The Spatial Web Read online

  But it has inspired many of us to ask the question—How do we enable science fantasy to become.... science fact?

  We inhabit two different worlds. One is the physical world, governed by space, time, matter, and physical laws. This is the world where we eat, breathe, live, and work. In this physical world, food, water, and shelter are still the fundamental requirements needed to live.

  The other is the digital world. It is not governed by space, time, matter or physical laws. This world serves as a canvas for our internal states, where we capture and share our thoughts, feelings, ideas, information, and imaginations with others. It’s like an external mirror which we project our individual and collective interior selves upon, even as it reflects these projections back to us. These worlds exist apart from the other—separated by a pane of plastic or glass. Though connected by threads of information, they have remained functionally separate with no means of reconciling their distinct and dissonant perspectives of space, time, and physical/non-physical laws. As our physical reality and digital realities collide, the implications for humanity and our future, remain unknown.

  It is possible that this new mixed reality may ultimately force us to rewrite our definition of reality itself as it becomes as collaborative, malleable, and editable as the print and electronic media of the 20th century became in the Web 2.0 era. Considering this possibility, how will we as a species ensure that we will be able to maintain the trust, security, privacy, and interoperability necessary to gain the greatest promise from this new reality while avoiding its most threatening pitfalls in the Web 3.0 era?

  Let’s begin by properly defining the term Web 3.0.

  DEFINING WEB 3.0

  E arly definitions of Web 3.0 have predominantly defined it as the Semantic Web. The Semantic Web put forth the idea that the text we read on the web would become contextual—the intended meaning of words or sentences could be made explicit and therefore “semantic.” Encoding the contextual meaning of a word into the text on a web page would enable both the text and eventually the Web itself to become “smart.” The smart web would know, for example, that on a site dominated by discussions of how best to grow healthy plants and vegetables indoors, a particular reference to the term “greenhouse” would be a reference to a glass building filled with plants rather than a house painted a shade of green. A great idea to be sure, but sadly, it was simply too difficult to reverse engineer a powerful new layer of intelligence to the world wide web.

  Beyond this technicality, what if the shortcoming for the vision of a Semantic Web isn’t in the scale of its ambition, but rather in its limited focus? In Web 3.0, the domain of what can become smart, contextual, and consequently “semantic” will not be limited to text but extended into the physical world itself, where spatial objects, environments, and interactions dominate. Web 3.0 will be a semantic web, but not because we have embedded intelligence into text. It will be semantic because we will embed 3D spatial intelligence into everything.

  Suffering from a case of industry-centric myopia, many contemporary definitions of Web 3.0 also lack holistic thinking. For example, Web 3.0 will not be limited to being a cryptocurrency-driven, peer-to-peer “Internet of Value” as many of the Blockchain faithful claim, or an “Internet of Intelligence” driven by a network of (hopefully) benevolent AI as the Artificial Intelligentsia suggest. It will not merely be the trillion device “Internet of Things” as Industry 4.0 advocates espouse or the “Internet of Me” where various wearables and ingestibles will be able to track every pulse, personalize every meal, and optimize every step, emotional state, and eventually even thought. It will not even be the long-prophesied 3D Internet of interconnected worlds, a Virtual Reality “Metaverse” or VR Cloud or its more recent counterpart, the AR Cloud and its “Internet of Places” as the Spatial Computing initiates may believe. No. Web 3.0 will not be limited to any one of these definitions because, in this next era of the web, it includes all of them. In Web 3.0, all of these get “connected” into the Internet of Everything.

  THE EARLY POWER OF SPATIALIZATION

  T he term “spatial” in the Spatial Web references how our future interfaces enable a web that extends beyond the screen to integrate and embed spatial content and interactions, facilitated by distributed computing, decentralized data, ubiquitous intelligence and ambient, persistent, edge computing. Each of these technology trends fundamentally extends computing power further into the space around us, bringing new dimensions of experience, connection, trust, and intelligence to the world. We call this macro-computing trend Spatialization.

  The Spatial Web’s imminent arrival can be glimpsed in the precursor startup “unicorns,” like Uber, Airbnb, Snap, Niantic, Postmates, and TaskRabbit, many of which rapidly rose to valuations exceeding $1 billion. These startups owe their success to the hardware enhancements of the smartphone—in particular, the location-based functionality imparted by GPS, the positional and directional capabilities of gyroscopes and accelerometers, and the miniaturization of camera technologies. These technologies drove massive user adoption and multibillion-dollar valuations because they unlock the value of a key trend without which they would not even exist—spatialization.

  For example, Uber rents a space that will transport you from one location to another. Airbnb rents a space that you can stay in when you get there.

  Snap and its new Lens Studio, Tik Tok, YouCam, and others are parts of a fleet of new smart camera-based products that offer the ability to alter, morph, augment, or change the nature of your face by adding crowns, horns, adaptive facial features or detailed makeup applications, a superimposed character over your own head, or even the background and environment around you. Niantic’s Pokemon Go exploded onto the scene with a global treasure hunt for unique anime characters that were strategically placed at various locations across the planet. A billion people walked out of their homes and chased virtual characters across the spaces in their towns, parks, shopping malls, and streets. The ability to have food delivered to your location via Postmates or order someone from TaskRabbit to mount a flat screen in your apartment is based on technology that navigates them to and from locations—a specific point in space, not on a screen.

  It is the digitization of location and commercialization of spatial tasks that form the foundation for the Spatial Web.

  THE EVOLUTION OF DIGITIZATION

  D igitization is the process of converting the analogue world around us into a code made of zeros and ones (bits) so that our computers can read, store, process this information and transmit it across digital networks. Fundamentally, digitization disrupts and democratizes the production, storage, and distribution of whatever medium it transforms. However, whereas humans learn spatially first and symbolically second, our computer systems “learn” or “process” in the opposite order.

  Computers began with digitizing symbols and are now gaining digitized spatial awareness and this drive towards the spatialization occurred over several stages. For example, computers first gained the capacity to digitize numbers. This led to advancements in mathematical computation that assisted us in data storage, statistical analysis, and code-breaking among other things. This phase of digitization essentially used computers as “math processors.”

  Next, computers became capable of digitizing text, and the “word processor” was born. Word processors allowed us to dynamically edit, save, and share text. Digital words powered the birth of new coding languages, desktop publishing, and email. The digitization of words also spawned the creation of “hypertext,” which led to the World Wide Web and Web 1.0 was born.

  The digitization of media came next. The power of the smartphone enabled digital media to be captured and shared at an unbelievable scale and pace. Web 2.0 was built on digital media creation and consumption backed by the power of the network effect of the web which accelerated the adoption of the smartphone. The smartphone became the web’s most efficient and effective “media processor.”

  Using 3D modeling and anim
ation tools, we have recently been digitizing “things” from every aspect of our lives across many different industries including television and motion pictures, video games, marketing, advertising, and augmented and virtual reality, but also for all of our modern product and industrial design, architecture, civil engineering, and city planning.

  Today, 3D models can be produced by scanning real-world objects and locations using the next generation, depth-sensing computer vision powered cameras installed in smartphones, drones, and cars. These cameras have the ability to scan and build 3D models and maps of products, objects, humans, buildings, and even entire cities. Connected devices are capable of mapping and tracking our faces, fitness levels, movements, moods and health. Smart sensors are being embedded into manufacturing and industrial equipment to track and monitor speed, pressure, temperature, and much, much more.

  So, we have progressed from the digitization of text and media and pages to the digitization of people, places, and things, not just digitizing our symbols and media, but the objects and activities of our physical reality. To complete our “computers as processors” metaphor, computers at this stage of Digital Transformation become “reality processors.”

  Fundamentally, digitization democratized the production, storage, and distribution of the medium it transformed at every stage. Looking back at the Impact our computer processors have had in digitizing our words and media; now imagine this impact when we apply it to every object, person, location and activity in the world.

  Although the power of spatialization can boggle the mind, the real power of occurs when computers become networked together. However, the communication protocols that we’ve relied on in the past to link the words and pages of the symbolic realm of the World Wide Web are ill-equipped for the digitally-enhanced physical realities of the Spatial Web. This is because they are based on a very different information model for describing reality.

  A NEW MODEL OF THE WORLD

  L et’s explore the difference. The way that we “model” our world, the ways in which we share it, the lenses that we look through, haven’t fundamentally changed for thousands of years. The model that civilization has used to share information over time has predominantly been via “words on a page.” A book.

  The “page” has evolved a lot over time, becoming lighter and more easily portable. What began as stone or clay tablets, became papyrus scrolls before being bound together into a codex. These were later replaced by animal skin parchment which more clearly resembled pages, leading ultimately to the creation of the modern paper-based bound book.

  The printing press—often considered humanity’s greatest invention after fire—enabled publishing at a massive scale. This new “machine” popularized the method for copying something using a mechanical press that eventually could use plastic, polymers, and even metals to “press” copies of the various products that we use today.

  Ever notice the “seam” on a plastic toy, appliance, or even car? That seam is there because nearly all the components of our products since the invention of the printing press are essentially “printed” as copies of various “sheets” that are assembled or “bound” together. It turns out that nearly everything is produced like a book. We make almost all products today using the mass-production techniques that were first invented for the mass-production of books.

  The “movable type” of the printing press, first powered by hand, then steam, and then by electricity, ushered in the Industrial Age and its evolution from mechanization to electrification to computerization. Along the way, the digitization of words and numbers combined with the typewriter, calculator, and the microprocessor and the modern computer was born. The “killer app” for the first personal computers was word processing, the two most popular programs being Microsoft’s “Word” and Apple’s “MacWrite.”

  This brings us back to the World Wide Web. It is truly one of our greatest and most amazing modern inventions but it is also quite literally an offspring of the printed book. Even HTML or Hypertext Markup Language, the dominant language for editing web page content, is the combination of two printing abstractions—hypertext and what is called a “mark-up” language.

  Mark-up languages have been in use for centuries. The idea and terminology evolved from the “marking up” of paper manuscripts with revision instructions by editors, traditionally written with a blue pencil on authors’ manuscripts. For centuries, this task was done by skilled typographers known as “mark-up men” who marked up text to indicate what font, style, and size should be applied to each part before passing on the manuscript for typesetting by hand. One of the earliest digital mark-up languages that used tags to separate presentation instructions and content was called..wait for it... “Scribe.”

  Scribe primed Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML), which became an International Standards Organization (ISO) standard. A few years later, a young Sir Tim Berners-Lee mashed up two elements—SGML and hypertext -to create Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). He then combined HTML with a revolutionary new protocol that could connect these “hyperlinked” pages called Hypertext Transfer Protocol or HTTP, and a new web browser called NEXUS, and the World Wide Web was born in 1990. Marc Andreessen then created the more powerful and popular Mosaic browser in 1993 and that helped to spread the use of the Web around the world.

  The World Wide Web is a global digital library. It uses hypertext to link between the pages of the websites (books) in the library. Just as we used to ask a librarian to help us find a book that we were searching for, today, we ask Google to help us find the page on the web (library). To really emphasize the metaphor, we even call the process of reading a page online, “scrolling.” And Facebook? Well...it even has “book” in its name.

  The written word and its consistent themes of words, pages, and publishing formats dominate the design architecture of the World Wide Web, highlighting the idea that the way that we share digital information today remains dominated by the model of the “book.” It has been the key to the cultural and scientific evolution of humanity, but at best, it is symbolic, two-dimensional information about the world , trapped in pages, set behind a pane of glass. It is an abstraction layer. It is not the world itself. It was not designed to connect people, places, and things in the real world and It was not designed to include activities in the physical domain, i.e. to operate spatially .

  Renowned scholar Alfred Korzybski’s famous dictum “The map is not the territory” reminds us that our words only capture a small percentage of the actual world. But with the Spatial Web, the map becomes the territory , moving us beyond merely reading “about the world” in books or on screens, to engage the world directly where information is presented in the world and as the world . It is time to evolve our model of the world from that of “the book,” to a new model—the world itself .

  THE INEVITABILITY OF A SPATIAL INTERFACE

  H uman beings are spatial creatures and we live in a spatial reality.

  Our biology has evolved for billions of years within a spatial environment. Our vision, hearing, cognition, and movements were all developed within the context of being spatial creatures occupying a spatial reality. We experience three spatial dimensions (six directions) plus time, and everything that we experience as “reality” is contained within these dimensions.

  It could be argued that the dominant theme over the course of human history has been our impulse and desire to control our environment. Guide it with our hands, turn it to our will, and transform it into things that we find useful and meaningful. To extend our control over reality humans create technology. The earliest known technology was a “stick” our ancient ancestors used to pry termites from a mound in the ground. With this stick, they augmented their reach beyond their physical limitations to gain access to a rich source of protein.

  Technology augments and extends the capabilities of the human body and brain. From the most primitive digging tools to the most advanced robotics, from the earliest abacus to the leading-edge
artificial intelligence, our technologies have exponentially increased our ability to exert control over space, time, and matter (e.g., manipulate our environment for our collective benefit).

  Digitization is simply the latest technology in a long line, invented to increase our control over reality. It enables us to translate the “external state of reality” into digital information, which allows us to use computers to edit, manipulate, share, and improve it, alter or update its context, and make it more valuable.

  As mentioned earlier, the road along the path of Digitization began with numbers, then letters, advancing through imagery, audio, and video. In every case, their production, editability, distribution, and sharing became increasingly easier and more efficient and hence more valuable.

  Spatialization is a technology that extends the extraordinary benefits and capabilities of digitization to every aspect of the physical world in which we live unlocking valuable new products, services and business models in the process. This is because spatial computing, like personal and mobile computing before it, has the rare ability to benefit all sectors of society—the consumer, public, private, and education sectors simultaneously.

  Benefits extend to architects and industrial engineers who design, plan, visualize, and test their work, to scientists who simulate environments from the past, and city planners who need to simulate the impact of traffic in the future; in video games, TV, and movies to complex applications for healthcare and medicine, like simulations for training or assisting a surgeon in performing surgeries, to artists redefining our relationships to this new age.