Wagner James Au / New World Notes

Author, strategist, virtual world reporter

Making of Second Life

Making a Metaverse That Matters

Contact me — links below!

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.

The Virtual Museum Team hosts several museums in Second Life, Wolf Territories Grid and Roblox. Check out all the teleport links here.

Breedables CoOp, helping the SL pet community grow through shared resources. Go here to get started.

  • Get IncrediMarble: Free-to-Play, Physics-Based, Marble Slide Construction Game for iOS from Linden Lab Vet Dave Kap

    IncrediMarble is a fun new sandbox construction game for iOS where you get to build gigantic marble slide worlds with real time physics, and earn points by adding more and better slides. The more points you earn, the more pieces you win to keep upgrading your slides, and turn them into massively deranged contraptions. (Android and PC/Mac versions coming soon.) 

    The game is solely created by Dave Kap, an indie developer who got his start at Linden Lab. The game reflects both his time there, playing SL, and a dream he's had since a boy:

    "When I was a kid," as he puts it to me, "I had a toy that was just this huge set of plastic slides and a bunch of marbles. You connected the plastic slides together, put the marbles into the top-most one, and watched them flow down from piece to piece. I always loved this toy as a kid in the 80s and it turns out that even kids now still have this toy. I always wanted more pieces and the ability to defy gravity so a video game version was something I've always wanted to play. It turns out nobody's ever made a good version of what I wanted, so here we are!"

    Linden Lab helped hone his developing skills, while Second Life influenced IncrediMarble 's creative gameplay:

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  • “Second Life is a Game” Meme Inevitably Outrages Non-Gaming SLers

    SL game meme by Antonio Giano

    Antonio Giano recently wrote and posted this SL variation of the famous defenestration meme on a private Facebook group for Second Life users — and as you probably would have guessed if you read New World Notes on the regular, it provoked a long back and forth of outrage and argument.

    Which as Antonio tells me, was what inspired him to make the meme in the first place: "[A]s you can see, people are always fighting a lot on that topic." In fact the post got so heated, he finally disabled his notifications.

    As I observed on the Facebook post, the argument inevitably breaks down between longtime gamers who know Second Life has many similarities to many games — and those for whom SL is the first online game in which they've devoted serious time, energy, and emotional investment. Here's why:

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  • Fashion Friday Blog: Visit Vanity Unfolded for Fantastic SL Shopping Tips

    Put it off

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

    Put It Off is one of several excellent posts at “Vanity Unfolded,” a blog featuring the photos and styling of Hopa Shinobu. In the post, she explains why she has been doing posts with just credits and not writing as much as she used to. She prefers spending more time with her daughter and putting off what is less important.

    She has wise advice: “[W]e should use this time to rebuild our humanity and compassion to others. To put off the things that dont really matter and focus on the things that are priceless.”

    I also love how carefully she posed herself so her feet and shoes look right. Go to the post for the massively detailed list of decor, including: 

    • Hair:DOUX – Ubert Hairstyle
    • Top:Mossu – Nora.Cardigan – Print N2 @Uber
    • Jeans:RIOT / Celeste Jeans – Blogger pack@Uber
    • Shoes:Garbaggio // Nicole D’Orsay – Nude

    Coming up, a blogger wearing clothes…

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  • Edge Computing Will Transform the Metaverse: My Article for Samsung Next

    Edge Computing Samsung Metaverse

    "Edge computing is opening a door to the metaverse" is a just-published article I wrote for a new web magazine from Samsung NEXT, the venture funding arm of the tech giant, and as the name suggests, it attempts to explain how edge technology will transform our expectations for VR, cloud computing, and building a mestaverse worth the name:

    Edge computing — in which compute, storage, security, and networking occurs physically closer to end users and their devices — will enable us to think about the metaverse and related applications in a new light…

    In the eyes of many industry insiders, edge computing will be an essential pillar in the metaverse’s creation, by enabling developers to reduce latency in virtual worlds. This technology could empower new and better devices and new virtual experiences that support many thousands — and eventually, millions — of concurrent users in the same shared 3D space.

    As an elevator pitch to explain edge computing, I often say, "It's basically a real life version of the Piper Net from Silicon Valley." And as you imagine, in it I talk with Philip Rosedale, Jim Purbrick, and a lot of other luminaries who've been working in virtual worlds for nearly two decades, waiting for this technology to come. Philip and Jim of course have some interesting perspectives on edge computing, such as how it will improve the audio experience of virtual worlds:

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  • David Lynch Appears as Avatar in Breakroom from Sinespace to Accept Award at First Major Film Festival Hosted in a Virtual World

    David Lynch Sinespace Breakroom GIFF virtual film festival

    Acclaimed artist and filmmaker David Lynch recently appeared in avatar form in Breakroom, the virtual world for live events from Sine Wave Entertainment (a sponsoring partner to New World Notes). Lynch did so to receive an award from Mexico’s Guanajuato International Film Festival (or GIFF), one of world’s largest annual cinema events. Due to the pandemic, GIFF moved many of its scheduled events to a virtual campus built in Breakroom, so hundreds of registrants could safely watch short films in competition, attend panels, even participate in a studio pitch session.

    David Lynch avatar virtual world Breakroom film festivalAs a longtime Lynch fan, it was a professional highlight to help bring the master creator of dreamlike alternate realities into a virtual world for the first time. Lynch and his assistant safely logged into Breakroom from his home in Los Angeles, from the very same spot where he shoots his famous weather reports. As you might have guessed, getting his iconic hair as accurate as possible for his avatar was the most challenging task. To make it a truly Lynchian event, the entrance to the theater lobby where the director received his award was even made to look like the Red Room from his cult series Twin Peaks. (We did consider adding a backward-talking midget as well, but that’ll have to wait.)

    More details and video below. With this event, GIFF became the first major film festival to move its activities to a virtual world, but with the global pandemic still raging, I expect many more will follow. As for Breakroom, it’s recently hosted virtual world conferences for Stanford and the United Nations, and will soon launch a speakers’ events series open to all — stay tuned.

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  • These Mouth-Watering Still Life Photos of Food Are Actually Second Life Screenshots of Virtual Meals

    + citrus love ♥️

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

    Xinni Somwan’s “Citrus Love” appealed to me so much. I love oranges and became allergic to them as an adult, so I sometimes dream about them. This is a photo from a dream. I love the bold orange, the blurred orange in the front, and the appeal of all that fresh and juicy, tangy oranginess of them all. 

    More foodie goodness ahead.

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  • New iPad App Uses Machine Learning to Capture Real World Objects & Convert Them Into Standard 3D Files

    Caveat emptor and all that, but the iPad LIDAR Scanner just published in Beta seems seriously impressive, able to "capture" real world objects and convert them into imperfect but pretty usable 3D models. It works, says developer Laan Labs, by automatically extracting objects via machine learning (i.e. extrapolating data for unseen surfaces).

    More info from iOS app page: 

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  • Survey of Top Tech Company Staff: Facebook Not Doing Enough to Prevent Election Disinfo & Hate Speech — But Most Facebook Staffers Insist Otherwise

    Blind survey Facebook election disinformation tech staff

    With less than a month before the next U.S. Presidential election, here's new survey results from the development team of Blind, an anonymous messaging/virtual community app for company staffers that's especially popular at large tech firms.

    This one asked a question that's been the subject of constant press coverage since the 2016 election: Is Facebook doing enough to prevent the spread of misinformation and hate speech on its platform related to the 2020 election?

    With nearly 1600 responses, most from team members at major technology companies, here are the results (right):

    By overwhelming numbers ranging in percentages from the mid 60s to the mid 80s, staff at Microsoft, Apple, Cisco, and other tech firms believe Facebook is not doing enough. Notably, staff at several of these companies — LinkedIn, Google (thorough YouTube), and Amazon (through its customer reviews section) — deal with preventing misinformation and hate speech on their own platform, and presumably have better than average knowledge to evaluable Facebook's efforts thus far.  

    Contrast that with the response of Facebook staff themselves:

    71% of respondents answered that the social network is doing enough to combat election period hate speech/misinformation. (Still, it is notable that nearly 1 in 3 of Facebook staff surveyed believe they could do more.)

    Launched last week, the Blind survey ran until yesterday — when as it happened, Facebook removed a post by Trump falsely claiming that the flu is more dangerous than COVID-19.

    You can read more details on Blind's company blog — including results on a related question: On whether (as has been reported by Bloomberg and other outlets) Facebook's policies and algorithms are designed to support Trump and other right wing political figures. Answer:

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  • Stylish SL Flickr Stream Devoted to Virtual Car & Chopper Culture

    Correre è un'arte, ma correre con passione è la vera arte.

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

    Who doesn’t love working on cars? “Correre è un'arte, ma correre con passione è la vera arte” impressed me with actually getting a bit greasy, though usually mechanics don’t get covered so thoroughly in grease. (My dad was a mechanic, cars and farm equipment, and I spent many hours helping in the garage.) My niece worked as a parts-puller and seriously, she could be covered in grease from top to bottom. Still, it’s lovely to see some grease. 

    Coming up, a great graphic image.

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  • Using Virtual Worlds for Real Work — An Oculus/Linden Lab Vet’s Insights

    Virtual meets RL work Jim Purbrick Oculus Linden Lab

    In the latest blog post by Jim "Babbage" Purbrick, a lead developer/consultant at Oculus, Eve Online, and of course Linden Lab, he shares his thoughts on using virtual worlds for real world work. Most of the examples he gives there are from his time as a Linden — but I wouldn't be surprised if we see Oculus come out with products partly inspired by the lessons he describes here. Such as:

    After an hour or so of pair programming with Zero to hand off the code I’d been working on during the UK daytime, other Lindens would start arriving at the San Francisco office and we would start using Second Life for larger scale team meetings. Even without tracked headsets, the 3D positional audio and instantly recognizable avatars made these meetings more successful than video conferencing. Because everyone was in Second Life together I felt far more present than I typically do using video conferencing to join a meeting in Menlo Park as the lone participant in London. Everyone was an equal participant in every meeting.

    I expect this to be a common model for collaboration between remote workers in VR: the virtual space provides a forum for communication, conversation and annotation while existing applications, editors and tools are brought in to VR to provide familiar and powerful ways to create content together. I’m particularly excited about the possibilities for people to collaborate on very complex problems at the limit of human comprehension like large scale software development which are often hard to discuss in real life, but possible to visualize, understand and explore together in VR.

    This doesn't necessarily mean copying business standard meeting tools into a VR space, so much as leveraging the capability of virtual worlds in a work context. As Jim puts it to me:

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