Happy XR Winter Holidays 2021!

It’s that time of the year again where I wish you great Winter Holidays! I can’t believe another year has passed by… and it’s been a crazy one for XR. We had the Quest making strides, new intensifying rumors on the Apple headset, a partial reveal of PSVR, Bytedance entering the field with Pico, Valve that may be working on a standalone headset, and many other things happening. We had insane news about people spending $50K to buy a JPEG of a monkey that anyone can copy-paste. But especially we had all the M-word hype that happened as soon as Zuck renamed Facebook as Meta.

Everyone now is talking about the “metaverse”, even if no one knows what it means. And everyone invents names that end in -verse, like the twinverse, the gameverse, the musicverse, and other similar abominations. That’s why I wanted to go full dystopia and I coined the term “Christmasverse”, with an image of how I imagine it to be.

I mean, we have gone so much high with the hype for the m**averse, that I wouldn’t be surprised if someone created really a Christmasverse. For sure, it would be much easier for Santa to gift some NFTs by staying at home and creating JPEGs in Paint with his elves at the North Pole instead of having to tour around the world in one night (with a sleigh) to give some real toys to the good kids. Immersive realities are a great advantage for him… as far as I know, he could be the mastermind behind all this hype. That old man is up to something for sure…

Jokes apart, it’s the time of the year where I also think about what I personally did in 2021. From many points of view, it has been an amazing year: my team has launched the fitness game HitMotion: Reloaded on App Lab; thanks to VRrOOm I have been featured on the Unity Blog for the concert Welcome To The Other Side; I have been for my first time in the USA and meet there so many friends; I have tried some incredible hardware like Ekto VR shoes, HaptX gloves, or Mojo Vision smart lenses. A lot has happened, but… I’m not satisfied honestly, I think I should have done more. Especially, I think I should have grown more professionally, building more and learning more… next year I should probably work on evolving in a smarter way.

For all the good things that happened to me this year, I have of course to thank all people that are around me: the people I work with (at NTW or VRrOOm) and without which I couldn’t build interesting projects; the people that have subscribed to my Patreon account and that support me financially every month so that I can keep the blog and the Youtube channel up; the people that every day send me news to review so that I can write better weekly roundups; the people of the community, that have always supported me in every possible way, and that have taught me so much. All the good moments from my year that regard my job have been because of all the amazing people that have been around me. I don’t want to write names today, because they would be too many… but if you are reading this post, you are probably one of them 🙂

I will spend these vacations with my family, relaxing a bit (but not too much), playing Resident Evil 4 VR (that I bought but never found the time to play), and eating a lot... my mother is already cooking some dishes that will make me gain at least 2 kilos just by looking at them. In the meanwhile, I’ll keep working, and I will think about how to have a great 2022. It may be a great year for XR, between the metaverse hype and the Apple hype, and I really hope to have some good professional opportunities next year. I’m already working to make some interesting things happen, so… fingers crossed.

What about you, instead? Do you celebrate Christmas? What are you going to do for the end of the year? Let me know in the comments! I wish you all some days of relaxation to spend with your family and all the people you love. If you celebrate Christmas, I wish you a merry Christmas and I hope you will receive many nice gifts… if you don’t celebrate Christams, well, I hope you will have a great Saturday! And I also wish you to celebrate the end of the year, and to have a 2022 full of satisfaction. As I’ve said, it can be a year of growth for XR, and I hope you will have many opportunities to exploit. I truly wish you the best, because you are amazing people and you deserve an amazing future. I send you all good vibes, a lot of love… and a potato, because the potato is the symbol of the metaverse and of great food… and I hope you’ll eat amazing food during these days!

Have a great time, and be happy!