Fantasizing about Web 3.0

Lucid dreams about a reimagined internet that can more seamlessly fuse our physical and digital lives.

Being a teenager in the 1990’s meant that I got to experience the early days of the internet boom with unfettered imagination. We grew up accustomed to meeting and chatting with anyone on the other side of the planet. The ancient ICQ and AOL Instant Messenger , as well as obscure chat rooms and good old Skype, these experiences shrunk the distance between us and our loved ones and colleagues, encouraging ideas to flow across borders, and collaboration to foster regardless of time-zones.

For those of us that were gamers back then and remember what it took to even load up a game on a PC, it makes today’s gaming experience feel like a farfetched dream. My journey as a designer made this whole experience even more unique as, from 1997 and on, I began chasing more computing power to keep up with creative tools that demanded more and more from my CPU and GPU.

Fast forward to 2022 and there are more tools for creation and collaboration than I will even have time for, the portfolio of dazzling games appears infinite, computing power feels borderless, and creative tools are at their all-time best. We have whizzed by the original capabilities of the personal computer, seemingly mastering graphics user interfaces, and expanding the internet in all its permutations to new heights.

With all this exponential growth and amazing tools at our fingertips, it’s so tempting to wonder what lies in the next 5-10 years of the internet, especially as we see the beginning of a brand-new phase of the internet kickstarted by block-chain: Web 3.0.

The truth is that the future is unwritten and, now more than ever, as we enter a more decentralized stage of the internet, we are all responsible for shaping it. All the recent excitement around the Metaverse prompted me to try make sense of it all and look at some unrealized ideas in this space.

It goes without saying that this is for my own personal amusement, and I am far from an expert in all of it. So, if you are as curious as I am and have something to share, please chime in with your own opinions. Don’t be shy! ??

Web 1.0 - The birth of the internet

For the whole of the 90’s and a bit into the 2000’s, we lived with a more primitive version of the internet, which is often referred to as read-only. A time when people hung out at private LAN parties , used Netscape Navigator on a dial-up connection to get around. Then, everything felt like one giant Wikipedia, connected through basic hyperlinks.

Nothing was yet profitable with ads and creating content for it wasn’t as easy. For those eager to contribute, it meant learning how to code and navigate uncharted territory. The digital art and design communities were uniquely active as we were all attracted to this shiny new medium for self-expression. We left behind the limited world of CD-ROMs and dove right into a brand-spanking new Macromedia Flash universe where animation and sound were table stakes.

As a designer, I was personally addicted. ???? Glued to my screen, consuming every interesting page I could find, and contributing to sites like K10K.net, Newstoday.com, Surfstation.com, DesignIsKinky.net and dozens more. Those were the days where most web users were just like sponges and browsing the web truly felt like a scavenger hunt. I miss it mostly for how novel things felt. Today, there is just so much content that it’s impossible to appreciate it all, and for that reason nothing feels quite special.

Web 2.0 – The floodgates of data

It was towards the end of Web 1.0 that we all saw startups sprouting out of the ground. A time when we began leaving behind the free model of “everything-is-a-wiki” and entering the capitalist internet world we know today.

It was the beginning of this “Read & Write” web, the start of its chapter as a platform and web-based applications were the hot new thing. It was then that I had veered off my beginnings in web UX and entered the motion graphics business. In retrospect it was probably a backwards step from a technology point of view, but I saw motion design as a limitless medium for advancing the melding of design, animation, film, and sound into a single content form unlike any other.

During those years, the internet blossomed into something new. It got organized with Google’s search engine, gave birth to social networks like Facebook and Twitter, and further fueled giant online-shopping businesses like eBay and Amazon. The new web was now more interactive and collaborative than its predecessor, and there was no way back.

With all this new activity, there was a massive surge in digital data and a new business model was formed around our activity on the web. As Jaron Lanier will tell you, it also created room for dystopia to thrive. I won’t go there, but there are plenty of examples to go around.

On a positive note, this allowed product-makers behind those iconic experiences to make them exponentially more powerful and often better for the end-user too. With the right instrumentation, it was finally possible for human-centered design to take off at an unprecedented scale.?

Web 3.0 – The world’s supercomputer to power a Multiverse of Metaverses

To understand where we are at now, it’s worth looking at where it all started, which was Bitcoin and the advent of crypto currency in 2008. Behind Bitcoin is a magic component, integral to the next version of the internet: Blockchain technology.

Since this topic isn’t my strong suit, I’ll describe it in my own simplistic voice: Blockchain, as the name sort of implies, is a way to make data incredibly secure by assembling it via a global network of computers, one block at a time. Each piece is secured and connected to the next piece in a chain-like fashion, synced in real-time across peer-to-peer network, making it nearly impossible to hack.

One can apply blockchain to lots of different things like digital ID’s, a vaccination certificate, or even financial transactions. In fact, blockchain is pretty much synonymous with today’s financial landscape. But this decentralized tech has come a long way since its invention and continues to disrupt other spaces, most notably the art market as NFT’s came into the spotlight in 2021.

Another critical piece of the puzzle is a mechanism for keeping your digital goods together so that your things are kept safe in a distributed (blockchain) ledger, or wallet. Most wallets available today, such as MetaMask , are for crypto currency, but it seems we will gradually see more services combining digital goods and trinkets you collect in the apps you use, tickets to events, or even your ID and the title of your home.

The evidence of new powerful solutions seems endless, and with all these disruptive ingredients, the web continues to be fertile ground for innovation. The question I ask myself is now: What is now possible if we combine old concepts with new ones?

The hot answer appears to be the Metaverse (read “Snowcrash ” for the true inspiration and source of this name). While there are many different definitions for it, which often come with abstract and far-fetched, futuristic “Ready-Player-One -like” visions, I find it more straightforward to simply think of Web 3.0 = Metaverse.

There are a lot of commonalities between the way the internet is organized today and the many incoming Metaverse concepts we have been hearing about in the news. They all essentially boil down to three core elements: People, Places and Things. Let me attempt to break them down:

(Apologies in advance as I may be biased by this way of structuring things as I co-authored a patent on this perspective while working on Kipman’s team at Microsoft).

People

Well, that’s us! Today we can show our presence in many ways, some more inherently human than others. From the movement of our mouse cursors in a FigJam , to our photos on an avatar or our live picture on a video call. The COVID-19 pandemic, and the subsequent global shift to a hybrid way of working have put a strain on the effectiveness of all these mechanisms, pushing us all to innovate and create more ways to feel truly connected to each other. A great example of this accelerated push is Together Mode in Microsoft Teams, which was developed at the very beginning of the pandemic.

Seeking more of these solutions shines a light on the gaming industry where we are accustomed to creating alternative personas to explore and play. This flexibility to personalize our appearance has been popularized in social media, with augmented reality, camera filters and lenses. Beyond pure fun, these advents give us new chances to share more about ourselves, our likes, and dislikes, helping us show up more authentically to others. It is easier to understand the value around this idea as companies like Microsoft and Meta have both shared some initial steps to bring customized avatars to the workplace.

To consider the next stage of this takes just a little imagination: as A.I. evolves, it can make UI simpler, more contextual, but it can also help us achieve more in everyday tasks with automation. These improvements create the opportunity for A.I. to take over for us at certain moments. However helpful it may seem; this is where we slowly begin crossing the line of what it’s like to be present and active in a user experience. How will we feel when it fully takes over for us during a conversation with a co-worker or after we pass away ?

While there are many fun innovations that can bring so much goodness to our conversations and professional collaborations, when it comes to people’s presence and their identity, I’d argue that it’s worth slowing down a little and considering potential negative outcomes.

Places

A link to a webpage, a shared document, or a chat thread with a co-worker. The location on Google Maps or an upcoming meeting, whether in the physical office or conference call. The invite to an online game party or even as granular as a particular level of a game. It all fits in the same category and could eventually work interchangeably with one another, originating first in the real-world and later gaining more value in our digital lives or vice-versa.

This overlap of physical and digital, low, and hi-fi is where we truly begin having fun. Closing the gap between the two is exciting beyond belief but will take time.

In this territory, Epic Games with its Unreal engine is leading the way . I am particularly impressed by its Pixel Streaming technology, which will help unleash beautifully crafted, interactive three-dimensional content to low-cost devices, making a Metaverse-like experience more accessible to everyone.

Equally special is XBOX’s Cloud Gaming solution, which continues to grow . These and other players will continue to enable high-fidelity content to show up on our small and big screens, including our web browsers.

It's also worth pointing out that every place comes with an inherent limitation on how people can feel and appear present. For instance, as we venture deeper into new territory such as virtual reality, sensors aren’t yet capable of registering much of the human body aside from our head and hand positions, so human presence either gets abstracted or their movement is limited. This is also true in two-dimensional apps like Figma for instance. There, a real-time cursor, and voice chat feel like plenty presence (for now).

All in all, the places component is my favorite due to its visual nature, but also because it presses us to make our experiences more sensorial. Going past visuals and embracing other senses ultimately makes us feel more present, regardless of how dimensional a place may be. This trend is clearest with audio where voice-based social media services have become so prevalent.

At some point I imagine a product akin to Google Earth where users may not only navigate to the location of a physical place, outdoors and indoors , but also find virtual-only spaces within it. A map of the world and all its Metaverses – a Multiverse map! As more creators adopt Threejs and WebXR , the closer we will get to such reality.

This happens to be the area where I have noticed the most activity from creators. See these examples from Six&Five , Tendril and Reisigner Studio as just a tiny glimpse of what people are creating.

Things

This is essentially everything else. It doesn’t have to be characterized as a rare item in a game and in fact, it should include anything ranging from your everyday files such as documents, photos, videos and so on, to a new skin you bought in Fortnite , your Nike sneakers , or a rare item collected in Animal Crossing , this is your stuff, and it shouldn’t be so hard to keep track of it all.

The recent explosion of interest in NFTs has made this category (things) far more exciting than we could have imagined years ago because it can finally level the playing field when comparing the value of a physical and digital assets. In other words, valuable digital art may be just the beginning. What about digital real-estate? Could I purchase someone’s Minecraft creation for instance?

What makes the next phase of things so interesting to me is a chance to create meaningful bonds between real-world connected devices (IoT) and digital objects. I recently learned that we are expected to have 64 billion IoT devices by 2025, compared to the 1 billion PCs we have today for instance, and their influence on how the internet is shaped is inevitable.

More and more apps are trying to intelligently bring your physical things into the digital world and more investments in computational photography will allow AI in our apps to understand what we are interacting with in the real world. Tesla ’s self-driving cars and Microsoft’s HoloLens already take advantage of semantic labeling in their own arenas, and we should see this kind of capability make waves across all three categories I outlined here. Afterall, understanding spaces and people (biometrics) are just as important.

A playground for creators stretches as far as the eye can see

It’s hard to contain my excitement about the opportunity ahead, but in all fairness, it is easy to dream big and imagine distant scenarios where nearly everything is immersive. But how do we get there? We must look closer and innovate with today’s products because we are still too far from a day when billions of people will have three-dimensional displays.

The basic building blocks are still relevant to today’s two-dimensional experiences, and we should keep building on them by forging stronger bonds between physical and digital.

I am a believer that crafting the next version of the internet will require us to think through the imaginative lens of Art & Science, more than we have as Designers and Engineers. Web3 is an amazing canvas for creators of all types, and it is encouraging to see companies like Adobe for instance, which has anticipated the demand and acquired the Substance suite. Afterall, three-dimensional software skills are to be expected of future generations of creators as 3D content become ubiquitous, leapfrogging old GUI standards beyond our belief.

I’m inspired by the opportunities that lie ahead. Are you? ?? If so, I would love to hear about the areas that interest you and the trends you’ve noticed. Chime in here with your comment or reach out with a private message to get the conversation started.

* Thank you to Miles , Struan and Rachel for their input. Artwork by MvsM and originally created for a different, yet connected topic.