Decentralizing the AR Cloud: Blockchain's Role in Safeguarding User Privacy

The role of blockchain technology in Augmented Reality (AR) is sure to be significant, if user privacy is to be considered. If not, users will hand over their most intimate details to large multinational corporations the likes of which the world has never seen.

AR Cloud and Spatial Computing

AR, also known as spatial computing, allows digital devices to understand the physical world, understand their movement and what they see in the physical world.

For devices to interpret the world, their camera needs access to have some kind of digital counterpart that it can cross reference. And that digital counterpart of the world is much too complex to fit inside one device. Therefore, the AR cloud has been developed. The AR cloud is a network of computers that work to help devices understand the physical world.

The main goal of AR is to help the device understand movement, position and rotation in space, because digital devices don't have a very good understanding of where they are in the world. GPS is not a very precise technology. As a line of sight technology, you actually need to have an uninterrupted line of sight to several satellites to achieve the sort of pinpoint accuracy needed in AR. For instance, GPS could not place me at my desk at which I am writing this piece.

An important part of spatial computing is positioning, which refers to a device’s ability to account for the position, orientation, and context of an AR camera, as well as the objects and surfaces around it. Visual positioning is the most popular method of solving the problem today of a device understanding where it is, etc.

Visual positioning basically means the device can analyze what it is seeing through its optical sensor, typically a camera and compare that to the digital counterpart in the AR cloud. Positioning can then be calculated by comparing camera data to the digital counterpart. When the environment is not too dynamic, it can be positioned with pinpoint accuracy.

In 2022, Google released its spatial AI, where they used billions of photos taken by Google Street View, and then put the photos into a machine learning algorithm that created a 3D representation of everything Google Street View had snapped.

Google used the 3D representation to offer an API that allows devices to share their camera feed with Google AR cloud, which can locate a device to about half a meter accuracy in most urban places, performing significantly better than GPS.

AR Poses Biggest Privacy Concerns Ever

Of course, you must share your camera feed with Google. The user tells Google what they are looking at, and Google tells them the location–a process that altogether fails to preserve privacy. In the case of AR glasses, Google would know what you were looking at at all times since AR glasses don’t work unless they are sharing a camera feed. Moreover, Google would know how the user feels about what they are looking at because glasses today can track how eyes react to what they are looking at.  This is one of the biggest privacy threats of all time.

In the context of AI, strategies regarding how to help preserve user privacy are more important than ever. Blockchain can minimize the risk when paired with AR by allowing positioning services to be decentralized. Rather than one digital counterparty of the world, such as Google’s digital counterpart, there would be micro-relationships between smaller digital counterparts, which might bolster trust.

Google should not have copies of everyone’s homes. Those copies should be held by users, who decide whether or not they let specific devices or services connect. Blockchain could minimize known risks.

The AR cloud is akin to an API to the world. The implications for applications that require knowledge about location, context, and more are considerable. In AR, the data is intimate data about where we are, who we are with, what we’re saying, looking at, and even what our living quarters look like.

AR devices can read our facial expressions, and more, similar to how the Apple Watch can measure the heart rates of its wearers. Digital service providers will have access to a bevy of information and also insight into our thinking, wants, needs, and desires.

Storing that data in a centralized server that is opaque is cause for concern. Blockchain allows people to take that same intimate private data, and put it on their own server from which they could access the wondrous world of AR minus such egregious privacy concerns. Blockchain delivers trustlessness to the world of AI, where perhaps in the not-so-distant future it will be needed most.