The Spatial Web Explained: Why the Convergence of Modern Technology Will Result in the Next Iteration of the Web

How web3, 5G, IoT, AI, and XR are interrelated and will become virtually inseparable.

We’ve seen multiple paradigm shifts over the last decade in technology and culture. From the rise of social media to the advent of decentralized finance (DeFi), disruptive technology is being developed that is reshaping our lives. DeFi has shown us that part of that future involves self-custody of not just the currencies we use on a daily basis, but also the data tied to our usage of the internet as we know it today. But bleeding edge technological innovations we often hear about in the news have a logical next step. In this article we’re going to outline what is being called the convergence of exponential technologies or the ‘spatial web’. Exponential gains in discrete subdisciplines within technology will converge in the coming decade as we approach the technological singularity. What is the spatial web, and how is it the logical next-step in the evolution of the internet as we know it today?

Wait…what about web3? What about the metaverse?

I thought that the future of the web would primarily consist of the read-write-own model put forth by proponents of web3 and web5 technology? How does spatial technology relate to the future of decentralized ownership?

You can think of the spatial web as a logical extension of many of the idealized tenets of web3. Ownership over personal data within a decentralized network will still be emphasized, but the reach will be greater and will encompass more digital and physical domains. Will web3 be replaced by the spatial web? No, it likely will be incorporated into the future of the web, which happens to be a blend of numerous technologies that include blockchains utilizing smart contracts.

• Web3 and the notion of turning expenses into investments will still be the case within the spatial web

• The emphasis of value-creation (value going to those who create) will still be a topic of concern as spatial protocols are built

• Collective ownership will continue to be fought for and will remain a fundamental priority for spatial

• Community governance needs to remain a top priority, otherwise protocols implementing spatial technology will not be adopted

• Gamifying incentives within communities is a major factor within web3, and that will expand to global adoption within the spatial web

• Data ownership and self-custody will remain a priority and requirement as web3 expands and morphs into the spatial web

Many of the ideas proposed under the framework of the spatial web are strikingly similar to the metaverse, especially with regards to how consensus is formed for both. The spatial web will power whatever metaverse(s) come into existence, dystopia and utopia included.

What is the Spatial Web?

The definition of the spatial web can be largely attributed to Gabriel René and Dan Mapes with the 2019 publication of their groundbreaking book, The Spatial Web: How Web 3.0 Will Connect Humans, Machines, and AI to Transform the World. The "Spatial Web," as it's defined by the authors, is the future of the internet which connects every facet of our lives. From games to navigation to e-commerce, the spatial web provides solutions to resource sharing using recent and future technological innovations in AI (artificial intelligence), XR (extended reality), IoT (internet of things), & blockchain.

The definition of the spatial web is broader than how we’ve come to traditionally view the core ideas of web3. Essentially, technology will combine to support a new level of unified reality, where the physical and digital are more intertwined and play off of one another. The new ‘spatial network’ will be a network of real-time representation of both physical and digital. The term Gabriel uses that really sticks is the idea of a digitally-mediated consensus reality. Bitcoin proved the viability of a distributed consensus mechanism for commerce, which I’ve written about previously. Blockchain technology will be utilized within the spatial web to form a consensus about factual data for the extended reality. We can think of extended reality as a combination of augmented (AR) and virtual (VR) reality technology. Mixed reality (MR) is synonymous with AR, and has culturally-redefining implications if implemented. 

Spatial is largely thought of as a mixed-reality, where the rapid rise of IoT devices are utilized within the real world to create a more interactive digital version of the physical world. A good example of an IoT device might be a smart bulb. I can be on the other side of the world and know if a light bulb in my house is either on or off. As technology becomes cheaper and the chips manufactured for IoT devices become smaller, more and more devices will be online. NFC-enabled clothing linked to NFTs is an example of how physical items will be accounted for digitally, becoming represented both online and off. This is effectively a prototypical example of digital twinning. 

What is a digital twin? Is it evil? What if I’m the evil twin?

Digital Twinning and the AR Cloud

The web is slowly becoming the world. Humans have a fascination and obsession with digitizing as much of the world as we can. Nearly every aspect of our lives is digitized in some capacity. From digital healthcare records to communication to your finances, it is hard to think of major parts of human life that haven’t been impacted by the internet. Digital twins continue on this trend, with the idea of a virtually identical version of the real world being mapped digitally. Modern cities will become transformed with countless digital touchpoints, where interacting with the physical environment will only be half of the experience.

Many parts of our lives have already been transformed in this fashion, but it is easy to overlook. Google Maps is effectively a digital twin of every possible location you’d like to visit within most major cities. While this example doesn’t incorporate every possible nuance, and the world can be thought of as containing seemingly unlimited data points, Google Maps gets the essentials right. By utilizing smartphones (in this case working as IoT devices) Google can provide real-time updates for traffic. These updates can save us time daily, and inform us of key information happening in the real world. Our driving reality is augmented from the usage of Google Maps, and arguably made easier. Value-add services like Google Maps are made possible because of the convergence of multiple technologies (5G, AI, chip manufacturing improvements, GPS, etc) and we’ll expect spatial technology to grow in a similar fashion. The world will continue to be mapped using a combination of LiDAR, photography, GPS, and AI. 

Incentivizing regular people to digitally map the entire civilized planet is inevitable, especially when paired with cryptocurrency incentives. Distributed networks with tokenized incentives work, as best exemplified by Helium. While Helium has its fair share of understandable criticism, it speaks to the potential of utilizing distributed internet devices to accomplish goals that would otherwise be impossible to achieve by a single company. Another fantastic example of this technology at work is Hivemapper. LiDAR is currently only a feature on higher-end smartphones, it will become more adopted with time, and will play a major role in turning the entire planet into a 3D, immersive XR experience.

The world will continue to be transformed into an AR Cloud, an environment supplemented with data points that will develop first as optional experiences and will eventually become required for participation in modern society. In the same way that QR codes were adopted during the pandemic, AR-enabled experiences will be pushed on consumers until they become so ubiquitous they are not questioned. Just as stores that do not accept credit or debit cards are increasingly uncommon in 2022, we should expect AR-less experiences in retail to be as uncommon by 2040. Mass adoption will happen once the consumer onboarding experience of spatial is seamless, easy, and frictionless. The same detractors who swore smartphones were only for business executives and tech elites believe that XR technology will never reach mainstream adoption. The twinning of the physical world to provide deeper insights using AI-enabled analytics is already underway, and its impact (like with all technology) will first become evident within healthcare, entertainment (sports, video games), and retail.

So, digital twinning is inevitable, but how is it actually going to work? Creating digital real time representations of countless real-world objects is going to take a next-level amount of internet bandwidth to achieve. Storing and making sense of that data is a major hurdle, as well as accessing it in real time, reliably. How is the spatial web going to actually be built?

Building the Spatial Web

Let’s take a step back and think about how the various iterations of the web have been built, and how things are currently functioning. Information, computation, and interaction are constantly evolving, and they’re evolving into a more intuitive (and arguably more addictive) way to experience information. The way information is interacted with directly impacts the experience. The shift from a purely browser-based experience into the app-based experiences from the 2010s to present was a paradigm shift, and saw the mobile phone go from an ‘email and phone call device’ to the ‘everything device’. NoSQL-based big data transformed how consumers ultimately interacted with information, and an additional paradigm shift will occur once more information is stored and secured using a distributed ledger system. This system will prove (and has proven already) that it is the solution necessary for handling the exponential increase of data from the impending spatial-era. 

Detractors will argue that blockchain technology is slow, ineffective, expensive, and environmentally damaging. The same criticisms are usually true for most nascent technology, and it will prove to be true for blockchain. Although proof of work blockchains aren’t perfect, recently developed chains are an order of magnitude faster and virtually carbon neutral. Chains will be chosen for data in the future that are as carbon neutral (or even more so) than the most efficient cloud-computing and server infrastructure solutions available today.

While 3G and 4G speeds were fine 5 years ago, the sheer amount of information that will be interacted with within a spatial setting will necessarily require the mass adoption of distributed computing, with an emphasis placed on edge computing. Edge computing is a part of distributed computing topology where info is located ‘closer to the edge’ where people and other network devices consume that info. 5G can be up to 100 times faster than 4G, and the proposed framework of 6G will result in 1 tbps (terabit per second) speeds, launching roughly in 2030. 5G and 6G technologies will be the wireless communication networks that make the future of the spatial web possible.

Hopefully you can see the pattern here. Information becomes distributed through a ledger, computation becomes distributed through edge computing utilizing AI, and interaction continues to become more intuitive, not less. Technology will be rejected until it is undeniably better, and we’re almost there. It’s okay if you hate XR right now, one day you will be using it daily and you’ll probably love it. Come back to this article in 20 years.

Our XR Future

The shift from smartphones to a wearable-centric future is clear, but the truth for when adoption occurs lies somewhere in the middle. Like all tech adoption, usage will go through three phases. The first is business usage (we are here), then the rich (coming next year with Apple’s headset), and finally regular people (you). Tech mass-adoption can be a chicken or egg situation. Which comes first, the software or the users? Why build a cool virtual reality experience if nobody has a headset worth using? Venture capital and leading technology companies can and will continue to push XR by creating awe-inspiring and inspirational usages of the technology, but we won’t see the true ‘reason’ to use this technology until its adoption proliferates like the usage of smartphones a decade ago. The future of wearables will likely not be a choice between either VR or AR, it will be a mixture of both. Wearables will need to be seamless and adaptable for usage in XR. But what will be running under the hood? Will there be a new set of standards for the spatial web? 

Spatial Standards and Managing Data

The spatial web is a very intriguing idea, but the task of unifying all of these disciplines and making sense of so much data is daunting. Protocols and standards for the web have been fluid and dynamic, not static. The world changes, and the internet changes with it. The Spatial Web Foundation (SWF) was formed to help address some of the currently foreseeable issues and challenges that come with this uncharted territory. The foundation seeks to serve the public good on a global scale, maintain standards consistent with universal interoperability, and focus on maintaining security, privacy, and identity. The foundation is also partnering with the Metaverse Standards Forum (MSF), which is also chiefly concerned with standardizing assets, renderings, transactions, digital twins, and geospatial systems.

So, what web standards is SWF proposing?

• Spatial Domains: Creating a solution that ‘addresses’ space, essentially creating spatial domains. Digital addresses for digital twins.

• HSML: Hyperspatial modeling language. Much like HTML establishing standardized methods to program or layout websites, HSML will exist as an ontological model that reflects ‘spatial, semantic, and societal interrelationships and interdependencies’

• Statefulness: An index enabled by a distributed ledger utilizing smart contracts. This index will be used for generating, representing, distributing, and securing value.

• HSTP: Hyperspatial transaction protocol. HTSP seeks to be a more all-encompassing version of HTTP. HSTP understands the context of packets, and will route users and 3D content between web spaces.

These are proposed file formats and standards, and it is unclear if this will ever amount to more than an idea. Keep in mind that W3C (the World Wide Web Consortium) is the group that ultimately decides on web standards. SWF may work with MSF to push W3C to accept new standards they are seeing as the most viable for long-term success within spatial.

The Next Decade

The path to spatial web’s maturity will consist of three parts: the augmentation of individuals, the optimization of organizations, and finally the unification of everything. Deloitte has an analysis regarding this path that I think is worth talking through and discussing.

Augmentation (of individuals): as suggested, this step towards utilizing the spatial web involves implementing AR for tasks like manufacturing, VR for skill development, and IoT for predictive maintenance. Individuals are modified by technology and use aspects of the spatial web, but often on a case-by-case basis and the solutions are not fluid and seamless.

Optimization (of organizations): Multiple use cases of exponential technology are aligned and integrated across the organization. Departments benefit from the connected data and workflows improve within the organization. Everything is cross-functional within the organization. We know that digital twinning is extremely beneficial within the world of supply chain logistics, manufacturing, and design. From rapid prototyping to predictive analytics, digital twinning can make a supply chain more resilient. Expect to see businesses that deal heavily with manufacturing to be the first to optimize across the entire organization utilizing AR and twinning.

Unification (of everything): Once multiple organizations implement and utilize spatial technology, these adoptions will proliferate exponentially until they are adopted by almost everything and everyone. A single ecosystem of inseparable physical-digital experiences will be formed. Platforms will be interoperable, and will adhere to agreed upon standards. This could happen in a couple of ways. The completely open-source and democratized spatial web is preferred by web3-lovers and web futurists. Option two supposes an oligopoly and walled-garden spatial web. Ultimately, open standards should be pushed for, and that’s exactly what these foundations aim to promote.

How Can I Prepare?

Many of these ideas will take years to blossom and come to fruition, although in time this reality will likely become real. Technology will not stop, and progress within each subdiscipline that makes up spatial technology will continue. The advances towards artificial general intelligence (AGI) by the 2030s will speed up any technology deemed necessary for these ideas to become reality. The spatial goldrush will happen, and it will impact all businesses and people. 

How you can prepare for the spatial web:

• Be future focused. When you implement a new technology at home or for a business, think ahead. Monitor and pay attention to the debates surrounding standards for the web.

• Begin to utilize IoT. Businesses will become more and more efficient as we continue to map the physical world. If you don’t adopt IoT and find ways to further optimize, someone else will. Incorporating sensor data and using AI to monitor and make sense of large data sets is key for making sense of the madness.

• Consider a digital twin. This can be useful for running a traditional physical business in both retail, logistics, and manufacturing. Become comfortable with these ideas and read up on how creating a digital twin can save you money down the line.

• Try out the latest VR and AR technology. A picture is worth a 1000 words, and the latest and greatest technology is best experienced. It is more difficult to question technology when you realize firsthand how powerful it can be.

• Learn more about blockchain technology. As time goes on, there will be further application and use for distributed ledgers. Having a rudimentary understanding of why this technology is disruptive is essential for any business owner.

That’s it! Hopefully this write-up has provided some clarity into understanding what the spatial web is, and what it may turn into. There’s a lot of technology at play, and making sense of everything takes some time. The future of the web isn’t just web3, and it isn’t just XR. The future is a combination of everything humanity is working towards. Hopefully we can make it a utopia with an emphasis placed on digital rights and freedoms, and not a dystopia we begrudgingly participate in. We can shape the future, one mind at a time.

Need help with your web3 go-to-market strategy? Eager to dive into web3 and NFTs, but not sure how to approach it? Reach out to immutablelabs.io and schedule a chat with one of our experts!

References:

https://spatialwebfoundation.org/
https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/topics/digital-transformation/web-3-0-technologies-in-business.html
https://medium.com/swlh/an-introduction-to-the-spatial-web-bb8127f9ac45#:~:text=The%20Spatial%20Web%20integrates%20Convergence,and%20physical%20lives%20become%20one.