New year briefing for 2024

Executive summary

Happy New Year! Here is a short update to brief you after the drinks and festivities. Think of this as a New Year briefing to get you started. Editions will be normal from next week onwards.

• Market health: A winter snap from the get-go. The market for VR and AR in the US shrank a little in 2023, by about 40% according to Circana. Investment is also on the lower side as well, based on my own network. The VR headset is relatively price-elastic, so we may see an uptick in raw headsets being sold when cheaper headsets come in 2024. But the deeper question is whether people will use headsets constantly after the Christmas period, or play then dump them in the living room corner.

• Employment: This is combined with tenuous economic headwinds in the tech sector, where we may see more layoffs similar to the rounds across 2023. The bright side is that we should expect conditions to improve throughout 2024, leading to a brighter 2025. Well-supported companies already knee-deep in projects should be safe until then. But if you are impacted, consider filling this form so I may profile you in the Immersive Wire.

• AI: Of course it will play a role. Pundits saying only that, then expecting a clap, should get the slap. What’s more interesting to me is where it will be deployed, and for me that is world generation; we are reaching closer to the point where we can have an LLM which can ‘speak’ objects into existence. Meta researched something similar earlier this year. The first platform to crack it would have an advantage similar to TikTok, where its suite of editing tools is so smooth and easy that it contributed to a surge of regular users. I expect this to get closer to fruition this year.

• Web-based metaverse: I am softly confident that we will see a fair bit of innovation in the area. We have Arrival.Space doing well, as well as the Wonderland team making activities. We also know that Horizon Worlds may go web-based this year as well. If the most common criticism of the metaverse is how hard to access it is, then making it more frictionless will bring more people into it - similar to how webAR improved the impact of AR for many companies.

• Events: A few right out of the gate. Gatherverse is happening in February 2024, while Laval is coming up in April. Like last year, the glut of events start from mid-2024 and largely come after September.

• New group: OPENVERSE is a consortium of leading European institutions. The site is here.