Spatial News™ #025
This week we're all about The Spatial Show, AR & VR resources, XR events, Blockchain, AI, digital models, gaming on NFTs, metaverse vs. Web3, and more!
Welcome to another monster edition of Spatial News™, Spatialists! “This must be a real horrorshow film if you're so keen on my viddying it.”
― Alex DeLarge in Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange
This week I was going to share my takes on a bunch of interesting Blockchain and Web3 stuff like
“Blockchain Economics”: a kaiju-sized research paper aimed at academic folk and Blockchain designers
A Blockchain Canvas to evaluate Blockchain projects
(Well, at least I can show an image of the Blockchain Canvas by Jesús Herencia.)
A Games Industry Guide to NFTs from Climate Replay (to compliment Neogames’ P2E report shared last week in SN#024)
But that went down the tubes like the Blob when I found out that
Yuga Labs has killed Web 3
In the opening of part 1 of Steve Jones’ 4-part article he writes,
“The greatest myth of Web 3 is that design and governance by committee is the way to get innovation. Over the past year we’ve seen the leading lights of Web 3, Yuga Labs, conclusively demonstrate that the Web 3 vision is bunk.
There are three things often touted for Web 3:
Governance by Committee
Decentralization — no more big companies behind everything
People own things, artists own things, not companies”
But he concludes,
“Yuga Labs are fully in control, they’ve got all the money, they’ve got total control of the NFTs, total control of the game [Otherside], and can force through changes in Ape Coin with a threat or a whim.
Yuga Labs a VC backed mega-corp who’ve just crowd funded the biggest game development budget in history, and killed Web 3 in the process.”
(Thanks to Theo Priestley for sharing.)
Did Yuga really pull a Freddy Krueger and turn the dream into a nightmare?
Or is it as the enigmatic and proudly named “web2boomer” proclaims in his Medium article?
“Web3.0 Must Be Destroyed”
because it is the “apotheosis of #crapitalism”.
“Crypto didn’t become the most important tech trend right now because it’s an individualistic, libertarian pyramid scheme that combines spectacle hype with mass YOLO/FOMO…. it’s because the US economy became an individualistic, libertarian pyramid scheme that combines spectacle hype with mass YOLO/FOMO.”
So if we take these two sets of articles together does that mean that Yuga Labs, “Slayer of Web3”, is, in fact, the hero of this tale…? (My brain just popped like Scanners.)
To add insult to injury,
Way More People Still Buy Virtual Items In Second Life Than Buy NFTs On Coinbase & OpenSea - Combined!
Your father’s metaverse (aka Second Life) continues to hold his own with that “old man strength” against the young bucks of the NFT world. Read about it in the “Internet's longest-running metaverse news and culture site” from Wagner James Au, author of The Making of Second Life.
And if that wasn’t enough, the terms ‘Metaverse’ and ‘Web3’ are at each other’s throats.
Metaverse vs. Web3
(Shared by Paula Marie Kilgarriff, thanks.)
After all of this commotion, Ape Arachnid’s face has suddenly started melting… I would’ve sold the receipt of his JPEG for some sweet ETH, but, well…
Tech imitates life, so
It’s hard to make AI fair and unbiased
As a way to curtail that Julia Stoyanovich, director of the NYU Center for Responsible AI, among others, want
“different stakeholders — including any group that might be affected by an algorithmic system, for good or for bad — to be able to make a case for which values and which types of fairness the algorithm should optimize for.
I concur. I’m curious to know who is bringing stakeholders together to do so in Finland, the Nordics, and in Europe.
“Digital” Models Are Less Digital Than You Think
“Despite what ample media coverage, academics and figureheads would have you believe, “digital” models [Lil Miquela and the like] are a lot less digital than most people think. Thanks to elaborate and inefficient software pipelines, they actually cost more than their human counterparts. They still require physical photoshoots, and are susceptible to human weaknesses, because beneath the mystical marketing hood of almost every digital model you know today is, ironically, a real human model.”
I guess this is one way to avoid the uncanny valley.
So, would this be a case of “deepreal”?
Thanks to Ben Hanson, Editor-in-Chief at The Interline magazine, for sharing.
These two previous articles mirror a line from
This Book Does Not Exist
“…for the mind of homo siliconus is corrupted; the body of homo digitalis is fraudulent…”
Uncanny…
And now… XR
Philipp Rauschnabel, Professor and XR Enthusiast at Universität der Bundeswehr München, and his colleagues want to clarify that
“Metaverse” is not XR 2.0!
Philip et al.’s definition of XR portrayed pictorially
“[W]e identify three characteristics that constitute metaverse:
Metaverse is experienced via immersive XR technologies, such as AR and VR. Hence, 3D environments experienced on a computer or smartphone screen are not metaverse environments.
It must share some similarities with physical societies – such as socializing, presence of individuals (potentially through avatars), some sort of a legal structure (e.g., ownership and community rules), and transactions through alternative exchange forms such as cryptocurrencies.
It must be decentralized. It also follows that neither traditional Internet-based applications (including social media) and current VR worlds (such as Decentraland, Fortnite, Roblox, and Sandbox) are metaverse environments. The Table blow shows the core differences between the three concepts[…]
XR is the gateway to the metaverse.”
(I call dibs on that line as a slogan! A quick goog later. Too late…)
It’s a good read that leads to their whole paper, which is also worth a read.
My 2 pence (I was going to say ‘my 2 Pennywises’, but it just doesn’t roll off the tongue):
I agree with the conclusion.
I would say that it should be decentralized as much as possible because it is well-nigh impossible for a number of aspects (infrastructure, much needed regulations, and so on) not to be centralized.
(See? 2.)
Thanks to Jeremy Dalton for introducing me to Philip’s work.
VR & AR Parent & Student Resource
Here is an introduction to AR, VR, & 3D learning and their impact on learning and work created by the VR/AR Association. Excellent resource, whether you are parental or swotty or neither.
Thanks for sharing, Julie Smithson.
Which XR Events You Should Attend in 2022-2023
Last but not least, we have XR events organized in a 2x2 matrix according to their focus (Business, Research, Games, Enterprise). The reasoning is articulated in the article shared by Rahel Demant, Co-Founder of XR Bootcamp. Which events should you be attending?
AWE Presents: The Spatial Show - Episode 1!
This is where XR meets comedy, and Spatial8’s Teemu is one of the stars!
This one was packed to the gills like the Creature from the Black Lagoon. Thanks for staying with us through these eldritch tales, Spatialists!
Joh of Spatial8, Your Humble Narrator
Join the 700+ Spatialists exploring XR, Blockchain, and other emerging tech, their applications, their potential, and their possible consequences
P.S. Don’t forget to take our Future Technologies Usage Survey 2022 for a chance to get some random NFTs!