by Gabriel René
The power of such technology for learning, experimentation, simulation, and more is incredible and has the ability to address some of our most pressing issues such as the climate crisis, poverty, inequality, and even racism by providing a level of visibility and detail on these issues that reveal new solutions. But there are real risks that are certain to emerge when we are not able to distinguish one “reality” from another any more than we can tell when we are in a very realistic dream. The human mind is incredibly susceptible to sensory suggestions and reality distortions. It happens to nearly all of us, every night. In Web 3.0, it will happen every day.
What is the cost of continuing down the path where our web and the world will become increasingly insecure and unsafe—where there is a virtual backdoor to every building, an open window to every room in our minds, where others can steal, alter, or delete our digital property including our identity, history, and means of communicating with others; where online identity theft grows up to become virtual impersonation, where psychological and biological hacking allows others to program our minds and bodies, our opinions, wants, and desires; where this kind of bio-social hacking actually becomes one of the largest and most profitable businesses in the future; where an elite few control the “master switch” to the web and therefore to our economy, society, our world, and our very reality? The cost, we know, is far too high.
If you think the current web has problems with hacking our data, tracking our actions, and giving us fake news, then the prospect of a powerful, real-world, geospatial Internet operating under the same ethical, technological, and economic design principles as our current web is a recipe for disaster. Instead of our websites and apps being hacked, it will be our homes, schools, drones, cars, robots, senses, biology, and brains being hacked.
This is just the beginning of the crisis/opportunity that we face in Web 3.0. Take avatar creation and authentication. In an era of massive ID theft, mega-security breaches, and private and public organizations failing to protect information, how do users authenticate the ownership of virtual avatars and digital assets? Which company can be trusted to generate and store them?
You wouldn’t imagine exchanging personal information or buying goods online from an unknown entity today. In Web 3.0, the need for authenticated parties is even more critical. With virtual reality, the need to create virtual identities will become commonplace. In many cases, users will have different avatars for different uses, just as a LinkedIn profile and persona is usually far different from the same person’s Facebook profile. Avatars will be some of the most important assets in Web 3.0 and for our daily lives. Their security and authentication will be of utmost importance to us. They will require a secure method to link back to us for biometric authentication.
Keep in mind that many of the avatars that will represent us won’t appear as “us,” although we may be acting and transacting through them. Some may be caricatures or cartoony versions of us, but others will be entirely different characters like the ones in games like Fortnite or virtual worlds like High Fidelity.
The launch of the iPhone X was a turning point for avatar technology. The next generation of smartphones and countless facial recognition cameras will come enhanced with 3D depth-scanning, emotion and expression recognition, and voice replication software that offer the feasibility of a hyper-real recreation of an avatar that looks, speaks, emotes and appears to act like you. What certification methods will ensure the authenticity and usage rights of our agents and avatars?
For a bit of context, a typical Web 2.0 identity problem would involve someone gaining access to the username and password of your Twitter account, but a Web 3.0 identity problem is when someone gains access to a complete, hyper-realistic replica of your face or voice or even biometric self. You can see the precursors of this type of digital impersonation with recent technologies like Deepfakes.
Deepfake and similar technologies use deep-learning AI to analyze photos and video of a particular person, say an actress or celebrity, and place their face onto another person’s face within another scene. Quite often it is a woman whose likeness has been co-opted and placed over the face of a porn actress, entirely without their consent or ability to stop it from happening. And it’s cheap enough for unscrupulous programmers to create in their spare time within hours. There are other less contemptible but equally creepy examples, such as placing Steve Buscemi’s face on Jennifer Lawrence during an awards speech. While some of these are fascinating extensions of mash-up culture, watch Jordan Peele use his voice to drive a realistic video of Barack Obama calling for war with North Korea and that fascination will quickly evaporate, as the capacity to weaponize this technology becomes painfully clear.
For the time being, this is limited to video, but with volumetric video, generative AI, real-time 3D modeling, and increasing avatar use, it could be someone that is appearing to stand right in front of you, pretending to be someone you know, saying all the right things in just the same way as the person you trust would. But it’s not them; the thing they are selling is fake, the environment isn’t real, and they may not even be human, just a really smart malicious algorithm fed the right information about you to gain your trust to complete a transaction.
Given recent advancements in AI technologies, emotional detection, and gesture-recognition data combined with wearable sensor data, motion tracking, and other personal data including medical IOT information, it will become increasingly difficult to prevent the recreation of an indistinguishable replica of almost anyone, by almost anyone, for any purpose, within the next several years. How can we protect our identities, our assets, the content, and the spaces that we own or visit?
The main takeaway here is this. If the crisis of Web 2.0 was fake news, in Web 3.0 it will be fake reality.
If you’re not scared yet, you should be. The collective power of the convergence of exponential technologies in the hands of humans, given our track record of abuses of power out of greed, malice, ignorance, and wishful thinking could lead to the end of life on this planet if not harnessed properly.
According to Wikipedia, the Doomsday Clock is a metaphor for threats to humanity from unchecked scientific and technical advances. It is a symbol that represents the likelihood of a human-made global catastrophe. Maintained since 1947 by the members of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the Clock represents the hypothetical global catastrophe as “midnight” and how close the world is to a global catastrophe as a number of “minutes” to midnight. As of 2019, the minute hand shows two minutes to midnight due to the twin threats of nuclear weapons and climate change, and the problem of those threats being “exacerbated this past year by the increased use of information warfare to undermine democracy around the world, amplifying risk from these and other threats and putting the future of civilization in extraordinary danger.”
The ominous tick...tick...tick...of the Doomsday Clock is wrong; it gives us a false sense of comfort. It gives us hope that there is still some time to “figure it out.” But we are not two minutes away. The alarm bell is ringing already. The time to act is now.
In the Web 3.0 era, the crisis isn’t limited to digitized information warfare. It includes digitized experiential warfare that can quite literally impact us physically, psychologically, and even biologically because our information will no longer be trapped behind our screens, but will be placed into the world around us. It will be spatial.
BUILDING THE SPATIAL WEB
T oday we need to move beyond the early web’s ambition (and limitations) as a global network of interconnected computers, documents, and media. Web 3.0 is about building an intelligent and adaptive new web, a universal network of interconnected people, places, and things where we will be able to securely interact, transact, and share our ideas, information and imaginations. We need to build Web 3.0 to enable seamless communication for the transportation of goods and services from any point on the world to any other point in any world. In Web 3.0, we need to reliably trace origins from
mine to market, from farm to table, and from game to virtual worlds. It must secure our virtual identities and their relevant profile information, activities, transactions, location histories, and digital inventories. Finally, it must enable a globally interoperable and interconnected digital economy that spans humans, machines, and virtual domains.
To fulfill this vision, the VERSES Foundation is proposing a set of universal standards and open protocols for Web 3.0 designed specifically to enable standards for defining and enforcing digital property ownership, data privacy and portability rights, user and location-based permissions, cross-device and content interoperability, and ecosystem marketplaces by enabling the registration and trustworthy authentication of users, digital and physical assets, and spaces using new standardized open formats, and shared asset indices secured by spatial domains, in which rights can be managed by a spatial programming language, viewed through spatial browsers, and connected via a spatial protocol.
In order to achieve a secure, unified digital and physical Spatial Web, we need a standardized way to identify People, Places, and Things (universal identity), a way to locate People, Places, and Things (universal address), a way to validate what we see and who we talk to (trusted data records) and an easy way to pay for goods and services anywhere we go across physical or virtual worlds (digital currency and web wallet). Most importantly, we need a way for all these things to seamlessly communicate together (a spatial programming language and protocol) that no one person, corporation, or government alone controls (open source) and a universal interface (spatial browser) that enables secure interoperable experiences across devices, operating systems, and locations across physical and virtual domains.
Why are universal standards important? They’re important simply because we all want to work, play, and learn together better. We want to be able to interact, transact, and collaborate at home, at work, and in our schools and institutions across the globe. As we have seen with the original Web protocols, when we have a common technological vocabulary that we can use together, we can more easily and effectively communicate and share our information with each other and the world around us and, ultimately, those who will come after us. This is the benefit of networks.
The approach to this particular problem was more of a logical problem rather than a technological one, requiring us (the authors and developers) to consider our world systematically and holistically. As a logical problem, we needed to shift our way of thinking about both web technologies and the physical world around us as separate—and instead imagine them as intertwined or entangled. And we needed to consider requirements both multi-dimensionally and cross-dimensionally (from the real world to the virtual and back). This allowed us to evolve the existing concept of a web domain to that of a spatial domain, a web page to a web space, from a digital file, virtual object, or physical object to that of a smart asset and from a file-based protocol to one that is spatially-based.
This logical framework has allowed us to move beyond the early web’s ambition (and limitations) as a global network of interconnected computers, 2D documents, and media to architect a more secure, intelligent, and adaptive new 3D web—a universal network of interconnected people, places, and things.
The Spatial Web requires a new set of technologies capable of enabling:
SPATIALITY: Digital content isn’t only a single blob of data but is dimensionalized and inherently spatialized, making location the fundamental representation rather than strings.
OWNERSHIP: Users can own their data and digital property and choose with whom they share this data. Moreover, they retain control of it when they leave a given service provider.
SECURITY: Secure data collection, transmission, and storage enables interactions and transactions with virtual and physical assets between any user within and across any space—physical or virtual.
PRIVACY: Individual control, trust, and security utilizing cryptographically-secured and decentrally-stored digital identity enables “trustlessly” complete interactions and transactions with anonymity and auditability. Previously the exchange of personal data and layers of verification were required.
TRUST: Trust is based in reliable real-time validation of all users, assets, and spaces and their interactions with certifiable and verifiable records that validate various proofs of ownership, activity, traceability, and rights.
INTEROPERABILITY: Multi-user interoperability provides searchability, viewability, interaction, transaction, and transportation of any asset or user within or across any spaces. Seamless user navigation and asset transfer is enabled within and between spaces across devices, operating systems, and locations.
A SHARED REALITY
T he Spatial Web requires new Spatial interfaces, Spatial Protocols and Spatial Programming Languages to interact with AR/VR, the IoT, AI, and Humans. Compatibility with Smart Contract and Distributed Ledger Technologies enables the validation of identity, ownership, and usage rights of any asset relative to its virtual and geospatial positions. This allows for the search, trade, transaction, trackability, and transfer of virtual assets by and between users within and across web spaces. The Spatial Web must be traversable and contiguous and be able to maintain geo and virtual position as well as asset and user-anchored persistence of spatial content.
The Spatial Web must
Enable users to securely register, find, buy, sell, and transfer virtually anything between individuals within and across virtual web “spaces.”
Enable users to connect these spaces together to organically grow a Spatial Web that both visitors and virtual items can securely and reliably move between.
Secure biometrically-authenticated human identities and virtual identities and their relevant profile information, transaction and location histories for representative agents and avatars.
Enable location-based asset provenance, persistence and validation and allow assets to maintain and prove their uniqueness, ownership and history.
Enable both a human and machine-readable understanding of the world and the ability for coordinated and collaborative biological, digital and virtual interaction.
But to actually enable this, we need that enables interoperability across all three tiers of the Web 3.0 Stack. We need a solution that allows for a “shared reality” at the Data, Logic, and Interface Tiers, simultaneously and in near real-time. A “shared reality” that is fundamentally spatial. One that is domain-specific, user-oriented and empirically discoverable whose data is reliable, verifiable, and secure. This is achieved and managed by a Shared Data Model maintained through all three tiers of the Web 3.0 Stack at the Interface Tier, the Logic Tier, and the Data Tier, uniquely connected by a Spatial Web Protocol that serves as the connective tissue and communication standard between all three tiers.
Interface Tier
Virtual, Augmented, and Mixed Reality “spatial” technologies collectively enable the Interface Tier to act as an Experiential Shared Data Layer. This occurs primarily at the Interface Tier of our Web 3.0 Stack and enables a shared experience layer. Readable and writable by humans, machines and AI.
Logic Tier
Spatial governance and business logic at the Shared Data Layer is created via a Spatial Programming Language that can be supplemented by any combination of smart contracts and AI, thus enabling a shared logic layer that can manage identification, permissions, credentials and validation for any interaction or transaction in any dimension.
Data Tier
The data processing and data storage layer writes, stores, and authenticates records across Local, Cloud, and Distributed Ledgers that enable a persistent, shared, and immutable data layer to allow for secure and reliable interactions and transactions.
The Spatial Protocol
The HSTP protocol connects all three tiers of the Web 3.0 Stack. It is the key element in assuring that Web 3.0 is an open network and not a walled garden. It can reference real-world and virtual world coordinates, and securely record and authenticate the position of pe
ople, places, and things in a “cross-ledger” fashion. It references usage and ownership rights and enables virtual items to be both transactable and transferable in terms of ownership but also in terms of their relocatability within and across real-world and augmented spaces. It creates Smart Twins by enabling data to be linked and synced to physical objects, users and locations. The Spatial Protocol is what turns any space into a web space. It makes “space” smart.
SPATIAL WEB STANDARDS
F or Spatial content across both augmented and virtual reality to be searchable across any number of spaces—both geospatial and virtual worlds—and to enable multiple users to simultaneously view and interact with each other and assets across any number of device platforms —developers, creators, and users require universally standardized formats, languages, and protocol standards to facilitate these requirements.
Like the Web before it, the Spatial Web requires a standard approach to networking nodes that extend the concept of a node to be any physical or virtual thing in space that utilizes open standards for defining Identities, Addresses, Activities, and the ability to record and query for events or “States” that occur spatially. These are the key architectural requirements for the Spatial Web.
Domain - Address (Address and Ownership of a Space—Where)
Program (Rules for Who can do What, Where, When, and How)
Protocol (Communication between addresses—What to Where)
State (Records of Who did What, When, Where, and How)
Let’s break them down so it is clear.
SPATIAL DOMAINS
A Web Domain name serves as a way to identify Internet resources, such as computers, networks, and services. Since an Internet Protocol or IP address for a computer is numerical in order for it to be machine readable, a text-based label was created to make it is easier for humans to memorize. A domain name is really just an address.