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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Citing The Information, Mac Rumors has a report that gives me some serious red flags: The first AR/VR headset that Apple has in development will need to be wirelessly tethered to an iPhone or another Apple device to unlock full functionality… It will be similar to the WiFi-only version of the Apple Watch, which requires…
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Last week's launch of Facebook's Horizon Workrooms garnered a lot of guffaws due to its sheer Zuckerbergian much-ness, but beneath the VR-for-office meetings platform is some impressive tech. On his blog, Jim "Babbage" Purbrick (who helped lead development of Workrooms) goes into detail on a key Workrooms feature — virtual mapping of the user's real…
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Facebook's new Horizon Workroom, a Quest 2-based virtual space for companies and organizations (just announced today) is the latest major project that's an unacknowledged descendant of Second Life: One of its lead developers was Jim "Babbage" Purbrick, who brought his own experience as a remote worker for Linden Lab who used SL itself as a…
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Based on earning reports from Q4 2020 and Q1 2021, we were able to estimate that Oculus Quest 2’s install base was around 3-4 million as of this April. Facebook announced its Q2 2021 earnings yesterday, so we can now update that figure based on this data: Revenue from Facebook’s Other segment, including consumer hardware…
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With Mark Zuckerberg announcing that Facebook has plans to become a Metaverse company, regular readers might ask, "Wait, weren't they already building a Metaverse?" I'm talking of course about Facebook Horizon, released in closed beta last September, optimized to run with the Oculus Quest 2 HMD that was also released about that time. However, it…
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Update, 7:18pm PT: While a Facebook spokesperson says this recall impacts Quest 2 owners "globally", it's unclear if "about 4 million" refers to the total install base worldwide, or just US-based owners. In a discussion on this post among VR developers (ironically on Facebook), Adam Frisby estimates the total Quest 2 install base worldwide to…
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I usually blog any Facebook/Oculus news with this irresistible pic of Zuckerberg striding like a dictator through the opiated masses in VR, but I'll give him some credit in this case:
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Here's the key results of my VRChat user survey with beloved VRC reporter Syrmor, primarily drawn from subscribers of his YouTube channel and my virtual world blog New World Notes. While it's not wholly scientific and has a relatively small sample size of 165 respondents, it is (I believe!) the first public survey of the…
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For some reason this huge news hasn't yet been picked up by any of the major tech outlets that I can see, but VRChat just raised $80 million in funding: The VRChat team is excited to announce that we have closed an $80M Series D investment round. This latest financing was led by Anthos Capital,…
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Here's results of my survey aimed at Quest owners, asking if they would buy VR apps for their headset if it contains ads. (As Facebook recently announced would start happening soon.) Of the 50 respondents, a majority answered that they would never buy or use a Quest app with ads, while a much smaller 18%…
Wagner James Au / New World Notes 