Spatial News™ #019
Spatial News™ #019
This week we're all about the Metaverse (Metaverse Fashion Week & IP, Second Life, Metaverse Survey, Liberland), Satoshi Island, Spatial News from Finland (OpenAR), and more!
Welcome to Spatial Foods™… News™! “We eat the year away. We eat the spring and the summer and the fall. We wait for something to grow and then we eat it.” ―Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle
Filled to the brim, I’ve had to cut this newsletter up into 2 parts (#019 and #020) and several slices.
Metaverse, Metaverse, Metaverse:
Metaverse Fashion Week 2022: IP Insights from Marks & Clerk
Digital fashionistas, don’t get caught without your legal briefs.
1. Consider the territorial scope of your current trade mark protection
2. Consider whether your brand needs to expand its existing trade mark protection to other goods and/or services3. Conduct a clearance search before use in the Metaverse
4. Consider whether your brand has any coexistence agreements in place which may impact their entry into the Metaverse
Read the article for more details and check out their other MVFW related articles “Metaverse Fashion Week and the implications for design protection” and “Questions about protection and enforcement after Metaverse Fashion Week (MVFW) draws to a close” as well.
Second Life Creator Sees Disaster in Meta’s Version of the Metaverse
If you don’t know by now that I like sprinkling some doom and gloom in the newsletter then I don’t know what to tell ya.
A snippet from the Philip Rosedale interview:
“Second Life is not very centralized. In Second Life, land is owned by different people. Actually our original design was to have those different landowners run their own servers. But we just could not figure out the way to make it happen in 2003 when we launched the service. On the other hand, there are things like reputation or trust and the currency system, about which it made sense to have elements of centralized structure just to make them work well.
In the conventional internet, we have a centralized payment platform like PayPal, which addresses problems of fraud effectively. Meanwhile, decentralized public blockchains cannot address problems of fraud very well. Fraud is being a huge tax on public blockchains. So I think that the real answer always lies somewhere in the middle of the spectrum -- between centralized and decentralized systems. Stable systems that will be of service to billions of people are going to have a mixture of centralized and decentralized systems.”
And yet…
NordVPN in their Metaverse Survey asks,
While privacy, security, and bad actors are issues, people seem to be ready to give it a go.
More than once I’ve heard that so far this hard to define future metaverse looks like the past (basically, Second Life). Why? Maybe because
“Nothing We’re Experiencing Today is Actually New”
Find out why. Prof Stone sums it up in 500 (!) words. My favorite part:
“For now, I will be watching how this crazy phenomenon develops. I may even get involved in one or two meaningful or unique Metaverse ventures, especially if they offer a means of delivering unique educational experiences for future “cyber generations”, environments free from personal data capture, surveillance techniques or abuse, and can demonstrate verifiable impacts on the real world – a world from which we can’t escape, but can influence together.”
Zaha Hadid Architects Designs Virtual Liberland Metaverse City
A British architecture studio called Zaha Hadid Architects has created a metaverse city where people can buy plots of virtual land with crypto, build digital buildings, and interact as avatars.
Pretty standard really, except… that the virtual city is based on the Free Republic of Liberland, a real life libertarian micronation founded in 2015 by Czech politician Vít Jedlička who claimed 2.7 miles (4.3 km) of disputed land between between Croatia and Serbia.
Liberland’s 7,000 citizens and residents and 700,000 applicants, who upon approval, will have first access to the city.
Satoshi Island
Not to be outdone, the privately owned Satoshi Island, part of the Pacific island of Vanuatu, will sell real plots of lands through NFTs. They intend “to become [the] home for crypto professionals and enthusiasts, with a goal to be considered the crypto capital of the world.” Thanks for sharing, Ash!
So now with those dishes out of the way, we present some
Spatial News™ from Finland:
OpenAR Launches their Roadmap for DIY AR Glasses
Augmented Reality glasses can now be built at home for less than 20€. Sweet! Visit OpenAR - Open Source Community for Augmented Reality to learn more. Thanks to Dipanjan Das, Doctoral Researcher at the U of Eastern Finland, for sharing the image (Credit goes to Jani Vallirinne of the U of Oulu).
AWE Nite Northern XR: Eyes on Estonia
Last but not least, feast your “Eyes on Estonia”’s agenda (April 7th, 18-19ish EEST, Helsinki time):
18:00-18:05 Welcome & Intro
18:05-18:15 XR Nation Presents Spatial News™ with Teemu Ollilainen, Prime Minister of XR Nation
18:15-18:20 "An Overview of the Estonian XR ecosystem" by Märt Lume, Chairman of the Board of EEVR (Estonian VR & AR Association)
18:20-18:30 Project Spotlight featuring:
Mondo Music Table by Maru VR - "Lessons from creating a music-maker with hand-tracking" presented by Rein Zobel, VR Creative Director
Alpha AR - "Creating digital twins with AI" presented by Madis Alesmaa, CEO
18:30-19:05 Panel Discussion: Metaverse Builders - Who Should Educate Them and Why?
Topics to be covered:
Where will Estonian future XR talent come from?
Who should educate them and why?
How can companies and educational institutions work together?
What is an ideal skill set to work in the XR industry?
Participants:
Moderator - Märt Lume of EEVR
Rein Zobel, VR Creative Director at Maru VR
Raimond Tunnel, Computer Graphics Specialist at the University of Tartu
Vladimir Kuts, Postdoctoral Researcher of Confirm Smart Manufacturing Centre (Ireland) and Head of Industrial Virtual and Augmented Reality Lab at TalTech (Estonia)
Vladimir Futnikov, Chief Executive Optimist at CM Games
19:05-19:10 Announcements & Closing
Follow the link to find out how to join.
Thank you for breaking bread with us, Spatialists! Feedback is welcome.
Joh, “You won’t like it when I’m hangry.”
Spatial8
P.S. Don’t forget to take our Future Technologies Usage Survey 2022 for a chance to get some random NFTs!