Spatial News™ #013
This week we're all about the case of Pixelmon, demystifying the metaverse, and Tim O’Reilly on Web3.
Welcome to Spatial News™ 013, Spatialists! Last week I had a corona break (and I don’t mean beers by the beach). While I’m still on idle, I didn’t want to leave you dry. “Empty your mind. Be formless, shapeless, like water. You put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle, it becomes the bottle. You put it into a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend." -Bruce Lee, martial artist and actor
Web3: “Get Ready for the Crash”
Tim O’Reilly, known for coining Web 2.0 and for publishing the first website in the world, has more to say about Web3.
“[T]he entire history of the computer industry was radical openness, which led to a lot of innovation, which later led to closing it down… there will always be new avenues for power to become centralized.
[E]ven if you're a true believer in blockchain technology as a power for decentralization, you should look for the next vectors of recentralization.
Already we see them. Blockchain turned out to be the most rapid recentralization of a decentralized technology that I've seen in my lifetime… it took only a couple years with bitcoin before the majority of the value was held by a very small group of people.”
Even as I imagine the waves retreating much further from the shoreline than usual the Wall Street bank J.P. Morgan has set up a virtual lounge in Decentraland and discusses its “Opportunities in the Metaverse”.
Image courtesy of jpmorgan.com/onyx
According to the World Economic Forum, from the perspective of human experience,
VR, AR, and BCI will Shape the Future of the Metaverse
The article mentions three concurrent theories of the metaverse
As a product or service
As a place
As a “moment at which our digital lives – our online identities, experiences, relationships, and assets – become more meaningful to us than our physical lives”
With this sociological shift comes how people can interact with the digital world, i.e., through the present and future (spatial) computing platforms. According to the article,
The metaverse of today is VR as “digital escape”
The near-term metaverse is an AR “to enhance – not replace – the human experience”
The long-term metaverse is Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCI), the “final platform”
“If the metaverse materializes, it is likely to expand into experiences that we cannot predict…”
The Protocol article below picks up where the WEF article leaves off.
The Metaverse will Require Computing Tech No One Knows How to Build
“…because it will be a distinct departure from prior shifts in computing. But it has become clear that to achieve anything close to the optimistic version, chips of nearly every kind will have to be an order of magnitude more powerful than they are today.”
It’s a “generational leap”, thus, a decade or two away. So while we may be in the midst of a sociological shift, without a balanced approach gung ho metaverse proponents and their followers may find themselves drinking deeply from the “trough of disillusionment” with only their “See You in the Metaverse” AR t-shirts and a crypto wallet full of bootleg “Dogs Playing Poker” NFTs to show for it.
Demystifying the Metaverse
The business-focused PWC report continues along the same lines as the previous articles positing that the “metaverse is an evolution, not a revolution — with opportunities today”. Brands can begin to tap into these opportunities by getting up to speed with the metaverse and its concepts, by developing a strategy for how they might utilize this new digital framework, and by creating POCs, co-developed with partners, for specific use cases.
We at Spatial8, for instance, have been working with brands to take them through this process including the co-development of POCs. These are only the first steps, though. Ultimately, learning how to align digital experiences with a brand’s already existing digital experiences and with physical ones as well as learning how the emerging technologies of the metaverse can be leveraged together to better enrich the customer experience and meet business needs will prove invaluable regardless of whether a metaverse ever emerges or not.
The Case of Pixelmon
Pixelmon on Minecraft
Thanks to Rafael Brown for bringing this curious case to my attention (and for basically serving the write-up on a silver platter). When people think of NFTs as the “Wild West” they are referring to something like this.
“So what is Pixelmon? It turns out it is multiple things. A venerable Minecraft mod, a lawsuit, a NFT cheap cash-in clone, a NFT crash, a second lawsuit…”
Pixelmon is a beloved mod that brings Pokémon-like pets and gameplay into Minecraft. It was around for five years before being sued by the Pokémon Company (Nintendo, Creatures, and GameFreak) and shut down. (The mod has actually resurfaced a couple of years ago.)
Pixelmon is also the name of an NFT project that surfaced two months ago whose creators cloned its name from the Pixelmon mod. This new project has recently banked 71 million in Ethereum (though the secondary market almost immediately tanked by 61%). Knowing how litigious both Nintendo and the Pokémon Company are this second incarnation will most likely get sued as well. Furthermore, it could actually get sued by the Pixelmon mod maker that hosted the servers, mod, and website and owns the name that Nintendo sued in 2017.
Sheesh.
Is this a case of a greed-induced myopia that allowed the Pixelmon cloners to do research only up to a certain point? Did they actually know how it all ended for the original Pixelmon and just not care? Something else? Whatever the case, it doesn’t look good. I’ll be keeping my eye on it to see how it progresses.
So while Pixelmon is biding its time before the gavel drops, CryptoPunks is being hailed as “the generationally defining artistic signifier of our time” in Sotheby’s Punk it! article. Welcome to the good, the bad, and the ugly of NFTs.
That’s it for this week, folks. To all the readers of Spatial News™, here’s to you!
P.S. Don’t forget to take our Future Technologies Usage Survey 2022 for a chance to get some random NFTs! Ending soon!