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 World Analysis
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I'm working with Julian Reyes and the Virtual Worlds Museum on compiling the most complete list of sunsetted virtual worlds that have existed since the groundbreaking Habitat* in 1986. But are we missing any? You can see the full still being revised list with descriptions and links of sunset worlds here on the VRM site,…
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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 recently shared the top 10 most active metaverse platforms I'm tracking, with Meta's Horizon Worlds trailing at slot #10 with 200,000 monthly active users. I'm now working with Julian Reyes of the Virtual Worlds Museum to chart the top 11 through 20 most popular worlds — i.e. virtual worlds/metaverse platforms which currently have between…
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I'm helping advise the Virtual Worlds Museum update this list of live virtual worlds to include in its programs, track in its database, and add to a timeline of virtual world history featuring nearly 100 virtual worlds over the decades. We're tracking well over 30 live virtual worlds now, all of which fit these three…
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This GitHub page is a resource center for The Virtual Worlds Museum (a proud media partner with New World Notes!), an incredibly ambitious project to represent the entire history and present state of virtual worlds. It's still very much a work in progress that's regularly updated, but there's already dozens upon dozens of worlds being…
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Update, August 20: Click here to download Designing Virtual Worlds as a .PDF file. Designing Virtual Worlds is a milestone book in the history of the genre, relevant to basically anyone working in or thinking about online games/metaverses/MMOs/etc.; written by UK professor Richard Bartle in 2003, much or most of it is still relevant to…
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If anyone is interested, we are working on a VR Chat map based on #AmongUs Come check it out and join our discord! We would love to know what everyone thinks of it! https://t.co/cCfMGjaLSl#VRChat #VR #amongusfanart #AmongUsMeme pic.twitter.com/lGPtsyE3BN — Shoobly (@Shooobly) September 25, 2020 https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js Among Us, the wacky sci-fi party hit game of deception…
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Pic from HiveMind Collective, a Cryptovoxels creative community Cryptovoxels is a WebGL-based virtual world running on the Ethereum blockchain — and to be totally honest, not something I'd find immediately interesting, ever since the blockchain-based Decentraland, after much excitement from from people like, well, me, more or less went sideways. Juergen Hoebarth, however, who I've…
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A lot is riding on TENET, the next movie from Christopher Nolan, because it's the first big budget major studio movie that will open in theaters after the lockdown is eased, in mid-July — meaning its success or failure at the box office will greatly shape the future of the film industry. So it's also…
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Somehow during its seventeen years of existence, "virtual concert in Second Life" has generally come to mean just that, and not much more: One or more avatars performing on a stage pretty much like they would at a real world show, with the possible bonus of synchronized gestures and out-of-sync mouth movement. Late last week,…
Wagner James Au / New World Notes 