by Gabriel René
The Spatial Web blurs the lines between our well-understood concepts of physical and intellectual property rights, contractual rights, monetization, geo-fencing, and tradeability of digital goods in a way that requires us to reconsider their definitions and enforcement.
The Spatial Web enables a new economy for tradeable and transportable digitized assets that combine the virtual with the physical, allowing the digital world to leap off the screen and into the physical world with commercial models never before possible. With the integration of Distributed Ledger technology, a new generation of secure digital trade of assets and immersive experiences becomes possible.
Smart Property
As mentioned earlier, Smart Assets are Digital Property that use Distributed Ledgers to secure and control their issuance, ownership, and transfer independent of any centralized, third-party registry. Smart Assets can be anything—2D, 3D, digital, physical, virtual, people, animals, equipment, information, and more.
A Smart Asset is defined by a Universal Asset ID file that contains all the relevant information about that specific, unique asset—who, when, where, and how the asset can be used. And it is registered on a Distributed Ledger. A Smart Asset ID can refer to all of its relevant information and related files such as its 3D model ID and its metadata, including time of creation, value, descriptions, usage rules, etc. By registering this metadata on Distributed Ledgers, the Proof of Existence, Authenticity of Ownership, and previous or current Geo or Virtual Locations can be determined and validated. This Smart Asset ID can also show relationship with other Assets (e.g., a Smart Asset could have smaller children and/or be part of a larger parent Smart Asset).
Smart Contracts can then be used to govern an asset’s usage permissions, determining who can search, view, interact, transact, track, and transport it within or between Smart Spaces. Detailed information such as the relative coordinates, pose, and orientation someone may view a Smart Asset from can all be specified. Smart Assets contain reliable audit trails of ownership, location, and usage rules “within” the Asset itself.
“Real” Ownership of Digital Things
When we buy a digital product like a song, a video, or an app, the online store manages the database with our inventory. The product is licensed from the company and often limited in use to its proprietary platform of origin. The terms of their license and/or user agreement may mean that not only do they own the product, they also own all of our data associated with its use.
In comparison, if an individual purchases a Smart Asset, the individual owns it. Like physical products, the ownership is completely independent of the store it was bought in. A Smart Asset can be yours forever, and no one can take it away.
Digital Scarcity (The Double Spend Problem)
Collectibles, art, sculptures, coins, diamonds—people have long invested their money into scarce artifacts. Investment-grade assets in the physical world could be very expensive or impossible to replicate, hence the original could grow in value over time. However, it has traditionally been difficult to reliably prove a digital asset is scarce because it is just made up of computer code and can be copied endlessly at near-zero cost.
Computers gave us programmable, digital abundance, but we also need the ability to create programmable, digital scarcity, which enables us to imitate various real-world business models. Blockchains provide the solution by showing us exactly how many copies of an asset exist or could be issued at some later time. Blockchain-based property allows issuance rules to be transparent, removing the need to trust the issuer, and thus providing absolute confidence in the issuance data and the amount of Digital Scarcity.
Digital Provenance
The concept of Provenance originates in the fine art world where it describes the documented evidence that’s used to prove that a work of art has not been altered, forged, reproduced, or stolen. Using the VERSES blockchain-based asset registries, the Spatial Web can now provide provenance by default to digital assets and spaces for the emerging digital economy.
Transferability and Transportability
Digital asset provenance enables the ownership of assets to be transferable between parties. Spatial Domain provenance allows assets to be transportable between locations. User Identity provenance enables users to transfer assets and themselves between real-world and virtual locations. This means that a hyperspace link can allow an object or user to “hyperport” to or from a virtual location like in the movie Ready Player One. In the physical world, Spatial Contracts can enable objects or users to be transported in the physical world much like Uber or Postmates automatically does today. Essentially having universal identifiers and addressability for any person, place, and thing allows you to transfer ownership and location.
Spatial Property Rights
One of the most important types of property rights in Web 3.0 will be the ownership and control of digital space. Whether this is the digital real estate of a physical property or a virtual one, similar rules must apply.
The freedom to buy, sell, and utilize property is protected in the United States by the 5th Amendment, where property ownership is viewed as a cornerstone of individual rights, economic growth and development, and the freedoms inherent to the society. Spatial Domains offer a form of digital Title that grants the holder absolute control over the digital use of their space and to whom, what, and when access can be granted or content displayed or sold. As more of the world is digitized, Spatial Property rights could become the most important property right in history, not only to control who or what can access our spaces but also what content can be displayed and even how and where transactions can be made.
THE BIRTH OF DIGITAL COMMERCE
T he early Internet’s most valuable contribution was decentralizing connectivity —any computer could join the network by using standard Internet protocols, and thus, the Internet was born. Next came the creation of the World Wide Web in 1990 and a new set of “hypertext” protocols that further decentralized communication and led to an explosion of hypertext websites. In 2005-2006, Web 2.0—the Social, Mobile, Local web——enabled decentralized content creation, sharing and portability by putting it in the hands of users as a smartphone and distributing content through Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and other social media platforms. And with 2010 onward, we’ve seen the dawn of the next generation of decentralization, with the introduction of Distributed Ledger and cryptocurrency technologies.
Cryptocurrency
A cryptocurrency (or crypto currency) is a digital asset designed to work as a medium of exchange that uses strong cryptography to secure financial transactions, control the creation of additional units, and verify the transfer of assets. Cryptocurrencies use decentralized control as opposed to centralized digital currency and central banking systems.
The decentralized control of each cryptocurrency works through distributed ledger technology. Typically, a distributed ledger technology such as blockchain serves as a public financial transaction database.
Bitcoin, first released as open-source software in 2009, is generally considered the first decentralized cryptocurrency. Since the release of Bitcoin, thousands of altcoins (alternative variants of Bitcoin, or other cryptocurrencies) have been created. No one knows for certain if we will end up with one dominant cryptocurrency or millions of them for every conceivable category, converting back and forth in real-time across various global exchanges. But one thing is certain. A highly secure, digital medium of exchange that can be programmatically designed to suit the various transactions between human, machine, and virtual economies of the future means that the Internet has found its own kind of commerce.
Web 3.0 is poised to usher in the decentralization of trust, money, and the transferability of value itself (i.e., commerce). Until now, users had to leave the Web to complete a commerce transaction by going through centrally-controlled banking. With Web 3.0, commerce is finally a decentralized protocol and thus, digitally native.
We’ve witnessed the decentralizatio
n of connectivity, communication, and content, but the Internet’s latest trick is to convert commerce into a “native feature” of the Internet, woven into the virtual fabric of the Spatial Web with its own virtual money, exchangeable between any two wallets, by anyone or anything, and anywhere with no intermediary required. In Web 2.0 we have a global network where the Web interfaces with an external global economy. In Web 3.0 we get a distinct network economy, whereby the Web becomes its own economy.
Licklider’s original vision of an “electronic commons open to all” is being realized in the Web 3.0 era by the Spatial Web—an open network that enables global access to the collective value (knowledge, power, wealth, etc.) of the world in its various forms. With connectivity, communication, content, and commerce, Web 3.0 provides the means to engage and exchange collective value between individuals anywhere on the planet. The Internet shifts value from centrally-controlled authorities to an authoring, distribution, and publishing network of peers. This is its core “value proposition.” The Internet is a Decentralization Engine. But it is one that reaches its true potential in its next incarnation—Web 3.0.
In the 1990s, the Internet disrupted “communications” across industries and services like mail, publishing, telecommunications, travel, and even retail. It connected people, information, and businesses like never before. It was fundamentally about decentralizing the flow and access of information. The Internet presented itself as a kind of networked library of information accessed via a sort of digital book or “browser” with “web” pages.
In Web 2.0, the second wave of the Internet disrupted “content” like music, television, videos, and photos and enabled peer-to-peer sharing via social networking sites, blogs, wikis, video sharing platforms, and data storage sites. It also ushered in the Mobile Computing Era, which enabled location-based and crowd-sourced sharing technologies that disrupted “physical” services like transportation (Uber), accommodations (Airbnb), labor (TaskRabbit), and food delivery (Postmates).
The integration of geolocation (GPS) technologies into our smartphones, along with the introduction of mobile applications and operating systems, reshaped our digital lives. These new technologies gave us the ability to easily share and enjoy the content of the web, photos, and videos in near real-time from anywhere, and just like that, not only were our devices connected but we were connected. Perhaps more importantly, the elements of the “real-world”—people, places, and things—became digitally connected. “Local” searches blew past 60 percent of all search requests from smartphones.
Suddenly knowing where people, places, and things were meant that people could more easily get to places, and things could more easily get to people. This integration of the digital and physical happened so effortlessly, and yet has become so integral to our lives that we can’t live without it. We also have yet to fully acknowledge this innovation. In this case, digital content was not the driver of these interactions; the relevance of content was now based on a far more critical factor that has emerged—context.
E-commerce powers online shopping. Over the last 20 years, e-commerce has grown to $3.5 trillion in annual spending. Some have argued that it is the fastest-growing economy in the history of the world. But e-commerce isn’t really digital commerce and it isn’t an economy. Why?
Because the authorization, storage, transmission and approval systems for payments are not “online.” A long list of intermediary service providers, banks, gateways, and financial institutions utilizing 45-year-old telecom networks authorize and “route” your money and take their customary fees for this. International transfers can cost an additional 25 percent in fees alone. Besides, the currencies themselves are owned, controlled, and managed by states, central banks, and governments. Far too often, this can lead to currency manipulation, high inflation, onerous interest rates, devalued money, and bank bailouts. E-commerce is commerce where the transaction is initiated online, but where the ownership, storage, transmission, and records all occur off-line.
With Web 2.0 we have a global network that interfaces with an external global economy. E-commerce is a tourist that visits the web. In Web 3.0 we will have a network economy, whereby the economy itself is native to the Web—a Digital Economy.
We’ve witnessed the decentralization of computing, communication, and content, but the Internet’s latest act is to convert commerce into a peer-to-peer exchangeable “native feature” of the web, woven right into the virtual fabric of the Spatial Web.
Janet Abbate, an Associate Professor of Science, Technology, and Society at Virginia Tech, in her seminal book Inventing the Internet , wrote, “People don’t break into banks because they’re not secure. They break into banks because that’s where the money is.” She went on to state that regarding the early designers and creators of the Internet, “They thought they were building a classroom, and it turned into a bank.” But the Web wasn’t designed to be a bank. E-commerce was a hack.
This hack has grown into a multi-trillion dollar value. Imagine the amount of value that we could create by intentionally supporting commerce at the core protocol layer of the Spatial Web.
Imagine all of the new ways that it might be used.
The Virtualization of Everything
In the Spatial Web, billions of new virtual assets, environments, and experiences will be created. In addition, trillions of digital sensors will be embedded into our appliances, cars, homes, and even our bodies. A massive number of new 3D-scanned “real-world” objects and locations will all become “virtualized.” Characters, objects, and environments from history will leap from the pages of books and comics and the screens of television, movies, and games to surround us and walk among us. As a result, Virtual Assets will become the largest asset class in history. In order for us to benefit from their value, they will require a secure and interoperable means of proving their uniqueness and ownership as well as a means for inter-game and inter-world commerce and portability between locations—both virtual and real.
Digitally Designed 3D Models
Since the birth of 3D computer graphics in the early 1970s, billions of 3D models have been created. Programs from companies like Autodesk have dominated the creation tools for 3D models.
These tools and the models they create are used in nearly every aspect of our lives today across many different industries including television and motion pictures, video games, marketing, advertising, and virtual reality. They are also used for product design, for building design and architecture, civil engineering and city planning, and environmental and science simulations. If you look around the room you are currently in, chances are that the majority of objects around you were designed as 3D models on a computer. Turn on your TV and watch any advertisement or show or play any console videogame today and you will see computer-generated 3D objects, logos, environments, and characters everywhere you look. Everything from the Iron Man suit, to the Oral B toothbrush, to the latest iPhone, to next year’s BMW is designed with computers; they are all 3D models.
Today there are numerous 3D asset stores with objects that number in the millions across platforms like Unity, TurboSquid, Sketchfab, and others. They all sell the pre-made objects, environments, characters, and more that populate our games, movies, and TV shows. But in Web 3.0, these assets can become transportable between the millions of AR apps and VR worlds that will make up the Spatial Web. Unlike much of our written words, photos, music, and movies, the billions of 3D models have one significant thing in common. They are not...online. Yet. They are all stored in siloed databases. They are not unique, easily sellable or distributed, and they are not yet a part of the Internet. But can you imagine the latent value that will be unleashed when they are?
Digitally Scanned and Twinned Models
The next category of Virtual Asset that has begun to emerge, and that threatens to eventually eclipse the Designed Models category, are the Scanned and Connected Virtual Assets. These are created through the use of scanning technologies that combine co
mputer vision and depth-sensing cameras to create 3D models of pre-existing objects, environments, and even people. These 3D scanning technologies have historically been expensive to buy, complex to assemble, and cumbersome to use, but the latest smartphones now include these new cameras and AI chips in their hardware, and the software and features are built right into their OS. This will allow the next generation of users to create realistic scans of objects, people, and environments by default. Consider that with the next wave of smart glasses, drones, and automated vehicles with these real-time scanning technologies on board, you can see how many objects, environments, and people in the world will soon have their own hyper-real 3D models.
As more objects become computerized, we may see trillions of objects that are both hyper-real and connected. As mentioned earlier, the ownership and usage data for IoT and its connected devices should be secured on Distributed Ledgers—but how do we actually access that data and view and interact with these devices?
A Digital Twin is a 3D digital replica or representation of the data associated with a physical asset, process, or system. Arguably, any digital representation could be considered to be a part of a Digital Twin—from text-based diagnostic information to 2D blueprints, schematics, and pictures, to a complete 3D replica that represents all states, conditions, and history of any item (or even a human). However, most descriptions today trend toward a 3D or spatial representation. They are a part of the industrial and enterprise Digital Transformation evolution.