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: VRChat
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A sharped-eyed Redditor recently noticed VRChat's tab for “Granted Avatars” had been changed to “Purchased Avatars”. Which, yes, means VRChat the company is actively working on an in-platform creator economy for avatars (I can confirm after talking with insiders). That the user interface has been changed suggests it's coming soon (i.e. this quarter or next),…
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The Virtual Worlds Museum (which I'm proud to advise for) is building out its network of official hubs across many multiple virtual worlds — see the whole list here. We're specifically looking now for a VRChat-skilled creator to build out a hub in that popular platform. This will be a VRChat world with interactive information…
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VRC Volleyball (website listing here) is the latest attempt in a decades-long quest to create a seemingly simple thing: A physics-enabled game involving a ball that people can play together from around the world in a 3D virtual world in real time. Most attempts end up being comically, unplayably laggy. This new version in VRChat,…
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New on my Patreon: We've tried for decades to make a physics-enabled game involving a ball that people can play together from around the world in real time. Most attempts end up being comically, unplayably laggy. But a new team-based volleyball game in VRChat, has been good enough to generate not only a large returning…
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Speaking of VRChat hiring, I kinda feel like the company should go ahead and hire community creator/merchant "lackofbindings" to make default avatars. Because, I mean, watch above. (Starts slow but shit gets real around 20 seconds in.) I watch this somewhat whimsically, because amazing avatars like this once seemed pervasive in Second Life as well…
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Meta is now laying off thousands of employees while all but announcing that staff working on Meta's Horizon Worlds is next on the chopping block this year. So it's important to note that Rec Room and VRChat — two metaverse platforms which have ironically thrived on Meta's own Quest platform — are currently hiring: Rec…
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Premiering online and at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah next week, Reality of Hope is a short documentary depicting two friends who first meet in VRChat's large furry community — and after a medical crisis emerges, the friendship deepens into real life in a surprising and powerful way. It's directed by Joe Hunting, whose…
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As expected, VRChat hit another platform concurrency record over the New Year's Eve holiday, hitting nearly 140,000 CCU as peak. (136,589, to be exact.) That's a new record breaking the last one of 100,000+ on NYE of 2023/2024, though falling a bit short of the 150,o00 I predicted last month. This continued usage growth is…
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Bullet Time Agent, as we covered here, is a VRChat-based, free-to-play adventure game (trailer above) created over several years as a one person labor of love by longtime community creator "Lakuza". Near pro quality in polish, ambition, and gameplay, Lakuza even hired voice actors for Bullet Time Agent, which takes up to ten hours to…
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Recently saw a Reddit rant about a VRChat avatar with a hilariously ridiculous number of triangles (above), and had to laugh in recognition at the title: "Friends joining with these half a million polygon avies are literally ruining the experience (not only for me)! This is outrageously stupid and unnecessary!" Maybe unnecessary, but also inevitable,…
Wagner James Au / New World Notes 