Open Forum: What Are Your Metaverse Predictions for 2023?

With the year 2022 starting to sunset, it's time to gather reader predictions for the New Year! Anything having to do with any metaverse platform (SL, VRChat, even Horizon Worlds) or related technology (VR, AI, MMOs, etc). As always, the more falsifiable the prediction is, i.e. concrete enough to empirically prove or disprove, the better!

To start things off, here's a couple I mentioned in my last video with Isabelle (watch below):

• VRChat will have 10 million monthly active users (either announced by the company or by a reputed analytics firm).
• Second Life will finally release an official mobile app.

Post your own in Comments below! I'll feature the best ones -- i.e. the most falsifiable and interesting -- in a post next year!

Sunset image credit: Brooke Erdmann aka the Awesome Wife.

Comments

[Martin K.]

Hardware:

1. Meta Quest 3 will be released with a better display, better CPU and GPU performance, better video pass-through, and longer lasting battery than Meta Quest Pro for less than half the price.

2. Apple will release a VR headset with an even better display and better video pass-through than Meta Quest 3.

3. Pico will release a VR headset in the US (not the Pico 4, but possibly a variant of it).

4. Valve will announce but not fully release a new VR headset.

Software:

5. A PC-based VR port of Crayta will be released.

6. Meta will announce a new name for "Horizon Worlds".

7. Decentraland will shut down.

[Kate Nova]

1. nVidia will release a new flagship, twice as fast graphics card. Instead of letting scalpers buy them and sell them at astronomical markups, nVidia will follow in the footsteps of Taylor Swift and Bruce Springsteen and sell the astronomically marked up cards directly to their "fans".

2. After you pay 5x list for the new, flagship nVidia card, SL will still have Lag, Chat Lag, low FPS, tragedies at region crossings, small draw distances, eternal avatar rendering, and Philip forbid, if somebody passes you a 512x512 texture, it will still take 1/2 hour to rez.

3. No matter how many cores your CPU has, say a gaming powerhouse 16-core CPU for example, SL will still only use 1 core.

4. At least 3 new "SL Killer" worlds will launch. At least 3 "SL Killer" worlds will close down. The new and the dead won't necessarily be the same. Either way, no world will beat, or even come close to, SL for SL true believers.

5. Horizon Worlds, or, per Martin K.'s post, whatever Meta rebrands it as, will be so bad the general public will start saying, "You know, SL wasn't that bad."

6. Avatars in Horizon Worlds will not get legs in 2023.

7. LL will announce various performance improvements through the year. New World Notes and other SL, VW, & Metaverse blogs will report on the improvements and the new, faster SL experience. However, Kate will be unable to notice any difference between the new, super-better SL and the old, slow, laggy SL.

8. Aside from the dubious "performance improvements" mentioned above, LL will focus neither on better performance nor on acquiring or retaining new users. Instead LL's primary emphasis will be on more finely slicing the current user pie to sell ever more specialty products like Premium-Basic-Sub-Prime-Plus Accounts and new SL Middle Names.

9. The new SL Mesh Starter Avatars will roll out. They will be nicer than the current starter avatars. However they will be designed inconsistently with the way bodies, heads, skin, and clothing are currently designed, sold, and used on the grid so that there is no clear or easy upgrade path from the starter avatars to a custom, individually personalized avatar. This won't actually matter however, because there won't be any truly "new" users in 2023, only current users who make yet more alts. These "new" users will be outraged when they can't visit their favorite head or body shop on their zero-day because scammers have forced the sim owners to put a "must be 3 days old to enter" policy in place.

10. A small % of Firestorm users will migrate to the less-featured Genesis Viewer when they realize how much better it performs on crowded sims and at region crossings.

11. On 1 April 2023 Meta will change its name to Google. And Alphabet will change its name to Facebook. All the tech billionaires will gather at a luxury retreat in the mountains and wax about how much they miss Jeffrey Epstein.

[Mondy]

Kate will be heralded a prophet when everyone sees at least 50% of her predictions come true and hired to advise the rest of the tech industry for 2024.