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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Flying in VR can help induce lucid dreams, says researcher With Quest headset sales slumping last holiday season, and their overall active usage dipping down to 1 in 3 active owners, there's a good chance your VR rig is gathering dust. Or maybe you're still enjoying it for games and virtual worlds like VRChat and…
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I promised myself I'd stop picking on Meta after last month's "Make Horizon Worlds succeed or get fired" debacle*, but this latest announcement is too painful to keep quiet about: Meta has made some strides on content by attracting more and more creators to build for the platform and creating some of its own first-party games…
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With news breaking that Meta is now laying off thousands of employees to focus on its AI products, this comment from reader Martin K last Thursday sure seem sadly prophetic: Since Quest headsets and Horizon Worlds cannot succeed on the scale of Meta's ambitions (and certainly not in 2025), I'm reading [Meta CTO's internal memo]…
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I was scratching my head last night about an "internal" memo that was "leaked" to Business Insider: "2024 was a pivotal year for Reality Labs and positioned us for greatness in 2025," [Reality Labs' head Andrew] Bosworth wrote. "The team beat nearly all of last year's aggressive sales and user goals, growing RL sales >40%…
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Trip the Light is a new VR game on Kickstarter that’s now painfully close to meeting its target, and that’s no surprise: It’s one of the most innovative virtual reality projects I’ve come across in some time. It leverages the VR motion controllers and sensors to… teach players how to ballroom dance with someone else.…
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Above: Experience offered on the Meta Horizons page Meta Connect is happening next week, and longtime New World Notes reader Martin K, an executive who works in XR, recently sent me some intriguing thoughts around Meta’s Horizon Worlds. On the surface, it’s an also-ran metaverse platform that has such a tiny user base, it barely…
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Join my Patreon to read this free excerpt to Making a Metaverse That Matters, delving into myths around the necessity of VR and AR for the Metaverse. And while you're there, please consider subscribing for premium content and special bonuses, including free copies of my books and ads here on New World Notes!
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I often say the market for metaverse platforms is about 1 in 4 people on the Internet, since 1 in 4 is roughly how many people enjoy heavily immersive 3D game worlds on their devices. But we are seeing new technology that enables immersion beyond a traditional game/VR device, as with Disney's HoloTile that I…
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WATCH: Disney’s HoloTile Points to Solutions Around VR’s Motion Sickness / Headset-Centric Challenge
In case you missed it, watch king tech YouTuber Marques Brownlee being the first person to get a hands-on (feet on?) demo Disney's HoloTile, created by Imagineer inventor Lanny Smoot. Basically, it's a grid of little motion-detecting treadmills on the floor, that enable you to walk in any direction, and have that motion integrated with…
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Meta just announced Meta Horizon OS, which despite the name is not specifically about its metaverse platform Horizon Worlds, but actually its mixed reality operating system for Quest devices which is now running on other upcoming XR headsets: Developers and creators can take advantage of all these technologies using the custom frameworks and tooling we’ve…
Wagner James Au / New World Notes 