Happy new year to you all – for our first post of the New Year, we are sharing some predictions for VR and AR in 2017.

With the success of Pokémon Go, 2016 proved to be the year of AR. This will continue to be true in 2017, as Snapchat just brought Cimagine Media, which uses AR to sell products. For Wired, Darran Anderson argues that “Saturated with information, we will have more choice than ever, provided we can afford the options on show. Our lives will arguably become far more convoluted. The freeing up of time and energy from menial tasks may be offset by competing interests vying for our attention.” To get started with AR, Popular Science put together a list of the best apps to try out.

The Oculus Touch.

Now that visuals and audio for VR are getting more advanced, touch is the new frontier for creating more immerse experiences. Oculus is currently in the lead with its touch controllers, and more companies are bound to experiment with handheld VR technology in 2017. For The Guardian, Samuel Gibbs writes that  “While the view around you tracking the motions of your head tells your brain that you’re no longer in Kansas, it is the almost tactile nature of doing things rather than simply witnessing them that makes you believe.”

As VR becomes more widespread in 2017, so will user interaction, but as Dmitri Williams writes in the Los Angeles Times, there are “very few developers making social VR spaces to compensate for those isolating headsets.” Although, with the inevitable growth of social VR, harassment of users will arguably become more prevalent, despite the power of technology to help people form connections around the world. For The Verge, Adi Robertson argues, “The best communities have thrived by giving users control over what they can share, letting them choose who to interact with, and consistently kicking out people who break the rules — not by waiting for some final, perfect method of communication.”

For fun: “VR Virtuoso Tipatat Chennavasin Reveals How Tilt Brush Got Its Name”

Featured Image: BBC