A New Metaverse Network plots an Escape from Meta’s ‘walled gardens’

Walling it off, or not?  Not sure.   Our own experiment was clearly walled.

A new metaverse network plots an escape from Meta’s ‘walled gardens’

STORY BY   Thomas Macaulay  In  TheNextWeb

Improbable wants open borders between virtual worlds

June 21, 2023 - 11:54 am

Two years after Mark Zuckerberg launched it into orbit, the metaverse is crashing back to Earth. As the hype sparked by Facebook’s rebrand fades amid jaw-dropping losses, risible selfies, and the generative AI boom, reality is setting in — which is when things start getting interesting.

Metaverse stalwarts are now fighting for competing visions.

On one side are the centralised platforms owned by the likes of Meta and Roblox. Under the control of all-powerful tech giants, these virtual worlds exist in siloes.

On the other side stand advocates for open, interconnected, and decentralised metaverses. In these utopian realms, users can freely traverse spaces and take ownership of their experiences.

Crystals, jets, and magnets — is this how to make cooling greener?

Improbable has firmly planted its flag in the latter camp. The company spent a decade building immersive virtual worlds, from military simulations to K-pop parties, before pivoting to building metaverse infrastructure. While the unicorn’s focus (and fortunes) have fluctuated, Improbable’s faith in open spaces has persisted.

“We have seen how walled gardens and closed networks exploit the people that spend time on the services for the benefit of few,” Herman Narula, the company’s co-founder and CEO, said last year '

More recently, Narula has been pitching an alternative.

“We want to contribute to ensuring the metaverse holds its promise of being a network of meaning that unlocks creativity, social interaction, and economic opportunities, free from gatekeepers,” he said last month.  To bring this vision to (virtual) life, Improbable has launched a new venture: MSquared, a network of metaverses.

The lay of the land

Today’s virtual worlds are ringfenced. In Roblox, for instance, you can use build games, buy weapons, and spend the Robux currency. But you can’t take any of that into Fortnite.

MSquared hopes to dismantle these barriers. Using a suite of technologies, services, and standards — as well as $150m (€138m) in funding — the project promises to power a nexus of interlinked worlds. 

If all goes to plan, the virtual experiences will extend across multiple platforms and an interoperable economy.

“I’m going to get shouted at for calling it this, but one way to describe it is a ‘meta-metaverse’,” Rob Whitehead, Improbable’s co-founder and chief product officer, told TNW.

Whitehead compares the concept to international travel. In this analogy, virtual worlds are akin to individual nations with open borders. If you want to visit a new country, you just bring your wallet and possessions with you. 

Upon arrival, your digital assets could be accessed through blockchain-enabled decentralised identities and cryptocurrencies, or traditional Web2 log-ins and digital goods, like Fortnite outfits and tools.

“We’re the layer that connects those different worlds together,” said Whitehead. “And it’s agnostic as to whether that metaverse is using crypto or non-crypto stuff.”   ... ' 

Sample Virtual Worlds Examined

For an upcoming effort I have been asked for an overview of Virtual-Meta worlds and their potential uses in areas like retail and beyond. Recall we worked with IBM on an experiment with 'Second Life' in the 80s.   Below are a list of such worlds, only a few that I have looked at,  via ChatGPT.  Looking in particular how these do/can link with AI enhancement. 

There are many virtual worlds that exist, each with their own unique features and user communities. Here are some examples of popular virtual worlds:

1. Second Life: As mentioned earlier, Second Life is a virtual world where users can create their own avatars and explore a vast virtual world.

2.Minecraft: While Minecraft is primarily a game, it can also be considered a virtual world. In Minecraft, users can build and explore their own virtual environments, and interact with other players in multiplayer mode.

3.Roblox: Roblox is a platform that allows users to create and play their own games, as well as socialize and interact with other users in a virtual world.

4.VRChat: VRChat is a virtual reality platform where users can create and customize avatars, explore virtual worlds, and interact with other users in real-time.

5. IMVU: IMVU is a virtual world where users can create and customize avatars, socialize with other users, and even shop for virtual goods using real money.

6. Entropia Universe: Entropia Universe is a virtual world where users can explore a vast universe, hunt creatures, mine resources, and even engage in real-money transactions.

7. Kaneva: Kaneva is a virtual world that allows users to create and customize avatars, explore virtual environments, and interact with other users in real-time.

These are just a few examples of the many virtual worlds that exist. Each virtual world has its own unique features and user community, and users can choose to participate in the virtual world that best fits their interests and preferences.

Persistent Computing and Virtual Worlds

 Worked a number of virtual world projects, never considered them persistent computing.  Useful thought.

Yu Yuan on Building A Persistent Virtual World The IEEE Standards Association president discusses technology for the metaverse  by EDD GENT

Despite tech giants including Meta, Microsoft, and Nvidia investing billions of dollars in the development of the metaverse, it is still little more than a fantasy. Making it a reality is likely to require breakthroughs in a range of sectors such as storage, modeling, and communication.

To spur progress in the advancement of those technologies, the IEEE Standards Association has launched the Persistent Computing for Metaverse initiative. As part of the IEEE’s Industry Connections Program, it will bring together experts from both industry and academia to help map out the innovations that will be needed to make the metaverse a reality.

Although disparate virtual-reality experiences exist today, the metaverse represents a vision of an interconnected and always-on virtual world that can host thousands, if not millions, of people simultaneously. The ultimate goal is for the virtual world to become so realistic that it is almost indistinguishable from the real one.

Today’s technology is a long way from making that possible, says Yu Yuan, president of the IEEE Standards Association. The Institute spoke with Yuan to find out more about the initiative and the key challenges that need to be overcome. His answers have been edited for clarity.

The Institute: What is persistent computing?

Yu Yuan: I have been working in virtual reality and multimedia for more than 20 years, I just didn’t call my work metaverse. After metaverse became a buzzword, I asked myself, ‘What’s the difference between metaverse and VR?’ My answer is: persistence, or the ability to leave traces in a virtual world.

Persistent computing refers to the combination of all the technologies needed to support the development and operation of a persistent virtual world. In other words, a metaverse. There are different kinds of VR experiences, but many of them are one-time events. Similar to how video games work, every time a user logs in, the entire virtual world resets. But users in the metaverse can leave traces. For example, they can permanently change the virtual world by destroying a wall or building a new house. Those changes have to be long-lasting so there will be a meaningful virtual society or meaningful economy in that virtual world.

What are the key components that are required to make persistent computing possible?

Yuan: The first is storage. In most of today’s video games, users can destroy a building, only for it to be restored the next time the user logs in to the game. But in a persistent virtual world the current status of the virtual world needs to be stored constantly. Users can create or destroy something in that world and the next time they log in, those changes will still be there. These kinds of things have to be properly stored—which means a very large amount of data needs to be stored.   ... ' 

Driving Value with the Metaverse in the Enterprise

Irving talks some of the work that IBM did with the Virtual World  'Second Life' in the mid 2000's at IBM which we also participated in, a nice look with lots of interesting links.  This also fills me in on lots of later work, such as metaverse located meetings and task interactions.  Could not get our folks interested  Much of that was documented in this blog.  Is the addition can AI 'Enhancement' enough to make the proposition much more interesting?  Will search, examine these for later comment.

A collection of observations, news and resources on the changing nature of innovation, technology, leadership, and other subjects      By Irving Wladawsky-Berger 

Driving Value with the Metaverse in the Enterprise     (much more at the link)

A killer app is an IT application whose value to individuals and companies is relatively simple to explain, its use is fairly intuitive, and the application turns out to be so useful that it can singlehandedly propel the success of a new product or service. Word processing and spreadsheets, for example, were major factors in the widespread adoption of personal computers in the 1980s.

I got interested in 3D immersive environments in the mid-2000s when IBM launched an exploratory initiative on the topic. As part of these efforts, we conducted a number of experiments on Second Life, a platform that allowed its users to develop a variety of virtual world applications. We built a number of workplace applications, including virtual meetings, and online events, and even built a virtual replica of Beijing’s Forbidden City in partnership with the Palace Museum that was opened to the public. But, despite our high expectations, we couldn’t find any compelling enterprise killer apps, and after about three years, the project was dissolved. In the ensuing years, 3D immersive technologies and applications continued to advance, but mostly focused on video-games and related industries.

The past few years have seen a surge of interest in the metaverse and extended reality. “After desktop computing, the consumer internet and the smartphone boom, the consumer-computing industry is past due its Next Big Thing,” wrote The Economist in  “A reality check for the metaverse is coming,” an article in its 2022 year-end issue. “[A]n internet which is still largely flat — based on two-dimensional text, images and video — is ripe for replacement with one that is three-dimensional and immersive.” ... ' 

Horizon World Metaverse Good Enough?

 Had a brief demo of the Horizon Meta Verse with regards to user experience.  In past years I had used and developed trial 'worlds' in the Second Life virtual world,  there we experimented with working and meeting in such VR worlds.  It as not good enough. Here there is much, much to do to make this viable.   Below a short recent article. 

Horizon Worlds metaverse app so bad that Meta has to force employees to use it  Ben Lovejoy  - Oct. 7th 2022 4:21 am PT

It seems Meta is having problems persuading even its own employees to don one of its virtual reality headsets and use its primary metaverse app, Horizon Worlds. So much so that an internal memo says the company would “hold managers accountable” for their teams using it.

It’s one of a set of leaked memos that suggest Apple may not have too much to fear from Meta’s competition to its own upcoming VR/AR headsets …

Background

Horizon Worlds is a free virtual reality environment that forms the company’s main metaverse platform. Here’s how Meta describes it:

A social experience where you can explore, play and create with others in VR. 

Horizon invites you to explore an ever-expanding universe of virtual experiences designed and built by the entire community. Everything you see in Horizon, including the Plaza and worlds created by our teams at Facebook, has been built with the Horizon creation tools. In Horizon, you can build the things you want to see and places you want to visit. 

Horizon makes it easy to meet up with your friends or explore with new people. Once you’re there, you can join a Party to chat together as you navigate Horizon and check out featured worlds in the Horizon Plaza to see what’s new. You can also navigate to the menu, where you can search the published worlds in Horizon by name and find new places to explore.

It is currently available through the company’s Oculus Rift S and Meta Quest 2 VR headsets, and will be available on the upcoming Meta Quest Pro VR/AR headset, which is expected to have a similar spec to the long-awaited Apple Headset.

We last month got an early look at the Meta Quest Pro, when what appears to be a finished model was left in a hotel room.

Meta staff being forced to use Horizon Worlds

Part of Meta’s vision for Horizon Worlds is that it will be used by businesses as well as consumers, but so far it appears that even the company’s own staff are struggling to think of a reason to do so.

The Verge obtained memos from the company’s Metaverse lead, Vishal Shah, in which he announced a plan for essentially force employees to use it.

A key issue with Horizon’s development to date, according to Shah’s internal memos, is that the people building it inside Meta appear to not be using it that much. “For many of us, we don’t spend that much time in Horizon and our dogfooding dashboards show this pretty clearly,” he wrote to employees on September 15th. “Why is that? Why don’t we love the product we’ve built so much that we use it all the time? The simple truth is, if we don’t love it, how can we expect our users to love it?”

In a follow-up memo dated September 30th, Shah said that employees still weren’t using Horizon enough, writing that a plan was being made to “hold managers accountable” for having their teams use Horizon at least once a week. “Everyone in this organization should make it their mission to fall in love with Horizon Worlds. You can’t do that without using it. Get in there. Organize times to do it with your colleagues or friends, in both internal builds but also the public build so you can interact with our community.”

Major quality problems

Even Shah admits that the app is suffering from major quality issues.

In one of the memos […] Shah, said the team would remain in a “quality lockdown” for the rest of the year to “ensure that we fix our quality gaps and performance issues before we open up Horizon to more users” […]

“Currently, feedback from our creators, users, playtesters, and many of us on the team is that the aggregate weight of papercuts, stability issues, and bugs is making it too hard for our community to experience the magic of Horizon” […]

He went on to call out specific issues with Horizon, writing that “our onboarding experience is confusing and frustrating for users”

The company responded to The Verge’s report by saying that it is “always making quality improvements” and that the app was “a multiyear journey.”

Apple is believed to be working on three headsets for launch next year, with the first of these expected to go head-to-head with the Meta Quest Pro. The company’s long-term aim is believed to be a pair of normal-looking eyeglasses with AR overlays, widely referred to as Apple Glasses.    ... ' 

NVIDIA AI Generate Objects and Characters for Virtual Worlds

NVIDIA always impressive:

NVIDIA's new AI model quickly generates objects and characters for virtual worlds  in Engadget

GET3D could make it easier for developers to make games and VR experiences.

3D objects created by NVIDIA's GET3D AI model, including cars, chairs, animals, motorbikes and human characters.

NVIDIA is looking to take the sting out of creating virtual 3D worlds with a new artificial intelligence model. GET3D can generate characters, buildings, vehicles and other types of 3D objects, NVIDIA says. The model should be able to whip up shapes quickly too. The company notes that GET3D can generate around 20 objects per second using a single GPU.

Researchers trained the model using synthetic 2D images of 3D shapes taken from multiple angles. NVIDIA says it took just two days to feed around 1 million images into GET3D using A100 Tensor Core GPUs.

The model can create objects with "high-fidelity textures and complex geometric details," NVIDIA's Isha Salian wrote in a blog post. The shapes GET3D makes "are in the form of a triangle mesh, like a papier-mâché model, covered with a textured material," Salian added.

Users should be able to swiftly import the objects into game engines, 3D modelers and film renderers for editing, as GET3D will create them in compatible formats. That means it could be much easier for developers to create dense virtual worlds for games and the metaverse. NVIDIA cited robotics and architecture as other use cases.

The company said that, based on a training dataset of car images, GET3D was able to generate sedans, trucks, race cars and vans. It can also churn out foxes, rhinos, horses and bears after being trained on animal images. As you might expect, NVIDIA notes that the larger and more diverse the training set that's fed into GET3D, "the more varied and detailed the output."  ... ' 

Virtual Worlds: AI Learning in New Ways

Interesting article in Quanta Mag,   Learning is the key,   How and how accurately.  

By Exploring Virtual Worlds, AI Learns in New Ways

By Quanta Magazine, June 24, 2022

In 2009, a computer scientist then at Princeton University named Fei-Fei Li invented a data set that would change the history of artificial intelligence. Known as ImageNet, the data set included millions of labeled images that could train sophisticated machine-learning models to recognize something in a picture. The machines surpassed human recognition abilities in 2015. Soon after, Li began looking for what she called another of the "North Stars" that would give AI a different push toward true intelligence.

She found inspiration by looking back in time over 530 million years to the Cambrian explosion, when numerous land-dwelling animal species appeared for the first time. An influential theory posits that the burst of new species was driven in part by the emergence of eyes that could see the world around them for the first time. Li realized that vision in animals never occurs by itself but instead is "deeply embedded in a holistic body that needs to move, navigate, survive, manipulate and change in the rapidly changing environment," she said. "That's why it was very natural for me to pivot towards a more active vision [for AI]."

Today, Li's work focuses on AI agents that don't simply accept static images from a data set but can move around and interact with their environments in simulations of three-dimensional virtual worlds.

From Quanta Magazine

View Full Article   

Ready to go beyond Zoom to Virtual Worlds?

Something we explored, but it was overall not very successful.  Even allowed us to construct part of the real-world operational process world to interact with.    If you are talking to a group of  plant managers, why not include the simulation of a manufacturing line that is a twin of the real thing?  Interact with virtual streams of data from the real thing? Makes some kinds of training more natural.  But now have needs changed enough to make it more reasonable?   A broader means of remote work?

Zoom Not Cutting It for You? Try Exploring a Virtual World   By Louise Matsakis  in Wired

If you’re craving more from your video chats, think outside the box. From Second Life to Online Town, there are plenty of places to gather while staying at home.

"... It’s time to think out of the Zoom box. Why not add a virtual world to your next video call? Having a place to socialize, even a digital one, can make connecting through a computer far more enjoyable—even if you think you don’t like videogames. Virtual worlds like Second Life, as well as massively multiplayer online games like World of Warcraft, have been around for decades, but the Covid-19 lockdown presents an opportunity to revisit them and to explore what we want in an online destination. “I think the new demands of the shelter-in-place orders may prompt interesting new designs for virtual spaces and also help us rethink assumptions,” says Nick Yee, the cofounder of Quantic Foundry, a gaming market research firm, and the author of The Proteus Paradox: How Online Games and Virtual Worlds Change Us—and How They Don’t. “Why do we need virtual chairs if our virtual bodies never get tired?”

Linden Labs Gives up on VR Spin off

Note our examination of virtual world retail, mentioned here earlier.  This piece gives us a look at the current status of world tech with current supporting tech like VR.   Last I looked SL was not heavily used.

Why 'Second Life' developer Linden Lab gave up on its VR spin-off
'We decided that Linden Lab wanted to become cash-positive.’
Nick Summers, @nisummers in Engadget
  
Second Life developer Linden Lab has sold Sansar, a platform for virtual 'scenes' that could be explored with a VR headset or traditional PC setup.

Back in 2016, I described the service as "WordPress for social VR." A foundation that allowed creators to import custom assets and quickly build their own shareable world. The company hoped that this mix would attract commercial clients — think museums, car manufacturers and record labels — that want their own VR experience but don't have the technical expertise to deal with game engines and digital distribution.

Similarly, Linden Lab hoped Sansar would attract users who crave diverse worlds — like those promised in movies such as Ready Player One — and, if they have a creative spark, possibly make their own assets that can be shared and sold to the rest of the community.

Sansar's VR compatibility was a big draw. At the time, there were many 3D chat room experiences — including Second Life — but few that allowed large groups to strap on a headset and freely converse. Linden Lab knew that the number of people with high-end VR headsets was small, though. And the team didn't want to dilute the experience so it could run on mobile-powered hardware like Google Cardboard and Samsung's Gear VR.    ... " 

Thinking About Virtual Worlds

Even a simple mirror can create a virtual world.  I remember when we experimented with data immersion using VR in virtual worlds, it was remarkable to see how hard navigation was.  To the point that you often had to go back to the expected flat world to make sense of it.   This article hints at why.

The Physics of a Mirror Creates a Virtual World in Wired.
Human eyes are sort of dumb—but you can trick them into being smart ... " 

Revisiting Virtual Worlds

As I have chronicled here, we looked closely at the Virtual World Idea, with the support of some management.   But it never stuck well enough, had too many problems involved with just getting things done.  And the older generations rolled their eyes.  But now that is turning over, and changes are underway, does it have a place?

    Its not augmenting reality, but replacing it with one that's potentially built for the job at hand.   A piece about changes being considered.  More closely connected to an effort called Sansar, which appears to bring it closer to game environments, which we also sought to make this useful for business.   Note that IEEE has a Virtual Worlds Standards Group, but a quick look at it shows the work is still thin. 

Immersive Terf

Immersive Terf.  Was reminded of Qwaq, which we examined for 3D Immersive collaboration.   To provide a virtual-world style collaboration.   Is it useful to have cartoon-like figures representing you and your collaborating colleagues, to provide an avatar inhabiting world with spaces that represent real conference spaces?  And is this more efficient than using advanced video driven spaces like Cisco's Telepresense? 

The New Virtual Office

I took several looks at this topic as part of our innovation center work.  Some of the capabilities I looked at still exist, see for example, what was once called Qwaq or "Immersive Terf".   Renamed 'Teleplace'. (tags on these efforts below). We also looked at and developed Virtual Worlds where people might reside and work.  None of these worked out to any degree.  Most people thought the proposal to be inefficient, cold and weird.  None really tested them sufficiently.  Now a new look:

Step into your New Virtual Office, by David Pierce in Wired

Augmented reality will transform the way you do your job, and you won’t look weird doing it. At all.
Next time you get a promotion at work, don’t agitate for the corner office. You won’t need it. Pretty soon, your office will be as big and messy and private as you like, because you’ll be the only one who can see it.

The early days of virtual and augmented reality have focused mostly on gaming, but Pokémon Go and Superhot are just a tiny part of how you’ll ultimately use smart glasses once they’re capable enough—and unobtrusive enough—to fit on our faces and into our lives. Most of the people developing mixed-reality tech think the venue where AR will really thrive is the workplace. .... " 

Looking Back at Second Life

Yes, it still exists, and has roughly the same number of users.   Surprised me.   This all came out a decade ago.  We did quite a bit of experimentation with it.  Worked with several large IT  groups looking at ways to make it useful.  Even a way to do research in that other world that might mirror our real world.    At the end of the day it was not very useful for us.  Does it still merit examination as an environment for marketing experiments,  or a retail architecture?  Experimented with using worlds to interact with the abstractness of data.  Virtualitics is doing that today.  Good piece that shows what Second Life is today. 

Returning to Second Life
Long after its grandest ambitions have faded, the platform still boasts people and profit.   By Samuel Axon in ArsTechnica .... " 

Sansar is a Virtual World using VR

We explored SL, built locations, thought of advertising there, swam through our data, had group meetings.  Click the tags below for more on all that.

The VR successor to 'Second Life' is now in public beta

Explore Sansar with a HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, or a regular Windows PC.

Sansar, the VR platform by Second Life creator Linden Lab, is now available for everyone to explore. The public "creator beta" follows a private "creator preview," which allowed developers and aspiring level designers to try Sansar's building tools. That period was crucial given, like Second Life, Linden Lab is banking on the community to populate Sansar with interesting experiences. Today, there are "hundreds" of places to explore, including museums, theaters and tropical temples. Some are virtual postcards, while others have games and stories inside them. Everything is free to try too, whether you're playing on a PC, Oculus Rift or HTC Vive.  .... " 

More Useful Virtual Realities

These kinds of developments made me think of virtual worlds, which also attempted to set up alternate worlds you could experience.   So they are necessarily not only games, but places you can meet or even just hang out.  And they need to be better than a very good video conference room.    And you can then ask:  how do they need to be better?   By including a manipulable co-reality? By allowing new kinds of interactions?    Still unconvinced of easy business value.  Social value is more adaptive.

Oculus just made Gear VR way more social with voice chat and virtual living rooms
A new way to hang out with friends in VR    by Nick Statt

Oculus wants people to think of virtual reality as more than a solitary, gaming-centric experience. To that effect, the company today is launching two new features for the Samsung Gear VR headset that it hopes will encourage users to interact with one another in a virtual hangout. The first is called Parties, and it’s a simple chat system — much like game chat for PlayStation or Xbox — that lets you jump into a voice call and talk with others while wearing the headset. The second feature is called Rooms, and it’s an entirely new way of interacting with others in VR.  ... " 

Virtual Advertising

 An area we looked at when it seemed like virtual worlds would become common.   Augmentation can have an ad floating in front of us wherever we are.  In AdAge: 

Virtual Advertising: Uncharted Legal Waters  By Jim Gatto.

As augmented reality and virtual reality applications continue to proliferate, virtual advertising and related legal issues will grow too.

AR applications layer information or graphics on a real-world view. As such, AR could enable a virtual ad to cover advertisements that exist on billboards and other structures, or insert an ad where no real-life one exists. Both uses raise legal questions for creators and brands using AR technology.

In VR, scenes are often created to mimic real-world locations. Famous buildings and locations can be depicted, and virtual ads may be incorporated. Some of VR's legal issues mirror well-known ones, such as depicting actual products in movies, but there are new twists.  ... " 

Design for Learning and Assessment in Virtual Worlds

Via Dianne Fodell:

" ... This a reminder about our Cognitive Systems Institute Group Speaker Series on Thursday, August 11, 2016 at 10:30 am ET US (9:30am CT, 7:30 am PT).  Our presenter this week is Brian Nelson from Arizona State University  who will present “Design for Learning and Assessment in Virtual Worlds.” 

Please point your web browser to https://apps.na.collabserv.com/meetings/join?id=2894-8491 password=cognitive.   Use audio on computer or 855-233-7153  PIN Code: 43179788    Non-IBMers and Non-Members, please use the "guest" option instead of entering your email.   

Please find the schedule of presenters here for the next several calls.   A link to slides and a recording of each call should be available on the CSIG website (http://cognitive-science.info/community/weekly-update/).   

Slides that will be used are here.

We encourage those who join the calls to add questions and comments to the https://www.linkedin.com/groups/Cognitive-Systems-Institute-6729452 on LinkedIn and please ask questions at the end of the call. ... " 

VR Revolutionizing Data Visualization

We experimented in this in a number of ways, virtual words and using 3D viewers ...  Visualization should also be part of the first few steps in any analytics project.

In Forbes, by Bernard Marr

" .. Visualization is often a key part of the ‘crucial last step’ in Big Data projects – large scale analytical operations designed to draw insights from the ever growing amount of digital data that we are generating and storing. While bar graphs and pie charts do their job of providing headline figures, today’s Big Data projects require a far more granular method of presentation if they are going to tell the full story. It must be simple for the user to identify and highlight correlations between perhaps billions of data points (in the case of really large scale projects such as fraud prevention in the financial services industry), which are often performed in real-time. ...  "

Humans Build Spaces

Is this what has caused us to construct spaces for social interactions with machines?   Too simple, but will this cause us to find other ways to communicate and interact within real and imagined walls?

Ebbe Altberg needs about a paragraph to define human life:
“What humans do is create spaces,” the gregarious 51-year-old executive says, leaning back at a table in a small room on the second floor of Linden Lab’s headquarters in San Francisco. “Some spaces are mobile, like a bus. San Francisco is a space that was created by its users. Whether you go into a pub, a bar, a classroom, a bowling alley, an office, a library … We create spaces and we have people come together in those spaces, and then we communicate and socialize within those spaces.”