I've been receiving great feedback on this recent Matthew Ball podcast, in which we discuss the revised edition of his best-selling book, "The Metaverse: Building the Spatial Internet."
If this space intrigues you, I highly recommend giving it a listen.
But I get it… spare hours aren’t easy to find. So, I’ve summarized the key ideas below for a quick and easy read.
This should provide compelling conversation starters while also deepening your understanding of the spatial internet— how it’s emerging, where it’s taking us, and why it matters.
Enjoy, and feel free to share your thoughts in the comments below!
How the Metaverse Can Make Us More Human, Not Less
We opened the interview with a philosophical query: how can the metaverse make us more human, not less?
It's a valid concern, given the dystopian images thrust on us by hollywood and shows like Black Mirror.
Many people worry the metaverse will erode the very essence of what it means to be human.
However, as Matthew Ball articulates, there's a compelling argument to be made that these technologies can actually enhance our humanity, particularly, through enhanced forms of co-location & shared presence.
Ball discusses the importance of co-location and the subtle yet significant harms caused by its absence. The COVID-19 pandemic made this broadly apparent. As schools shuttered and education moved online, national studies began to show alarming trends. Declines in math and reading scores among nine and thirteen-year-olds were unprecedented.
These findings underscore a fundamental truth: humans are social creatures who learn best in more immersive & interactive environments.
Moreover, Ball tackles the phenomenon of "Zoom fatigue," an ailment many of us have come to know all too well. Virtual meetings often leave us more drained than their in-person counterparts. The reason is partly due to the unnatural setup: staring at our own image, trying to interpret social cues through a screen, and the disconcerting need to maintain eye contact with a camera. Such dynamics lead to distraction and a sense of disconnection.
Yet, there is hope in the form of advancing metaverse technologies. Ball highlights innovations like Google Starline, a holographic communication tool that significantly improves nonverbal communication, eye contact, and memory recall by simulating physical presence.
These advancements suggest a future where the metaverse enhances rather than diminishes human interaction. The more immersive/spatial environments maximize the bandwidth of communication, allowing for deeper understanding and more effective knowledge transfer.
In essence, rather than fearing the metaverse as a harbinger of dehumanization, we might consider its potential to enrich our lives. By bridging the gaps left by current digital communication, the metaverse could reintroduce elements of physical co-presence, making our interactions not just possible, but profoundly human.
How to explain the metaverse (to grandma, and to an executive)
For Grandma, the simplest approach is to talk about a 3D internet.
But what both Matthew and I have learned is that starting with the final user experience isn't always the most convincing.
Matthew prefers to take a more bottoms up approach, starting with the substrate upon which we're now so reliant (the internet), and then discussing its natural, emergent properties.
This starts with a basic framing of the internet: a robust network of protocols and standards, facilitating seamless information exchange across 200 million servers and 110,000 networks. This resilient infrastructure supports six million applications, two billion websites, and tens of billions of web pages.
The importance of this isn't just its breadth. Its the resilience & flexibility. In the middle of this interview, Matthew could go across the street to a Pizza Hut, use their smart TV, plug in basically any webcam, and as long as it can run a browser, re-join Riverside and continue this conversation; all with a different network, a different tech stack, and different hardware. And this could happen from practically anywhere in the world.
In other words, the internet does not specify a use case, it doesn't specify a device, it doesn't specify an industry, it doesn't specify essentially any applications whatsoever, and magically, nearly everything we do runs on it.
With that backdrop, Matthew then explains how nearly everything this substrate was designed for is 2D and linear. Hence why the average person can name a myriad of linear and 2D file formats such as .word, PDF, MP4, but 3D formats remain less known. The internet’s primary function was never to facilitate live interactions or represent the physical world, but simply to locate servers or client devices.
The current goal, and the purpose of the metaverse, is really to just upgrade this system, such that it can better support live, 3D, shared experiences. So that rather than people independently going to a news website, we could go engage with media in an entirely new, co-located, and social way.
This bottoms-up approach gives people a slightly different appreciation for how the internet works. It also creates a slightly different platform to discuss the metaverse and its inevitability.
Digital Twins and the Role of AI
Matthew's book has an entirely new chapter dedicated to AI.
The core premise: AI will be mission critical to bringing this future to life, bridging daunting gaps in hardware, game engine development, content creation, and computer vision.
To illustrate the point, Matthew refers to a vision recently touted by NVIDIA CEO, Jensen Huang, who believes that half of the global economy will eventually operate through the metaverse, aka spatially represented digital twins and simulations powered and co-authored by AI.
The enterprise space has pursued digital twins for over decade. But for the most part, digital twins remain quite lame. It's just too difficult to capture enough real-time data and keep the visual representations accurate and up to date.
Even if we did succeed, humans don't have the bandwidth to process all of this information, nor the mental capacity to make the volume of decisions required to make use of that information.
If we hope to have truly living, ubiquitous simulations; ones that sustain decentralized, end-to-end, machine-to-machine communications; AI is going to become a requirement. Scaling, operating, sustaining, complex digital twins is otherwise unfeasible, especially when considering the myriad issues surrounding interoperation, code conventions, and metadata— all problems that AI is beginning to solve.
AI-powered 3D reconstruction techniques like Gaussian splatting and NERF (aka photogrammetry 2.0) will also be crucial, likely operating as components within a larger, AI-driven framework.
Without AI, the industrial enterprise ambitions will be difficult to realize. With AI, this tech stack transforms into a broadly distributed economic engine
Compelling Niches within the Metaverse
As the saying goes… riches are in the niches.
One of them will be creating hyper-custom experiences for smaller, more localized audiences.
User-generated content in Roblox and Minecraft is heading in this direction, but the most notable successes today are those with broad appeal—virtual theme parks or popular games that draw the masses.
However, 3D tools are improving and AI is lowering the learning curve, allowing non-3D experts to build personalized content tailored to local communities.
For example… a family creating a virtual world based on their inside jokes, or residents of a neighborhood designing a shared digital space that reflects their unique culture.
These hyper-localized experiences could also extend to the workplace and the classroom, unlocking forms of creativity and relevance.
The most immediate opportunity here is immersive training within the enterprise, the authoring of which requires immense nuance and customization. The oil and gas industry is a good example, where they are deploying AR/VR at scale within safety training programs.
Oil rigs are extremely perilous, with high fatality rates on offshore platforms. The challenge is preparing workers for these alien environments and the long tail of potential dangers.
Traditional training methods, like safety videos, often fall short. VR and MR offer a more immersive and hands-on training experience. For example, even with approximated virtual environments, companies have observed significant improvements in job performance and safety. Eye-tracking technology within VR headsets are also uncovering critical insights, such as the visibility and recognition of safety signage during emergencies.
These findings have prompted real-world design changes that enhance safety protocols and save lives.
These example also make you realize... these technologies are not about isolating individuals in virtual worlds. But rather about complementing and enriching our physical existence.
The most important question for humanity to be asking itself
In the pursuit of good questions, I end every podcast with the same question: “in the face of dramatic change due to technology, what’s the most important question humanity should be asking itself (as individuals or a society)?”
Matthew answers by reflecting on some of the potential failures and missed opportunities of the original internet.
If we could rethink the original layers, what changes would we make?
One pivotal change would involve identity. Currently, our digital identities are fragmented and siloed within proprietary databases controlled by major corporations.
Imagine if we had developed a decentralized yet ubiquitous identity system from the outset. Such a system would allow a singular, consistent identity across all digital platforms and services, akin to the universal connectivity of email protocols. This shift would dramatically alter the balance of power in the digital era, breaking down barriers to competition and reducing corporate control over user data.
The implications of such a transformation are profound. Current regulatory efforts focus on tweaking existing products rather than building a truly open, shared infrastructure.
That said, Matthew believes the essential question for humanity is to rethink identity in a digital-first world, envisioning an internet where self-sovereign identity and data are fundamental rights accessible to all.
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Stay tuned for more content to come on spatial computing, AI, and the future of being human.