Building Lasting Connections in the Spatial & Immersive Web

The future of the web we share, the immersive internet is spatially aware, personalized and social. Are we ready to bring our creativity and channels to these new spaces in safe, equitable and appropriate ways? Are our relationships ready for this leap in portability and awareness?

Are we ready to integrate hyper-aware solutions into our lives?

Smartglasses are here and embedded interfaces are coming to our public and private spaces. Today we are stepping into a more connected 4D landscape where our information and data, art and media channels are converging into immersive spaces that resemble our own personal game worlds. Everywhere we go, places will know us by our steps and gait, speech and faces. The lines between what's real, immersive, hybrid or virtual will begin to fade as the synthetic bleeds into the digital through media, entertainment, gaming and experience design.

Hybrid AI is just a part of what's coming as worldbuilding and design of new metaverse experiences will be as easy as speaking or prompting them into existence. Major media companies like Warner Bros are announcing new metaverse story worlds, open sandbox spaces that mix virtual and real play.

A few big leaps are coming for us as the post-hype metaverse is realized:

• Portals between websites and worlds on the open web (Metaverse social experiences with transactions, interactions and relationships) are easier to open now between 3D web worlds and WebXR experiences of all types

• Portable social graph through Discord, streaming audiences allows friends, groups and communities to move seamlessly across game and social worlds from the web to specific platforms on URLs and through portals and live nested sessions where entire worlds exist within other www.web worlds

• DIY Creator Channels: Building systems becoming easier to use for the 3D web (PlayCanvas, Unity, Croquet, Unreal and Godot+ many others in generative tooling such as Simulacra, Nyric and whatever Midjourney is cooking up) will make it easier to combine assets from design and development tools with created, hybrid and generated media libraries with our public collections and channels to provide all creators a way to integrate their web presence into immersive spaces. These tools will be easier to use over time and many platforms will be baking them into their sandboxes.

See a generative worldbuilder in alpha: NYRIC Generative Worlds

• Media players for real-time streaming (RTMP & other formats) are integrating real-time tools with AI and avatars, creating cyphers like our band AURICLES uses for live events with social spaces available on mobile, web, in headsets and smartglasses to provide cohesive virtual and hybrid experiences we can share in anywhere, from any device. Avatars are 20+ years old now and entire generations of creators are now building worlds within game engines that also power digital twins and real world systems. NVIDIA made a few announcements on these fronts today at CES: NVIDIA New Tools and Microservices
• Avatars are becoming something more than just digital representations - they are evolving into our GPT assistants, librarians, archivists and agents of discovery. Nothing in these agent-human relationships replaces the amazing relationships we've built over decades of engagement in the AR, VR and XR industries that include a wide variety of fields from volumetric and virtual production to gaming, smartglasses apps for health and emergency preparedness simulations.

These simulations are vital sandboxes as we sort out how to create more supportive and beneficial systems for all humans. This is where human-centered innovation and design can shine, if we choose to focus our attention on the essentials of what matters to human thriving in the decades to come. Any company, team, organization, field or sector can and will be using these immersive spaces in the future. Socially, they work for millions of people. Lasting friendships come from virtual and hybrid engagement and these friendships have personally lasted my entire adult life from the earliest 3D worlds coming to this amazing new time of prompting new worlds with our voices and words.

We'll be discussing all of this and much more this week on stage at CES (Future of the Post-Hype Metaverse) on real-time cyphers, digital twins, holographic spaces and worlds, digital and volumetric convergences between the worlds we see through virtual production stages in our media and the worlds all of us can create together through Realitycraft. I'm working on a book on this topic, specifically focused on the process of designing for immersive, spatial, interactive and generative media convergences and welcome any of you in these fields to reach out and share more of what you're working on - drop a comment or line to leave a link or breadcrumb trail and you're all welcome to join us at Auricles.AI for the next adventure with my band, AURICLES. Download new music now (for free, as we love you!) before our release to streaming channels.

I teach and consult on strategy across these topics if you need support internally from a specialist. Contracts are available by the day, week, month and year depending on your needs including private art consultations with media and generative production with your team. Previous clients excited about this work together include film features and cinema, VR and XR teams, theaters and concept design endeavors, festivals and even doctors and therapists. I consult in art and media production services and am moving toward accreditation on appraisal and valuation services for all types of art and media with a specialty in the immersive, 3D and interactive art of our amazing global community. As much as I love being a creator and artist, I love working with artists and creators to make sure their work is valued well and this is a growing part of our work at Realitycraft in Emeryville, CA.

If I can help you be more creative and capable in 2024, get in touch.