Augmented Rarity 2022 wrap 🌯👽

For a 2023 of more exciting present-day-soft-dystopias 🥂

Dec 30, 2022

Hi and welcome to the last Augmented Rarity email of the year 💚

Today we have a different format because everyone has been doing wraps recently and we deserve one as well 🔥

I'll be adding some news in between to keep us up-to-date, as usual, so get ready for some basic Google Trends screenshots to support my arguments. Let's begin! 👇

🤖 Artificial Intelligence

AI in general has had relevant interest over time, but thanks to ChatGPT, the volume of searches increased drastically 🔥
Regarding AIs that draw, Midjourney had a peak in August (compared to Dalle2 or Stable Diffusion), but none of them went viral (compared to ChatGPT🏆)

As a creative, I've been very immersed in the text-to-image trend, so it's hard to accept it wasn't trending that much. Assumption: they are too niche while ChatGPT brings AI to anyone interested in googling 🔎.

🥽 Extended Reality

I had to add VR to the search to see some action and removed AR because it was misleading to Argentina’s searches 🏆

Augmented Reality and Mixed Reality are potentially the technologies that will have better market adoption in the near future, but they didn't get significant searches 😥
The main value of searches is for VR, because Virtual Reality is too long lol. Anyway, the main interest is around:
- The launch of Pico 4 as an alternative for the Quest 2 🥽
- A trend in people searching for how to set exercise goals in Quest 2 🏋️‍♀️
- People randomly worrying about headsets killing you(?). Ok let me rephrase that now that I googled it - In November the Oculus founder announced he wants to launch a VR headset that would kill you in real life if you die in VR 🪦 (Remember that Oculus was bought by Meta so the founder now needs to get our attention back somehow? I’m lost.)

2022 hasn't been a year with many changes in the XR industry, and unfortunately, Meta's reputation has gotten worse rather than better (covered in the next section). But we are getting there, the transition is happening slowly, and adoption will come naturally. There are plenty of opportunities for creatives to write the guidelines for tomorrow's digital experiences. We are still early 🙈

🌐 Metaverse

The Metaverse itself is still not a thing in 2022. It kind of started trending when NFTs were at their peak in January, but its interest decreased drastically over the year.
NFTs started trending in March 2021, with a peak in January 2022 (related to the Metaverse peak), which then led to their near oblivion 😶. But since the beginning of December this year, they reached the same trending level as in March 2021, apparently due to some famous people launching NFT collections of themselves:
- Neymar ⚽️, who in November dropped a collection of NFTs of himself and now people are starting to hear about it when it’s already sold out.
- Trump 🍊, who of course made NFTs of him as a superhero not for the money but for the art - sold out in hours.

Let's add Meta (as in the company) to the analysis because they are losing billions trying to get people to adopt the Metaverse:

Meta did gain more interest during its yearly event in October with the launch of the Meta Quest pro and the memes around their avatars now having legs, but the main interest around meta is related to the recent layoffs 👋 and their stock value dropping by 65% 📉.

👽 Augmented Rarity

Unexpected section 🤓. I want to be more transparent with you, so here’s also a small recap of this project 💚

I wrote 33 emails since April 17th, 2022. I only missed 2 weeks in August and 1 week in November due to holidays and traveling.
8 months later it’s almost 400 of us here! 😱. 389 amazing innovative creatives reading this email every week 💚. I must admit I regret not pushing myself to do more so we could be thousands here, but that’s my goal for 2023 😜. Ignore the ‘paid’ subs, that's my 2 emails, this newsletter won't cost money 🤝.

This newsletter was meant to be around AI, VR and the Metaverse, buuuut with time I realized that categories will be evolving as tech keeps evolving and shaping society.

And this is it for today 🤓

Tomorrow is the last day of the year and I just wanted to take a quick moment to say thank you for being a part of this community and for your support. I hope you have a fun and safe New Year's Eve celebration! For a 2023 of more exciting present-day-soft-dystopias 🥂 and less bad ones 🫡

I had to ask ChatGPT if that made sense 😅