Looking Back at 2021 and at What’s Ahead for AR and VR in 2022

This is the last dispatch from Reality Check for 2021. It is also the end of the newsletter’s first year of publication. Whether you started reading back in March when we began, or are just diving deeper into AR and VR now, thank you for spending time away from your headsets and try-on filters to read Reality Check.

For The Information’s annual list of predictions, I made one adventurous guess—that Meta will lock up a major gaming franchise to drive sales of the Quest 2 VR headset and establish it as an alternative to gaming consoles. Rather than set any other predictions in stone, here are some thoughts about how the AR/VR world evolved in 2021, and where it might be headed in 2022.