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Hypnotic Romance, an SL sim with secluded spaces for couples. Click here to teleport.
The Virtual Worlds Museum. Click here to teleport to their Second Life hub with tribute to sunsetted worlds!
“TV POWWW!” by Tom Boellstorff & Braxton Soderman. Read about the first televised videogame here.
The Fitting Room: Try out new SL fits in a secure, private space. Click here to teleport.
Breedables CoOp, helping the SL pet community grow through shared resources. Go here to get started.
Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
Zai Zai’s picture of “River Walk” is gorgeous and evocative of a Hitchcock film. The black and white with just the hint of fog makes me think of spies slipping microfilm in a crack in the wall or passing each other on the bridge. It’s the perfect setting for trading secrets or catching spies. They provide a SLurl, too. [Click here to teleport.]
For an out-of-this-world picture, click here.
"Remember Second Life? That Could Be Facebook’s Future" is the title for my recent chat with Bloomberg's Parmy Olson (author of the seminal book, We Are Anonymous). Here's some of my favorite excerpts, along with some reference links where available:
WJA: For any story I’ve seen about the metaverse now, there’s an analogue to what happened in Second Life. This talk of a metaverse real estate boom? Yes, that definitely happened. Talk of big companies opening up virtual headquarters? There were a lot of other Fortune 500 companies that opened up a site in Second Life.
PO: What do you make of the metaverse worlds being created today by Facebook and Microsoft?
WJA: Well, Facebook’s [social virtual-reality app Horizon Venues] is not very impressive so far. And I’ve talked to people who’ve worked on it and there’s apparently a lot of churn, people coming and going. There’s not much design focus. It seems like they’re still struggling to get it into a mass market product. The great irony is that Oculus is selling pretty well, but there are other [social] platforms that are more popular, like Rec Room and VRChat, which have way more active users. VRChat hit almost 90,000 concurrent users on the platform at the same time last New Year, which is getting higher than Second Life…
I know a lot of metaverse evangelists who promote it as the next big thing. But what’s notable is that very few of them actually use the metaverse with the degree of frequency that they say we’re all going to be using it. Using the metaverse takes time — being able to log on and just the amount of focus you have to spend. You have to be very aware of your surroundings in the immersive space, including audio cues. It takes a lot of time and attention…
Still, to me, even if [the metaverse] only becomes a more creative, more democratic alternative to traditional movies, TV and even games, I think that’s a big win for humanity.
Emphasis mine! Parmy and I also got into the weeds about why Second Life failed to go mass market:
Click here to teleport to the location, where I still hold a small parcel of land in Waterhead. And yes, this shrine to Snow Crash was created in 2006 with the approval of Neal Stephenson himself, brought in-world by a metaverse marketing agency at the behest of Penguin, Stephenson's publisher. Many copies were meant to be distributed, but it's possible that I have the only one that's still instantiated in Second Life. It originally contained a readable excerpt of Snowcrash which would appear in a heads-up display when you clicked the shrine, but evidently the scripting which made that possible has been lost to time.
Oh, the giant plant to the left?
Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
In My Bag is a post from Ani Eulenberg for her blog Cinnamon She focuses on her witty handbag. Literally a hand-sized handbag. Look closely. It’s there. The plaid dress, though, that’s everything!
For some celebrity high-fashion, click here:
Update, 2/4: I initially estimated a Quest 2 install base of nearly 7 million but forgot to count Portal sales and accidentally separated out Oculus app revenue. I've revised the estimate (and title) accordingly. Apologies for the error! (Hat tip: Amal Dorai.)
With Facebook/Meta's latest earning report, it's once again time to play "estimate Quest 2's install base and activity from intentionally obscure revenue numbers". With this latest Q4 2021 report, at least, the company has helpfully separated its XR-related "Reality Labs" revenue (i.e. Quest sales) from as far back as Q4 '20 — which as it happens, is when the Quest 2 went on sale. Here we go:
Meta's Mark Zuckerberg has stated that his "escape velocity" target for Quest 2 sales is 10 million, and we still seem to be just beneath that. Quest 2's install base by August of last year was about 5 million, and despite early reports, holiday sales were not strong — or strongly growing. Compare Reality Labs' Q4 '20 revenue to that of Q4 '21: It's only up by $160 million, i.e. just 535K more Quest 2 sales sold in the holiday season of 21 compared to the holiday season of '20.
Speaking of Oculus app revenue, we have some good indication of how many Quest 2 owners actively buy them:
There was lots of social media chatter around Maia Lyre’s impressive “Back to School 2021” group photo, because as anyone who uses Second Life knows, getting that many avatars together — 34 in all! — in the same space for a high quality group photo is a logistical and technical nightmare to overcome.
Which is a great challenge to feature on New World Notes. Can you and your friends top it? Here’s what Cajsa and I are looking for to feature in an upcoming post:
Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
Lia Oakleaf shot a pic of her friends along with lions and tigers and bears. Well, with giraffes and tigers and elephants which, if you think about it, is even more impressive. While fewer in number than yesterday’s epic group photo of thirty-four people, I also love Liaf’s group picture. After all, it’s not just fifteen people, there are all the animals, too. A veritable “Peaceable Kingdom.” Lia is also the filmmaker who created the back-to-school video with those 34 avatars. [Click here to watch.]
For a more relaxed pic, click here:
Sanny Yoshikawa が、New World Notesのなかから、毎月おすすめのバーチャルワールドニュースを日本語で紹介します。
Sanny Yoshikawa covers the monthly virtual world highlights from New World Notes for virtual Japan.
Since Facebook/Meta announced its Q4 2021 earnings report today — the first quarter of the company operating under the new name Meta, with a stated direction of making the metaverse — let's take a look at its first attempt at launching a metaverse platform for a mass market.
I'm talking of course about Horizon Worlds, open to the public late last December. Here's its user ratings so far, taken directly from the Oculus app store:
3.5 stars from 541 Quest users is… not bad, I guess, not atypical for an open beta launch.
These ratings also give us some insight into how many people have installed Horizon Worlds. As a general industry rule of thumb, for every single app store user rating, assume there are 50-100 other users who did not take the time to rate the app.
On that assumption, roughly 27,050-54,100 Quest owners have installed Horizon Worlds since its closed beta launch.
Now let's compare that to two other metaverse platforms also available on the Oculus app store, with similar features and functionality. First up, VRChat on the Oculus Store:
