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: Virtual Reality
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Very good point by Adeon on the importance of mirrors in VRChat, jumping off from Strasz's video, where he notes, "While vision is key, where that vision emanates from [in VRChat] is even more important. We need to believe that it comes from our own eyes, and that the body parts we see are in…
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If people citing postmodern theorists in VRChat videos isn't enough of a sign of the virtual world's growing cultural prominence, here's another one: South by Southwest (i.e. SXSW), generally considered one of the leading tech and culture (music, movies, etc.) conferences in the US if not the world, is staging some of its events and…
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What you're watching above is a pretty cool hack of classic virtual world and new VR technology: Oculus Quest 2 running Second Life. While the venerable sandbox MMO wasn't originally architected to run in VR, its user community has created a number of unsupported viewers that are compatible with leading virtual reality platforms, while the…
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Well this seems unexpected: Nearly 5 months after launch, Facebook’s Oculus Quest 2 is the most used VR headset on Steam. That is according to the February 2021 results for the Steam Hardware Survey. Valve finally started counting Quest 2 headsets in its own category at the beginning of January. Quest 2 jumped from 17.40%…
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Based on a recent Facebook' revenue report, it looked like the Oculus Quest 2 had sold 1.5 million to 2 million copies in its first four months on the market, starting last October. Nielsen analytics company SuperData, however, recently asserted sales were significantly less than that: Over 1M Oculus Quest 2 headsets were sold in…
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A scant few weeks after I worried that Google's open sourcing of its excellent Tilt Brush VR app would lead the codebase to die the death that open source projects often do, I'm happy to say I was totally wrong: VR startup Rendever quickly created a multi-user version dubbed MultiBrush (available for Quest here), and…
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As Unreal unveiled its new MetaHuman system for highly detailed ultra-realistic avatars, I happened to be chatting with Oculus / Linden Lab veteran Jim Purbrick, who's been thinking quite a lot about the best avatars to use in a social VR space. "Increasing the visual fidelity of avatars raises the expectations for realistic motion to…
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Why do so many VRChat users look like cutesy anime girls, anyway? If you assume the snarky and simplistic answer is, "Because it's full of otaku geeks with a weird waifu fetish", watch this video which suggests the actual story is much deeper and far more fascinating than that. Created by "Strasz", who's becoming something…
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Apple has posted over 40 job AR/VR openings since last August, which more than any recent rumor swirling about, convinces me that Apple is moving into the AR/VR space. But! 40 or so employees is actually not that much amid a company with nearly 150,000 total staff. (And translates to Apple paying these new hires…
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Ian Hamilton of UploadVR caught an interesting point in Facebook's latest earnings call/report: Quest 2 “is on track to be the first mainstream virtual reality headset,” Zuckerberg said during the call… Facebook didn’t provide any specific figures for how many Quest headsets it sold. However, the company’s revenue in its non-advertising “other” category grew in…
Wagner James Au / New World Notes 