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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Metaverse author Matthew Ball (who we were just talking about!) made a good point in Comments, responding to our survey that nearly half the respondents said they "never" want an Apple Vision Pro. The thing is, Matt points out, people once said that about the iPhone before it launched in 2007: I dare say that…
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Matthew Ball, author of The Metaverse, has a massive new report on the state of the broader game industry, "The Tremendous Yet Troubled State of Gaming in 2024", which includes this fairly surprising passage on the current state of consumer VR: According to IDC, worldwide VR/AR headset sales fell 8.3% in 2023, a year after…
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Loading… Now that Vision Pro is open for pre-orders, it's time to survey New World Notes readers, who are surely early adopter/hardcore fans for cool VR/AR devices. But does that mean they're lining up with credit cards now? Take the survey above, and explain your answer in Comments! (By the way: Respond to the poll…
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Appreciate this post from Jess Weatherbed at The Verge: Meta is investigating reports of tracking issues blighting its Quest 3 VR headset following user complaints that controller tracking performance is “much worse than the Quest 2” in some games… One comment from a game developer (known as carrotstien) for Eleven Table Tennis claims the issues stem from the…
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Here's what Meta's CTO Andrew Bosworth bragged about in June, regarding AI improving the soon-to-be-released Quest 3: Our decades-long work in AI is driving progress everywhere even in places you wouldn’t expect like Quest 3’s Touch Plus controllers. No tracking rings—AI models for estimating their position got so good we don’t need them anymore. Result…
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Resonite is a new free-to-play metaverse platform launching on Steam today, and it has a fairly wild history. It's lead developed by Frooxius, who up until very recently, was lead developer of Neos, another platform with extremely impressive features and content. But after reports that there was a sharp disagreement about integrating cryptocurrency into Neos,…
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The Meta Quest 3 is here, with a starting price of $499, and before I begin ranting, let me start with the positive: It’s launching right out the gate compatible with Roblox (along with Quest 2 and Quest Pro), so it’s immediately metaverse friendly. That’s good! Now to rant — or maybe “stand there, utterly…
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cyubeVR is easily among the most impressive-looking VR games I’ve come across, and while it launched in 2018, it just had a huge graphics optimization update. It’s now on sale on Steam until September 20. A voxel-based sandbox world, cyubVR (pronounced “cube VR”, of course) is credited as coming from Stonebrick Studios, but it’s really…
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Philip Rosedale's latest vlogcast interview is with Avi Bar-Zeev, an XR/metaverse pioneer who's been doing this so long, he was working for a virtual world company in the 90s which Neal Stephenson used to visit shortly after Snow Crash came out — when Stephenson first reportedly looked into creating the Metaverse himself. (At least that's…
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Commenting on Meta putting the new Quest/Roblox integration as a key to its metaverse strategy, VR expert "SkarredGhost" believes it was a rush job: Yeah, it's clear that Meta is betting a lot on Roblox. I tried today Roblox on Quest and it is so full of visible bugs that it is clear that it…
Wagner James Au / New World Notes 