Tech: the words and concepts to know for 2023

The year 2023 will be a rich year when it comes to technology, that’s for sure. And to approach it well, it is necessary to know a certain number of words and concepts.

While technology evolves, our vocabulary must follow. Whether you are a total neophyte or whether you live in tech, there is always something to learn. 2023 will be another year with lots of technical words and concepts, some innovative, others older, which will become more important. Anyway, you owe it to yourself to know what they refer to.

Extended Reality

Extended Reality, or XR, is nothing new, but you’re sure to hear more about it with companies like Meta pushing to promote their vision of the metaverse in our lives.

Fortunately, the XR is easy to understand. It is a term that encompasses the virtual reality, augmented reality and everything in between. VR is when you put on a headset like the Meta Quest 2 and go on an adventure in a virtual environment. AR is about integrating virtual objects into the real world, like a Snap filter. When the two technologies are mixed, it’s mixed reality, which also falls under the XR’s big hat.

Avatar

An avatar is simply a digital representation of yourself, whether in a video game, the metaverse, or anywhere else. He may or may not look like you. That’s the beauty of digital worlds.

Get creative, or not, with your avatar. But you will probably have to create an avatar at some point during the year.

Stable diffusion

The technical details behind Stable diffusion are rather complex, but it’s easy to understand what Stable diffusion does rather than how it works.

Stable diffusion refers to a specific type of text-to-image generation AI that gained popularity in 2022. Unlike competitors like DALL-E, Stable diffusion can use your computer’s GPU directly (DALL-E only works in the cloud) and the code is open-source.

But in the end, it is only an additional option to generate images by giving a simple textual definition, in natural language.

AI

The concept ofartificial intelligence (AI) has been around for decades: it’s the ability we give machines to perceive and work with information. The field has been making giant leaps in recent years, and the trend is expected to intensify further.

Stable broadcast and DALL-E use AI. Smartphones too, to offer sublime photos, for example. ChatGPT is an amazing chatbot.

matter

Home automation enthusiasts will closely follow the news around matter so great is his promise. With Matter, there will be no need to worry about the different protocols and technologies of each connected device that we buy.

All you need is a device in its housing that functions as a hub, such as an Amazon Echo or an Apple TV 4K, and you can connect to it and use other Matter compatible devices. You will be able to give orders to a device Google Nest using Siri, for example. Cool, right?

FAST

Something less cool than Matter, which is currently coming to streaming services like HBO Max. Series like Westworld are removed from service, leaving fans in the dark. This is where FAST comes in, the free, ad-supported streaming services.

This is to offer a selection of free content, with advertisements. FAST services include Roku TV or Amazon Freevee. You don’t have to pay anything, but the offer is much more limited and you have to deal with advertising. It is whispered that Westworld will arrive shortly on a FAST service.

DLSS

2023 should see many new terms around video games flourish, but we must already keep an eye on DLSS, deep learning super sampling or deep learning super sampling. It is a technology developed by Nvidia for its high-end graphics cards. Nintendo would use it for its next Switch console.

DLSS uses AI to scale images beyond their native resolution. For example, native 720p or 1080p content can, thanks to DLSS, appear to be running perfectly at 1440p or even 4K. AI comes in to create a higher quality image than the one that exists, and it can even make games run better.