The Spatial Web Read online

  The Spatial Web Copyright ©2019 by Gabriel René and Dan Mapes.

  All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America.

  For information, contact us at www.thespatialweb.org

  This book is dedicated to all future generations.

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Foreword

  Preface

  Prologue

  Introduction

  THE SPATIAL WEB

  The Dream of the Spatial Web

  Defining Web 3.0

  The Early Power of Spatialization

  The Evolution of Digitization

  A New Model of The World

  The Inevitability of a Spatial Interface

  Spatial Web Technology Stack

  The Web 3.0 Stack Overview

  The Web 3.0 Stack in Detail

  The Interface Tier: Spatial Computing

  Virtual, Augmented and Mixed Reality

  Interface Tier: Physical Computing:

  The Internet of Things or IoT

  Logic Tier: Cognitive Computing

  Artificial Intelligence, Smart Contracts, and Quantum Computing

  Data Tier: Distributed Computing:

  Distributed Ledgers and Edge Computing

  The Integrated Web 3.0 Stack

  PROBLEMS

  World Wide Web Limitations

  Web 2.0 Problems

  Web 3.0 Crisis/Opportunity

  SOLUTIONS

  Building The Spatial Web

  A Shared Reality

  Spatial Web Standards

  Spatial Domains

  Spatial Programming

  Spatial Protocol

  Statefulness

  The Spatial Web Components

  FEATURES & BENEFITS

  Identity in the Spatial Web

  Digital Property Rights

  The Birth of Digital Commerce

  Contextual Immersive Advertising

  The Death Spiral of Online Advertising

  Spatial Economics

  Navigating the Spatial Web

  Searching the Spatial Web

  RISKS & THREATS

  Threats to the Spatial Web

  IMPLICATIONS

  From the Spatial Web to a Smart World

  EPILOGUE

  FOREWORD

  By Jay Samit, Former Independent Vice President Deloitte Author of Disrupt You !

  D on’t you just hate it when you can’t find your keys? One moment life is fine and the next you are frustratingly turning your house upside down like Indiana Jones searching for the lost ark. Americans spend 2.5 days per year just looking for misplaced items (where is that remote control?) and $2.7 billion dollars a year replacing lost necessities that remain missing (I now buy my reading glasses by the dozen).

  Turns out humans are exceptionally good at losing things. Airlines annually lose over 3.5 million pieces of luggage. Cargo ships lose over 10,000 shipping containers per year valued at over $50 billion. Keys, glasses, and cargo can all be easily replaced. What happens when we lose things as valuable as knowledge?

  The University of Alabama was created in 1820 with the esteemed goal of being a world-renowned center of learning. By the time of the Civil War, the University’s library had one of the largest collections of books in America. When it was burned to the ground, only one book survived. Again, humanity is really adept at losing things. The world’s greatest knowledge repository in 331 BCE, the Library of Alexandria in Egypt which had hundreds of thousands of Greek scrolls, is lost to history. Twelfth-century Turks burned the 700-year-old Nalanda library in India to the ground. One hundred years later, Mongols destroyed the Abbasid Caliphates House of Wisdom in Baghdad. In the New World, Spanish conquistadors lost the Maya Codices. The loss of priceless knowledge that takes centuries to relearn shortens lives and thwarts progress.

  While losing scientific knowledge can set civilizations back centuries, it pales in comparison with the loss of human identity. Perhaps the most existential question of all, Who am I? is getting harder to prove in the 21st century. Far greater than the $16 billion in fraud costs annually caused by identity theft, millions of people are no longer able to prove who they are, where they came from, or what they own. Wars and regime change have displaced more than 68 millionpeople around the world.

  When government records are destroyed, the title and ownership of land or assets get lost and become unable to be substantiated. Courts are still trying to settle ownership claims to properties and artworks stolen in the Second World War. Today, there are now more refugees than after World War II and the numbers of stateless people are about to grow exponentially. When climate change floods the Ganges, Mekong, and Nile River Delta, another 235 million people will be displaced. The United Nations estimates an astonishing 1 billion displaced persons globally by 2050! But thankfully, technology can now save humanity from our losing streak.

  Lost cargo, inaccessible knowledge, and corrupted data are global issues facing every business, nation, and economy. The Spatial Web not only easily solves all these problems, but provides new insights and data to drive the fourth transformation of computing: connecting the digital and physical worlds into one integrated universe of objects and ideas. The impact of this new Spatial Web will dwarf that of the Internet and change how we live, work, and thrive.

  A mere couple of decades ago, the personal computer ushered in the first digital transformation by connecting humanity to an intelligent machine. The Internet powered the second digital wave by connecting individuals with all sources of knowledge. Mobile further expanded these connections by connecting people with billions of other people. As transformational as these three technologies were in changing how we live, they all were still restricted to functioning in a two-dimensional digital plane.

  By leveraging the incredible data speeds of 5G (downloading a 2-hour movie in 3.6 seconds), and utilizing the power of edge computing, people will be able to combine the real world with useful data and wearables such as augmented reality glasses. Add in a layer of artificial intelligence drawing from real-time data from a trillion Internet-of-Things sensors, and our lives will go from googling for knowledge to our environment anticipating our needs.

  Your smartwatch, which monitors your vital signs and compares them to all others in your cohort, can tell your autonomous car to take you to the hospital before you even realize you are having a heart attack. Your doctor will also be simultaneously notified and can provide customized instructions to the emergency room staff. Smart cities can prioritize and move traffic out of your path to assure the quickest travel time. Every medical procedure you undergo at the hospital will be immutably recorded onto your blockchain-based medical history profile. The Spatial Web will provide better patient care outcomes while cutting US healthcare costs in half. In fact, 85% of present healthcare costs are caused by heart disease and diabetes which AI and wearables are better suited for managing patient preventative maintenance. The Spatial Web holds the key to fewer doctor visits, fewer medical tests and procedures, and a lower demand for prescription medications. Healthcare is just a small example of the power of spatial computing.

  Digital supply chains will interface seamlessly with sensors in warehouses and on retail shelves. Store shelves will place orders to warehouses when inventory is low. Just-in-time manufacturing will enable bespoke products delivered to your door. Maintenance crews can follow virtual arrows through buildings to find equipment in need of repair. Every mannequin in the department store will match your body dimensions and showcase the latest fashions accessorized by the clothing items you have previously purchased. Homebuyers can walk through potential homes virtually and see how their existing furniture fits the new home while spatially previewing carpets and window treatments
from vendors that have the exact measurements of each room or window. Digital goods can be licensed to specific geographic locations and AI smart contracts will be able to make micropayments for a host of new goods and services. Trillions of dollars worth of new companies and innovative products will enhance our daily lives.

  The Spatial Web holds so much promise for improving our lives that those companies failing to invest and embrace in the future will go the way of Kodak and Blockbuster. Companies that I work with such as Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple are already investing billions to provide the tools and platforms needed to utilize the Spatial Web. It is up to the entrepreneur to create the next generation spatial apps and services that will fuel the future. With this book, Gabriel Rene and Dan Mapes are the Lewis and Clark of this pioneering adventure. And as you are reading this, you are already in possession of the map they provided for your own personal discovery.

  PREFACE

  FROM FLATLAND TO SPACELAND

  I n 1884 English schoolmaster Edwin A. Abbott wrote a satirical novella about a fictional two-dimensional world of Flatland and a particular Square that encounters for the first time a three-dimensional entity known as the Sphere and its tales of Spaceland. This now-famous story has been told and retold for more than a century. Carl Sagan re-introduced the Flatland narrative into popular culture in his monumental Cosmos series. In the story, paraphrasing Sagan, the inhabitants of Flatland have width and length, but no height. Some are squares; some are triangles; some have more complex shapes. They scurry about, in and out of their flat buildings, occupied with their flat businesses and flat interests. They are familiar with left-right and forward-back but have no concept about up-down. Now imagine the inhabitants of Flatland. Someone may suggest that they imagine another dimension. And they respond, “What are you talking about? There are only two dimensions. Point to that third dimension. Where is it?” To them, the mere suggestion of other dimensions appears absurd.

  As Sagan tells the story, “One day a three-dimensional creature— a sphere—comes upon Flatland, hovering above it. Observing a particularly attractive and congenial-looking square entering its flat house, the sphere decides, in a gesture of interdimensional amity, to say hello. ‘How are you?’ asks the visitor from the third dimension. ‘I am a visitor from the third dimension.’

  The wretched square looks about his closed house and sees no one. What is worse, to him it appears that the greeting, entering from above, is emanating from his own flat body, a voice from within. A little insanity, he perhaps reminds himself gamely, runs in the family. Exasperated at being judged a psychological aberration and in order to allow Square to be able to see the truth, Sphere descends into Flatland.

  Now a three-dimensional creature can exist in Flatland, only partially; only a cross-section can be seen, only the points of contact with the plane surface of Flatland. A sphere moving through Flatland would appear first as a point and then as progressively larger, roughly circular slices. The square sees a point appearing in a closed room in his two-dimensional world and slowly growing into a near circle. A creature of strange and changing shape has appeared from nowhere.

  Rebuffed, unhappy at the obtuseness of the very flat, Sphere bumps Square sending him aloft, fluttering and spinning into that mysterious third dimension. At first, Square can make no sense of what is happening; it is utterly outside his experience. But eventually, he realizes that he is viewing Flatland from a peculiar vantage point: ‘above’. He can see into closed rooms. He can see into his flat fellows. He is viewing his universe from a unique and devastating perspective. Traveling through another dimension provides, as an incidental benefit, a kind of X-ray vision.

  Eventually, like a falling leaf, Square slowly descends to the surface. From the point of view of his fellow Flatlanders, he has unaccountably disappeared from a closed room and then distressingly materialized from nowhere. ‘For heaven’s sake,’ they say, ‘what’s happened to you?’ ‘I think,’ he finds himself replying, ‘I was “up.”’

  Sphere gave Square the ability to participate in interdimensional contemplations—to let us know that we need not be restricted to two dimensions. We can, as Sagan suggests, imagine higher dimensions.

  In the grand arc of the human story, this book in a role similar to Sphere, presents ideas and forms from the third-dimension and beyond, transforming and translating into the language of Flatland—words. If effective these words will not only succeed in their aim to express or explain a new way of experiencing the world but also will inspire in the mind a more nuanced and multi-dimensional vision for how we might experience reality in the future. Like the Sphere, we hope to offer a brand new perspective to shift your frame of reference—to journey beyond Flatland, to help us to add new dimensions to the web, our world, our communication, and our very reality. Welcome to Spaceland.

  I n 1962, J.C.R. Licklider, the first Director of Information for the Pentagon’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), was struck with an extraordinary vision for the future. It was a vision of a new type of decentralized global computer network. Licklider believed that this new network would allow ordinary people, from anywhere in the world, to search digital libraries, communicate together, share media, participate in cultural activities, watch sports and entertainment, and make purchases of any kind by accessing computers from their own homes. He described it as “an electronic commons open to all, the main and essential medium of informational interaction for governments, institutions, corporations, and individuals.” He called it the “Intergalactic Computer Network.”

  In 1969, amidst the nuclear fears of the Cold War, the first phase of Licklider’s vision was funded and the “ARPANET” was born. It was a new approach to a network, one that could protect against the kind of “single-strike attack” capable of delivering a lethal blow to America’s then centralized telecommunication network. ARPANET achieved this goal with a new invention—packet-switching. Packet switching routed messages in the form of data “packets” between a decentralized network of computers (nodes) by allowing the packet to find its optimal route between the sender and receiver. This enabled a message to reach its ultimate destination even if one or more nodes in the network were attacked, compromised, or even destroyed, leading to the invention of the Internet Protocol Suite (TCP/IP). As more nodes joined, the more decentralized, secure, and incredibly valuable this interconnected network-of-networks or “Internet” became.

  The nodes of the Internet were initially defined exclusively as “computers” and more specifically as computer servers—each with its own ID called an Internet Protocol Address or IP Address. However, the Internet has grown radically from those first four nodes in 1969, evolving through the eras of Web 1.0 (read-only websites on pc’s) and 2.0 (social media on smartphones), and is currently on track to surpass 50 billion worldwide nodes. Those nodes have come to include our laptops, smartphones, watches, home appliances, drones, vehicles, and robots and one day, even us.

  The first four nodes of the Internet circa 1969

  Today as the world enters the era of Web 3.0, the power of the Internet and its decentralized design ethos will continue to extend into every aspect of our lives. We are about to add a trillion new sensors, beacons, and devices to the Internet of Things (IoT) over the next decade including exotic new types of wearable and biotech ingestible devices. This process will continue until we have computerized and connected every person, place, and thing in the physical world along with countless virtual objects and spaces. If it isn’t obvious yet, the Web 3.0 era is about the Internet of Everything .

  However…as the Internet transitioned from Web 1.0 to 2.0, we lost much of the distributed spirit of the original design principles. Corporations and governments are capitalizing on the surveillance, centralization, and monetization of web users and their data, in part, due to the limitations of the Web’s inherent architecture. As we transition to Web 3.0, we have an opportunity to address these limitations and re-establish the decentralized nat
ure that is central to the original vision— the creation of a global electronic commons, open to all. This is the Spatial Web.

  INTRODUCTION

  A s we bear witness to the Digital Transformation of our world and cross the threshold into the Web 3.0 era, we face some extraordinary choices with serious and wide-ranging implications. Our technologies, from the first use of fire to the future of facial recognition, appear to be neutral by their very nature. Their appearance obscures their innate potential to magnify both the best and worst of human desires. Like the tale of Prometheus who stole fire from the gods to give to humankind to warm our homes and illuminate our civilizations, we must always remember that the gift of fire used to cook our food can just as easily become a curse that burns down our home.

  The 21st-century technologies introduced in this book also contain the power to burn both ways, albeit at a previously unimaginable level of power and scale. And it is precisely for this reason that we as a species must carefully consider their use because the choices we make will fundamentally impact the lives of billions and set the stage for decades, perhaps centuries, to come. Our choices will not only determine the territorial lines of the web and the world, but also our very definition of the words humanity, civilization, and even reality itself. We must choose wisely.

  The emergence of smart cities and factories, autonomous cars and homes, smart appliances and virtual reality worlds, automated shopping, and digitized personal medicine are transforming the way we live, play, work, travel, and shop. All across the planet, our technologies are breaking out from behind the screen and into the physical world around us. Simultaneously, the people, places, and things in our world are being digitized and brought into the virtual world, becoming part of the digital domain. We are digitizing the physical and “physicalizing” the digital. Clear boundaries between the real and the virtual are dissolving. Our near-term future has all of the indicators that the technologies that we’ve seen in our science fiction stories over the last century will be realized. Looking back a century from today, will we consider our sci-fi stories prophetic tragedies that we ignored or cautionary tales that we heeded?