The Spatial Web Is at Hand...Is Web3 Prepared? - Part 1

The Network of Everything is coming

The Economy of Everything is at our doorstep

At the forefront of this transition is the convergence of new Smart Technology stacks merging AR, VR, AI, IoT, and Distributed Ledger innovation.

Yet, there's a HUGE elephant in the room.

To date, there are many companies building amazing Web3 technologies and products, with one glaring problem. These technologies are all disparate by design. They are not joined by a common language protocol. The Metaverses, dApps, and other Web3 solutions that are being built at this moment are all siloed.

Even “protocol” extensible user interface cradles like Metamask, My Crypto, Status, or Parity, are open-source browser extension tools that are designed for individual blockchains. Cross Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP) is heading in the right direction. Still, at best, it is merely a bridge between blockchains and does not consider that 99% of all data lives on databases, not blockchains.

Real-world IoT devices do not have a common language to share data between various manufactured sensors for a seamless experience. A common user identity to be shared between all interactions both virtual and real does not yet exist.

Most Web3 companies are building for “enhanced” Web2 experiences. They are not yet considering what is truly required for the implementation of a decentralized and fully networked Web 3.0 world.

The Metaverse experience of the future requires that all entities — people, places, things, both real and digital, will need to be networked together, capable of being indexed, searchable and accessible by anyone, anywhere, just like being able to search websites on the Web2 internet of today.

Dan Mapes, President, and Co-Founder, of VERSES Technologies, and Director of The Spatial Web Foundation, describes it this way, “In the future, you could go into a Web 3.0 Metaverse to design and order a pair of custom sneakers — you receive both a real pair and a virtual pair that your avatar can wear. The Sneaker Metaverse then needs to communicate to the digital twin of the factory to produce the physical shoes — the factory needs to track the shoe through the supply chain and ultimately to the drone delivery to the customer. Later, the customer might receive tokens for recycling the shoes. Everything will be interoperable because everything will be running one protocol — HSTP — just like the World Wide Web is now doing for webpages.”

This network of everything — this future Spatial Web browser experience will include a vast amount of data. This feat of parsing through these enormous datasets, and making sense of them, will require the assistance of artificial intelligence on a grand scale.

This unified, interoperable, and searchable network requires a common protocol. Just as HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) is the internet protocol of Web2, the Spatial Web requires its own unique protocol that takes into account a 3D immersive browser environment called, the Hyperspace Transaction Protocol (HSTP).

The web protocol we use today (HTTP), is designed to connect pages on computers with the goal of sharing information. Tomorrow’s web protocol (HSTP) will connect Smart Spaces, including all data and entities — physical people, cities, buildings, objects, and their digital twins, creating a smarter world by adding context and intelligence to every encounter. It will facilitate the technologically augmented experience of our daily lives in real-time. Decentralization will ensure trusted and secure interactions and transactions for trusted records and transfers of value.

What we really need to be building toward is a blending of virtual and physical worlds using cognitive and distributed technologies. Undeniably, there are specific Smart Technologies that will be crucial to the architecture of this networked Web 3.0 experience.

For the sake of fast-tracking the growth and transition into this new Spatial Web protocol, it is critical that the companies building these new technologies are collaborating with each other during this next transition period, keeping interoperability top of mind.

Also published here.

• This is Part 1 of a four-part series titled, “The Spatial Web is Coming… Is Web 3.0 Ready?”

  Read more in Part 2 to find out which Smart Technologies matter most in Web 3.0.

Special thanks to Dan Mapes, President and Co-Founder, of VERSES Technologies, and Director of The Spatial Web Foundation. If you’d like to know more about The Spatial Web, I highly recommend a helpful introductory book written by Dan and his VERSES Co-Founder, Gabriel Rene, titled, “The Spatial Web,” with a dedication “to all future generations.”