Spatial Web

= "The Spatial Web integrates Convergence technologies into a single network ... providing us an Augmented Intelligent Reality". [1]

The Concept

By Gabriel Rene:

"Facilitated by new network protocols, the Convergence could lead to the creation of a new web that connects physical places together with virtual places. It could enable an open and interoperable new generation of the web — a Web 3.0 era that secures the privacy and property rights of individuals while ensuring secure and trustworthy interactions and transactions between the human, machine, and virtual economies. This future literally adds a new dimension to the web. It enables — The Spatial Web.

The Spatial Web weaves together all of the digital and physical strands of our future world into the fabric of a new universe where next-gen computing technologies generate a unified reality; where our digital and physical lives become one. This is a new kind of network, not merely one of interconnected computers like the original Internet or a network of interlinked pages, text, and media like the World Wide Web but rather a “living network” made up of the interconnections between people, places, and things, their virtual counterparts, and the interactions, transactions and transportation between them. Like the World Wide Web before it, this new Spatial Web requires new code to bring it to life. Not merely software code, but critically, ethical, and social codes as well.

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The power of the Spatial Web initially comes from its ability to describe the world in the language that the world speaks to us in — geometry. The Spatial Web lets us use a digitally-mediated universal language in which all information can become spatial. It enables the current information on the web to be placed spatially and contextually on objects and at locations, where we can interact with information in the most natural and intuitive ways, by merely looking, speaking, gesturing, or even thinking. But it also enables the digital to be more physical as sensors and robotics become embedded into our environments and onto the objects around us. It makes our world smarter as it adds intelligence and context to any place, any object, and every person that we encounter, and it allows our relationships with each other and this new network to be more trustworthy, more secure, and faster by decentralizing and distributing the computing and storage of the data. It will enable us to accelerate and improve, augment and enhance every facet of our existence — our education, our creativity, our health, our businesses, our legal system, our politics, and our ecologies. The Spatial Web has the potential to move us from predominantly egocentric and ethnocentric concerns to more worldcentric ones that are more holistic, equitable, and inclusive." (https://medium.com/swlh/an-introduction-to-the-spatial-web-bb8127f9ac45?)

Discussion: Our Digital Twin

By Gabriel Rene:

"In Web 3.0, we will not only create a “Digital Twin” or soft copy of our world and everything in it, but a Smart Twin of everything, with its own unique ID, interaction rules, and verifiable history capable of being linked and synced to its physical counterpart, spatially. Like a Wikipedia for anything, making all the world searchable, allowing for any object, person, process, and system to be updated, quantified, optimized and shared — if you have the right permissions to do so. The applications are endless and the implications, both positive and negative — practically indescribable. However, it is important that we begin to describe them; and accurately, at that, if we are to benefit from its promise and avoid its pitfalls, we must first name the thing correctly.

Plenty of Augmented Reality or AR-centric names for a Digital Twin of the physical world have been put forth by various industry leaders. Augmented World Expo’s founder Ori Inbar has suggested the term AR Cloud, a digital point cloud or mesh-like scaffolding of environments that allow us to project holograms into the world in ways that can be persistent and therefore experienced by multiple parties. Magic Leap has put forth the term Magicverse, a more playful version of a global digital twin that inspires visions of the fantastical. And in early 2019, acclaimed futurist Kevin Kelly of Wired magazine fame wrote an entire feature entitled Mirrorworld which attempted to consider a broader description that mentions IoT and other technologies in the Convergence but lacked a description of how these technologies would work together. Regardless of your preferred term, they are each meaningful attempts at the near impossible — describing an inevitable future world where the digital and the physical blend together, where the “world will be painted with data” as notable Forbes writer and industry XR veteran Charlie Fink is fond of saying.

What each of these terms lack is a clear vision for AR in the glaring light of the Convergence. How will this Digital Twin of the world combine with IoT, AI, and Blockchain to become a Smart Twin? How will AR work across various devices, operating systems, and locations? How will it work with other realities like Virtual Reality, the slower (projected adoption curve) but arguably larger cousin of AR? VR will play out its own exponential role — a 3D Virtual Reality internet of all connected VR spaces, games, and worlds classically referred to as the “Metaverse” in Neil Stephenson’s seminal sci-fi novel Snow Crash and more recently described in Ernest Cline’s book Ready Player One as “The Oasis.” Whether we use these terms, the “Internet of Non-Things” or simply call it the “VR Cloud,” we cannot casually omit it from the Convergence, banish it to its own corner of the Spatial Computing universe apart from AR. This is why a more comprehensive term is required, one that encapsulates all of the technologies of the Web 3.0 era and even provides the ability for users and digital objects to move seamlessly between AR and VR spaces." (https://medium.com/swlh/an-introduction-to-the-spatial-web-bb8127f9ac45?)

The Book

By Gabriel Rene:

"The Spatial Web book lays out the need for a Spatial Web and describe how the technologies of the Convergence will be connected by new software protocols will bring it into existence. They further outline the applications and implications for us as individuals and as a society. Our intention, as authors, is for this book to serve as a primer to acquaint you with each of these powerful technologies, and to lay out a vision for a path forward that inspires and invites you, the reader, to participate in the development of a more open and free new web… a new web that stands on the shoulders of those who built the earliest Internet and web infrastructure, but looks to our future, to lay down a new universal digital infrastructure that is designed to better align the power of our technologies with our human values." (https://medium.com/swlh/an-introduction-to-the-spatial-web-bb8127f9ac45?)

The Movement

Gabriel Rene:

"The Spatial Web Foundation is a non-profit organization committed to free and open standards across emerging technologies. Our organization, with input from an extraordinary group of pioneering thinkers, has architected a theoretical and technological framework for a universal digital infrastructure for the 21st century. To bring this vision of Web 3.0 to life will take us all to advocate, develop, iterate, and realize it." (https://medium.com/swlh/an-introduction-to-the-spatial-web-bb8127f9ac45?)