The Secret Tool to the Metaverse's Success with Gabriel René - Step into the Metaverse podcast: EP32

Good day everyone and welcome to the Step into the Metaverse podcast. My name is Marc Van Reimenam and I'm also known as the Digital Speaker. I'm a future tech strategist and I think about how emerging technologies change organizations and society. This podcast is part of my new book called Step into the how the Immersive Internet Will Unlock a Trillion Dollar Social Economy. The book is available as an ebook, hard copy and audiobook. As part of this book I did nearly 100 in depth interviews with the stakeholders involved in creating the open Metaverse, the investors, the developers, the artists, the collectors, etc. And I've turned a selection of these interviews into this podcast as I think that these conversations are too valuable to leave them on my computer. In this interview I interviewed Gabriel Renier. Gabriel is a technologist, Entrepreneur, author with 25 year career in technology, telecom and media industries specializing in emerging technologies and their applications for industrial fintech, govtech and global standard organizations. He's the founder and CEO of Versys Labs, a Spatial Web software development group. He's the author of the number one international bestseller the Spatial How Web3 connects humans, machines and AI to transform the World. During the interview we discussed the importance of the Spatial Web and some of the challenges of the Spatial web that we need to overcome if we want to create an open metaverse. Enjoy the conversation.

Can you just share a bit of background of who you are and how you are involved with the Metaverse?

My name is Gabriel Rene. I'm the Executive Director of the Spatial Web foundation which is a standards body focused on developing and maintaining next generation of multi dimensional standards needed to support things like the Metaverse and the Internet of Things and smart cities and smart governance of the future. I'm also the CEO of Versus Labs, which is a commercial entity that is essentially developing platform and applications on top of the Spatial Web protocols in order to help drive adoption and commercial engagement. And I sit on a number of boards and organizations at the intersection of artificial intelligence and augmented and virtual reality, Internet of Things and some various distributed ledger like technologies. And I'm a longtime fan of science fiction and I think that it provides cautionary tales for us, mostly about how to make sure we the kinds of worlds we don't want to have in the future. That's pretty much my focus and dedication is on helping to facilitate tools and standards that can use to upgrade civilization in this generation.

Very good. So, and what is sort of the dystopian future that you don't want to see according to you?

Well you know, it's kind of funny. Like all of our, nearly all of our sci fi films and books and stories and narratives are dystopic. The technology is super cool, but the social fabric and the political fabric and the economic fabric is pornography. Usually massive sort of stratification, the haves and have nots. And you know, it's not an abundance economy where people live in sort of harmony. So it's fraught with conflict. And usually there are extensive challenges that come with that technology. Whether we're looking at the sort of horror stories of the Black mirror sort of narratives where people are trapped in virtual, you know, torture environments or being mined for their sort of biometric data in order to guide or direct them, or that we're just merely batteries.

Or.

All the robots try to kill us all. So, you know, they're not great, they're not good visions for our future. I think Star Trek is kind of the one pop culture example where it's at least attempting to see at least an Earth that lives in relative harmony with sort of post capitalist era where there's a sustainable, functioning planet. And of course then we're expanding out into the galaxy, galaxy and the universe to discover other worlds and ultimately there's a galactic federation. So that's kind of an interesting non dystopic sci fi narrative. But most of them are pretty bad for roadmaps. They're great for entertainment, vital roadmaps.

Fair enough. I was actually just writing about the Oasis and how it's actually quite funny how they created it, portrayed it.

Sorry.

That they have this one metaverse owned, controlled and created by one single person, which would be the equivalent of one person owning the Internet.

But yeah, yeah, it's kind of like the kind of good corporation owns it now. And this one kid gets, you know, potentially the keys to the whole thing where he has absolute power and right over all decisions and the bad guy is just a corporation that wants to do this, you know, that just wants to monetize it differently. Yeah, yeah, it's pretty bad. Again, as sort of, you know, a cultural roadmap. But again, it works as entertainment. Right. You sort of like single good guys. But yeah, these are horrible outcomes for anything like the metaverse or spatial web.

Yeah, I completely agree. So according to you, what is the metaverse?

Well, I mean, the metaverse in the original narrative was predominantly a virtual reality world with some, arguably some AR overlays, but it was an immersive virtual reality world that was traversable and functioned as a network. In the case of Neil Stevenson's book, It's just one street, really. It's crazy Vegas. The Oasis has a kind of more interesting, diverse narrative to the metaverse that filled with all this pop culture, intellectual property, and these distinctly different worlds that you can traverse in a kind of single universe. Neither of those definitions really work with a modern definition. And when I say modern, I mean whatever today's date is, because for the last six months, it's been a moving target on basis. So let me start by kind of providing what I think the current narrative is, and then I will provide my definition. So the current definition is I'll try to do both at the same time. Let me do this. So the metaverse right now is nothing. It doesn't. It's an idea. It doesn't exist. Every article about get involved in the metaverse and participate in the metaverse isn't a thing yet, because there's no metaverse. Now, the idea behind what the metaverse is evolving to become essentially the human interface, in my opinion, to the spatial web. So the spatial web is a multidimensional network. There are human interfaces to that that are sensory and experiential, that is the metaverse, that might take the form of virtual or augmented content in virtual augmented reality, and could take other forms as well. But the main point is that it's immersive and traversable, meaning you can move between these various sort of spaces. And there is the concept now, which has really gotten richer in the Web3 sort of narrative in the Web 3.0 era. And I do make a distinction between Web3 and Web 3.0, but which is predominantly about sort of, you know, next generation of the economy. So really the digital economy and that economy would work across these various traversable virtual spaces. And that's really important because today, you know, Roblox and Fortnite and whatever, these gaming spaces might have their own economies, but they're not shared economies. So in the same way, we need sort of a shared universe of spaces and shared world. You know, we need a shared economy. And it's not unlike, you know, what the planet went through over the last 150 years, where we had to develop planet scale economy that was interoperable, where currencies were able, traded between other currencies, and, you know, you could bring your Visa card and travel around the world and pay for things anywhere. So those kinds of economic interoperability components are equally as important as the experiential components. There is an author named Joe Pine who many years ago wrote about the Experience economy. And it was mostly predicated on the concept of sort of Web 2.0 experiences, but also sort of millennials wanting to really preferring to have and spend their money on experiences rather than product, which would have been the driving force of the earlier economy. So I think these ideas around the experience economy are really quite relevant for defining the universe because at one level, it's predominantly about experiences. Like reading a book is not the metaverse, and the IoT is not a metaverse. Autonomous cars are not the metaverse. But your interface to your autonomous car could be part of the Metaverse. And so it's really about that interface, that human interface to the spatial web that is driven by these sensory experiences and with the ability to have these sort of economic, shared economic functions, sort of in a shared universe. So, you know, it's 3D Internet with money.

Digital money.

I would say 3D Internet with digital money.

I like it. So, and how important is the spatial web metaverse and for it to be successful?

Well, I don't think, and I haven't seen a single proposal otherwise, that you can build the metaverse without the spatial web standards, which are being developed now within, inside the ieee, regardless of politics and economics and superpowers of both the commercial and political kind. WI fi standardized by the IEEE works pretty much the same everywhere you go in the world. And so you need that kind of interoperability at scale, and you need it to be very reliable, in my opinion. It needs to be developed by nonprofits, nonprofit organizations that are dedicated to developing and maintaining these kinds of standards. It cannot be developed by a corporation. It can't only work in one territory or one government. It's not going to be developed by some game world that turns into the Metaverse. You know, the battle right now really isn't for the metaverse. The battle right now is the WordPress of the metaverse. So Facebook doesn't want to be the metaverse. They want to be WordPress for the metaverse. You know, significant number of websites in the world today are built on WordPress because it's an easy way to go build your, your website, add your e commerce, you know, function. And there's all these templates to get up and running. So they want to do that. You know, they may also want to kind of be the Yahoo of the metaverse, kind of be your, your homepage, you know, the place that you start from. I think these are not the metaverse, they're just sort of retread concepts where centralized powers can add, you know, some unique benefit and hopefully help accelerate the broader network capability. But back to your main question, which was, you know, the spatial web, that the spatial web is more than the metaverse, the spatial web is also the IoT. And so in a world where the metaverse is defined as including augmented reality, it's going to need to interact with all the things that the devices in your home, your smart home, your smart car, you know, drones, cameras, sensors, all around the world. And those aren't interfacing with the Metaverse. Those items don't. They're not experiencing information or content, they're processing it. And so the spatial web really acts as the underlying fabric under which you can have both of these things interoperable, which I think most people, after thinking about it, realize that that's really a requirement. So the spatial web protocol really act as the thread that helps weave that together. And it provides two main functions, one technical interoperability, and the second is governance. Right? Even interoperable governance, so that these devices and this content that we're going to be surrounded by are able to be managed in ways that respect the laws and environments that are necessary in order to operate. The Star wars universe is going to need certain levels. Vader is going to need certain levels of control over the Death Star, just like federal government want certain control over where drones are able to fly and not fly. So the ability to have governance and interoperability are the key ingredients upon which network functionality and trust and privacy and security are built upon. And if you don't have those, you really can't build a network. You don't get network effects, and you won't get the Metaverse, in my opinion.

Yeah, that makes sense. In my research that I've done in the past couple of months, I sort of discovered that you have different levels or different layers of openness, different layers of interoperability. Of course, you have economic openness. You have economic interoperability where you can take out some assets, but not all assets. So what's your idea around that of having these different levels of openness, where you have inclusive openness, that you open it, you have the platform for everyone. You have platforms that allow you to upload your own content, and you have platforms that don't. What's your idea around having multiple layers of openness?

So, I mean, it's, in my opinion, that's a requirement. So every space has different levels of openness, and every space has different levels of permission. And when I say space, I mean like your home entering an airplane, going into a bank, walking into a public park. These spaces all have policies and permissions around them. Spaces are governed, right? And there are cultural, there are social, and there are legal considerations and or economic considerations around our ability to access and enter and perform certain activities and operate in spaces. And so you're going to need every sort of the range of those from completely open to absolutely closed in the same way that we have it in the physical world. And, you know, that's a bit different from the way the web is set up today. And frankly, it's a bit different from the way blockchains are set up. So today the web infrastructure is designed in such a way that nothing can prevent me, and I don't have to ask your permission to come to your website. Can't stop me, can't prevent me from doing it. I don't have to ask your permission. You can't prevent me, and I don't have to ask your permission to send you an email. I don't have to ask you, and I don't have to get your permission in order to send money to your eth wallet. You can't stop me. Right? So these architectures are permissionless, which comes with a handful of problems. You know, email is filled with spams and scams. Websites are unstructured link tables. Right? I mean, the entire World Wide Web is an unstructured set of links. Well, if you look at the Metaverse, don't you want to be able to, like, properly navigate through environments? Don't you want to create spaces that have certain permissions about who can and cannot put content or information or objects those spaces? I believe the answer is yes. Right. And so that requires a different type of infrastructure, digital infrastructure, that really has network functions that presume permissioning as a primary foundational component. And so I believe you need that to be able to support that entire spectrum, because that's what the uses will actually require. People are going to want to have completely closed and private spaces, and people are going to want to have completely open and public spaces and everything in between. And so this is why, if you don't have certain levels of trust or certain guarantees in and across the entire metaverse, well, people can just trick you into thinking that it's a private space, but they're monitoring you. So you got to have certain levels of trust that are built into the system and the network. We went through similar things when E commerce emerged around banking and how to make sure you were on the banking site and you weren't on a site that looked like your bank and so we're going to need that kind of trust at the experiential level, because frankly, we won't be able to trust what we see purely because that information is going to be able to be manipulated. Kind of the whole point of these environments is that you can fake any type of sensory experience, ultimately even haptics. And eventually with neural implants and other things, it'll be indistinguishable from our dreams. So, you know, fakes are rather high. And this requires quite a bit of consideration around how we define open versus closed and how we know whether something open versus closed.

But then this open versus closed, the debate around interoperability is slightly different because that of course states that you can take your assets from one platform to the other, which is also related to open. I can bring my own avatar to an open community, but I also can bring my avatar to a work community, which is private, for example.

Yeah, possibly. But just like there's dress codes today, doesn't mean that you can enter that space. Unless you maybe have to use their avatar or maybe your avatar has to have a certain level of fidelity. You can't bring a Minecraft avatar into Fortnite, or maybe you can, and that's up to essentially the owner and controller of that domain. Some domains would be public spaces where you conceivably could bring or do anything. And again, others would be effectively private property. And you can go to Disneyland, but you can't go to Disneyland as a Nazi. Yeah, and you know, I can guarantee you that, you know, a lot of what we're talking about in the metaverse is the redistribution and experiential interactivity of pre existing intellectual property. And so Disney's only going to let Mickey Mouse go in places where it knows that Mickey Mouse is going to be in environments that are on brand and not in environments that would compromise any of their acts. And there, you know, the entire world is, is designed around, especially in the content world, is designed around rights related to intellectual property. And these rights are not going to just evaporate because we created the Metaverse and Today, you know, YouTube was an open free for all. But what happened, music and film content that people didn't own was getting mashed up and used in that environment. So they got sued and there were sort of open harbor, digital millennium, Copyright act type things that were helping to govern that broader use of that. But it was still, at the end of the day, YouTube, in order to function, had to play nice with all the copyright holders or it wasn't going to survive. Ultimately it did. And YouTube, I don't think it's wildly compromised by that type of cooperation. But that sort of mature approach to content and information, I think is inescapable. And I think it's naive to kind of imagine that, that you can just. Even though the web is open today, but there's a lot of things you can't get past your is. And if you, you want more freedom, then there's the dark web and other options. So there are, there are and will be, and I expect there will be, you know, options for everything in these kinds of network. But in the generally used metaverse of tomorrow, you know, it's likely to be a more lawful than not lawful place where certain types of treaties and, you know, in a virtual world like, you know, Fortnite, they cut intellectual property and license agreements with their IP holders in order to be able to have them, or Ariana Grande is not going to perform.

Right, yeah.

And so these kinds of digital legal considerations, I think are not part of the dialogue. But if you kind of put that in the broader question of governance, you see that they are really quite important in order to have a really thriving metaverse or, you know, spatial web.

Yeah, makes sense. Okay, so what are some of the challenges that you foresee for the spatial web in the metaverse?

I really think it comes down to interoperability and governance. And as you indicated, interoperability might mean, you know, and governance both are very broad terms. So experiential interoperability. Right. I need to be able to move avatars around environments and have them work in reliable ways and be rendered in reliable ways. I need my wallets and my currencies to be interoperable. Right. And I need certain functions of the network and the environment to be interoperable. And then with respect to governance, it's the same thing. I need to know that if I go into an environment that someone doesn't have the power to destroy my assets or objects or property or, you know, I need to have sovereign ownership over, over things. Right. And I might need laws that are respected in virtual environments that are made in the physical world that I can rely on, or I need to trust the ones that are created in virtual worlds because there's some democratic process of governance or some sort of consensus based algorithm that is transparent enough for me to be able to comfortably build assets and earn money and buy things and pay taxes in certain virtual worlds and know where that money is being used. Right. So interoperability and governance are really the two pillars in my opinion, that are required for, for both the Metaverse, which we see as a portion of the spatial web, and the broader spatial web at large. Because as I indicated, you can imagine that the IoT needs all those same interoperability and governance considerations. What that gets you is trust and privacy and security by design, by default, upfront, not after the fact. We had interoperability with the web, but we're in a constant cat and mouse game with, with trust and privacy and security. And as you know, we move into the world of ransomware attacks on supply chains will be ransomware attacks on, you know, your heart monitor.

Yeah.

And ransomware attacks on, you know, maybe trapping you in some sort of virtual, you know, experience that you don't want to be in unless you pay to get out. Or like, imagine if you could hide hyperlinks. So I trick you into going into a virtual world that you think is, you know, great and it's horrible, and then you can't get out. I've trapped your avatar in some sort of torture environment and I'm going to ransom you to pay me X amount in Bitcoin in order to get out.

Right.

So we have to really think through these kinds of considerations. It's not just about building teleportation portals and jumping around between games. And by the way, I don't think there's been a really strong argument for you and why that's particularly interesting or useful yet. But I know those will come and I'm quite confident in the long term viability and usefulness of the Metaverse and certainly of the broader spatial web. But I think these are the kinds of really deeper thoughts that our organization, you know, the Space Web foundation, that we think about all the time, every day, and where we're really dedicated, thinking about how to support this next generation of rights and data, property as property and digital sovereignty and interoperability in order to ensure that really, that the Metaverse is not a dystopic sci fi nightmare and actually could be, you know, helped launch a global renaissance of art and creativity and new forms of, you know, abundance and breakthroughs in science and idea art. So if it's a tool for upgrading civilization, we're all in on that and we're completely committed to ensuring that that's the case and that it doesn't turn into the matrix.

Well, thanks so much, Gabriel. It's been a pleasure talking to you.

Yeah, great to meet you, Mark. Talk to you later.

Bye bye. Bye, bye.

And that wraps up the conversation with Gabriel. Rene. If there's one thing that stands out for me from the conversation. It is the fact that a spatial web is a prerequisite of a metaverse, and that without it, not much will be happening. Which is why in my new book, Step into the Metaverse, I argue that spatiality is one of the six characteristics of an open metaverse. If you enjoyed this conversation, don't forget to hit the like and subscribe button on your favorite podcast platform so you will be notified when any of the other interviews will become available. Thank you and see you in the metaverse.