Creating the Metaverse

Background

It has been a while since I released a public blog since the publication of my book, Creating Augmented and Virtual Realities was all consuming and was recovering from some really heavy personal family matters (death in the family), I was unable to fully put out there and even market the book appropriately. During the pandemic, I did keep track of a lot of things, including the renaming of leading company, Facebook, now changing its name to Meta, leading to a buzzword of the metaverse and something of an easier concept to grasp than AR and VR. As many of you all know, In 2018, I conceptualized the OReilly media anthology, Creating Augmented and Virtual Realities: Theory and Practice for Next-Generation, Spatial Computing. this book was translated into Chinese and Korean, and distributes in over 24 countries.

  1. Some of the topics I wanted to include in the first book of unfortunately cut, including: cryptocurrency blockchain and web3, ethics, and webXR, areas of focus that I chose to spend time on since its publication in 2019.
  2. Here are some great companies that are working at the intersection of all three topics are: Lamina1, LivingCities, CultureDAO. I have yet to find a ton of other ones really working at a spatial computing experience first company that intersects with the web3/blockchain/cryptocurrency space to truly embody the principles of both human centered design and experience along with the values attached to ideas of ownership utilizing distributed ledger technology.
  3. There are quite a few advancements in AI (Artificial Intelligence) in the past few years. Generative art took off with NFTs, even though the algorithms themselves (generative adversarial networks or GANs) has existed for many years, they started to catch on in 2021 and 2022. With constant innovation from Stable Diffusion and OpenAI's innovations with GPT, we are seeing a much change in put Computer Vision (CV) and Natural Language Processing (NLP).
  4. While there are still quite a bit of an inaccuracy or types of errors as indicated by Vitalik Buterin and Andrew Ng by GPT-3, we can be excited about the possibility of enhancing, augmenting human potential with new innovations in speech and a new human computer interaction paradigm. The founder of Stable Diffusion wants to rethink the idea of PowerPoint for example. Balaji Srinivasan (former CTO of Coinbase and founder of Earn.com) has also talked about the new types of applications with the utilization of NFTs with private spaces.
  5. There are countless intersections between the various layers of technologies, from the human computer interaction (HCI) experience layer with spatial computing in the real physical world in combination with the digital or virtual world, the ownership layer, and the automation and augmentation layer where AI and robots can enhance (not always replace) the productivity workload of our species for mundane tasks.