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!
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Loading… As promised, here's a short anonymous survey for SL merchants who regularly cash out their L$ earnings, which I'll be implementing in an in-depth report next month. NOTE: Take survey on desktop/laptop with a mouse/trackpad for best results, or click here to take it directly on Google Forms. My hope is the results give…
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Why does the Metaverse matter? Because at its best, it enables millions of people around the world to serendipitously form diverse, creative, economically sustainable communities in the same shared, immersive space — one that's largely free from the toxicity of traditional social media and barriers of the real world which divide us. In this excerpt…
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Excerpt, Making a Metaverse That Matters, Chapter 14: Metaverse Lessons for the Next 30 Years Community Creates Value — Not the Other Way Around The failure of Decentraland and other blockchain-based metaverse platforms, as we saw in Chapter 6, illustrates the limitation of virtual worlds that begin with virtual real estate sales and other speculation.…
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As promised a few months ago, VRChat is now taking sign-ups for the closed beta testers of the virtual world's upcoming iOS app. Though there's a pretty pressing catch — you need a fairly recent/high-end iOS to join the beta: We’re also looking for people that aren’t expecting a flawless experience. This is a test,…
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Here’s the latest luminously gobsmacking Second Life machinima from Teal Aurelia (first profiled here) and this time, it’s seriously epic. It also happens to be an ad for an SL-based brand: In this case, Crack Den, the long-running urban roleplay mini-MMO, and Teal’s precise visuals allude to the game’s detailed backstory right from the start: …
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Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting Jamiencells Stories (GlitterPrincess Destiny) is an extraordinary artist in Second Life. “Butterflies Are – ‘Real’ is gorgeous. In a strange way, it makes me think of a Modigliani portrait, though without his trademark elongated face and neck. Her work is not in…
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You've probably read rumors that Apple has lowered production numbers of the Vision Pro due to low demand, but a former senior developer of the Vision Pro sees things differently. Avi Bar-Zeev led Apple's Experience Prototyping (XP) team working on Vision Pro, has been working on VR headsets since the 90s, and so has a…
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Commenting on the hilarious trolling by SL player "Wendy" on Convai's new LLM-powered bots, reader Martin K. has some good thoughts on how to better optimize NPC conversation, referencing a classic game design text: To me it looks as if Wendy was intentionally evading the NPC's questions in order to stall the progress of the…
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One day famed game designer Raph Koster awoke to discover that his classic book, A Theory of Fun, had been turned into a plug-in for ChatGPT. Which was somewhat strange, because Raph Koster had not authorized his book to become a named discourse in ChatGPT. In fact, he only found out about the plug-in because…
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Longtime virtual world/VR developer Tim "Flipper PA" Allen just got a somewhat unwelcome email from Meta (above), announcing that the company will start collecting "anonymized data" from Quest 2/Quest Pro users. Going to Meta's privacy page, he noticed that what Meta's collecting is pretty deeply personal aspects of who you are as an individual: If…
Wagner James Au / New World Notes 