Watching the interconnecting part of the next generation Internet is very exciting.
Artificial intelligence is something that is capturing the imagination of many and for good reason. The reality is that, for the moment, it is rather primitive. While a lot is made of the potential, it is rather restricted.
This is not a knock against what is being developed. It is amazing. Instead, what we are referring to is the realm that it operates.
We are focusing upon the digital world. There are massive advancements that, naturally, can be made. However, this is missing much of where everything exists, the physical world.
For this reason, we need to look at The Spatial Web along with the future emergence of spatial intelligence.
Image generated using Ideogram
For years I distinguished between Web3, the moniker coined by Gavin Wood, and Web 3.0, the actually next generation of the Internet.
Web 3.0 is much bigger. It incorporates Web3 yet goes far beyond that.
This is actually the potential convergence of many technologies. We are looking at:
These are some of the technologies that could be part of this equation. We will have to see how many of them evolve and what role they have.
For this article, we will focus upon mixed reality. This is either AR or VR as well as some combination.
It is something long promised but, as of now, really hasn't materialized. That is going to change in the future.
Our digital world will end up 3D. This is something we know although the equipment of today is rather primitive. We might not know what the access will be, just that it will exist.
This is what the spatial web is. We are dealing with something that incorporates space into the equation.
To give a minor example of what it will be like, let us do a search of Cross pen.
In Web 2.0, we get results relating to this. Perhaps the company appears in the results along with places to buy it. There might be a review site also included.
With Web 3.0, the result will be "in your nightstand next to your journal".
Do you see the difference?
What is spatial intelligence?
As you can guess, it is artificial intelligence applied to the spatial world. Here is where we see AI and the spatial Internet merging.
Fei-Fei-Li, who use to run Google Cloud, has now starting a company to work on this issue.
Artificial intelligence startup World Labs announced its official launch on Sept. 13. the firm is reportedly valued at over $1 billion and has raised more than $230 million in funding to build “spatial intelligence” systems.
They go on to explain in their blog post what their goal is:
Today we are announcing the formation of World Labs: a spatial intelligence AI company building Large World Models (LWMs) to perceive, generate, and interact with the 3D world. We aim to lift AI models from the 2D plane of pixels to full 3D worlds - both virtual and real - endowing them with spatial intelligence as rich as our own. human spatial intelligence evolved over millennia; but in this time of extraordinary progress, we see the opportunity to imbue AI with this ability in the near term.
What we see has enormous potential.
Toward this goal, World Labs will develop spatially intelligent Large World Models (LWMs) that can understand and reason about the 3D world from images and other modalities. Over time, we expect to train increasingly powerful models with broader capabilities that can be applied in a variety of domains, working alongside people.
Initially we will focus on generating 3D worlds without limits - creating and editing virtual spaces complete with physics, semantics, and control. We hope this will unlock new capabilities for creative users and professionals such as artists, designers, developers, and engineers. It will also allow anyone to imagine and create their own worlds, expanding the potential of generative AI from 2D images and videos to 3D worlds.
The excitement over 2D AI, especially regarding generative AI is tremendous. Can you image what the level will be with spatial intelligence emerging? It opens up so many possibilities.
What we are looking at is a completely new paradigm. The old standards are going to exit.
Consider the technological shift when going from the mobile phone to the smartphone. The impact on society was revolutionary. It is one of the largest steps forward in our history.
This is likely to be bigger.
Many espouse the potential of AI, discussing how it will be even of greater impact than electricity. I would surmise, for the most part, these people are still focusing upon 2D AI.
What happens if we start to see spatial AI? How much more potential exists there?
Consider the idea of being in a movie that you prompted instead of simply watching it. This is something that might be possible with spatial intelligence.
The key is that everything becomes the Web. Our entire world is altered where the digital and physical are not separate. We already have this to a degree with sensors extracting data regarding the world around us.
With spatial intelligence, there is the possibility of a jump of many orders of magnitude.
Is the the foundation of the Metaverse so many have talked about? Possibly.
The implications for business, entertainment, communication, and design are all radically altered.
For the moment, this is a far off potentiality. However, it could be worth watching over the next few years. If there is a foundation put in place, with some standards, we could see some explosive developments.
Once again, Web 3.0 is more than just tokenization.
