As always in January I like to play the speculation game and make my personal predictions for augmented and virtual reality for the new year (2022, in this case). The difference between the two is becoming always more blurred, but for this year I prefer keeping them separate because they still have different markets. I can’t guarantee that these predictions will come out to be true (I always joke about the fact that I miss many of the predictions about Meta/Oculus), but I think they will be worth reading anyway to understand what can be the trends to look for in this new year.

So… let’s start!

GENERAL TRENDS

The metaverse hype will cool down

This is not a tweet, it is a #metaverse message…#VirtualReality #VR #AR pic.twitter.com/f9aDJ2mbc3

— TonyVT SkarredGhost (@SkarredGhost) July 25, 2021

We all know the Gartner hype cycle of emergent technologies: they are initially overhyped, then undervalued, and finally, they fulfill their potential and become popular and useful. The M-verse will follow the same road: now it is at the peak of its hype after the Zuggity Zuckity has changed the name of his company to “Meta”, but soon will go straight to the trough of disillusionment. You may wonder why I think so. Well, it’s easy to be said:

• No one has an idea of what “metaverse” mean. As XRSI’s Marco Magnano told me: if even we in the industry can’t agree on a meaning on the term, it’s impossible we are able to communicate it properly to the average consumer. I mean, we have not even agreed if it is “the” metaverse or “a” metaverse (I believe in the former, btw)… how can we produce and how can we bring to success something that we don’t even know what it is?

• No one has an idea on how to build it. The ecosystem is full of people that keep writing articles about “How we will study in the metaverse”, “How we will work in the metaverse”, and that make talks about how one day we will have a concert with 20,000 people all together in VR like if it was happening in real life. Then if you ask them “ok, cool, and what is the tech stack you would use to build it?” they go lying in a corner in fetal position while crying. Or they answer something with utterly no sense like “I don’t know now, but we’ll discover it in 5-10 years”. That’s a bit like saying that I will marry Dua Lipa, and I still don’t know how it is going to happen, but for sure in 5-10 years, it is going to happen (I truly hope so). As the god John Carmack has said, we are too full of “architecture astronauts” while we need people that work on the real technical problems, that create the tech stack that makes the metaverse possible. No one still knows how to build the necessary technologies to make it happen.
• Everyone dreams about features that are not going to happen in the short term. My favorite one is “interoperability”: you shoud be able to go through all virtual worlds carrying with you what you have got in one into the other ones. All XR brands talk about “building the metaverse together” as their core mission. And that’s amazing, I love it. Unluckily, in the last 12 months it has happened to me that on two platforms I tried to make a reference to another competitor platform in the environment (a little reference), and I was asked to remove it otherwise my experience would have been removed. And it’s hard to me to imagine that companies which don’t even want to see the name of another company on their platforms, want to build full portals that drive you there… But yes, that will happen in 5-10 years, this too… someway, somehow…
• The economic value is still not clear. We have people speculating by buying virtual land in virtual worlds because “one day when everyone will live in these worlds, it will have a lot of value”. I hope for them it will happen, but actually these worlds are currently empty and will remain mostly empty in 2022, because they have been built around money and not around providing value to the users. And this is what they are getting: money and not users. The result is that in some months, there will be some people that have spent tens of thousands dollars for a piece of virtual land in a virtual desert and will panic that it will be totally useless because the world they have bought it in is not used by anyone, and the celebrities and brands that are his neighbours are actually never there and bought the land as a marketing stunt. This is not going to turn out well. Not to mention that story about JPEGs of monkeys…
• The technology is not ready. Networking libraries, VR hardware, AR glasses, common standards… nothing is ready to build the metaverse in the short term. We have to wait 5 to 10 years for some magic to happen. Yes, I use “5 to 10 years” a lot when I want to say “I have no f***ing clue”, too.

I could go on with other reasons, but I think these ones are enough to convey the idea. The M-word (and M-world) will be a reality one day, but that day is not now and not even this year. I believe a lot in the potential of the big-M, I really want this to happen, and I’m sure it will bring a lot of value to everyone, and that the creator economy and even some kind of land management will be important, but this is not going to happen soon. And people get bored really fast: in some months, all the cowboys that were blabbering about the metaverse will just run away from our field because they realize that they have to work many years to actually see their investments to become profitable. But they don’t want to work hard for years, so they will run away looking for some other buzzword that may look to them able to provide easy earnings, like “3D printing of organs”, “6G”, or “cyberpotato”. I wonder if the articles saying “the metaverse is a fad” will start being written this year or in 2023: the same people looking for likes with the articles about “how we will go to the toilet in the metaverse” (this is actually an article I would love reading) will search for likes with “why the metaverse will never become a reality”. And trust me, I was here in VR when the tech was overhyped, I was here when everyone was running away from it, and I’m still here when the VR market is actually growing in a healthy way. I think the metaverse will follow a similar trend. Brace yourself.

The VR market will grow up, thanks to Meta

After so many years, finally VR is reaching its tipping point where one platform will reach the 10 million sold units, which is considered as a magic number for a healthy ecosystem. 10M means that many people have a friend with a headset, so it’s easier for someone to try a device and be convinced to buy one himself. Plus it means that the market is big enough for developers to live out of it by selling content to the users. And more developers mean more and better games, which means more users that come for the content, and this means a bigger market, and so more developers that are attracted from it, and so on. Of course, the device that is reaching (or has already reached) this magical number is the Oculus Quest 2, which has literally taken VR out of its quicksands, becoming the first mainstream device.

Quest is still not truly mainstream, but let’s say it is entering the mainstream market. This is not happening everywhere: at the moment, mostly in the USA, thanks to the big marketing push by Meta in street ads and TV commercials. In Europe, this marketing effort is just starting now, so the penetration is not that high, yet. At the moment, the adoption of VR is very different in different parts of the world. In the USA, it is almost mainstream; in Europe, it is something for people that have some knowledge of gaming or technology; in South America, is very difficult to get a headset. The situation is usually less uniform than people think: talking with other VR developers, I realized that 50-70% of the revenues of each game come from the US. The rest of the world is still lagging behind, and this is something that should be improved.

The other form of inequality comes from which headsets are being sold in the market: almost all bought headsets in the consumer market are Quest 2. Meta is selling a great product with great content at an under-cost price, and its offering is unbeatable. This has been on one side amazing to increase the size of the VR market, but on the other side, it is becoming concerning, because Meta has now a de-facto monopoly, controlling all the standalone VR market, and more than 60% of the PCVR market. Considering that Facebook has been known for many shady practices in the past, knowing that our market is totally in the hands of this company doesn’t make me happy.

In 2022, I envision VR entering more in the European consumer market, and the fact that Meta has started to showcase ads about the Quest in some countries here is proof of that. If it manages to enter the European market, it means that Meta can sell many millions of headsets more than in 2021. It also plans to hire 10,000 people working in XR in Europe, and while on one side it makes me happy that Meta is investing in European talents, on the other side, it worries me that managing all these people, can apply more pressure on the decisions of the EU about privacy in XR.

I think that in a good part of 2022 we will just see the VR market growing because of the huge growth of the Quest 2. VR in 2022-2023 will definitely enter the mainstream market, and I wonder if it will just be because of Quest or there will be some other devices. We strongly need a competitor, and I hope we’ll see one of them towards the end of this year.

Headsets

Meta still to dominate the consumer market

I’m happy to be proven wrong, but I don’t see any credible competitor in the consumer market for Meta in 2022. I mean, someone able to offer a headset that is so cheap, so polished, and so full of interesting content. Yes, there may be some companies entering the market and stealing some market shares (I’ll talk about this in a while), but I think that the competition will need some years to catch up. The Quest will still be the king in 2022, and probably will arrive at least at 15M sold units this year.

I don’t think there is much more to say about this device than you all already know: the Quest gets new updates every month and is getting always more features. From a VR headset for gaming is now an MR headset for entertainment and productivity. It is easy to be used. New amazing content is coming, like Assassin’s Creed VR or GTA San Andreas, and some very popular VR titles like Population One or Beat Saber, are exclusive to its standalone platform. It costs little money, and Meta is spending many millions in marketing: when I was in San Francisco in November, there were ads about the Quest everywhere in the city. It’s very hard to compete with all these features.

I’m not saying that a new competitor can’t enter the market (I really want this to happen, actually), I’m just saying that the barriers are very high, so gaining shares in this market needs a lot of time and a lot of money. It’s very unlikely that the launch of a new headset, which should also cope with the chip shortage, can reach the same numbers as Quest in 2022.

Meta this year will also launch Project Cambria, a high-end device with better graphics, better ergonomics, passthrough MR, and more horsepower. The launch will probably happen in Q2-Q3 this year, for a price that I envision in the $5-700 ballpark. This headset will serve to make Meta also conquer a bigger share of the prosumer market, the ones that are unsatisfied from the current Quest performances and/or want to use the Quest as a productivity tool. It will also be a defensive move against Apple.

I don’t think we’ll see the launch of a Quest 3 this year (it would compete directly with Cambria), but I think we’ll see some revelations about it, and a 2023 release. Quest 1 will become abandonware, instead: it is just too old to catch up with all the new features and games of Quest 2.

Apple could announce its headset

The rumors on Apple entering the XR field are intensifying, and from my experience, I can tell you that when this happens, there is something that is actually true behind all the leaks. It seems that the company from Cupertino should reveal this year a new headset capable of MR/VR, with very high-resolution displays, high-quality passthrough, and huge processing power (for a mobile device). The headset should so be a premium one, for a premium price (rumors say $1-3000 per unit).

The announcement should come this year at WWDC according to many, but there are already rumors about this being delayed because of the pandemic, the chip shortage, and some technical problems on the device. And there is still the possibility that Apple cancels the project, something that wouldn’t be new to it.

Making a prediction of it is really hard, but my gut says that probably we’ll have a reveal this year and a launch next year. If this happens, it could create a new hype around all XR-related technologies in the second half of this year, and this hype could mix with the one of the metaverse… or maybe not, because actually, Apple is not interested in this buzzword according to various rumors. An announcement by Apple could accelerate our ecosystem because Apple always gets huge attention from the press. It could have the same beneficial effect that we had when Zuckerberg told about the name change to Meta.

This would also be a disruptive force. I don’t think it would disrupt the Quest, because it is a different market (for now)… but I think it could harm many prosumer AR and VR headsets. If the features that have been rumored are true, all the brands proposing a high-end headset for professional use should be worried, because this could offer similar performances, but with an Apple on it, and all the famous great UX of all Apple devices. This device could be less for gaming and more for creators and professionals (a bit like the Mac computers). Meta should be more worried about Project Cambria and all its goal of making the Quest/Cambria a productivity tool. Apple has years of experience in offering tools for productivity that are used by all people working with videos, 2D, 3D art, and written articles, and I don’t think Meta is ready to compete with this.

It will be interesting to see how Meta will compete with Apple. Both companies are loved and hated by the mainstream for different reasons, but the Apple brand is much stronger, and also has a better ecosystem ready, and especially has stores where to make people try the headsets and market them as substitutes for PCs and TVs. When it will launch, it will make a difference.

We could see Bytedance’s first move

Bytedance has acquired Pico last year, but after the acquisition, we had no news about it. Pico is continuing its business as usual, but I don’t think this will last for long. If the Chinese giant has spent more than $700M, it is because it wants to enter the XR field, and after a year, I think it’s time we’ll have some first news about its plans.

Some of the possibilities are:

• New cool exclusive content for the Pico Store, that is already growing with interesting titles. This can be worldwide-offered content, or something just for Mainland China;
• An international consumer launch of the Pico Neo 3, that already has feature parity (on the hardware side) with Quest 2;
• The teasing of a future consumer VR headset;
• The teaser of a new AR visor/headset incoming, probably exploiting the AR R&D that Bytedance has already done to offer AR filters on TikTok.

I’m not sure about what is going to happen among all of this, but I’m sure we’ll start having some news from Bytedance soon because I think the time is ripe to understand Bytedance’s vision on XR. Bytedance can’t compete out off the bat with Facebook, but it has deep pockets too and also may have the support (and the money) of the Chinese government, so it is a company to keep an eye on.

PSVR 2

Even if Sony has not confirmed a release window for PSVR 2, I believe that it will be launched in 2022, probably in the last part of the year, in time for the Winter Holidays. It will come with a good catalog of exclusive games, for a price of probably around $400. I imagine it having decent success, but considering that the chip shortage is hurting the sales of PS 5 and that in the meantime many kids are discovering the Quest, I find it hard that the new console by Sony can sell as much as Meta’s device. I believe Sony should have launched everything two years in advance, so the sales of a PSVR 2 could have a chance to outperform the Quest 1, re-writing the history of VR… but now it’s too late to catch up.

PSVR 2 will surely be a very good headset (it has amazing features), and since it will be paired with a famous console, and host a good collection of games, it will have millions of sales in its lifetime. It focuses on high-end graphics, and it will be an important test to understand how VR users still value this feature over the usability and the low price of Quest. I predict a good success, but not a disruptive one.

PC VR

There is a lot of debate on if PCVR is dead or not. I don’t think it’s dead, but for sure it has lost a lot of its appeal. And with the success of Quest 2, many VR devs are aiming only to standalone devices now, and either they don’t publish for PC, or they publish for PC a game with the same graphics as Quest. The result is that it becomes almost useless to buy a $1000-worth Valve Index that offers increased realism to then play only low-poly games. It would be like buying an 8K TV to play Minecraft or Minesweeper. For PCVR to have sense, we need games with fantastic graphics, like Half-Life: Alyx, which put you in awe when seen through a high-res, high-FOV headset.

I think that PC VR has only a few chances to shine again:

• PSVR 2. The new Sony headset may convince more developers to create high-end games for this console, if it sells enough. If this happens, it would be quite cheap to make a porting of PSVR 2 games to PCVR and release the games also on Steam. If this happens, PCVR people can have great titles to play again;
• Hybrid games. If developers of PC games want to invest more time to create a VR version of them (like it happened for No Man’s Sky, or Microsoft Flight Simulator, for instance), this could help a lot the PCVR market. Also VR mods of existing games (thinkg about Resident Evil 2 and 3) can be a help in this sense.

I think it will be anyway a tough year for PC VR. The software market will have a slight growth, but it will be driven anyway by the Quest, that is a standalone headset, which makes up 60% of all the SteamVR users. The hardware market won’t grow much, in my opinion.

Some headset surprise?

There are many brands operating in the XR field, and it is legit to wonder if some of them will surprise us with some unexpected launch. I don’t know who… otherwise it wouldn’t be a surprise :D. There are some rumors on the Valve Deckard, that could be Valve’s standalone headset, but given that Valve is still struggling to manufacture its handheld console, I don’t think a launch may happen this year. But I foresee we can have more leaks on it.

Another brand I’m very curious about is Samsung: sooner or later, it should announce something, either in VR or in AR. Samsung has always released interesting products (think about the GearVR or the Odyssey), and it would be cool for it to release a standalone headset with mixed reality features. It was rumored until 2020… who knows if they are still building it…

Hardware technology

Lightweight headsets

On the technology side, we have seen that always more headsets are abandoning the usual shoebox shape, and I think that this trend is continuing in 2022. Think about Vive Flow, Huawei VR headset, Project Cambria, the rumored Apple headset, Lynx R-1, Panasonic Shiftall… all of them are lighter, and cooler to be seen than old headset. Most headsets that are going to be launched in 2022, especially the standalone ones, will look like big sunglasses or ski goggles.

I think that we will keep seeing the shoebox shape only from Chinese Quest clones, or high-end headsets that will need a bigger shape of the device to dissipate the heat, and/or to offer a wider FOV. For the rest, we’ll finally see a change in the design of headsets, that will so become lighter, more comfortable, and also less awkward to be worn outdoor (e.g. on a plane). This will be possible thanks to microdisplays and pancake lenses.

Passthrough MR

All upcoming VR headsets will ship with some form of passthrough AR. This is a trend that started in 2019 (with the Quest, Vive Focus, and Lenovo Mirage Solo… yes, the Lenovo Mirage Solo, who else remembers about it?) and that has becoming always more prominent. VR headsets are not only for VR anymore, but they are all hybrid headsets.

This year, passthrough will become colored: headsets like Project Cambria and Lynx R-1 will let people finally have high-quality passthrough MR that is truly usable, and that is not distorted and black and white. This will give headsets many more uses, because they will be able to be used both as VR and as AR: I envision many apps also offering a hybrid mode, with some things happening in VR and other things happening in AR.

This is something that I personally always envisioned, and in fact, the game that my team at NTW is building, HitMotion: Reloaded (play it!), was already in passthrough AR in 2019 on the Vive Focus Plus, so that to guarantee the safety of the users that could play our fitness game by being aware of their surroundings. In 2021 we implemented a hybrid model, and the user can choose if prioritizing the sense of immersion in the game with VR, or its safety and awareness with AR. I see something like we did become always more popular inside Quest apps this year.

https://gfycat.com/memorabledefinitiveinsect-virtual-reality-oculus-quest

Colored passthrough, especially when paired with other features like environment understanding and spatial anchors (all features that are coming to Quest), will make VR headsets become truly competitive with native AR ones. I think this year we will have always more examples of this kind, and the Apple headset should be the final realization of this trend. HoloLens has been warned.

Eye tracking

PSVR 2 will be the first consumer to implement eye-tracking and foveated rendering. Project Cambria should come with eye tracking too. 2022 will so be the year in which many consumer and prosumer headsets will start to ship with eye tracking to offer better performances, better graphics, and also a prettier appearance inside social VR spaces. If a headset must not be super slim or super cheap, it will come with eye-tracking cameras incorporated, or at least with the possibility of purchasing an eye-tracking add-on.

For manufacturers, eye tracking will also mean gathering more data about the users, and I think we should all talk about this topic.

Accessories

I envision the aftermarket for VR headsets to grow. Haptic suits like the one offered by bHaptics, addons to increase the ergonomics of a headset (e.g. the Elite Strap), power banks (e.g. the one by Rebuff Reality), haptic gloves, new controller types, improved earphones, hygienic covers, prescription lenses,… I think that now that we have a good number of VR headsets out there, there are the numbers for little companies and hobbyists to sustain themselves by selling add-ons and accessories for them. I don’t think that there is room for big companies to live out of this, yet, but small startups can create a name by offering these products, hoping to grow together with the VR market.

Technology

Tech convergence

Charlie Fink wrote some years ago a wonderful book called “Convergence” about the convergence of many of the upcoming technologies in the next… 5 to 10 years. XR, AI, 5G-6G, Machine Learning, Blockchain, etc… they are all going to empower one the others so that to create the next technological revolution. We are already seeing this convergence happening, and I think we’ll see more in 2022. AI systems will empower AR glasses to understand what you have around you so that to provide you better guidance; the blockchain will be useful to offer ownership certification of digital assets and will empower creator economies in virtual worlds; 56-6G may empower cloud rendering, so that part of the rendering of every virtual world will be outsourced to the cloud. And so on.

LOL #VirtualReality #VR #Web3 #metaverse

source: https://t.co/ewoBU7pj0d pic.twitter.com/rgHrHSOx0f

— TonyVT SkarredGhost (@SkarredGhost) January 23, 2022

I think this year we’ll see this convergence become always more evident as it has already started happening at the end of 2021. When talking about the M-word, until 1 year ago, the debate was all about XR, while now it is both about XR and Web3 (that is, crypto, NFT, and blockchain). And while I’m not a huge fan of the speculation happening in the crypto ecosystem, it is evident that the underlying technology will be important for our future inside virtual worlds.

Cloud rendering

I mentioned cloud streaming via 5G as one of the trends of this moment in XR, and one of the trends to follow in 2022. My prediction is that we will have always more companies working on it, and we’ll have the first commercial services offering it either at the infrastructure level (e.g. NVIDIA CloudXR over AWS or Azure) or at the service level (like Holo-Light, or Plutosphere). I think that the technology is ready, but we miss the network. To have cloud rendering available everywhere, we should guarantee that wherever you are, there is a rendering server close to you, and that rendering server can serve both you and all the other people around you that need remote rendering. Plus, we need 5G everywhere. All these conditions are never going to happen in 2022, and someone even questions if they are going to happen in the next years. Not to mention that cloud rendering services are very expensive, so even if it were feasible, it would be quite expensive.

So I think we won’t have standalones that fully work via cloud rendering, but we’ll have some use cases or companies using cloud rendering, maybe via Optical fiber network+Wi-fi+Standalone headset (like Quest) in locations where a rendering server can be very close.

Pro usage of VR

B2B VR becoming the norm

I remember when I started with VR in 2014: many companies didn’t even know what VR was, and they had no idea about why they should implement it. Over the years, its value for offering a more valuable training experience or to prototype products (like cars) in a much shorter time has become clear, and always more companies have started integrating XR. Now in some environment, VR is the norm: I’ve heard that all automotive companies use it in some parts of its production processes. Last year we had some important examples of the adoption of XR in business: Accenture has for instance ordered 60,000 Oculus Quest 2 headsets for better onboarding and training of its employees.

In 2022 using VR in a company won’t be special, but it will be the norm, especially for big enterprises.

Many headsets will be working in the B2B space

While Meta is a clear leader in the B2C space, it is absolutely not in the B2B one. The Oculus For Business is not going bad, but it is clearly not something into which Meta is investing a lot, given some feedback I received by some companies working with them. The headset is very good, but the service may be better. For sure Meta is able to get anyway huge deals involving a good number of headsets, like the one with Accenture.

There are other companies offering good standalone headsets, but with better enterprise services, like Pico and HTC. Pico and DPVR are also the ones still earning good money by offering 3DOF headsets, that are not dead like many people think. And then there are other companies offering high-end tethered headsets, like Varjo, that still offers the best passthrough AR headset on the market, XTAL, whose new XTAL 3 device has astonishing visuals, and HP whose headset is quite affordable notwithstanding its high resolution. Each one of these devices has its pros and its cons, and they are all battling for the B2B market, in different sectors, without a clear winner.

I think in 2022 the situation will be similar, with just new headsets coming with more advanced features (more resolution, added comfort, etc…). Enterprise headsets will develop high resolution and wide FOV before the consumer ones.

LBVR on the rise

Location-based VR had a huge crisis during the first wave of the pandemic, but after the lockdowns have been suspended, these businesses are started to come back. Sandbox VR is back to business, The Void may come back in some form, and HOLOGATE is performing always better. New devices like Vive Focus 3 with dedicated local colocation features will allow for lighter setups for visitors of LBVR arenas, who will be able to wear just a headset, without needing a heavy backpack on the shoulders to play a VR laser tag together.

I think that LBVR will grow, but because of the pandemic and also the fact that the Quest has almost entered the mainstream, it has not the same potential that people envisioned for it in 2018. I still think it can be a good business, I think we’ll hear some success stories, but I don’t believe that it can be one of the main businesses in XR, at least not here in the West.

Productivity tools won’t be a thing… yet

I hope to be wrong on this, but I don’t see the potential FOR THIS YEAR for XR headsets to substitute PCs as productivity tools. I see this becoming a thing in the long term (5 to 10 years?), and I think it will be amazing. I foresee huge usage of VR in enterprise contexts, but I don’t see VR headsets substituting the PC in the houses of people, not even of us enthusiasts in 2022. The devices are still uncomfortable to wear for many hours, the resolution is not enough, the compatibility with the other tools is still unripe, the batteries end too soon. For sure it won’t happen with the devices currently on the market: I tried doing that with Quest and Valve Index and it is just too uncomfortable.

It may happen with some new hardware: maybe Apple has really cracked the formula, maybe Project Cambria is what we are looking for. Maybe. But honestly, I don’t see it happening for this generation of hardware. Maybe the next one has more chances. I mean, some people will use VR for that purpose (some are already doing that), but the majority will stick to mouse, keyboard, and computer screen, which are much more comfortable to use for a long time. I spend in front of a PC probably 12 hours a day, I would kill myself if I had to spend that time working inside a Quest 2.

Open standards and digital rights

OpenXR and other cross-platform standards

Slowly, OpenXR is growing well. All us Oculus Quest 2 developers are now using the OpenXR backend, because Meta is “forcing” us to do so to exploit the new features of the SDK. This has been one of the best news of 2021: Meta/Facebook, which is a company building a walled garden, is actively pursuing the implementation of an open standard like OpenXR. Epic has implemented it, and Unity is doing that too. Other headset manufacturers have implemented it into their runtimes as well. This is huge, because OpenXR is what will guarantee the interoperability between XR applications and XR runtimes.

And it is not only OpenXR that is growing well: also the cross-platform tools offered by the game engines and their implementation by the vendors is on the rise. I am a Unity developer, and I can tell you that now Unity.XR and the Unity Interaction Toolkit, two frameworks for managing multiple headsets with the same code, are implemented by all the major standalone headset manufacturers: Meta, HTC, Pico. You can write the code for one, and build for all of them! This is exactly what we need in our ecosystem: a way for developers to target all possible platforms without much effort. This is better for us because we can earn more money, and it is better for the market, because we can have many platforms all with great content.

The effort to support multiple platforms is still not zero, though. Every platform requires the developer to build specifically for it, and there are still some lines of codes to change… but the situation is better than in 2019, when handling multiple platforms was a huge mess. I envision in 2022 this situation to keep improving, and cross-platform frameworks and OpenXR to become always more widespread. I also envision that all the platforms will finally be included, and so also SteamVR will have a situation uniformed to the one of other headset runtimes. I don’t know if in this year we’ll already have the tools so we can build an application only once to then run it on all platforms. I’m not sure of that. But we’ll get close.

WebXR

WebXR is a technology in which I believe a lot because if the Metaverse is the evolution of the internet, WebXR can be the evolution of the web, it can be the main infrastructure onto which the “metaverse” is based. But in the last years, it has been mostly abandoned to itself, and even the promising Amazon Sumerian, that was a great game engine to produce WebXR content, has become de-facto abandonware. Mozilla Hubs has great potential, but features-wise it is far behind its social VR competitors. I keep hearing that WebXR is the future, but I don’t see anyone building it so that it becomes the future. I’m not very positive for a 2022 in this sense, I still think that standalone apps will be the main experiences for this year. I still have hope, though.

Privacy, safety, digital rights

The debate on privacy, safety, and digital rights will continue, as it has always happened in the last years… especially because of the concern of the community about Facebook’s data management. I think that in 2022 also the regulators will start investigating what is happening in VR. It is already happening, with the FTC that is investigating Meta’s acquisition of Within (Supernatural), and that is probing the safety of the headsets for kids. Meta will go under scrutiny various times this year, especially for two reasons: 1. Facebook is not a brand with a good reputation among regulators; 2. It is the first quasi-mainstream headset, so the only one truly relevant for the regulators. I’ve found to be particularly important the debate that stemmed after Christmas about the safety of VR for kids, and in which I’ve been one of the proponents with this article. I truly believe that all that has been said about the many children receiving a Quest even if they are not in the suggested age range will force Meta to take some action and offer better parental-control tools. If it happens, it would be the proof that we all together can be a positive driving force to improve the well-being in XR.

There will be also the theme of digital identity, with cross-application and cross-platform avatar systems like Ready Player Me and Facebook Avatars becoming always more popular, because people will want to carry their own identity across applications.

And while social VR space will become more popular, the debate on harassment and safety and how to enforce it will continue, even if I think we won’t find a solution this year.

2022 will also be the year in which Meta will explain better how to login on Quest: after having abandoned the Facebook login, I believe it will create a new Meta login, that won’t be mandatory, but strongly suggested, and that will offer access to many features. This will also be used to profile users to offer more ads in XR. In 2021 Meta talked about ads in games and had a huge backlash, but I think the project is not over and they will propose it again this year. Meta is an ads company, and will work to implement ads inside the Quest, I can guarantee you this. And we should be careful about how it will implement this.

Miscellanea

Content

Meta and Sony will bring new great games to XR. We already know some of them, like GTA for Quest and Horizon VR for PSVR, but I’m sure that we’ll get some new cool announcements. I think that Meta will tease 1 or 2 new big titles and will release one that it has already teased, like Assassin’s Creed VR. Sony will have to do more if it wants to create hype for its device, so I think that it will have to announce 4 or 5 new games with PSVR 2 support, native or hybrid ones. It will be a great year to be a gamer in XR. PCVR won’t have native big new titles, in my opinion, but some new hybrid experiences.

Oculus name

2022 will be the last year we’ll hear the Oculus name, which will be substituted by the Meta name everywhere. Having started my career with an Oculus Rift DK 2 and having admired the work of the Oculus founders, seeing the Oculus brand disappearing makes me sad. But it’s life, I know 🙁

Social VR spaces

Social VR spaces will reach always higher peaks of concurrent users. The variation of the offered events will be always wider. Attending a concert in a social 3D space (in VR or not) will be considered something usual, and not special anymore. The same playing in VR with other people or meeting in VR just to hang out. These won’t be mainstream experiences, but they will be quite frequent in our ecosystem.

Horizon Worlds won’t become a very successful social VR world: it will have its community, but it won’t be as big as the one of VRChat or Rec Room. I’ve visited it, and I haven’t found its spaces very interesting. Plus I don’t even see its potential if compared to Rec Room, apart from the fact that it will be integrated inside the Oculus Quest… we’ll see.

Holoride

It will be interesting to see if Holoride will be able to launch its in-car VR entertainment service, and how this will be received by car passengers. It’s an intriguing idea, for sure, and I’m curious to see how it will evolve over 2022.

Adult entertainment

A common question when you talk about VR to non-techie people is “how is porn with that?”. There is a lot of curiosity about adult entertainment in XR, and there is also a growing market, with companies like Sex Like Real and VR Porn offering very profitable services. I think that the new success of Quest will bring more demand and so also more offering in 2022, with adult videos reaching unprecedented quality. Not that this interests me, I’m speaking for a friend.

China

China currently lags behind for what concerns consumer VR and the metaverse. In China there is not an equivalent of Meta, there is not an equivalent of the Quest, and also the government restricts the use of games by kids, so it’s harder for the ecosystem to grow. In the last 5 years’ plan, there was no particular stress on XR, so it didn’t seem an important topic for the government, even if it previously claimed that it wanted the country to become a leader in this technology by 2025. And in part it is succeeding, considering that almost all headsets are made in China. But in other parts, there is still a big work to do, especially for what concerns creating an internal XR consumer market, and a healthy software ecosystem with the right infrastructures.

These weeks, various local governments have started feeling the metaverse winds from the West, and are asking the central government to take action. If the main government wanted to push for the creation of the Chinese metaverse, the country could run faster than us towards it, considering that the strong central government could pour a lot of money to make this happen, plus work itself on developing standards that platforms would be forced to implement to guarantee interoperability. Plus the digital yuan could become the currency of such a virtual world, creating a perfect “digital twin” of what happens in the real world, avoiding the risks of using unstable cryptocurrencies. But this would require the central government to undertake a big effort, that at the moment is not happening. Let’s see if 2022 will be the right year for this to start happening.

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And that’s it! I hope you enjoyed this long journey into the trends of VR for 2022. I don’t know if my predictions will turn out to be true, but for sure the above points are all ones to keep an eye on for the future. I’m also curious to hear your opinion: what are your predictions for this year in VR? Let me know in the comments here below or on my social media channels!

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