Welcome back to the Friends With Holograms newsletter. We took a bit of a hiatus from publishing (although certainly not from consulting on and producing amazing XR and metaverse content) but now we’re back on a brand new platform. And we’re going to kick things off by addressing the elephant in the room: is the metaverse dead?
The tech press certainly loves to declare it, although the actual evidence the accompanies real reporting seems…rather thin. Meta, at present one of the market leaders in the space, released a roadmap of new headset launches, and while leaders there have expressed interest in building out AI products, they’ve made no claims that it will be at the expense of the company’s investment in XR and the metaverse. In fact, Nick Clegg released a long blog post yesterday detailing all the use cases for the metaverse in education.
When you really start digging, you start to see the truth — XR and the metaverse are being widely adopted. VictoryXR is building digital twins of college campuses for schools like South Dakota State, New Mexico State, and Southwestern Oregon Community College. Companies are buying headsets, building XR training sims, and seeing the same great results we’re been talking about for years.
And in the midst of a tech winter, shares in Roblox, the metaverse platform that is hugely popular with tweens and teens, are up 25%. Boy, that’s a sure sign of dying industry if ever there was one?
The fact is, the tech press loves clickbait, and there’s no better way to a flame war going than to declare something “dead” or “the future.” In the late nineties and early aughts, the internet was eulogized on several occasions; the demise of MySpace led to op-eds about the end of social networking. It’s all just part of the growth process.
Two months from now, once Apple releases its headset, we’re likely to see a big change in attitude. So if you’re on the fence, the time is right to get going and start building.
Please reach out to us if you’re interested in learning more about how we can help you figure all this out. And if you’re in Ann Arbor on Wednesday, come see Cortney at the University of Michigan XR Summit, where she’ll be talking about generative AI and the metaverse.