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!
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Category: VRChat
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If I'm describing this video accurately, it's mind-boggling: VRChat YouTuber Mitama Sakumaru (known as "390_JUGGLER" in VRC) is juggling in real life — but the objects he's juggling only exist in VRChat. Yes: The juggled objects in VRChat are physics-enabled and respond to his real life juggling movement via the motion tracking of his VR…
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FlipperPA has a good analysis of multiplayer Beat Saber, which has evolved to become a supportive social VR community that reminds him of Second Life in its early "small town" years — except instead of communicating via text, socialization is through real gestures: It may be by complete accident, but it seems like they may…
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As another sign of the VRChat community's growing strength as a creator ecosystem, here's another fairly mind-boggling factoid: Like many virtual worlds, VRChat has an internal scripting language. (Called Udon, in this case.) However, many developers (especially those who work on a professional level), prefer to code in C#, which already runs natively in Unity…
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Quick tip on spin detection: When a company spokesperson claims their figures have "doubled" or even "quadrupled", but decline to give you specific, absolute numbers, make sure your antennae twitches furiously. So it is with Facebook's Andrew “Boz” Bosworth, recently making this claim about Oculus Quest 2 sales which are being breathlessly repeated by VR…
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Since launching last August, "The Devouring", an incredibly ambitious multiplayer survival horror game created inside VRChat, has become a huge hit within that virtual world's community — level designer Lakuza tells me it's since attracted nearly 350,000 total visits and counting. So I wasn't totally surprised to learn that two of the original development team…
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I didn't think this would be possible but there's now a driving simulation in VRChat with an insane level of detail. (If you have VRChat installed, click here to play) "It's very well scripted and a great example of the types of interactions that are possible with the Udon language [VRChat's scripting system] when close…
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While VRChat attracts quite a lot of attention thanks to its smart and inventive community, and Rec Room for its high usage numbers and valuation ($1.25 billion, the Wall Street Journal just reported), both of those heavily-funded social VR platforms still seem to be over-shadowed on the feature and UX front by Neos VR, a…
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A bot on the official VRChat Discord (link here) regularly updates the number of online users — or you can just click here to get that number. For instance, as I write this at around 1:30pm PT, for example, there are 29,414 concurrent users. Which is interesting, because if you check VRChat's concurrency via Steam…
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In this new video from Strasz (previously featured here), the VRChat sociologist deep dives into the obsession with staring at one's avatar in virtual mirrors. (It's such a popular VRChat pastime, we devoted two posts and an original comic to it.) Heavily citing French postmodernist theory ("Foucault* would have a field day in VRChat"), Strasz…
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Why do so many VRChat users look like cutesy anime girls, anyway? If you assume the snarky and simplistic answer is, "Because it's full of otaku geeks with a weird waifu fetish", watch this video which suggests the actual story is much deeper and far more fascinating than that. Created by "Strasz", who's becoming something…
Wagner James Au / New World Notes 