AR Networks
In this article, we describe how small world networks will develop within augmented reality experiences and how they will be powered.
Small-World Networks
Who runs the world? It's not Beyonce. It's a Small-World Network.
Every animal connectome is a collection of small-world networks. Your collection of group text messages is a small-world network. Your high school reunion is a good example; a forest is another.
Nearly everything in life is both a fractal and a small-world network. Here's a short, 4-minute video we recorded where we explain it in more detail and how to use them to your advantage:
Augmented Reality Worlds
But why should we care about small-world networks when we're talking about Augmented Reality (AR)? Even though Apple released its version of the global reference product, it does not yet have a killer use case that drives people to buy its hardware product.
We at the firm feel fairly confident that the killer app will not be a port of a 2D app from the iPhone to a see-through 2D app in a 3D space. It will be something different and native to the platform itself.
It requires an entertaining experience that gives you superpowers when you put on the glasses, which you use in your digital and real life for work and play.
The solution will unify the experience of work, play, digital, and real life. It will go in the opposite direction of apps that break apart use cases for the small screen. It will consolidate them.
So where do you look for inspiration of what the future world will look like? We already have beta tests adopted at scale. These include Minecraft, Fortnite, Roblox, and RecRoom. Roblox, for example, has nearly 100M daily active users, 2.6M developers, and 5.2M experiences driving nearly $1B in bookings as of the end of Q1 2024.
But even in these Ready Player One metaverse worlds, where people come to hang out while doing things, experiences are fragmented, fake money is used, and there is no real-world integration. In addition, these are all fully virtual experiences instead of digital experiences overlaid in the real world.
As a result, there are many small-world networks, but not the primary ones. The primary one we all live in is the real world. Whether you believe we're in a simulation or not, we're here and there's no escaping it.
Connecting the Real with the Virtual
How do you connect the real world with the virtual world?
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You use Bitcoin.
At this point, I'm going to walk away for a few minutes to let that sink in fully.
Let me explain briefly. The Sun emits energy, which we capture with solar panels. Those solar panels power small-world networks of computers called data centers. Time passes and those data centers create Bitcoin (until there's only 21M in total) and process transactions, adding another "entry" onto their blockchain. This is the internet. Connected computers doing calculations based on human and machine interactions. Those Bitcoins are used to pay for things in the virtual world.
So, the real world turns into the virtual world over time.
As we've described in prior memos, people don't understand Bitcoin or Artificial Intelligence. But they do understand how to walk around our world and interact with things. We learned it as babies and have been doing it our entire lives. 3D objects move around a 3D world. The only difference is we’ve now overlaid digital objects. We’re quite literally digitally transforming the real world.
What this means is that AR starts in the virtual world and moves into the real world when we put on glasses and interact with them. Meanwhile, Bitcoin starts in the physical world (sunshine, computers) and then interacts with us in the virtual world.
Now put the crossover, convergence, and evergence together:
Sun > Humans > Electricity > Computing > Bitcoin > Artificial Intelligence > Augmented Reality > Humans
or go the other way
Humans > Augmented Reality > Artificial Intelligence > Bitcoin > Computing > Electricity > Humans > Sun
Confused yet? Or as our friend Anthony says, "Brain grenades"?
What's Next
Where do we go from here? We remind ourselves of the Evergence:
We begin building small-world networks in a three-dimensional augmented reality overlaid in the real world and powered by artificial intelligence, bitcoin, the sun, and core values.
Or said differently, we build a better world.
Stay tuned.
--Sean