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: New World Tech
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What you’re watching above looks like a podcast narrated by a chill Brit called Cliff Knotes, in an episode devoted to Second Life. But here’s the thing: The podcaster is AI generated, and the content that "Cliff" is discussing was pulled completely from Wikipedia. This is Wikéo, a new YouTube channel and site which converts Wikipedia…
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NewsArc is a free new iOS/Android app from SmartNews, a startup where Cory Ondrejka, Second Life's co-founder/ founding CTO, has been CTO for the last couple years. As he explains on his blog, the app is a kind of culmination of his career over the last twenty-something years, including at Linden Lab and Meta, and…
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Here's the latest demo video of the Quark engine from MetaGravity, which employs "causal partitioning" (more on that below) to enable single shard virtual worlds with massive concurrency. They're showing off that technology later this year with their own Minecraft server, which they say will be able to handle up 100,000 concurrent players. (You can…
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Quark Multiplayer is a new networking engine showing off the ability to deploy worlds/experiences with thousands (and thousands) of concurrent users in the same space. Coming soon to an SDK for Unity and Unreal, you can apply for Early Access here. It's a project from new-ish UK start-up MetaGravity, I'm not too familiar with the…
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If you're on Bluesky and want to connect with other SL/virtual world fans, Caspian Morningstar created this whole huge, two part starter pack. (You can also request to add your own account to the pack.) Morningstar's packs are up to about 300 members so far, though I'd estimate there's at least 3000 SL-related accounts on…
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Brendan "PLAYERUNKNOWN" Greene wasn't satisfied with lead developing PUBG where you fight other players in a small landscape, so he put together a team to create an entire virtual world engine dubbed "Melba" you can check out right now: Preface: Undiscovered World is an immersive tech demo showcasing Melba, PLAYERUNKNOWN Productions' groundbreaking technology generating Earth-scale world.…
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New World Notes columnist Cajsa Lilliehook just locked up her fairly large X/Twitter account (with nearly 20,000 followers) and opened up shop in Bluesky here. I wasn't surprised when she told me this last night (for reasons I'll explain below), but it's actually part of a larger trend: In the last couple weeks, my mostly…
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Programmer Damjan Minovski created a seriously impressive add-on for Blender which turns the 3D modeling software into a multiplayer experience. (Watch above.) It's part of his Omnistep project, which gives Blender game engine/virtual world qualities. And if you're wondering if multiple users can create in Blender running Omnistep, Damjan replies that's possible in the future:…
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Here's a cool update from NWN partner Equimake, the free indie platform for live, multi-user collaborative 3D building on the web: 3D Annotations, which enable creators to add clickable text descriptions throughout their scene, which when clicked, centers the user's camera angle on the annotation. To see what I mean, watch the tutorial video above…
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Via Julian Reyes of the Virtual Worlds Museum, this site here has a whole huge library of virtual world/XR tech being used in many various real world use cases. Most are decidedly on the dry/corporate marketing side, but that's very much the point: This is tech usually associated with gaming applied to an enterprise context.…
Wagner James Au / New World Notes 