Gabriel Rene on spatial rights management and the spatial web

0:21is it making the world a better place through technology so I guess the short answer is that the world wide web really transformed the way that we communicate globally it's also a public utility for the world that's not owned by any one country or corporation and yet all countries and all companies individuals use it the shortcoming of the web is

0:49that the information that we seek about the world whether it's whether it's you know the specific information on any thing that you're looking at or interested in maybe googling it and searching for it or whether it's instructions and DIY how to how to perform a task in the world that all happens behind screens but with the birth of a new interface that's

1:12happening with frequent Oh with augmented reality and holographic information you can suddenly start to place an information and instructions and even program physical activity like in the same ways that we program actions articulates on websites into the physical world itself so like the original web protocol standards that we all rely on today open standards like

1:33HTTP hypertext Transfer Protocol of an HTML we've invented hyperspace transaction protocol it's a way of taking that same sort of functionality and placing it into the world the advantage of that is it actually creates a sort of underlying grammar that both humans and robots and machines and Internet of Things devices can all use to make sense of the world and share

1:58information together the benefits of that are that you can then program activities in any sort of operational sense we're sort to think about you know pickers locating things in a warehouse or ships moving in and out of ports or products moving between distribution points or locating something in a retail space Home Depot and we want to find this exact thing in three-dimensional space

2:21suddenly everyone can use this underlying protocol technology to enable sort of digital information in the world in a way that's interoperable and like how we actually interact in the world today wow that's really fascinating Gabriel how did you get into this in the first place and when did you first start versus well the idea for versus is several decades

2:47old I started working in the early 90s the R&T lab called cyber lab and at the time a lot of the science fiction stories that had come in the late 80s and early 90s were all about this idea of sort of three-dimensional web they used to call the meta first and a lot of really funky movies at the time around virtual reality lawnmower man and Johnny mnemonic and a few others and we were

3:16working on some of the earliest versions of these technologies working with human interface technologies labs at University of Washington and getting a chance to really test some of the early prototypes and as a young man I could suddenly see that even as the web was emerging was eventually going to go so we're a period of many decades working me across the Commerce and working in

3:37immersive immersive technologies and database architectures and gaming really started to see that combined with mobile technologies and networks to build this new sort of web in the world which we call this facial web so we started versus formally about twelve months ago I think it was in R&D for a couple years before that but the actual company is just under 12 months old now

4:06so I would say 25 years of R&D in an eight-year-old that's amazing and how far is the development of the spatial web right now and is it already live in the market or what's the timeline here yes so the underlying protocols are in beta now we have a handful of really large global partners that we've done some test integrations with and that are

4:33currently testing it we will plan on deploying it sometime next year we'll roll that out with the with the Foundation which will then host that much like the world wide web foundation today and make that available for everybody so we've already proven out the basic functionality and it's working really nicely so then we'll be relying on everyone to participate we'll

5:01spin up working groups and start to test it for different markets and then develop the standards over time with a number of people at the table and I also read that as the spatial web grows you mentioned for example a picker could find something in a warehouse very easily in a three-dimensional space but this really expands to a whole smart city of sorts do you foresee smart

5:24cities growing through vs. and how would that work so I think actually the only way you can you know really have a smart city is if all the things that we call smart are able to interoperate right so right now we talk about smart phones and smart cars and smart contracts potentially smart glasses some are warehouses smart you know smart utilities there isn't gonna be a version

5:53where Microsoft technology controls the port and the transportation is managed by googles and all the IOT you know devices are IBM plus 30 other companies and Amazon controls all the automated transaction experiences that's not a smart city that's a highly fragmented city where with large companies controlling the parts that won't work together so in our opinion you cannot

6:20have a smart city unless you have something like vs. as your underlying digital infrastructure and open structure that then allows all those parties and participants along with startups and new companies and citizens and federal governments or local governments to all participate together much like the web today so it's the difference between sort of a Pico

6:40systems were stuck in today with you know Apple and Android or even the absent cells with your siloed experiences you know the world is interoperable it's fine if you want to have that behind a little screen but when it when it becomes active in the world the ports and the airports and the cars and the streets and the drones and our shopping experiences and

6:57entertainment and safety and utilities and energy actually all need to work together so we think this is the basis for a universal digital infrastructure that allows everyone else to develop on top of it in an open and free model mmm-hmm yeah that's a great idea G and one thing that I think of when I think of 3d dimensional spaces and that's been popular recently is digital assets

7:23inside of virtual spaces and also the marketplaces for those assets do you foresee some integrations with virtual assets inside of the spatial web and would they be a marketplace for that or how do you see that playing out yeah great question I think there's two distinct classes of virtual assets so in one one respect everything in the world will have its

7:51own sort of virtual asset almost like a digital twin that's often using their industry 4.0 narratives that's tied to it's as if everything has sort of a holographic representation of it where all the information about that thing is embedded so all the Wikipedia information all the history all the usage all the rules around how you can use something or buy something it's all

8:13sort of embedded in sort of holographic these are a representation that is in synched with in with respect to data and then link to that object and this is where blockchain becomes valuable because the data integrity around these things becomes important so that's that couldn't be for anything or ultimately maybe for everything and then there is

8:33what you might consider pure virtual assets these can be characters the information it could be it could be experiences that are you know then are layers in the world every game every movie every bit of sort of storytelling intellectual property sub need becoming interactive and available to experience in the physical world in augmented reality or completely new

8:56worlds in virtual reality so I think that you'll the largest asset class in human history will end up being virtually these sort of different classes of them within that some that are very specifically tied as representations of something happening in the real world and others that are purely really are our ideas and fictions and fantasies that we get to explore

9:17with blocking and the idea of you know turning these into smart assets they may be good maybe one of a kind representations there could be only one version of the market – Iron Man suit that is a virtual experience that you can step into and that may end up being incredibly expensive so you know creating digital scarcity is something that blockchain enabled we had digital

9:39abundance but that really drove the price of digital things to zero so with digital scarcity the ability to create you know a unique identifier for an object and essentially protect that on the chain adding to a digital data integrity around it you're gonna have an asset class that I believe will boost the global economy by a significant factor and if you look at the beginning

9:59of digital transformation the 1950s to today we almost have 10x the global economy from about you know 10 trillion dollars to almost 100 trillion today so you can only imagine what the accelerated path of these technologies might do over the next few decades and I don't think that it's too crazy to say that with my 10x again within the next 40 years 50 years I'm really glad that

10:22you touched on blockchain there with the virtual assets as well because there will need to be some enforcement of digital scarcity and there really has been a sort of devaluation with digital abundance when you can just duplicate things and you can't really create unique scarce items in the spatial spacial web so with versus are you guys integrating that blockchain scarcity

10:44from the get-go and how will that work and have you already been working on that yeah so there's there's two components there one is that we're we're working with what's called decentralized identifiers D IDs and think of them almost as the new URL URLs are pretty cool because in one sense they're an AI identity right Amazon and there an address so what we want is

11:12to take the sort of format the idea of the most most widely adopted you know identifier in the world which is the URL and then apply that to objects whether it's you know real world objects or digital assets and so those those assets themselves can then be registered on any blockchain so with versus we are setting up the HS TP protocol to be able to be crossed ledger

11:37because I don't think that any of us are entirely bought into the fact that they'll be somehow one blockchain we know that's not a real thing at the same time there's DAGs and graphs and tangles and you know who knows what's quantum Ledger's who knows what's next so the idea important that the important idea there is the data integrity and whether that's a combination of

11:58cryptography or sort of human and social you know consensus algorithms incentives that are really social hacks to make sure people are telling the truth we want to be able to support those in any way so we see that almost as the same way that the world wide web did not have a one particular approach to data storage that here's you know as long as you can you can store data

12:21anywhere you like you can store it you know your buddies server in his basement or you can spend you know two hundred thousand dollars and stored on Akamai and that we have AWS we want to be agnostic with respect to this sort of data integrity there and which Ledger's are communicating so we have ways of using D IDs to enable cross ledger functionality which hopefully will will

12:43make it future proof I'm really glad that you've taken that approach and I completely agree that you need to have that blockchain interoperability and that cross chain transfer ability of assets because you just don't know and you need to future-proof yourself because the block chains today may not be the block chains of tomorrow and that's the same with every progression

13:05and evolution as we saw from MySpace to Facebook and whatever comes after that right and to always be prepped for the future so that's really great that you've taken that approach one thing that I've recently saw from versus is that you released the spatial web book that you and you're developing that into the vs. ecosystem can you talk a little bit

13:25about the book release and how that fits in yes I think whereas vs. is really an organization that's focused on the development and support of the underlying technologies and as well as the commercialization and adoption of them the larger narrative is really about the spatial web and what we wanted to do was put all of our thoughts about the world and the impact that artificial

13:54intelligence and you know spatial computing and blockchains cryptocurrencies Internet of Things and other exponential technologies are going to have on the world if the last you know 150 years is any indication our definition of progress as a society includes amazing technological advances as a civilization at the same time these technologies have brought us to the

14:19brink of potential destruction and the impacts on climate change and other other issues even with respect to our social fabric are problematic so we think that with these new technologies which are exponentially more powerful than the last century it's really critical to make sure that we lay down some ethical foundations that we have a conversation about how we want to use

14:44these these technologies in advance use them to hopefully reverse the tide of some of the challenges that we've faced in currently faces today with respect to our the usage of technologies today and pave the road for what we hope might be the opportunity for a global civilization that works together as a single sort of network and so the book really outlines that

15:08narrative it goes into some of the promises and as as where occurs where I always like to say the pitfalls around these technologies but really importantly it describes how the protocol itself becomes this connected tissue to create a sort of digital nervous system that really could help us address a lot of the questions and challenges we have around sustainability

15:28around privacy an identity around security and Trust and so it's it's available on Amazon starting September 2nd and we have some really wonderful quotes from some market leaders and they've been getting great feedback so as I as I mentioned to you before the call here from industry leaders around the world so we're very

15:55much looking forward to putting this out here as a way of boosting the disability and starting the conversation so we can select to weave this into our businesses into our governance structures into our education models into our design Easy's and into our everyday lives that's really great I'm looking forward to seeing that release on Amazon and I will put a link in the description below

16:20when the book is available on Amazon for the viewers and that's all the time that we have for the interview but how can people learn more about versus or get involved and of course follow along as you guys progress if you are interested please come visit us at versus i/o and after the book launch you can also come to the spatial web dot org to learn more

16:46awesome thanks Gabriel it's been a pleasure let's follow up in the near future looking forward to dashing thank you so much