Wagner James Au / New World Notes

Author, strategist, virtual world reporter

Contact me!

Bio / CV

My Patreon Supporters

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.

  • Images from Philip Rosedale & Adam Frisby’s “Metaverse as a Shared Imagination” Fireside Chat in Breakroom – Video Coming Soon!


    NWN metaverse imagaination Philip Adam High Fidelity Breakroom 3

    Thanks to everyone who came to my fireside chat with Philip Rosedale and Adam Frisby on "The Metaverse as a Shared Imagination"! Many old friends and metaverse veterans were on hand, which was great to see. I'm fairly biased but at some point, I was pretty blown away by how all technical pieces came together (the 3D spatial audio, the web-based streaming, the Unity 3D graphics) into a sense of true immersion, to a point where it really felt that we were chatting by a fireside in a magical realm. That culminated in the moment when Sine Wave CEO Rohan Freeman instantiated a 3D sculpture of a horse over the roaring bonfire — which was a work of art originally created by his illustrator mother in Tilt Brush. (Above.)

    Video of our conversation coming soon. Meantime, more images below, including the Sinespace versi0n of Philip Linden, which you must see in its full animated flowering:

    (more…)

  • Three Amazing Avatar Poses in Fierce Black & White by Paola Mills

    SL avatar poses Flickr Cajsa

    Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting

    “Call me” by Paola Mills gives us a woman waiting for a phone call. She lives in a small enough town that the white pages can fit in one insert. I love the contrast between her very modern outfit and the vintage phone and white pages, though those phone numbers are from way way back before there were seven, let alone ten digits in a phone number. 

    For a different view of Paris, click here:

    (more…)

  • Expect a Real Life Crackdown on Second Life Gachas, Says Expert Lawyer

    Second Life Gacha regulation law

    Update, August 2: As Vaki predicted, Linden Lab announced the end of gachas in Second Life:

    Due to a changing regulatory climate, we’ve had to make the difficult decision to sunset a very popular sales mechanism for content in Second Life.  It’s widely known as "gacha", and is defined by a chance-based outcome as a result of a payment. We know that creators plan their content releases far in advance and will need to re-tool their products, so to mitigate the impact to those affected, we are giving a 30-day grace period, until midnight SLT on August 31.  After that time, selling content via gacha machines will no longer be permitted in Second Life.

    Read her analysis here. Original post from June below.

    Loot boxes in videogames are considered gambling and therefore illegal in some countries, and regulated in many other jurisdictions. But does that have anything to do with user-created gachas in Second Life? Extremely popular within the SL community, they are a vending machine game of chance to win valuable virtual goods. Should we expect a crackdown on them at some point?

    In a word, yes.

    "Gacha games/loot boxes/etc. are gambling" says Vaki, a longtime Second Life user who is also a real life attorney specializing in privacy and internet issues; she's even represented SL users in this field. "And they're starting to slowly be regulated as such. Best way to see this is in Chinese games like Genshin Impact, where gacha functionalities are regulated and providers are required to display the actual percentage of likelihood to receive each reward."

    While it remains an open question whether SL-based gachas in particular are considered gambling, Second Life creators of gachas, along with Linden Lab itself, should prepare for regulations around them:

    (more…)

  • Tomorrow: Join Philip Rosedale, Adam Frisby & Me for a Fireside Chat About the Metaverse & Imagination Inside the Metaverse of Sinespace’s Breakroom

    Sine Wave Philip Rosedale High Fidelity Adam Frisby Breakroom fireside chat WJA

    Click here to RSVP for a literal fireside chat with Philip Rosedale and Adam Frisby tomorrow at Noon PT inside Breakroom from Sinespace (a proud sponsoring partner to this blog), which I am thrilled to moderate. (And yes, that's Philip's classic SL avatar, updated for today with a glittering codpiece.) Event info:

    Since its inception in the early 90s, the Metaverse has inspired our wildest imagination — even if the technology to fully realize that dream has seemed just out of our grasp. But now, with advances in edge computing, VR, and 3D graphics/audio, nothing seems impossible. Given such powerful tools at our fingertips – what could this look like?

    The fireside will also showcase Philip's High Fidelity spatial audio, which was just integrated into Breakroom, while the world itself will be streamed onto Chrome browsers (no install needed). If you can't make it, no worries: The Breakroom team is recording the event and will be broadcasting in coming days.

    (more…)

  • Perfectly Posed Avatar Pics from Jayce Takeda

    Heat of the Summer
    Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting

    Jayce Takeda and friends sure are having fun. They seem ready to hit the beach at Sunvana and find respite from the heat wave. I love group shots and this is a great one. Folks are having fun and fooling around but you can still see everyone. At least in Second Life no one is going to sneeze at the wrong moment and ruin the picture. (Well, unless they have that in their head animation loop. Turn that thing off for pictures!)

    The next is a picture of heartbreak if there ever was one, click here:

    (more…)

  • Breakroom Brings Philip Rosedale’s High Fidelity 3D Spatial Audio to its Highly Immersive Virtual Worlds Streamed on the Browser

    As VentureBeat just reported, NWN media partner Sine Wave has teamed up with Philip Rosedale to bring High Fidelity's 3D spatial audio to Breakroom, its browser-based platform for virtual world events and remote teams, and it's a metaverse reunion of sorts:

    The deal is a convergence of pioneers who have made their mark on the development of virtual life. Philip Rosedale is the CEO of High Fidelity and launched Second Life in 2003. Sine Wave Entertainment, the creator of Breakroom, got its start as a content brand in Second Life before it spun out to create its own virtual meeting spaces for real-world events.

    Adam Frisby, chief product officer and cofounder of Sine Wave, said in an interview conducted inside Breakroom that the High Fidelity spatial audio will help Breakroom create a triple-A quality experience in a virtual world.

    Sine Wave’s Breakroom draws heavily on lessons learned in Second Life to create a frictionless, mass market, user-friendly virtual world.

    “You can hear everything better with High Fidelity,” Rosedale said in our interview in Breakroom. “Breakroom combines low-latency server-side video and spatial audio in a way that lets you hold an event like it’s in the real world.”

    Listen above for a demo, more here. I'm highly biased of course, but I believe this represents one major next step to bringing metaverse technology to the mass market.

    Speaking of which, I'm hosting a literal fireside event in Breakroom with Philip and Adam this Thursday at Noon PM, and there are a few seats available: Click here to reserve a spot in "The Metaverse as a Shared Imagination" chat.

    (more…)

  • Watch: Second Life’s First Big Budget Online Commercial – It Won an Award!

    Linden Lab – Second Life “Children of Creation” from Levitate

    Last year Linden Lab started production on the very first big budget online commercial for Second Life, but far as I know, it hasn’t yet officially debuted — though you can see glimpses of it in Second Life’s new-ish homepage (to the confusion of many).

    However, it is already online, hosted by the video’s creator, Levitate Media — watch above! In fact, the ad won a Telly “People’s” Award in that competition’s Online Commercial category. 

    Overall, it’s quite a bit better than I originally feared from the homepage imagery: 

    (more…)

  • Custom-Made Environment Enhancements Make Second Life Look Like Breathtaking Paintings

    Ship wreck @ Summer Cherishville (open)

    //embedr.flickr.com/assets/client-code.js
    //embedr.flickr.com/assets/client-code.js

    Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting

    Ask for beautiful EEP WindLights and you shall be given. This and every other picture in Lam Erin’s photostream is a stunner. If his name sounds familiar, one of his pics was featured in a column on rainy day pictures. He’s also the creator of PRISM apparel, though sadly he is not selling his EEPs. I love the many golden sunsets he shot, but this one with the pelicans and the shipwreck is my favorite. I love pelicans. 

    For a chilly touch, click here:

    (more…)

  • Why Understanding Virtual World Economies Is Important For Crafting Real World Policies Today

    State of Play Beth Noveck Jack Balkin

    Some social media readers were skeptical over last week's post highlighting Linden Lab veteran Gene Yoon's policy paper on virtual currency addressed to Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen. One reader snarkily suggested that that amounted to saying, "I was responsible for managing the currency used as commodity for pixel furries to use at strip clubs on a platform called Second Life".

    While amusing, this snark misses some import history of Second Life, and virtual worlds in general — especially now. 

    As Gene puts it: 

    "In a time where cryptocurrency has gone from zero value to almost a trillion dollars in the space of a dozen years, one would hope that people would understand that digital assets are real assets. Second Life was a truly remarkable window into the future, and the management of its economy was in fact a fantastic early look into the promise and perils of digital currency.

    "Sometimes I think that the people who used SL the most are in some ways the least able to see just how remarkable it was. Perhaps familiarity breeds contempt. But as William Gibson said, the future is unevenly distributed, and if you were lucky enough to be using SL in the mid-aughts, you got a preview into many aspects of online life today. I'll always be proud of my work in SL and all that my colleagues and the community taught me. I learned at least as much if not more from Linden Lab than I did anywhere else, and I'm grateful for that."

    All of that seems obviously true for me — but then again, I'm thinking back to ancient history (by which I mean 2004):

    (more…)

  • Why Linden Dollars Succeed as Currency Where Bitcoin Cannot: Stable Exchange Rate

    Linden dollar exchange rate versus Bitcoin

    Good points from reader Erik Mondrian, on how Linden Dollars help drive the success of Bitcoin, and why L$ is still more often used than BTC to buy goods and services:

    The other issue that I think is important to bring up in this context is exchange rate, which weighs the scale even further toward the Linden Dollar. Thanks to its rate remaining relatively stable, Residents can pretty much assume that 1 USD will be worth about 250 L$—now, tomorrow, next week, next month, and next year—an assumption that has a lot to do with the health of the Second Life economy and the willingness of people to accept and rely on Linden Dollars as a form of payment and stored value.

    Contrast that stability with Bitcoin—its infamous fluctuations and the astronomical rise over the years in how many thousands upon thousands of US dollars you'd have to pay to get just 1 BTC—and it should be obvious why using the latter as a currency is ridiculous. It's much more like investing in the stock market and then hoping that enough other people will want to buy in that the value of your "asset" keeps going up. (And also hoping, of course, that a certain billionaire CEO doesn't tweet something that sends its value falling again.)

    Seen in that light, comparing daily transactions is almost beside the point, since these two "virtual assets" represent entirely different expectations and mindsets. Bitcoin evangelists, like those cited in the article above, celebrate the so-called milestones of BTC reaching ever higher exchange rates and total amount invested. Meanwhile, in Second Life, we use the reliable ol' Linden Dollar to do what people tend to do in any society with a functioning currency: buy and sell goods and services (and pay our rent), trusting that the money we use to do that with will still be worth more or less what we gave or got for it the next time we're asked to open our wallets.

    The key reason that Linden Dollars remain stable against the US dollar, versus Bitcoin?

    (more…)