Chapter 2
Technologies

Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation.

-William Gibson, Neuromancer

A large number of technologies are involved in creating the metaverse. Among the most important, consider ??technologies that allow seeing and mapping the world, the ones that calculate relative distances and adjust perspectives in real time, ones that integrate different services together, and others that manage real time data updates. These technologies are today coming together, connecting and converging to allow persistent and synchronous 3D virtual worlds for all of us. These are the building blocks of the metaverse.

When you're in the metaverse, you won't see any of these technologies the same way when you start up apps on your smartphone-you will just experience them.

Web3

To begin, let's set the basic concepts straight and separate Internet from web. These two are often confused. For the former, we're referring to the telecommunications infrastructure that connects computers in the biggest network of all time. It is all about connecting machines. The World Wide Web is much more about connecting humans and refers specifically to the largest information network available on the Internet. We can navigate it thanks to a novelty created in 1989 by scientist Tim Berners-Lee: the link. Suddenly, we could place a mouse cursor over a blue, underlined word or an image to be directed to another page of information.

Berners-Lee created the first web version when he decided to exchange information from his employer organization, CERN (stands for the European Organization for Nuclear Research), with other scientists and universities. He created the first web server in 1990, a computer that continuously connected to the Internet and enabled outside users to access its files, like the world's first website. That site is still live at info.cern.ch. By 1994 there were already 10,000 websites available, which ultimately became known as Web 1.0.1

This first version of the web was essentially read only. Sites on the information superhighway existed to convey just that-information-and users mainly interacted by sending out messages via email software clients or forms. Don't forget, we're talking about a network created by scientists and researchers, so it's only natural they also accounted for the largest number of web users at that time. There wasn't a social community as we know it in the 21st century in the same way, with e-commerce stores or online marketplaces. Of course, there were a few advertisement formats available, but they were in the very early stages of development.2

In 1999, the web started moving beyond this read-only version and the distinction became clear when the Web 2.0 concept appeared in 2004. Social media and search engines suddenly allowed us not only to read web content, but to become creators or curators as well. Everyone gained the power to push a button and publish texts, photos, videos, and what we today define as user-generated content (UGC) to an audience of millions, who could like, share, and comment on each post.3

This unparalleled reach at our fingertips brought in the advertising business as we know it today. Platforms were created around the opportunities to profile and communicate to the users of these services. Knowingly or not, we started sharing our own data in exchange for free use of services such as email, photo sharing, discussion groups, free hard drive space for backups, search engines, GPS services, or dating services. This data collection grew even more when smartphones allowed us to use these services wherever and whenever we wanted, collecting our location and travels, thus enabling ads to become more targeted and relevant.

At the same time, this brought a number of security issues and social problems, unforeseen by most. Free speech, privacy, and safety started being halved, as companies, countries, and hackers gained access to this data for their own personal gains. This prompted the current public discussions around this topic, led by organizations like the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C, w3.org), founded by Berners-Lee himself.

So, next comes Web 3.0. This is the web we're now building, also known as the intelligent web or semantic web. Berners-Lee, the original creator of the web, described it as "the Web [in which computers] become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web-the content, links, and transactions between people and computers, (.) [where] day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy, and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. The 'intelligent agents' tech thought leaders have touted for ages will finally materialize."4 It's a vision that elevates the concept of the web to a level where artificial intelligence can use the data to enable automated tasks and help us in our everyday lives, that fits with the vision of the metaverse. However, this version of the web doesn't necessarily include blockchain or cryptocurrencies.5

It's important for you to realize that Web 3.0 is separate from the term Web3, a difference that is not intuitive. Web3, along with the Spatial Web, are two alternative visions for our future web that have been rising in interest and that previewed several of the discussion topics brought in by the metaverse. When you say or write Web3, you're talking about a model for a decentralized web. Its concept was coined by Gavin Wood back in 2014 and is built around the idea that users can become co-owners of the web and free from corporate or government oversight to make the best version of the web. Most, if not all, of the interactions, would become peer-to-peer without gatekeepers in between to intermediate.

This decentralization rethinks how user data is gathered and handled. On Web3, every user has their own wallet that can identify them and enable payment across all services on the web; users can replace corporations and government in roles to make services on the web work; they can also own digital assets and digital currency without relying on notaries; they can own their data while navigating the web and performing transactions that are transparently available on the blockchain, for everyone to check.

As data is also decentralized, Web3's business principles are built around alternative means of monetization outside of using and selling personal data (which is the fuel for today's Internet advertising). Instead, it enables new business models that may contribute to the upcoming metaverse. Web3 then aims to create a more private, safer, and user-oriented version of the web based on blockchain.

Still, critics state Web3 isn't yet ready for primetime. Some refer to the need to massively transform the current infrastructure of the web to make Web3's final vision possible. Others say it depends too much on the processing power of servers to scale, since registering transactions on the blockchain is having an increasingly disconcerting ecological impact. Many highlight how wealthy users and venture capital investors, are slowly owning the ecosystem, subverting the cry for user participation and the decentralization principle of it all. Finally, others warn against the decentralization effect and how taking mediators and public officials out of the picture can create fertile ground for fraudsters and all kinds of crime. "(Decentralization) is a matter of culture over tech," explains Danilo Castro, Head of XR and Metaverse strategist at the Brazilian UOL Group. Regardless of all these issues, several online platforms and communities have announced themselves as being Web3 and are actively promoting its principles.

The Spatial Web

In 2019, Gabriel René and Dan Mapes published a book, The Spatial Web, outlining their vision for a third version of the web. In it, they discuss how the physical and digital are merging, and that this symbiosis will bring together the biological, digital, and physical sides of reality in a truly interoperable way. They envision a move from a text-and-image web into a full 3D explorable experience, where services and applications will be made available in physical spaces, be aware of each of these space's characteristics, and allow for seamless interactions with both digital and physical objects using gestures, voice, gaze, and our binocular vision the same way. Goodbye, mouse pointer and keyboard and other peripheral equipment. They state we are destined to interact more and more within the Spatial Web as we do biologically within the physical world.

Because it's such a foundational approach, René and Mapes propose a new system where:

• All web elements are available on top of a persistent digital twin of the world, available to every user via a new kind of spatial browser (web navigation software that is aware of the physical world).
• Every physical space, object, and person has a digital counterpart (digital twin) with its own ID, which can then be used for private or public purposes.
• Everything in the physical and digital world can interact seamlessly. This means a button pressed in virtual reality can turn on a machine in a physical showroom, and vice versa.
• New standards, rules, rights, and permissions will need to be set in order to interact spatially, namely by standards...