The Spatial Web

by Gabriel René

  Interoperable Web Wallet

  The Web has no integrated digital payment solution for the use or sale of digital and physical items: no universal secure “web wallet” or native digital currency with the ability to facilitate peer-to-peer microtransactions and provide for near real-time global payments and settlement. Authentication, tradeability, and transactability of valuable virtual assets (which in some cases will need to be authorized by pupil, voice, or gesture) will require the support of Distributed Ledgers. IoT devices will trade real-time resources and data. AI will manage international finance. Siloed e-commerce carts of today’s web will simply not suffice.

  The web wallet of the Spatial Web should be integrated into a Spatial Browser as part of your Personal Smart Account. It should be able to handle transactions with any currency or payment service—fiat, credit card, cryptocurrency, or other. It is possible that a universally accepted native web currency could emerge. Many people feel that this is the promise of Bitcoin. Whether this is the case or another currency assumes this mantle remains to be seen. In any case, a native web wallet built into a Spatial Browser as part of a single-sign-on that works interoperably everywhere would open the possibility for entirely new categories of economics—it connects the human, machine, and virtual economies to come.

  The Economy of Everything

  By definition, the Internet is a technical system. However, over the past two decades, the Internet has become far more than just a technology. It’s a decentralized communications infrastructure that enables networks around the world to interconnect without needing the approval of a central authority. With more than 3.5 billion people online today, the Internet is now becoming a decentralized economic entity larger than the GDP of the UK, India or Brazil. And it will evolve substantially over the next 10 years, fueled by innovations in technology and business models. The Spatial Web is the key to enabling a Digital Network Economy powered by the exponential technologies of AR, VR, AI, IoT and DLT’s of the Convergence.

  In our hyper-connected global economy, no sector of the existing economy will be untouched by these technologies—hospitals, farms, cities, manufacturing firms, transportation companies, retail stores, media, gaming, and virtual worlds will be impacted and transformed—and only those who adapt quickly to technological change will be successful. Business models and the very nature of economics may be profoundly changed.

  Think of it as the Economy of Things, the Economy of People, the Economy of Places, and the Economy of Experiences all being networked together. This will be brought about by the creation and then networking of four major trends.

  Digitization of people, places, and things

  Transactionalization of physical or digital places and things

  Spatialization of transactions

  Monetization of novel sensory experiences

  Spatial Retail Shopping

  Amazon Go’s new cashierless stores are shaking the foundations of traditional retail by automating the entire shopping experience as a frictionless transactional environment. Automated retail has been around for a long time. We’ve all used it. Vending machines have provided us with sodas and snacks for decades, and if you’re in Tokyo, you can even purchase apparel from such machines.

  However, in the Spatial Web, you will be able to walk into any store, pick up what you want to buy, and be automatically charged for your purchases as you exit. No need to wait in line.

  The “just walk out” future of shopping allows you to enter a store by checking in with a smartphone, and with identification and verification or by cameras with facial recognition software. You can browse and add items to a basket as in any grocery store. Every time you pick something up, add it to your basket or put it back, a combination of AI, computer vision, and sensors track your movements. When you are finished shopping you simply walk out of the store and are automatically charged for the items you took…but you can see how quickly this becomes problematic in a siloed, “app-specific” ecosystem.

  Will only Amazon devices work in Whole Foods or Apple devices in some stores, Google’s or Samsung’s or Baidu’s in others? What about in a mall or shopping district? How will this work if I need a separate app account and wallet for every device, operating system, or store? The Spatial Web must enable interoperable and automated retail experiences.

  Imagine the “Amazon Go-ification” of every store, just not exclusively by Amazon, but as part of an open standard that any storefront can use, every device can reference, and any wallet be used to transact. For that, you need the benefit of a shared data layer—a single source of truth that can be referenced by anyone with the right permissions for Identity, Assets or Goods, and Payments. In other words, you need a Single Sign-On for the World that comes with its own Web Wallet.

  Perhaps even more interestingly, a new sector of the global economy will become the fastest growing and ultimately the largest sector—the Experience Economy.

  The Immersive Experience Economy

  As VR and AR begin to generate high-quality digital experiences in an endless number of virtual environments, new generations of consumers will increasingly choose to purchase experiences over services and products. Older jobs will be automated and the Experience Economy will become the largest sector of the economy. The term “Experience Economy” was coined by B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore in 1998. They described the experience economy as the next economy following the agrarian economy, the industrial economy, and the most recent service economy.

  Services today are increasingly being commoditized, is that because of technology, increasing competition, and the increasing expectations of consumers. This situation represents one of the strongest arguments for an economy based on experiences, especially ones that will predominantly be virtual, immersive, and personalized.

  Historically, products can be placed on a continuum from undifferentiated (referred to as commodities) to highly differentiated. Just as service markets build on goods markets, which in turn build on commodity markets, so experience markets (and eventually transformation markets) build on these newly commoditized services (e.g., internet bandwidth, consulting services, etc.).

  The classification for each stage in the evolution of products is:

  A commodity business charges for undifferentiated products.

  A goods business charges for distinctive, tangible things.

  A service business charges for the activities it performs.

  An experience business charges for the feeling customers get by engaging it.

  A transformation business charges for the benefit customers (or “guests”) receive by spending time there.

  You can see the forerunners of this in the gaming world, in social media with Instagram and Facebook videos—and increasingly Snapchat lenses, and with the introduction of volumetric video that creates 3D holograms much like R2D2’s projection of Princess Leia in Star Wars .

  In 2018 Uber, Audi, and Disney introduced synchronized VR “Holorides” that enable users to “skin” or add a layer over their drive that can stylize the road and scenery outside their window to look like a cartoon or a movie. In a Holoride, you can play a game of Angry Birds along your route or battle digital characters in a simulation of Tron that is mapped onto the road itself. Imagine the range of experiences enhancing and overlaying every inch of the real world itself, magnified by the potential billions of virtual worlds and experiences.

  In 1996, Danish researcher Rolf Jensen of the Copenhagen Institute for Futures Studies wrote in his article “The Dream Society” for The Futurist that American society is yielding to a society focused on dreams, adventure, spirituality, and feelings where the story that shapes feelings about a product will become a large part of what people buy when they buy the product. Jensen framed this trend as the commercialization of emotions. “In 25 years, what people buy will be mostly stories, legends, emotion, and lifestyle.”

  The first eCommerce transaction occurred in 1994. It launched the eCommerce
Era. Twenty years later eCommerce drove $1.5T in B2C transactions. In 2019, China alone surpassed $1T in eCommerce transactions.

  All this has happened before even factoring in an emerging machine-to-machine (M2M) economy where the smart, autonomous, networked, and economically independent machines act as the buyers and sellers and service providers, powered by AI and able to carry out significant physical and economic activities with little to no human intervention. This evolving ecosystem will be made possible by the growing number of IoT devices able to trade and share compute power, storage, and data.

  Spatial Economics will exponentially increase our global economic value as it combines our physical economy, the machine economy of IoT, and the digital economies of billions of augmented and virtual environments, their assets, and AI agents.

  This presents us with another critical question—how will we search and navigate across something as vast as the Spatial Web?

  NAVIGATING THE SPATIAL WEB

  Searching the Spatial Web

  S earch as we think of it today will change radically as smart glasses become commonplace. Today, we predominantly search the web via text. We type in a query. Then Google searches the content it has indexed from across the web and delivers to us the pages it considers to be the most relevant based on an algorithmic page ranking model. You can’t search for or discover assets, objects, or users while you are at a specific location, because Google has no index for those things. On the Spatial Web, what we’ll search for and how we’ll search for it will fundamentally change.

  In a Spatial Web search, your personal AI will check spatial contracts using a combination of object and sound recognition to detect how and what is presently in the location you are searching. Spatial Search will react to your voice commands, track your eye movements, gestures, and emotional and neural responses, filter for your historical taste preferences, select the optimal spatial content channels to display, and feed all of this into your Spatial Browser. This will let you find what you’re looking for, thinking about, or desiring, and present it to you based on an increasingly subtle and nuanced set of personalized results—tailor-made for you—presenting the right thing that you are searching for and making it available, exactly where and when you want it.

  You can search via domain name, location, asset, or channel. For example, you might say “show me the city streets” or “show restaurants” and the Spatial Browser or application would perform the search, enabling relevant Smart Spaces and Assets in your vicinity to appear, and loading any Smart Contracts, with the appropriate permissions required to view or interact with them. Smart Spaces will also have default information associated with them, stored with their asset content, including Channels, keywords, and arbitrary text that will be crawlable.

  If you’re sitting at home on the couch with your VR Headset, you might want to go shopping. When you say “Let’s buy some shoes,” your Spatial Browser might know from your preferences to shop at Foot Locker, so by default, it takes you to the Foot Locker Space. Or perhaps you are at home using AR glasses and wish to search for shoes across multiple stores. The AR glasses can give the stores access to your size, shape, and color preference ranges, allowing you to simply swipe through them, project them onto your feet, and confirm before purchasing via your secure wallet plugin to your browser. You can have the physical shoes droned to you within an hour and the virtual pair delivered instantly to wear in a game of virtual basketball with your friends.

  Inside of a physical store, the Spatial Browser will be smart enough to perform local searches, displaying menus of available content. Spaces can have their own channels that offer complete flexibility for making content in any Space discoverable by users. So you could search inside the shop for heels, then pick a pair from the results, look at them in detail, or wander the virtual shop floor to browse the displays.

  In a physical grocery store, looking for a specific product, you could ask “Where is the coffee and based on my previous coffee purchases, which organic fair-trade roaster would I like?” The Browser will perform a localized channel search of the grocery store’s Smart Space, find matching products and direct you to the correct aisle and shelf via AR directions.

  Content can be searched for by channel globally, within a Space or even for a user. On the Spatial Web, users can add content or Assets to a channel in your User Inventory Smart Space which can function as a micro-feed like a combination of Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Blogging /Vlogging for that user. Other users can subscribe to the feed by subscribing to that channel. Enabling a “UserFeed” channel globally would allow any content across all feeds to be searchable by tags.

  Perception in the Spatial Web

  The ability to perceive (see, hear, touch, etc.) anything on the Spatial Web is determined by the permissions as defined by the Spatial Domain where a given Asset is located. Merely being able to search for something does not automatically grant the right to see the information, object, or person. If the Smart Space that an Asset is currently in is searchable, the Asset itself has to agree that based on your user permissions, you have the right to even perceive it. Beyond that, perception is not limited to an individual’s specific biological or mechanical senses as any combination of human, machine and virtual sensors and haptics could be combined to experience or analyze something. Both human and computer vision combined along with several IoT devices that measure temperature and moisture could be required to validate that a particular medical device is approved for surgery. In the Spatial Web, perception can be augmented, modified, shared or crowdsourced.

  Interaction in the Spatial Web

  Interaction in the Spatial Web can be governed by Spatial Contracts that determine the interactions of any user with any object or other users in any space. This may include creating an asset or particular types of interactions including but not limited to touching, moving, routing, rotating, scaling, modifying, consuming, or destroying, all of which can be governed by rules, rights, and governance layers based on the rights granted and recognized by the authorities of a given domain.

  Transacting on the Spatial Web

  Transactions in the Spatial Web can occur between any person, asset, or space under any conditions set by Spatial Contracts. Transactions can occur automatically—the terms can be preset within a Spatial Contract to initiate a transaction between any two (or more) parties, in any accepted currency, using any form of virtualized wallet.

  The invention of Bitcoin has been compared to the invention of email. At first, email was only used by computer experts to communicate on the internet worldwide, instantaneously with anyone who also had an email account. Everybody else continued to use the postal system for another 20 years until personal computing became widespread.

  Bitcoin can be thought of as eMoney. It can be sent over networks worldwide instantaneously whereas our existing national currencies have to travel through multiple intermediaries to arrive at their destination. This is both time consuming and costly.

  Today, everyone uses email, text messaging, video conferencing, and other digital communications tools. Rarely do we mail a letter. Tomorrow, everyone will use various forms of digital money and rarely will they use national currencies. This will fuel the next great wave of digital commerce and it will enable many forms of automated transactions between spaces, devices, and objects with no human interaction required.

  Transportation on the Spatial Web

  The transportation of Assets or Users in the Spatial Web occurs between Spatial Domains. This can be a function of “hyperporting” any digital asset between any Smart Space across geo and virtual locations or dynamically routing physical objects along a path that includes any number of points in three-dimensional space. For example, you could easily hyperport between any number of virtual worlds as if they were all a part of the same universe, just like “moving” between websites today.

  Similarly, moving from point A to B in the physical world would simply be a matter of routing a user be
tween two Smart Spaces, much like mail delivery or an Uber car routes packages and people between physical world addresses today. And since Smart Spaces exist in the physical world as well as virtual worlds, one can imagine a one of a kind BMW concept car co-designed by multiple parties from around the world using VR. Upon completion, the virtual car could be teleported to a viewing room in London for an audience to see in AR. We call this cross-reality transportation.

  Time in the Spatial Web

  In the Spatial Web, you can specify a point or a range of date and time you wish to view. When present at a particular location (physically or virtually), you can “scrub” through a timeline to go back in time to view the contents of the space at a given time (if the data is available and you have permission to access it), including full historical representations or information at a given place. Conversely, you could place objects to be viewed in the future or to be used to view the timeline for a future project.

  Channels in the Spatial Web

  One of the most significant challenges to AR and VR is managing and filtering the available content or permissible activities of a given space within a given category. Imagine an unfiltered AR Times Square experience, with thousands of sources of content and advertisers; the experience would be completely overwhelming. Enabling “channels” of content that allow users to select the content they want to view enables a personalized AI to filter content and activity based on the permissions and preferences of the user. For example, the user may only be interested in seeing Times Square restaurant reviews on Yelp, Instagram photos from friends, virtual objects from an AR game, and Local Municipal content. In addition, users can create their own private channels where they place their own content for personal use or to share.

  When immersed in an AR or VR world, people’s behaviors will be significantly different from how they use their smartphone and desktop interfaces today. Currently, when using a smartphone, people enter into discrete applications for specific functions, usually one at a time like posting a photo to Instagram, sending an SMS, or making a phone call.