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virtual mainstreaming

There is a growing perception that the virtual world is as real as the physical world.

In the real world, trust is how relationships and institutions work. It is the basis for how businesses thrive within the legal system, how our money markets continue to function, and a form of measure for our relationships. Trust makes each of these systems scalable.

As trust continues to grow in the “virtual” realm—online friends, virtual items and crypto assets, smart contracts, and online experiences—it will increase the scalability of the Metaverse and the industries that support it.

But in any big trend, there's often a countertrend; as people take the virtual world more seriously, it encourages those who try to take advantage of it.

Unfortunately, cybercrime is an example that many people are familiar with: phishing to steal your account, online scams of all kinds, ransomware attacks and spreading malware, etc.

Online bullying, abuse, game cheating, and relationship cheating all increase harm as people trust virtual relationships and possessions to be real. As more value is placed on these acts, they will proliferate, as will investments from companies aimed at fighting crime and abuse.

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low code platform

Low-code and no-code application platforms (LCAPs) provide higher-level abstractions, such as visual scaffolding and drag-and-drop tools, to replace hand-coding of processes, logic, and applications.

The most obvious benefit of this trend is that non-programmers can do things that programmers have done before. However, this doesn't quite capture the impact, or why companies are adopting these platforms.

A big part of the "magic" of LCAP is the massive amount of automation that happens beneath the visual layer: workflow, deployment, security, scaling, and integration with various data endpoints. Typically, this complexity and scalability dominates the development of Internet applications.

The result will not only be a shift in staff, but a significant reduction in the effort required to create applications.

Gartner predicts that by 2023, more than 50% of large enterprises will use LCAPs to operate at least some of their infrastructure.

Likewise, many of these developers are moving towards a serverless architecture. On the other side of the enterprise, you have more and more creator tools that make it easy to create metaverse content, script complex behaviors, and engage in commerce.

There is a common belief that products are either catered to businesses or small businesses, but this is not the case. While "enterprise" technology is often difficult to scale down to individuals, there are many examples where things can be in the hands of individuals, making this the easiest option for businesses. This includes pretty much anything Adobe has ever done. More recently, no-code/low-code platforms like Shopify also power everything from small businesses to some of the biggest brands in the world (Hasbro, Budweiser, etc.).

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machine intelligence

Machines are doing more work that was previously done by humans. This includes the fields sometimes called deep learning, machine learning, and artificial intelligence.

We live in a world where learning algorithms fine-tune advertising messages, sales and online engagement. We are in the early days of natural language processing and image recognition. In the real world, we are very close to applications such as self-driving cars.

In the Metaverse, machine intelligence merges with all the other trends you see here. It will impact creativity as computers become collaborators in the creative process – see how AI Dungeon generates stories, or how Promethean AI sets up virtual landscapes – and imagine this going further in the next decade.

AI will be used to design the microchips that power the Metaverse, and to generate code to aid programmers.

Machines will interpret gestures, predict where our eyes will look, recognize emotions, and even the firing of our neurons.

Machine intelligence will be connected into our no-code and low-code application platform, and they will operate as part of a service architecture and design consultant.

Agents driven by our preferences and interests will show us the information we want, when we need it.

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The rise of cybernetics

Cybernetics has arrived. They are not as evenly distributed as the future, nor are they as developed and amazing as the future.

Cybernetics is about the integration of human sensory and motor systems with computers. Existing examples take advantage of video game input/output devices, wearable devices, mobile phone accelerometers, and VR headsets.

Miniaturization and high-speed networking have transformed devices from stationary workstations into mobile supercomputers in our pockets. These computers are getting closer and closer to our bodies.

We are transitioning from looking at computers from an outside perspective to a future where we occupy virtual spaces and live in a world where computing is ubiquitous.

"Smartphones" already feel like an archaic term because they're not phones -- they're highly portable computers that just happen to have phone apps preloaded. We can already occupy virtual spaces with VR headsets like Oculus that respond to our eyes, head position and gestures. When these become smart glasses, we'll be able to bring this experience to more of the world around us. In the future, we might even have functional smart contact lenses.

Light field technology even allows us to project photons and their accompanying depth of field onto the retina, allowing your eyes to focus on different parts of the virtual scene, resulting in a truly holographic experience.

These devices will increasingly interpret our voice commands, our gestures and our biometrics. Neural interfaces could even allow our devices to understand our intentions—perhaps even faster than we can understand ourselves.

as a result of? Virtual reality won't just be places we've been. The metaverse will be everywhere.

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Open Systems Challenge

The original intention of the Internet was to build a highly distributed, decentralized network of interoperable computers and applications.

The Internet today is dominated by a few very large platforms that act as gatekeepers and tollbooths.

However, emerging technologies and open standards could democratize the future of the Metaverse.

WebAssembly (Wasm) promises fast, secure, sandboxed binary applications for the open web. WebGL and WebXR will contribute to graphics and immersive experiences that can be delivered outside of the app store. Platforms like the Unity Data-Oriented Technology Stack (DOTS) are leveraging these platforms to deliver compact, efficient binaries that execute at the level the Metaverse needs (in particular, Unity's Project Tiny).

Open systems are also a social phenomenon because they allow for extensive collaboration among software engineering projects.Reed's lawPredicts the exponential value of applications like Slack or WhatsApp, which can be applied to the open source movement - which is essentially a permissionless social network for software developers.

Open source and an open platform like Wasm can maximize the number of potential collaborators, creating more value than all licensed platforms combined. Permission-free platforms like Linux and PC should also thrive in the future.

Likewise, people can regain sovereignty over their own data using technologies such as zero-knowledge proofs and decentralized digital identity systems. This may encourage consumers to trust Internet applications with more personal data -- simply because they don't need to trust anyone.

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Adopt blockchain

What open source and the open internet can do for software and applications, and what blockchain — a distributed ledger technology — can do for assets and data.

Why is this so important? Network effects again. The more nodes that can participate in the network, the higher the value of the network, and since groups can be formed around certain activities (games, financial legos, etc.), the value of the network increases further according to Reed's Law.

The value contribution is exponential. More individuals, more applications, and more components means more smart contracts and more decentralized applications.

Blockchains are considered "trustless" because you don't need to trust any one authority; the trust lies in the blockchain itself.

The collective long-tail distribution of all these trustless applications, contracts, and components gives blockchain social scalability.

Network effects have paved the way for on-chain data feeds (oracles) that can be used as smart contract conditions; this has given rise to decentralized lending, decentralized finance, and decentralized asset trading. The advent of blockchain computing could replace some aspects of cloud computing; the rise of non-fungible assets could become the basis for virtual goods in a new generation of games, avatar customization, and metaverse experiences.

This is just the beginning of the possibilities when you unleash assets, data, and programmable contracts into the open internet.

Blockchain allows trustless data exchange; decentralized authority, records of history and provenance, provable scarcity of assets. When decentralized, blockchain allows for permissionless participation or governance through decentralized autonomous organizations.

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Walled Garden Ecosystem

Walled gardens—I use this word with love because gardens can be beautiful and organized—benefit from all the other big trends impacting the Metaverse.

Not every app or every world will be open. Sometimes licensing, integration, management and control are desirable features of a platform or application. Roblox would never have caught on without the integration of these features.

Ironically, walled gardens also benefit from open systems that challenge them. They use the same open source and blockchain as everyone else, and many customers may feel more secure in it.

With the proliferation of walled gardens, one question is how to spot each one. There are hierarchical discovery systems such as Roblox, which acts as a "YouTube for Gaming", driven by search and popularity. This will continue as people like curators and developers like to reach large audiences. But portable avatars, portable social networks, and approaches to interoperability are on the horizon—which could use open platforms to connect walled gardens of all sorts together, while sparking new opportunities for discovery and curation.

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Accelerate distributed network

5G networks will improve mobile network speed, concurrency, and latency by orders of magnitude. And 5G is not the end of the road: 6G will improve these metrics by another 10-100 times. We should see 10 Gbps speeds with latency down to 1 millisecond within a decade.

Accelerated speed is necessary to support the Metaverse, but network effects really occur when all participants in the network are able to share the real-time data that powers some of the most interesting applications.

As the local network layer is no longer the bottleneck, the focus shifts to moving more computing power directly to the "far" edge of the network. Sometimes this will be at a local cell tower; sometimes it might be right in your home, where the information will be pre-processed and presented to your cybernetic device.

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simulated reality

SkillSkill. Ray tracing uses the physics of light to simulate the appearance of an image based on how photons bounce between and through different materials. Ray tracing can create prettier, more realistic images -- which is why it's used for pre-rendered content like movies -- but requires vastly increased processing power.

But real-time ray tracing is on the way.

This is just one example of how we will simulate reality inside our machines. For example, one of the use cases for the NVIDIA Omniverse platform is to perform simulated fluid dynamics: imagine being able to accurately map a river, or simulate an HVAC system. Then imagine all these simulation and AI engines plugged into an interoperable framework that allows the world of virtual machines, objects, environments, and people to be simulated with logic and predictions.

Data will also come from an exponentially growing feed of the physical world. This includes geospatial data and traffic data; digital twins of physical objects that report all their attributes, oracles that report financial data to smart contracts; and real-time data about people and processes.

We won't simply have the Internet of Things - we'll have the Internet of Everything - combined with predictive analytics, artificial intelligence and real-time visualization.

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The metaverse is speeding up

The Metaverse is going to change the way we socialize, work, and play; the megatrends I share might give you some ideas on how to do it.