The Knowledge Metaverse The Intelligence Explosion and How We Are Becoming Superhumans

By Dan Lejerskar & Josh Chesler

Laguna Beach, August 28, 2021

Prologue

The idea to write this book first came in conjunction with a visit to Korea during the COVID-19 pandemic. After having to attend the Asian Leadership Conference remotely in 2020, EON Reality had been invited back in July 2021 to attend in-person.

For me, that meant my first trip out of the country after the longest stretch at home in my adult life.

As a lifelong businessman and entrepreneur, I’d grown accustomed to traveling around the world to share our products and solutions with partners and prospective clients. With decades of experience creating, promoting, and distributing augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) — collectively known as XR — products and solutions, I grew accustomed to hopping on a plane with nothing but a laptop and a smartphone to explain what the future of XR most likely holds to people far smarter than myself.

From CEOs of Fortune 500 companies to deans of major universities to Ministers of Education for countries on a handful of different continents, I’ve shaken hands and shared my views of the future and the massive role XR will likely play in it. Together with my colleagues, I visited hundreds of partners, clients and prospective clients in over 130 countries — some of them dozens of times. Regardless of language and cultural barriers, many of them have agreed with me, joining the EON Reality family one by one until we became the global leader in XR programs for academic and industrial uses — or “knowledge and skill transfer” in more technical terms.

But at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, that all stopped.

I knew that I wouldn’t have to worry about my team’s work ethic as nearly everyone moved to working from home. When you build a global company like EON Reality, you need to trust that the people you’ve hired can do their job without much oversight.

But the big question mark for me was how the pandemic would affect the XR industry. In my head, I saw a tremendous opportunity. With social distancing measures and the threat of the virus spreading all but shuttering in-person events, people needed alternative options for interaction and engagement that they’d likely never considered before. Much like how Zoom quickly showed people how in-person meetings could be replicated with video calls, EON Reality could come up with an option for more hands-on solutions — and that’s exactly what we did.

Of course, there was always the possibility that the entire company could be severely hurt under the weight of the pandemic.

On September 1, 2020, EON Reality announced the official launch of EON-XR , our all-in-one platform that we considered a turnkey solution for those looking to delve into the world of XR learning and training without needing to learn programming or acquire expensive hardware. Shortly after we also released EON Merged-XR Digital Twin creation that enables AI Based Knowledge Injection?and Spatial Meetings that enables you to Teleport to a Real Place in Real Time and Explore, Discover, Converse by?Walking Around And Interacting With the Host’s Surroundings. It meant retiring our classic EON software and integrated equipment-based history centered around custom programs for specific locations and it (combined with the pandemic) was a significant risk that we all deemed was needed to address the new market in a post-pandemic world.

A matter of months later, we saw our user base increase by over 800% and our global network expand into 73 countries. My schedule was so packed with Google Meets, Skype discussions and Zoom calls to present EON-XR to interested clients around the world that I had to adjust my sleeping schedule to accommodate our partners and prospective clients in Europe, Asia, and Africa. I was virtually attending dozens of conferences, inaugurations, and other events for our new additions every week. Together with our business development and customer success teams, I became an expert in speaking, demonstrating, and toasting to the webcam on my laptop.

EON-XR was a success in every way, shape, and form that we had dreamed about, but it still felt incomplete without being able to celebrate in-person with the people I was helping. So when I was offered to fly to the Asian Leadership Conference on July 1, 2021, I jumped at the opportunity.

But I felt that at an event like the Asian Leadership Conference, time has come to share a big impactful solution if people were going to remember what I talked about while sharing the stage with global leaders from both the private and public sectors — no one is going to care about a Swedish CEO from California’s vision of virtual reality’s future if it’s presented right after a former President of the United States.

I began focusing my speech on a concept that we at EON have been working towards since the company's inception 23 years ago: the metaverse. We’ll obviously get much deeper into what the metaverse is, what it’s made of, and how it could affect people — that’s the purpose of this book after all — but I feel it’s important to briefly mention the topic here just to set the stage.

First introduced to the world in 1992 by Neal Stephenson’s science fiction novel, Snow Crash, the metaverse is a persistent virtual world — accessible to individuals via “special goggles” (or these days, smartphones, XR headsets, and other wearables) — in which people could meet, claim territory, build things, make money and more. The impact of Stephenson's idea on the non-fictional world has long been profound, but impossible to realize… until now.

The concept of the metaverse is simple enough. It’s effectively the combination of the latest XR technology with the near-infinite knowledge of the internet. It’s the ability to bring everything that we can see and do on the internet and make it accessible and available in the modern world — whether that means seeing online product reviews on an item while physically purchasing it in a store or having a step-by-step YouTube video on how to change a tire broadcast directly on to the side of your car when you need it most. Combined with recent advancements in artificial intelligence (AI), this could mean that everything you do for the rest of your life has the potential to be aided and/or expanded by the full power of the internet.

But more on that later.

I mention all of this solely to say that by the time I arrived in South Korea, I’d realized that we can now officially announce what we with the new EON-XR platform have began to realize, “the knowledge metaverse.” Without giving too much away — again, we’ll get substantially more detailed about this in the coming chapters — it’s a branch of the metaverse solely focused on making sure that we’re able to learn, train, and perform as efficiently and effectively as we possibly can. In my mind, it’s the natural evolution of EON-XR, and one of the most helpful ways we can transform the world in the near future.

Images Courtesy of Advisory Board Member John Gaeta

?

By the time I finished my presentation at the Asian Leadership Conference, I could tell that I was on to something. Following my time on the stage, I received more questions than I’d ever gotten before. People were already discussing areas of the knowledge metaverse that I hadn’t considered and wondering about topics that I’d only mentioned in passing. There was more interest in the metaverse after less than an hour of my rambling than there was for just about any other subject covered that day. I knew I was on to something.

About a month after my speech, both Facebook and Microsoft announced that they’d be working on their own versions of the metaverse, bringing the phrase into the mainstream. Of course, it’s no coincidence that two of the largest providers of XR hardware are among the big names to adopt the metaverse early on, but the beauty of the metaverse is that it’s similar to the internet of today — or a shopping mall before we all moved online — there’s enough space for all of us to pursue our own visions without even significantly affecting each other.

It’s clear to everyone involved that the metaverse is the future of the internet — and it’ll likely shape everyday life just as the internet already has. The promise of the metaverse has already intrigued hundreds of governments, companies, and academic institutions, and that number is certainly growing with every passing day. But similarly to any new technology, there’s still no shortage of questions surrounding the metaverse and its uses. While many titans of the industry are throwing around the term a lot, no one is taking the time to explain the details of the metaverse or outlining what daily life would look like with the metaverse incorporated into it.

I wrote this book in the fall of 2021 while visiting with Ministers and academic leaders in more than 60 countries . Most governments that I visited have developed a digitization vision with focus on post-pandemic resilient recovery for education. They have realized that they need to leapfrog using digital experiential learning solutions that are more fun and engaging than Zoom or traditional e-learning.?However most face the challenge to convert their vision into practical programs that provide tangible results today.

There is a sense of urgency to assist them, and it is therefore we cross the globe to help together with our Non-Profit Learn for Life that has 15 years experience in Africa with XR projects to improve Education, Health awareness, Safety and Sanitation.Yes, it is exhausting to travel during COVID times, filling forms and undergoing almost daily Tests (I have had my nose penetrated more than 40 times) but at the same time it is enormously rewarding when I see the positive impact we are making by helping students and workers to better learn, train and perform .

However, visiting alone will not accomplish this task. There’s a need to create more awareness, understanding, and belief around the metaverse if it’s expected to change humanity as we know it, as people won’t be willing to adopt what they can’t understand. And that’s exactly what I’m aiming to do with this book. This isn’t about sales or branding, it’s solely about explaining and showing the importance of the next technology that will change the world — and if you don’t believe it can, then I guess you haven’t seen what the metaverse is capable of yet.

?