Hopes and Dreams of a Metaverse Wanderer | ETHDenver 2023

Hello everyone. My name is Johnny Ostramm and this is Hopes and Dreams of a Metaverse Traveler. It's a fun and playful title for what will be a short, rambling exploration through concepts about building the metaverse, from my perspective as a builder, someone who works in space and has spent a lot of time and met a lot of people here. It's interesting for me to talk about the metaverse because it's a big, nebulous topic that many people have a lot to say about. It contains themes such as infinity and singularity.

It is both tangible, insofar as we are building it, and intangible, insofar as it is something we talk about hypothetically. It is also a highly controversial place where people fight for power. There are architects who publish manifestos about how architects are the best people to talk about the metaverse. And there are game designers who say, "We've been building virtual spaces for over 50 years virtual spaces for over 50 years ." "What are they talking about?"

There are sound designers and users. There are UX and UI designers. And there are also people like me. And the way we talk about the metaverse and how we think about it determines how we're going to interact with it and how we're going to build in it. There are visions of the metaverse that are frightening.

They are dominated by platforms. They are, they are controlled by large companies that want our data. And there are visions of the metaverse that inspire hope and contain many possibilities. So that's a little bit of what I'd like to do today: share my perspective with you. For me, it's even a bit bigger.

It has to do with how we spend our time. Some people feel that the metaverse necessarily means that we are more disconnected from reality, that we are hiding from things in the real world. But, in a way, we already do. We immersed ourselves in our phones. We are connected to people through social networks on our devices that send us notifications without our permission and that control our attention.

So it's a fascinating problem, or a fascinating space that we're already in fascinating space that we're already in . And yes, we're going to explore. This is a brief summary of the talk. There are actually only three parts. First, I will delve into my previous work as an artist and builder, then we will enter into the infinite now and the internet, and talk about the possibilities.

So this is me. This is my avatar . My online name is Memory. And this is a sort of funny and partially idealized version of myself. A little tall and lanky, but also athletic in build.

Uh, I'm wearing also athletic in build. Uh, I'm wearing glasses. Perhaps I want you to perceive me as someone intelligent. Uh, my first 3D virtual space that I participated in was Quake 3 Arena. If you recognize this map, then uh, it's interesting that my first 3D virtual space was social and multiplayer.

The, the, the only goal is to blow the other person to bits. I was always that kind of fun, talkative player who didn't really want to compete, I just wanted to connect with people, which didn't really fit with this. So that led me to visual effects and, uh, I worked in the visual effects and film industry for several years and made several experimental films that toured the world at different animation festivals and conferences animation festivals and conferences . This is "Change". It is a seven-minute experimental animation that won several awards.

And my journey as a filmmaker and artist follows the same path as the animation industry as a whole, which is to move from pre-rendered images, files full of thousands of EXRs, hundreds of thousands of gigabytes of data, to real time, which is this place where we find a convergence of data. That is, the computer becomes this central point of convergence of multiple data streams. Here I am manipulating MIDI and OSC controllers along with screen capture and video capture. It's about making the invisible visible. We are looking at microphones, where we see waveforms and mouse coordinates coordinating and mouse coordinates coordinating .

This is one of my most recent projects where I use HTC Vive trackers coordinated with webcams to create a 3D compositing environment for visual effects. So this has led me to see this real-time technology as a place of infinite potential. This is a place where things can flourish and sprout from a simple code. At the bottom left you can see the turtle commands that make up these L systems that create growing structures. These are plants that I designed in my research.

My search for real-time expression led me to its ultimate expression, which is, and the most accessible version, Web XR or Web VR. This is my first multi-user space made in A-Frame. This was in 2016. Of course, you can't mention A-Frame without mentioning Mozilla Hubs. Mozilla Hubs was the platform that really gave me the moment of revelation for web-based virtual experiences.

Mozilla Hubs, if you don't know, was created by Mozilla, and it's a platform where you can talk to other people and interact by dropping GLB files, images, and videos. And what's really interesting is that, because of its spatial audio, it produces a kind of interaction effect where, instead of everyone on a Zoom call talking at the same time or having a single conversation with a single thread, you have multiple threads and a way to organize the chat. And this led me to the first place where I really thought about the metaverse, which was using the Mona platform. Mona is a tokenized web3 space creation platform for creators that gives them the tools to make web-based virtual spaces, which in my opinion, are the best you can find online right now. So, Temple Garden is the first space I built, and it was really the first place where I started thinking about the metaverse as this medium that could extend through time could extend through time , that could essentially help us ascend or help us talk to each other, connect, express ourselves, and overcome the limitations of a 2D Web 2 space.

It's also the first place that taught me to think of space as a really good match for blockchain. Perhaps you don't have an idea of ​​virtual scarcity as in a 2D plane where you can only own one property or only one person can own a space. But it makes sense in a coordinate system that there is a specific location and that there is no other type of indicator for that location. So that's where I started to delve into the metaverse. But when we start thinking and talking with other people online or elsewhere, we arrive at this definition of the metaverse that seems to be basically 3D virtual chat rooms.

You think of different platforms like... I won't even mention any. There are simply so many. You know exactly what I'm talking about. 3D virtual chat rooms where you have some kind of avatar, you move around and talk to other people.

But this is a somewhat limited view. I would say that defining it as a 3D virtual chat room makes it the exclusive domain of architects, who see the metaverse as a playground for form, experience playground for form, experience , light, and texture; And it does, it really does have an impact on people's emotional state, but it's much more than that. You think about how a building could be made of structural components that are necessary. You have a roof for the rain and walls for the wind, but in the metaverse, what if those don't exist? And what if there's no gravity exist?

And what if there's no gravity ? Therefore, there is no need for structural components to support the building. There is no air conditioning, there are no pipes. So what remains when all these things are removed is an interface. It is an interface between information and humans, and links to other places, other things, and other times.

And if you look at our own spaces, perhaps your home, your apartment or your house, that is also an interface. It is an interface for objects and memories. Perhaps you have objects that remind you of places you've been or people you've seen who are no longer in your life, or images that remind you of mental states you had in the past or mental states you would like to have in the future. Under that metaphor, the shopping mall becomes a kind of economic interface where businesses and people interact with each other, and an institution like a university becomes a kind of connective interface. So that's my main point, I think; that the metaverse is not a 3D chat room where we are represented by avatars.

It is a multi-user interface. It is a place for collaborative computing. Maybe it's virtual reality, maybe it's not. It is n-dimensional, so it is not only three-dimensional, but one-dimensional, two-dimensional, it is all those things. It is multisensory.

And my favorite, and what I've learned most recently, is that it's layered. It's not just one platform at a time. They are multiple overlapping platforms to create a tapestry. In that way, you start to see platforms not as the metaverse, or the Gucci metaverse, or whoever's metaverse. They are all simply viewers that allow us to see the underlying flow of data that exists.

In broader terms, the Metaverse (with a capital M) is a kind of dense network of interconnected nodes where ping approaches zero and we become increasingly connected to everything around us. This is an interesting graphic, uh, it's a map of the real-time location of Starlink satellites, which, when I saw it, really amazed me. I had no idea there were so many . You can see it at heavensabove.com.

So, expressed as a graph, it might look like this. The ping tends towards zero over time. And once we reach zero, that's when we reach singularity. So perhaps the metaverse could also be defined as the space around the singularity. That sounds pretty ambitious.

It's a place defined by the proliferation of real-time collaborative multi-user interfaces, like Bezel or Figma, where people can create, talk, and also express emotions at the same time, or my favorite Blender multi-user plugin , which suggests a "Blenderverse," which I think would be an interesting outcome. All of this, think of it this way, means that there is no single location in the metaverse. There are many locations and they are more or less connected to this connection graph. Perhaps the most "metaversal" spaces would have the most connections with other places, and things like games would be outside because they don't link with other things. So you might be wondering, isn't that just the internet?

Why do we even need a definition for the metaverse? I would say, yes, it is simply the metaverse, or sorry, it is simply the internet, but it is defined by hypertextuality. The internet is a place where things link to other things, where we have nested contexts and nested information. But if the internet as it is today is the metaverse, then it is a place defined by layers of tabs, by timelines that induce a kind of amnesia. Timelines are a social battleground where we compete for the attention of others and the algorithm.

A place where we build our identities in public, in a place that some describe as a global combat zone . And it's a place where, at least for me, I'm in this continuous state of forgetting, switching between tabs in my browser, trying to remember a thread, trying to build that thread a thread, trying to build that thread . It is also a platform-dominated place , where places like Facebook own our data and are even the custodians of our information after our death information after our death . All of this means that these platforms create our liminal spaces. They create our flow of how we experience time, others, data, and memory.

And the metaverse is, for me, a kind of space that emerges from the surface of this. It is, uh, creating a new possible place for us to experiment, I would say. And this is my favorite quote. It belongs to my friend Mark. He said, uh, we used to surf the internet, now we do doom scrolling.

And this is absolutely true for me. Uh, so in the last section, Hopes and Dreams, I posed the question: what metaphors could we use to describe an immersive multi-user interface? Could we wander the internet or search for information and connections? Could we create spaces where we have a genuine sense of contemplation or feel truly connected to presence and time? Could we create places where we can actually think and not be bombarded by ads and notifications?

Can we create a place where we can think about the future positively and perhaps mourn the things we lost in the past? Will the metaverse, as a 3D multi-user interface, allow us to interact with and navigate data in a different way? This is a concept for "winder stat quests" that, uh, um, would scan your hard drive for files and create a virtual space based on that. We often think of immersive computing as something you dive into, but we do n't usually think about what we're blocking. And these immersive spaces and immersive user interfaces create the possibility of blocking out all the things around us that might distract us from our human condition.

It also creates the possibility of multi-user collaboration or hybrid media. So this is Touch Designer being used with multiple overlays, web browser-based VR spaces, and facial tracking for an avatar, an avatar overlay. Could it be a place where we connect and talk with people we may have never met before or with whom we haven't had the opportunity to talk and make connections? To be a place where we reconnect with our experience of seeing, where we can explore with our eyes and collect information and objects, or build a new sense of self, have a new interface with our own memories, or a place where we create avatars that have a hypertextual meaning. So, this was created by a friend of mine, Katherine, who here challenges religious iconography through an avatar with intertextual garments.

Or could it be a place where we interact with brands and create new brands for ourselves and others? On the left is POV, who took a Flipper device, which provided an STL file of his device with the purchase, and brought it into the metaverse as a wearable item into the metaverse as a wearable item . Or could it be a place to connect with people who are on the other side of the sea and whom we may never see in real life? For me, I think of the internet as it exists now and there really isn't room for presence. There's really no room for intimacy or even for being present with someone.

We get read receipts and little green dots next to people's avatars or profile pictures, but there's much more. There's much more potential there. And that's the last part of my presentation, which is my current area of ​​exploration: hybrid interfaces. Given this definition, there is much to be done in terms of creating interfaces that cross between different spaces. This is a prototype for a travel map between metaverses or platforms, where a user could move between different spaces, websites, and information in an embedded and playful way.

This is a conceptualization of a space as an interface with input and output. Right now we have virtual spaces that are, in a way, static. But what happens when we can integrate real-time blockchain information and make plants or space grow as a DAO does? For me, that means that an environment and a context become a place where, in an environmental way, you absorb multiple layers of information from connected contexts. Can we create interfaces that allow us to exchange objects, ideas, and value?

Can we adopt overlays as a way to create a kind of primitive interoperability, where we don't necessarily create a dominant structure that we all must obey, but can coexist through mixed contexts? And this is where I really get interested. I have 55 seconds to talk to you about Compass Browser, which is my current area of ​​research. To build a 3D interface with 3D objects that allows users to store information, places, things, and connections in a playful and contextual way. Perhaps it can give us a way to navigate through our own memories to build structures loci or memory palaces that help us keep our friends and memories close.

Perhaps we can use mixed two-dimensional contexts to add additional layers to the spaces we are in and the websites we visit. This is a current experiment of mine. It's an inventory that allows you to build small applications or micro-applications that live in a layer above the metaverse. So all of this, in reality, is the open metaverse. It is a platform where we all collaborate to create a new spatial interface for the information we already interact with.

So if you're interested in this, follow projects and platforms that promote the open metaverse. Follow companies that are participating and follow people who are talking about it, like Jyn and myself 888. Thank you very much. That's all.