The Spatial Web

by Gabriel René

  How exactly will a Smart City of the future work if none of the so-called “smart things”—smart glasses, smart cars, smart stores, and smart accounts—work together...How smart would such a city be?

  You can see how the combination of spatial content, centralized data storage, and proprietary payment systems are not only impractical for our future Smart Cities, but will be entirely dysfunctional for everyone, no matter where we go.

  You can make walled gardens for individual users staring at a screen by themselves. But you can’t silo the world. You can’t succeed in making a closed “Spatial Web” any more than AOL could make a closed web 25 years ago. The web needed to be “world wide.” But there is really no need to have these silos.—there is plenty of room in the Spatial Web

  The open specifications and standards of the World Wide Web enabled many of the Web 2.0 companies to drive themselves to trillion-dollar market caps. Android and iOS are constructed from the open-source benefits of Linux. For Web 3.0, there is no need for companies to compete at the level of the core spatial protocol or kernel—they will all be free to develop their applications on the Spatial Web. The best thing that large corporations can do is assist in the support of open Spatial Web standards and the Spatial Protocol that is designed to connect us all. Then we can all benefit and thrive from the network effects that we achieve together.

  Government Bureaucracy

  Another threat to the Spatial Web is government confusion, opposition, or apathy regarding the evolution of privacy rights, property rights, and legal frameworks for digital currencies. We will need technologically savvy parties with strong government and public sector relationships and backgrounds to assist in the education process necessary to gain widespread support for the effective adoption and implementation of the Spatial Web. This is especially true in light of the legal and regulatory implications that the Spatial Web poses and the need to re-frame and update our definitions of property rights as it relates to private, public, and intellectual property use regarding AR content and its adoption at scale.

  In addition, the ability for the Spatial Web to revolutionize our global economy and serve as the economic engine that powers wealth creation for the next century will be largely determined by the implementation of common-sense regulations of digital currencies and digital assets that strive to protect users without constricting innovation.

  The effective implementation of a seamless and frictionless peer-to-peer global economy that unites the human, machine, and virtual economies together could deliver a level of prosperity that could (finally) enable equitable economic benefits for all of the inhabitants of the planet.

  This is an opportunity far too great to allow potential threats and risks to the Spatial Web to prevent us from working together, with all of our collective will and power, to make it a reality.

  FROM THE SPATIAL WEB TO A SMART WORLD

  T here are an infinite number of applications of the Spatial Web. Fundamentally, the millions of applications that it enables are the result of enabling all “smart things” to work together like smart glasses and cars and factories and cities, smart payments and contracts and assets and identities and spaces. These Smart Spaces, all networked together, hint at the Spatial Web’s largest implication. For the first time in human history, it would enable a smart and interconnected global civilization. A Smart World .

  Dawn of A Smart World

  A Smart World is a world where there exists a self-sovereign, universal identity and address for any person, place, or thing, across both physical and virtual domains. Smart payments and smart assets are integrated into smart cities. The Spatial Browser, working across all brands of smart glasses and other new interfaces, enables everyone anywhere to access location-based smart information and objects across real and virtual worlds. And finally, a Smart World is governed by a digital ocean of Spatial Contracts that permeate everything around us, allowing dynamic rules to be automatically executed and enforced in order to enable the interactions, transactions, and transportation of assets and users between Smart Spaces.

  Cities are busy places, full of roads, vehicles, energy and waste management, resource systems, planning, laws, and bureaucracies. In a Smart World, cities will track, monitor, and optimize the flow of traffic, power, water, waste, resources, goods, information, transactions, and people. They will optimize usage dynamically and make adjustments accordingly. Municipal data relevant to locations can be displayed and updated in real time. Government and decision making can be revolutionized with systems designed to enable citizens to contribute to the decision-making process. Such a Smart World would make all city infrastructures in the world compatible and interoperable—because a Smart City is just one type of Smart Space. And there are many types of Smart Spaces.

  Smart Factories are another type of Smart Space. Modern factories have millions of different components and processes with highly complex machines in operation producing a myriad of different products. The modern factory is a very complicated system. But in a Smart Factory every part, robot, device, and product becomes a Smart Asset. All of the materials, machines, and products are tracked through space and time. Smart Assets contain the Smart Twins of each item, which also contain the records of their maintenance history secured by Blockchains. And all of this information is spatially attached and tracked to Smart Assets via AR and Computer Vision all working together. When a factory becomes a Smart Space, it can set the rules to manage, record, and authenticate the movement of all the products and all the activities of both humans and robots. AI and Smart Contracts can be deployed to analyze and execute operational requirements to optimize the ease, efficiency, and effectiveness of the factory. These same capabilities can also be applied to Smart Farms, Smart Mines, Smart Stores, Smart Homes, or Smart Cities.

  A Smart City and a Smart World use digital wallets for transactions. But in this new digitally-transformed environment, everything has a wallet. Not only people have wallets, but objects and spaces also can have wallets. This enables anything to transact with anything else. For example, as a Smart Asset enters a Smart Space, such as an autonomous vehicle entering a parking structure, its identity and purpose are authorized. Then as it pulls into the parking structure, a payment is automatically triggered between the car and the building based on the permissions set by the building rights holder.

  Smart Transportation

  By extension, it is easy to see that this kind of Spatial Commerce forms the basis for an entire unified global smart supply chain. Smart Spaces that are connected to one another, using smart payments, authenticating users, spaces and assets, tracking interactions and transactions between everything, enable global supply chains.

  How does a global supply chain work? First, a Smart Space would grant the ability to gather raw materials and transport them to a Smart Space manufacturing plant to turn the raw materials into a product. The product is then assigned its own Smart Asset ID, and based on the rules contained in a Spatial Contract, it can be moved from point A to point B to point C, from manufacturing to shipping and from storage to store with a complete record of what happened if an audit is required. All of the payments and transfers of ownership can all be automated and recorded. And consumers can see whether the product fulfills particular brand promises (e.g., Fair Trade, conflict-free, carbon-neutral, sustainably produced), or not.

  Furthermore, a Smart World enables connected spaces that allow users and objects to move between them. Instead of the pages of the web, every space becomes a Web Space, and instead of moving between pages, you can now move between virtual spaces. For example, imagine you are in a fantasy world where you buy a magic sword that would be a Smart Asset with a history of its battles recorded into its Smart (twin) profile. You then teleport yourself in the form of one of your many avatars and the sword to a futuristic world where you battle another user with a lightsaber. If you win the battle, you could actually record that win into the sword itself and then teleport it, with permissions, to yo
ur niece or nephew’s bedroom as a surprise birthday gift (with their parent’s spatial permission). This is just one example of data and object and user portability between virtual worlds and the real world itself allowing assets and people and currencies to move between them. Another way of saying this is that we have created a seamless unity between Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality, an essential capability in the emerging Smart World we are all busy building—whether we realize it or not.

  Smart Ecology

  The Spatial Web can help humanity to become more sustainable and will be a powerful new framework for Impact Investing. The industrial economy has brought us many benefits but it has also created many unsustainable social and environmental problems. The Spatial Web can help us address these seemingly intractable problems better than any technology yet invented. As a quote attributed to Einstein says, “We can not solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them.”

  The Spatial Web enables a new level of thinking. A new way to analyze and solve the massive problems we now face begins with the concept of the Smart Twin. As we continue to digitize our businesses, our cities, our countries, and ultimately, our entire world, we will create a Smart Twin of Earth. We will have an increasingly accurate digital model of the planet as a living system with near real-time measurements of its various systems and the impact they have on us and on our environment.

  This model will be online and available for everyone to observe and use—something like a 3D WikiEarth. This Smart Twin will improve the quality of our global conversation because we will have accurate measurements to to inform decisions. No longer will politicians argue over whether something is hot or cold—we will all be able to read the temperature ourselves. With this increasingly accurate model, we will be able to run large-scale complex simulations and do other types of predictive analysis that will guide the way to truly sustainable solutions. Think of it as something like a giant 3D spreadsheet that will allow us to ask a series of “What If” questions and see the potential impacts of our decisions in real-time. Researchers of all types, from anywhere in the world, will be able to use this new tool to help us solve the many problems we collectively face. This is Cybernetic Thinking on a global scale—offering us an entirely new meta-level of thinking about our problems.

  The UN has identified 17 Sustainable Development Goals to achieve a more sustainable future for all. The SDGs address the social and environmental challenges that must be solved. They provide a blueprint for how we might realize all of the benefits that exponential technologies can provide us. If we don’t address these global challenges, life could become unlivable for large numbers of people.

  Utilizing the power of IoT to sense activities, AI to measure and predict outcomes, and AR/VR immersive spaces to learn, experience, and share, the Smart Twin combined with the global collaboration capabilities of the Spatial Web may provide the breakthrough required—to achieve the scale and number of impact projects that are necessary to make a real difference on such serious issues as climate change, global health, responsible consumption, and all the other Sustainable Development Goals identified by the UN in the window of time that we have to act.

  As businesses and governments implement individual spatial computing projects and network them together via the Spatial Web, they will each begin to realize the operational efficiencies of Spatial Operations. Spatial Operations can then utilize AI to provide ongoing Spatial Analysis of these projects. Spatial Analysis inevitably leads to Spatial Optimization which continuously identifies ways of achieving the same or better results using fewer resources. As the Spatial Web spreads around the planet in a manner similar to Web 1.0 and 2.0, we will evolve toward the realization of a Smart Sustainable Planet with an accurate Smart Twin as a powerful real-time visualization, interface and platform.

  Looked from the bottom up rather than the top down, the Spatial Web also helps us with specific Impact Projects. As an example of the Spatial Web in action, let’s explore the building of a Medical Clinic in an underserved area of the world. Using the power of the Digital Twin, we can create an entirely new way of designing, building, operating, maintaining, and replicating this Clinic.

  Let’s begin with the design process. Because the Spatial Web has a Virtual Reality interface, it is now possible for everyone to experience the design of the Clinic as a Smart Twin—at actual scale—no blueprints needed. Anyone can walk through a simulation of the building while it is still being designed—including the various communities that will use the Clinic—and provide designers with feedback. Stakeholder communities will include the medical and administrative staff, the people from the surrounding neighborhoods that will use the Clinic’s services, the vendors that will provide equipment and infrastructure, and insurers and regulators. Feedback from these communities can then be incorporated into the design and all stakeholders can sign off on a highly refined final design. This design is then completed by the architects and the final construction document is also a 3D Smart Twin of the building but with every component specified down to the last nut and bolt.

  Now comes the fun part. Every component used to construct and operate the clinic can now be bid on by various vendors and the final cost of the building can be locked in. Because the Spatial Web includes blockchain technology in its data layer, all of the building components can be linked to Smart Contracts that pay automatically when the materials reach the job site. This eliminates all corruption and almost all errors.

  Using Spatial Web technologies, building the Clinic will now be similar to putting together a child’s Lego toy set. Every part of the building process is programmed and sequenced making the building process similar to putting together a kit. Augmented Reality technology is very useful in this stage and you can see a simulation of the finished building sitting exactly where it will be when it’s finished. This acts as a visual guide during the building process. The blueprint is no longer on a large sheet of paper but it is right in front of you in full 3D. You can see the building as it will be when it’s completed or at any stage in the construction process.

  The Smart Twin of the building can be updated in real-time as the building is being completed which is useful for inspection and certification by various city, state, and federal verification teams. This ability to scrub forward and back in time and see every step of the building’s construction is called a 4D view—three dimensions of space plus time. As mentioned earlier, once we link and sync a 4D visualization of a Digital Twin with Blockchain data integrity and Spatial Contracts, it becomes a Smart Twin.

  In parallel with the construction, it is now possible to begin training staff in the Smart Twin of the building using VR. As the building nears completion, the full staff will have completed training in the various departments of the Clinic, making the handoff from the builder to the owner/operator very smooth.

  At this point, we now have two versions of the Clinic—the fully constructed and operational physical building, and a perfect digital copy aka Smart Twin of the Clinic with all of its construction history, materials provenance, legal contracts, and verifiable information embedded within it. Now we can watch the Clinic in action and learn from it. Artificial Intelligence in the form of machine learning can observe the actual use of the Clinic over time and make recommendations on modifications to the operations of the Clinic. This is called Spatial Analytics and provides those with the proper spatial permissions to view the data and allow it to be used to modify their operations, and in some cases, the actual design of the building or of future Clinics that might be constructed elsewhere. Copies of the Clinic can easily be built in multiple locations around the world using the data gathered in the first Clinic to upgrade and refine the design of later iterations.

  To look at this process more deeply, the Spatial Web is designed to interconnect all of the exponential technologies such as AI, IoT, AR/VR, Robotics, and Blockchain to enable a feedback loop of Spatial Operations and Spatial Analytics on a planetary scale. This
interconnectivity enables the convergence of these powerful technologies to be aligned for good—not just for building more sustainable clinics but sustainable farms, water and waste management, supply chains, and entire cities. They can be used to measure, manage, and coordinate the information and resources necessary to operationalize the global challenges and opportunities outlined in the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Using geo-spatially accurate 3D datasets that can function as a single-source-of-truth that is universally verifiable and shareable, the Spatial Web enables a new level of global coordination that can be actionable across nationalities, political entities, and global businesses for the first time in human history.

  The Spatial Web protocol, HSTP, will ultimately create a web out of everything in the world. This will act as a new nervous system for the planet, connecting everything and everyone together. We can now create ever more accurate Smart Twins of our hospitals, our campuses, our factories, our cities, our countries—and ultimately our entire world. Our fundamental human values, when powered by Artificial Intelligence and Blockchain technologies, can optimize energy flows, logistics, and everything else involved in the operations of modern society. This will be used to create and automate sustainable systems and quickly identify non-sustainable activities so we that we can correct or cure many of the global challenges we are currently facing. The Spatial Web enables us to define a clear pathway to finally creating a Smart Sustainable Planet.

  A Smart World is the logical emergent result of a Spatial Web that continuously networks together all of these digitally enhanced “smart things”—smart people, smart places, smart assets, smart rules, and smart money—into one holistic system. This digital upgrade for the planet links everything together in an integrated, interconnected digital network economy that enables an entirely new reality.