis, is doing so… with his mind. Literally: “To control my ears I imagine them as a floating number along a slider and I adjust the intensity by thinking…
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This 2024 prediction of mine came true sooner than I expected, as first reported by Matthew Ball this morning: According to leading Roblox analytics service RTrack, Roblox had an estimated 354 million monthly active users in December 2023. That's an addition of 54 million from last June, when RTrack estimated Roblox to have 300 million…
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In case you missed Matt Ball's prediction, here's the teaser trailer to OVERDARE, an upcoming mobile-forward metaverse platform from Krafton, the South Korean-based publisher of PUBG Battlegrounds. From the announcement: The project represents a bold, new frontier in mobile-based interactive platforms for user-generated content where users are free to express themselves creatively. Built on Unreal…
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Some predictions for 2024 before we hit the New Year: A new, well-funded metaverse platform launches. Likeliest candidates include Everywhere from Grand Theft Auto veterans and Playable Worlds from Raph Koster and crew. I say "well-funded" because we also sure to see some bootstrapped or crowdfunded projects hit the market as well. (I may know…
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Now that the first wave of Premium+ subscribers are getting to try out the private Alpha version of the upcoming Second Life iOS/Android app (and didn't have to sign an NDA to do so), I'm excited to share one of the first-ever published hands-on looks, courtesy longtime SLer TavishBrock Resident, who helps manage the Rosehaven…
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Segment starts at around 1:35:20! Woke up at 6:15am today to talk with the fine folks on the Yahoo Finance broadcast, chatting about how the Metaverse is poised for a comeback in 2014. Inevitably the topic was framed around generative AI, though as I try to explain on the segment, we're still not clear how…
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Above: From the Epic vs. Google ruling [.pdf here] We won't directly feel the impact of Epic winning its lawsuit against Google immediately, but barring some reversals, the Metaverse should start becoming much more Android-centric in coming years. That is, if Epic's Tim Sweeney, who's made fighting Apple and Google's control of mobile app stores…
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Along with helping promote user-made islands made in Fortnite, Epic just added a LEGO game expansion, Rocket Racing (from the creators of Rocket League), and Fortnite Festival, a Rockband-type multiplayer game mode from the creators of that franchise, to the core Fortnite experience. (Watch above.) Longtime game industry reporter Stephen Totilo has the rundown on…
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Above: Best Fortnite Island nominee Murder Mystery by Alliance (Island Code: 8513-2892-9361) The 1oth annual Game Awards are announced here in LA on December 7th, and while the show has been attracting more viewers than the Oscars since 2018, this year includes another milestone — the first award for user-generated content on a metaverse platform.…
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What went wrong with ‘the Metaverse’? An insider’s postmortem is a new guest essay I wrote for VentureBeat, and I hope you consider reading and sharing on social media! The quotes around "the Metaverse" are intentional, because I'm talking about the straw man version most people in tech have been toying with recently, not the…
Wagner James Au / New World Notes 