Hopes and Dreams of a Metaverse Wanderer | ETHDenver 2023

Transcript

Hello everybody. My name is Johnny Johnny Ostramm and this is Hopes and Dreams of a Metverse Wanderer. uh which is kind of a a fun and playful title for what will be kind of a a meandering little exploration through concepts around metaverse metverse building from myself as a metaverse builder, someone who works in the space and who has spent plenty of time and met lots of people here. Um, it's interesting for me to talk about the metaverse because it's this big nebulous topic that lots of people have lots to say about. It's uh it kind of contains topics like infinity and and

singularity. It it it's uh both tangible and that we're building it and it's intangible and that it's something that we talk about hypothetically. It's also a place that is highly contentious and where people are kind of contending for power. So there are architects that release manifestos about how architects are the best people to speak about the metaverse. And there are game designers who say, "We've been building virtual spaces for over 50 years. What are you talking about?" There's sound designers and users. There are UX and UI designers. And there's also just people like me. And how we talk about metaverse and how we

think about it determines how we're going to interface with it and how we're going to build in it. So there are visions of the metaverse which are scary. They're platform dominated. They're they're owned by big companies that want our data. And there are inspire hope and uh and and contain many possibilities. And so that's somewhat what I'd like to do today is is to to share with you my perspective. To me, it's also it's even bigger. It's it has to do with how we spend our time. So some people feel as though the metaverse necessarily means that we're more disconnected from reality, that we're kind of hiding from the things that are in the real world. But in a way, we kind of do that already. We we pour ourselves into our phones. We're connected to

people through social media networks on our devices that give us notifications without our permission and that kind of control our attention. So it's a it's a fascinating problem that we're already kind of or a fascinating space that we're already in. And uh yeah, let's explore. So this is a brief overview of the talk. There's really just three parts. Uh the first I'll go into my past work as a an artist and a builder and then we'll go into the infinite now and the internet and we'll talk about possibilities.

So this is me. Uh this is my avatar. It's my name online is memory. And this is kind of a a funny partially idealized version of myself. Kind of long and and gangly but also hard-bodied. Uh I have got I've got glasses on. Maybe I want you guys to perceive me as being intelligent. Uh, my first virtual 3D space I engaged in was Quake 3 Arena. If you recognize this map, then uh it's interesting that my first virtual 3D space that was social and multiplayer. The uh the the sole goal of it is to blow the other person up into these bloody chunks. I was always the

kind of like fun and talkative player that would didn't actually want to compete just kind of wanted to connect with people which didn't really uh match with this. So it kind of led me to visual effects and uh so I worked in the visual effects and the film making industry for a number of years and [snorts] uh made a number of experimental films that went around the world in different uh animation um festivals and conferences. This is change. This is a seven-minute long experimental animation that won some awards. And my my trajectory as a filmmaker and an as an artist tracks the same as as the animation industry as a whole, which is moving from pre-rendered images, files full of thousands of EXRs, the hundreds of thousands of gigabytes of

data to real time, which is this kind of uh this place where we find a convergence of of data. It's the the computer becomes this center point of the convergence of multiple streams of data. Here I'm manipulating uh MIDI and OSC controllers along with um screen capture and video capture. It's making invisible things visible. We're seeing microphones uh where we're seeing waveforms and and uh mouse coordinates kind of coordinating. This is one of my more recent projects where I use uh HTC Vive trackers to coordinate with web cameras uh to create a 3D compositing environment for uh visual effects.

So this kind of has led me to to see this real-time technology as this place of infinite potential. This place where in where things can can bloom and sprout from simple code. In the lower left you see turtle commands that make up these L systems that create growing structures. These are plants that I designed my research. uh my my pursuit of real-time expression took me to the kind of ultimate expression of it which is and the most accessible version of it which is uh web XR or web VR. So this is my first multi-person space made in A-Frame. Uh this was in 2016.

Of course you can't mention A-Frame without mentioning Mosilla Hubs. Um, Mosilla Hubs was the platform that really gave me the aha moment for web- based virtual experiences. Mosilla Hubs is, if you don't know it, made by Mosilla, and it is a uh a platform where you can speak to other people and interact by dropping GLBs and images and videos. And what's really interesting about it is because it's spatial audio, you can kind of have this protomingling effect where instead of everyone being in a Zoom call and everyone's speaking at the at the same time or there's only one conversation with one one thread, you have multiple threads and you have a

way of kind of organizing conversation. And then this led me to the first place where I really thought about the metaverse which was uh using the platform Mona. Mona is a a web 3 tokenized spacebuilding platform built for creators that gives uh creators the tools to make web- based virtual spaces which are in my opinion the best that you can get online at the moment. So, Temple Garden is the first space I built and it was really the first place I started to think about the metaverse as being this medium that could potentially extend through time, could essentially help that could potentially help us uh ascend or or help us speak to each other and connect with each other and and

maybe express ourselves and and get beyond uh kind of uh the constraints of a of a 2D web 2 uh space. It's also the first place that that taught me to think about space as being kind of a very good match for blockchain. Uh maybe you don't have an idea of virtual scarcity like a a 2D plane where you can only own one piece of property or you can only own um or only one person can own a space. But it does make sense in a coordinate system for there to be a specific location and there not to be any any other kind of indicator for that location.

So that's where I started getting into the metaverse. But when we start thinking and talking to other people on online or everywhere else, we kind of think we get to this this definition of the metaverse which seems to kind of be 3D virtual chat rooms. You think about different platforms like uh I won't even mention any. There's just so many. You know exactly what I'm talking about. 3D virtual chat rooms where you have some sort of avatar and move around and speak to other people. But and and this is kind of a limiting view. I would argue that framing it as a 3D virtual chat room makes it the the sole place of of of architects and and architects see the metaverse as being this playground for uh for form and and

experience and light and texture and that it is and it really has an impact on people's emotional states, but it's more than that. You think about how a a building might be made of structural components that are necessary. You have a roof for rain and walls for for wind, but in in the metaverse, what if those don't exist? And what if there is no gravity? And so there's no need for structural components that hold the building up. There's no HVAC, there's no plumbing. And so what you're left with when all these kind of things are removed is uh an interface. It's an interface between information and humans and uh links to to other places and

other things and other times. And if you look at our own spaces, maybe your home space, your apartment or your or your your house, that too is an interface. It's an interface for objects and memory. Maybe you have objects that remind you of places you've been or people you've seen that are no longer in your life or images that remind you of mind states that you've had in the past or mind states that you'd like to have in the future. And under that metaphor, the mall becomes a a kind of economic interface where businesses and people um interface with each other and an institution like a like a college becomes a kind of uh connective interface.

So, that's my main point, I think, is that the metaverse isn't about a 3D chat room where we're embodied in in in avatars. It's a it's a multi-user interface. It's a it's a place for collaborative cocomputing. It's maybe it's virtual reality, maybe it's not. It's it's nimensional. So, it's not just three-dimensional, but one-dimensional, two-dimensional, it's all these things. It's multiensory. And uh and my favorite and what I've kind of learned more recently is it's layered. It's not just one plat platform at a time. It's multiple platforms overlapping to create a a tapestry.

In that way, you start to look at platforms as not being the metaverse or, you know, Gucci's metaverse or whatever's metaverse. They're all just viewports that allow us to look into an underlying flow of data that exists. More broadly, capital Metaverse, it's it's a kind of a densifying lattice of of interconnecting nodes where ping is approaching zero and we're becoming more and more connected to everything around us. This is an interesting uh this is a graph of the location of Starlink satellites uh in real time, which when I saw this kind of really amazed me. I had no idea there was so many. You can see this at heavensabove.com.

So expressed as a graph, it might look like this. Ping over time goes to zero. And once we reach zero, it's it's we reach the singularity. So maybe the metaverse could also be defined as the space around the singularity. So that feels pretty lofty. It's a place that's defined by the proliferation of uh real-time collaborative multi-user interfaces like uh this is bezel or Figma where people can create and talk and also emote at the same time or my favorite multi-user blender add-on which kind of suggests a a blender verse which I think would be an interesting outcome.

All these things, think of it in this way, means that there's not one location in the metaverse. There's many locations and they're either more or less connected to this graph of connections. So maybe the the most metaversey spaces would have the most connections to other places and things like games would be on the outside because they don't link to other things. So you might be asking yourself, isn't that just the internet? Why do we even need a definition for the metaverse? I would say yeah it is just the metaverse or sorry it is just the internet but uh and it's it's defined by hypertextuality uh the internet is a place where things link to other things where it's we have

nested contexts and nested information but if the internet as it is is the metaverse then it's a place that is defined by uh by layers of tabs by timelines that are are kind of inducing a an amnesia. Uh timelines that are a social battleground where we v for the attention of each other and of the algorithm. A place where we are constructing our identities in public in a place that some people describe as being a global PVP zone.

And it's a place where at least for me where I I'm in this continual state of forgetting where I'm tabbing through my uh my browser trying to remember a thread trying to construct the thread. It's also a place with uh platform dominance where places like Facebook uh own our our data and are even the custodians of our data after our death. Uh so all this really means these platforms kind of they they create our liinal spaces. They create our the flow of how we experience time each other and experience data and memory.

And the metaverse is this kind of to me is this kind of space that's bubbling off the surface of this. It's uh creating a new a new possible place for us to to to experiment I would say. And this is my favorite quote. It's by my friend Mark. He said, uh, we used to surf the internet, now we doom scroll. And this is totally true for me. Uh, so the last section, hopes and dreams, I asked the question, what metaphors might we use to describe an immersive multi-user interface? Might we wander through the internet

or forage for information and connections? Might we create uh spaces where we can have a genuine sense of contemplation or feel genuinely connected to presence and time? Might we create places where we can actually think and not be bombarded by uh ads and by notifications? Can we play create a place where we can think about the future in a positive way and maybe grieve things that we've lost in the past?

Will the metaverse as a 3D multi-user interface allow us to intersect with and navigate through data in a different way? This is a concept for winder stat quests which would uh um would check your hard drive for files and create a virtual space based on that. We often think of immersive computing as something that you're being immersed in, but we often don't think about what we're blocking out. And these immersive spaces and and and immersive user interfaces create the possibility for blocking out all the things around us that maybe distract us from our being human.

It also creates the possibility for multi-user collaboration or hybrid media. So this is touch designer being used with multiple overlays uh web browser based VR spaces and uh facial tracking for avatar an avatar overlay. Might it be a place where we connect and speak to people that we may have never ever met before or had the chance to to speak and create connections with? to be a place where we are reconnected with our experience of seeing where we can explore with our eyes and collect uh information and objects or construct a new sense of self have a new interface with our own

memories or a place where we create avatars that have hypertextual meaning. So, this was created by a friend of mine, Katherine, who here is challenging religious iconography through an avatar with uh intertextual wearables. Or might we it be a place where we uh interface with brands and create new brands for ourselves and others. On the left is POV, who took a flipper device who provided an STL file of their device with a purchase and he brought it into the metaverse as a wearable. Or might it be a place where we can connect with people that are across the seas and we may may never see in real life ever.

For me, I think about the internet as it exists now and there's not really space for presence. There's not really space for intimacy or even for being present with someone. We're we're we're given read receipts and little green dots on the sides of people's avat or people's um profile pictures, but there's so much more. There's so much more potential there. And so that's the the last part of my presentation, which is my current area of exploration, which is hybrid interfaces. So given this kind of definition, there's so much that can be done in terms of creating interfaces that intersect between different spaces.

So this is a prototype for a cross metaverse or crossplatform traveling map where a user might be able to travel between different spaces, different websites, different information and kind of embodied and playful way. Uh this is a a conceptualization of uh a space as being an interface with input and output. So right now we have virtual spaces that are in some way static. But what happens when we can bring in real-time blockchain information and perhaps have plants or uh the space grow as a Dow grows. Uh to me that means that an environment and a context becomes a place where kind of ambiently you're

absorbing multiple layers of information from uh connected contexts. Can we create interfaces that allow us to exchange objects and ideas, exchange value? Can we embrace overlays as a possible way to solve uh to create a kind of proto interop where we're not necessarily creating one structure which is a dominant uh structure which we all have to obey the same rules but instead we can kind of coexist through blended contexts. And this is where I'm really interested. I've got 55 seconds to tell you about uh Compass Browser, which is my current area of research. Building a a 3D interface containing 3D objects

that allow users to store information, places, things, connections uh in a a playful and contextual way. Perhaps it can give us a way to browse through our own memories to build loai structures or memory palaces that will help us uh keep our friends and our memories close to us. Perhaps we can use 2D blended context to uh add extra layers onto the spaces that we're in, onto the websites that we're in. This is a current experiment of mine. uh it's an inventory which allows you to build little apps or kind of micro apps that that live on a layer above the

metaverse. So all this really is it's the open metaverse. It's a platform where we're all kind of collaborating to create uh a new spatial and uh interface for the information that we're already interacting with. So if you're interested in this, follow uh projects and platforms that are championing the open metaverse. uh follow um companies that are engaging and follow people who are talking about it [snorts] like Jyn and like myself 888. Thank you very much. That's the end.

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