Visualization Tutorials

A tutorial on the right way to create slopegraph visualizations for assessing technological trend shifts, similar to virtual reality and generative AI.

Apprehension lingered within the air on the close of 2021 when Mark Zuckerberg gave us a glimpse into the ‘Metaverse’ — a digital universe, accessible through virtual reality headsets, that goals to create a convincing sense of physical presence in lifelike virtual environments. As a consequence, in 2022, we witnessed a resurgence of interest in virtual reality, sparking each excitement and existential dread.

While the metaverse stirred interest in 2022, it was not the one transformative force at play; the explosion of generative AI had swiftly altered the collective focus.

In Metaverse and Generative AI: Envisioning the Way forward for Human-Computer Interaction, Ian Hughes and Sudeep Kesh explain,

“2022 and 2023 have been particularly eventful years in certain branches of artificial intelligence. While much of AI and machine learning […] has been hidden away from broad public attention thus far, the overall online population has suddenly been able to interact with large language models (LLMs) via interfaces similar to OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard. […] This development was accompanied by the rise of generative AI for images, with the likes of DALL-E and Midjourney leading the pack. […] Some serps have began to implement this technology. […] Just like the metaverse, generative AI has the potential to affect every interaction we now have with digital content and with each other.”

These previous couple of years have been a testament to the remarkable speed at which the tech landscape evolves and trends…