Meatspace vs The Metaverse

Working in venture across the emerging technologies space, I have seen noteworthy developments in workforce?dynamics and how culture and tech in?tandem?are?guiding this transitional?period of disruptive tech and institutional impacts.

TL;DR, when it comes to data security, privacy, liability balanced against its unbelievable & largely dormant utility - not only is trustless tech > pinky promises, but we?are?also likely on the cusp of a new era for consumer, retailer, advertiser positive sum markets. A win, win, win.

The death of colocated collaboration.?

Now, just as we still have candles post-electricity, we'll always have some percentage of collaborative work iterations that happen under one roof - but that percentage is fast approaching a minority stake.?

Apart from the anecdotal evidence, the data has been proving this out. The pandemic was a remote-first advocate's Monkey's Paw wish fulfilled. Suddenly, the world was adopting the methodology, but without the ops or philosophy to do so at its best - and for the worst conceivable?reason.?

Fortune 1000 CxO surveys through 2020 & 2021 have shown that, after swallowing the force-remote pill, those that have been able to adjust have seen overwhelming benefits to overhead costs and productivity boosts, driving an average 30% boosted long term commitment to stay remote should the public health necessity diminish.

*One space emerging in response to this more-common-than-ever issue is the toolset for continuous and or spontaneous remote collaboration. Whereby, Spacial,?Gather.town ?or?Cosmos.video ?+?Tandem.chat , or the recently debuted?Lounge.place ?- which looks the be a hybrid of all the former.

Meatspace vs Augmented Reality & The Metaverse.?

The technology isn't very new here, it's the market that's catching up.?As far back as 2014, I was building a peer-to-peer navigation app, shopping around for an analytics service, finally visiting the office of Upsight, where they offered to have us participate in the private beta of their new feature. They could push pop-up content to users' phones based on geofences we could draw on a simple web map.?

I immediately wanted to pivot our business to an augmented reality, gamified version of the navigation app - to have our users engage with their environments both during the journey and at the destination. I told my cofounders,?"Think Pokémon meets Foursquare."?We didn't do it. I still love the idea. I think Waze is starting to incorporate similar features, as inspired, perhaps, by the example of Pokémon Go.

I think this?kind of technology is mature enough that we'll finally be seeing many more emerging in the AR and gamified-map space.

Very soon, we're likely to start seeing these XR consumer apps that mobilize and monetize everyday activity, involving a good measure of tokenization via crowd-produced work to 'unlock' experiences & tokens - both fungible & non - while mapping, tagging, mining, and participating in digital and physical spaces.

To date, most AR deployment has seen traction in enterprise applications, managing safety, working with much more high fidelity blueprints and demonstrations than two dimensions could ever offer.?

I'm looking forward to the return of a better google GLASS to the consumer space (along with a quietly and robustly maturing Snap Specs line, releasing their 4th generation model soon), but glad it's found use in its mid-term retreat to enterprise tech - the proving ground that makes astounding tech cheap and simple enough to debut properly for the general user.

Why will AR likely see much more impact than VR??Put simply, AR meets you where you?are. A?Chromecast is made to plug into and augment the experience of a TV. A Ring or a Nest is attached to a house to augment its security or 'user experience'. A Salesforce app augments business intelligence on-platform. Similarly, AR can bring a visual, audio, or haptic boost to your daily life, working information, productivity, and/or peace of mind.

VR is dazzling, but I suspect will never see the same use and scale AR will start to, due to its interruptive and by definition separated experience.

How AI & IoT will change privacy and augmented UX forever - spoiler: it's not looking like a dystopia.?

Regarding AI & IoT - from the consumer to enterprise level - let's get the elephant in the room out of the way first. Problems: Data privacy, ownership, bias, trust & delivery, and here's the thing, the cat is out of the bag.

From facial recognition we've seen?security and UX enhancements?at near-frictionless point of sale, experience tailoring or augmentation, to exponentially more accurate and predictive advertising - consumers. retailers and even developers alike feel mounting discomfort with the uncanny accuracy and magic of data-augmented shopping (not to mention the?biases baked into?the homogeneously lopsided training data?that we've?seen).?

Even forensic data from financial behavior, location, gait, and tone recognition can and?are?being deployed - so the data treatment seems to be the crux upon which to dedicate efforts.

With Distributed Ledger Technology, however, privacy is back within reach - and possibly moreso than ever before.

*"Federated?Learning enables mobile phones to collaboratively learn a shared prediction model while keeping all the training data on device, decoupling the ability to do machine learning from the need to store the data in the cloud. This goes beyond the use of local models that make predictions on mobile devices (like the Mobile Vision API and On-Device Smart Reply) by bringing model training to the device as well."

Federated?Learning?and?the advantages of hardware like neuromorphic chips,?have set the table for?machine?learning?to work with?data from disparate sources, creating insights about consumer?behavior, for example, but?without the risk incumbent in actually sharing raw data.

Federated?Learning introduces the opportunity to have your cake and to eat it too here. From opt in systems of engagement from the keyholders of the systems of record - on device (especially secure leveraging tech like neuromorphic chips), and as many distributed nodes as there?are?people for bad actors to try to pressure into forfeiting data.

Retailers and advertisers utilizing data via?Federated?Learning also eliminate the cost and?liability inherent in keeping aggregate honeypots of personal user data up & protected - as the data stays with users, on-device.

The distributed?tokenization?of data, further, is capable of supporting a new infrastructure for?trustless data?as nonfungible assets, which?also?allow for?individualized?licensing for an earned microtransactional UBI from health, behavioral and consumptive data.?Tokenization to also address automation threats to ceteris paribus livelihoods, more data is better - especially in leapfrogging emerging markets

*Google's?Federated?Learning research:?https://ai.googleblog.com/2017/04/federated-learning-collaborative.html

** Snips.ai, Private by Design, Decentralized Voice Assistant was built on?Federated?Learning software, acquired by Sonos in 2019

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Elizabeth Hunker

Elizabeth.ai