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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Above: Dr. Diaz talks with someone who formerly trolled them As Meta learned the hard way, avatar trolling is a core behavior in virtual worlds that needs to be dealt with on a constant basis. Surprisingly, there’s not much shared research around the phenomena, or best practices for how to address it on an essential…
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VRChat the startup appointed Chandra Janakiraman as Chief Product Officer (a veteran of Meta and Zynga) late last year, and is currently hiring three Director of Product roles to work under him. The description for the Director of Product, Consumers role is intriguing: The Director of Product, Consumers, is a highly strategic Senior IC role…
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Someone running a third party API tool recently came across this intriguing log-in status (screen capture at right), strongly suggesting someone on the VRChat development team was logged into the platform with an iOS tag on their current session. I.E., an iOS version of the VRChat app is almost certainly being live-tested. (This is via…
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Inevitably, VRChat can already be accessed through Apple Vision Pro (kinda sorta). There's no official optimized app yet — and the official Rec Room app for Vision Pro hasn't launched yet either — but if you're willing to do some workarounds, you can. Here's details from top VR YouTuber Bradley Lynch, who got this going:…
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What you’re looking at above (on the surface at least), is a VRChat furry wiggling its ears. But here’s the thing: The avatar's real life own, Rantis, is doing so… with his mind. Literally: “To control my ears I imagine them as a floating number along a slider and I adjust the intensity by thinking…
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VRChat concurrency data via the VRChat Metrics site. Well this is metaverse news starting the year with a pixealated bang: Peak concurrent users in VRChat during 2023's New Year's Eve (typically the platform's biggest day, usage wise), reached 105,991! That's quite a leap from New Year's Eve in 2021, when peak CCU reached just under…
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Just in time for the weekend, VRChat for Android is now freely available here on Google Play. I'm an iPhone nativist myself, but if you do have an Android, dear reader, I hope you give this app a try and report your experiences back here. Prior to this, it was in closed Alpha and only…
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VRChat Finally Adds Monetization Option for UGC — Here’s What Three Top Content Creators Think of It
VRChat finally launched official monetization last week right before the Thanksgiving holiday, so it's likely most metaverse folks in the US missed this long-awaited, much-considered feature. (It was announced last May.) Here's the basic gist: Paid Subscriptions allow everyone in VRChat to directly support the creators they love with dramatically less friction. At the same…
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Challenge #1: VRChat's user base of some 5-10 million people are from all over the world, some of whom (probably 10,000-20,000 of that number) are deaf in real life, and so can't communicate through VOIP. Challenge #2: Sign language "dialects" vary from country to country, with no one standard. Challenge #3: VR-based hand tracking for…
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For years, a programmer kept having a recurring dream — more a nightmare, maybe — where they were lost in an endless library containing all the knowledge of the universe ever written, but where the seeker never finds the answers they are searching for. The dream was inspired, of course, by Jorge Luis Borges’ legendary…
Wagner James Au / New World Notes 