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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The numbers from Nielsen analytics company SuperData seem to welcome us to VR's winter season: The growth outlook for augmented and mixed reality (AR/MR) headsets has been revised downward due to Q2 setbacks for consumer AR/MR. We now estimate that AR/MR headsets will only account for 23% of XR revenue by 2023, down from a…
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Earlier this year when the pandemic hit for the first time, my family and I were fairly well-prepared, in the sense that we had a huge supply of sanitary wipes on hand, even when store shelves had been completely wiped out of every bacteria-killing product. Why? Because late last year, I had been spending quite…
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UploadVR has an interesting story on a new prototype created by Facebook’s VR research division which replaces the traditional, totally bulky virtual reality headset with something closer to the sunglasses form factor we've been wanting since Snowcrash: Facebook Reality Labs’ new approach is a thin film where focusing is done by holographic optics instead of…
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While everyone in games and 3D graphics are enthusing over the new tech demo for Unreal Engine 5 (see below), it's probably the fine print that's more important today. Specifically, its updated royalty agreement: "You may have missed it in all of the #UE5 excitement," as Epic evangelist Alan Noon puts it, "but my fellow…
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After months or more of relative secrecy and silence, High Fidelity founder Philip Rosedale just unveiled Limited Early-Access invites to a 3D audio version of his virtual world platform, writing on his Facebook wall: We now have a way to bring people together using 3D Audio. It’s a lot easier to try than to explain,…
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Davigo is an upcoming multiplayer indie game for VR and PC which turns the relative lack of VR headsets into an advantage: The player with the VR rig plays as a giant, while the PC players are the little Davids scurrying around trying to defeat him. This via Road to VR, which has more details…
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Lots of interesting reader comments to my post last week wondering if Half-Life Alyx has yet to make a profit for Valve (almost certainly not) including this one from Kent Bye, a VR podcaster very much worth following: How would you incorporate the fact that Valve makes 30% off of future XR games sold through…
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Update, 8:50pm: In a VR community page conversation on this post, Facebook pal and veteran game designer Tadhg Kelly says my original estimate of average Valve salary is way off: "$150,000 per year per person forgets facilities, office costs, time off and social security etc etc. And Valve reportedly has a healthy bonus structure. Closer…
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Reader Tan Mojo saw the literally massive Travis Scott performance in Fortnite, and says something succinctly that's been hovering in the air: This was life changing. For a person like me who wants to become a content creator, this was a huge realization that the metaverse does not lie within known pastures. SL, Sansar, OpenSim,…
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XaosPrincess in High Fidelity from her home in Bavaria The Lockdown Dance Party runs tomorrow (April 25) from 2pm-6pm PDT in High Fidelity, and it should be a massive, worldwide rave. It's organized and hosted by famed social VR evangelist XaosPrincess, who's been trapped like most of us in a Coronavirus quarantine for weeks: "Ever…
Wagner James Au / New World Notes 