New World Notes

Watch This Weekend: WebXR Awards (The Polys) Celebrating the Best of the Immersive Web

We’re thrilled to share that our original #WebXR game, The Escape Artist, has picked up some @webxrawards noms: Experience of the Year, Game of the Year, Entertainment Experience of the Year, and Developer of the Year! pic.twitter.com/0ZN7nG4Y7x

— Paradowski Creative (@paracreative) January 26, 2024

Update, 3/3: Event is over but awards are announced on social media.  The Escape Artist from Pardowski Entertainment took Game and Entertainment Experience of the Year.

Streaming on YouTube this Sunday (March 3), starting at 2pm PT, the Polys are announcing the best of the immersive web -- Best Game, Best Education Experience, and so on.  

You'll probably recognize many of the nominees and announcers like Evo Heyning (previously), and it's being co-judged by Julian Reyes of the Virtual Worlds Museum (a proud sponsoring partner to this blog), who's also a Polys co-sponsor through his studio Keyframe Entertainment.

Virtual Worlds Museum Site Launches XR Resource Page For Metaverse Fans, Researchers, and Developers

There's a new XR Resources page of the Virtual Worlds Museum (a proud sponsoring partner to this blog), expanding on founder Julian Reyes' mission to make the site a central community and information hub for people fascinated with the Metaverse and virtual worlds in general.

“Researchers and world builders can visit the VirtualWorlds.museum,” as Julian told me on a recent call, “and find useful information in one place; our XR resources page includes videos, podcasts, use cases, etc. 

"We’re also building a 3D visualizer of immersive platforms and that’s what the crowd funding page is for. The digital museum website will connect all the platforms’ communities, which is our end goal -- there’s not a solution like that anywhere.”

While I'm highly biased, I'm pretty excited by Julian's goal -- reliable information about virtual world history and active user communities around them are hard to connect with on the Internet. (Ironically enough!)

Start exploring here. To get involved, connect with the Museum on Twitter/X.

Join Bad Unicorn's New Discord Server for Fun & Second Life Specials -- Visit the Store for New Holiday Decor!

Bad Unicorn, proud purveyors of creative chaos with Second Life friends (and an awesome sponsoring partner to NWN), has a new Discord server: Join the fun plus SL weekend specials, giveaways, and a L$20K raffle.

Speaking of specials, Bad Unicorn just released several sweet holiday-themed decor items in the mainstore (click here to teleport), with a discounted price of L$60-99:

Have Yourself a Bad Unicorn Christmas With a Weedmas Tree, a Candy Cane Club, and Other Chaotic Yuletide Decor!

Bad Unicorn has a whole Santa's bag full of zany fun items for your chaotic holiday events in Second Life -- starting with this cannabis Christmas tree with seriously dank ornaments. Get it for L$799 at the Kustom9 shopping extravaganza: Click here to teleport!

Also on sale in-world is Bad Unicorn's better version of Elf on the Shelf:

That's right, it's a Sneaky Shelf Elf the owner can hide and challenge friends to find! Going for L$299 at the Frost-E Fest Event: Click here to teleport!

Plus there's much more chaotic Christmas/holidays items in Bad Unicorn's SL Marketplace page, including:

 

Watch: Seamlessly Jumping Through Multiple Worlds in the Virtual Worlds Museum. First Live Group Tour Planned for January!

Watch this sneak peak of the XR wing of the Virtual World Museum (a proud media sponsor to this blog)!  While I'm somewhat biased, it's pretty cool how team lead Julian Reyes is able to seamlessly jump through one virtual world to the next, with no loading screen or log-in page -- even leaping through one virtual world while already in another one.

This is made possible with Arrival Space, the XR platform Julian is working with for this portion of the Virtual Worlds Museum, which aims to be something like an immersive Wikipedia site for the entire virtual world/metaverse ecosystem, past and present. 

A live group tour of this technology is being planned for January 11, and I hope you join us. Visit VirtualWorlds.Museum for more info, and consider contributing to the project's crowdfunder, which is now hosted directly on the site.  

By the way, here's the worlds we visit just in this one six minute tour:

Virtual Worlds Museum Crowdfunder Includes Donor Reward of Your Own Custom 3D Exhibit World Build!

The Virtual Worlds Museum - WebXR Exhibit crowdfunder on Indiegogo (which I'm proud to support as a sponsored partnter!)

The very top tier, Virtual Exhibit World Build, costs $11,000 but comes with a raft of benefits including your own custom 3D exhibit world build. This would be an ideal for, say, game/virtual world startups and marketers who want to exhibit their content in an immersive space. (And as I can confirm from personal experience, that offering alone would generally cost 2-4x more than $11K to commission from a development studio!)

The full details:

 

Explore This Virtual World Timeline - And Request to Add Your Own Virtual World Platform To It

 

This is a fun and useful timeline for the history of virtual worlds from the team at the Virtual World Museum (a proud sponsoring partner!) which starts all the way back to Plato's Allegory of the Cave from 375 BCE to the present day. Very much a project in progress, developers of current virtual world platforms can request to add their world to this timeline by filling out this form.

I'm Helping Crowdfund the First WebXR-Based Virtual Worlds Museum Exhibit! Please Consider Contributing at Indiegogo!

Excited to announce a new sponsoring partner to New World Notes: A crowdfunder to create the first Virtual Worlds Museum in WebXR!

Spearheaded by Julian Reyes, a passionate advocate of virtual worlds, this is the first project I'm aware of to create an immersive museum dedicated to depicting the decades-long history of virtual worlds in 3D.

This is a much-needed project. Many/most virtual worlds are no longer active or easily accessible, only remembered by the millions of people who once socialized and created within them, now memorialized only in text and some random screenshots on old /non-interactive websites. Julian is a passionate advocate of 3D online worlds of all kinds, and during a recent visit to LA, spun for me an incredibly ambitious goal of creating a place where people like us around the globe can come together to share and explore virtual worlds we love and want to learn about.

As the official announcement puts it:

New World Notes Seeking New Sponsoring Partners! Here's the Details

As I continue promoting The Book and pondering my next career step -- go back to working for a metaverse company, become an analyst, start a column/podcast* are three likely steps -- one thing is certain:

New World Notes will continue, and keep striving to bring readers the best/most interesting content from Second Life and its many metaverse platform successors. It will also be a part of whatever I do next professionally.

Which is a long way of saying: New World Notes is seeking new sponsoring media partners. 

Click here to for latest rate card:  

Download New World Notes Rate Card Fall 2023

And if you have questions, here's how to get in touch with the ad team/me:

Welcome, Bad Unicorn: Creator of Comically Chaotic Second Life Items is Now a New World Notes Sponsoring Partner!

I'm psyched to welcome Bad Unicorn as a sponsoring media partner to New World Notes. Founded by Bhad Craven (Second Life Spotlight profile here), Bad Unicorn is a leading creator of SL items ideal for creating comic chaos with friends.

That's Bhad above, hitting me in the face with his newest item: Thor's Hammer, i.e. a bunch of old-ass Nokia phones duct-taped to a stick. [Click here to teleport to Bad Unicorn's mainstore, which is full of zany delights]

"Bad Unicorn began as a modest clothing store," Bhad explains, "but over the past decade, it has evolved into a dynamic platform for me to explore various aspects of design and digital artistry. I have created a wide range of items during my time here, such as houses, Halloween costumes, vehicles to weapons and many other random objects. I'm not really sure what inspires me, but fun and chaos definitely play a big part in this creative journey."

Creator of the recent meme-worthy combat folding chair, what really sold me on Bad Unicorn were smart/goofy items like his Basel Banana: