Avi Bar-Zeev led Experience Prototyping for Vision Pro at Apple, where he was most recently a Senior Manager; he just shared some intriguing observations on Apple's Vision Pro reveal:
The word "Metaverse" didn't appear once in Apple's WWDC thus far. 3rd party apps may espouse that next-gen internet vision later. But I'd argue it's much better to start with smaller conversations, consensual, collaborative and co-present.
The word "Avatar" is thankfully going away. It's a cultural misappropriation implying some sort of god-hood for hidden people and throw-away status for the digital skin. "Personas" is much better, partly because it reminds us that these are real people and our interactions matter.
The most important term invoked was "Spatial Computing." The earliest reference I know of is from my former CEO, Robert Jacobson, Ph.D., and friends around 1992 in a company called WorldDesign. I have a slide that suggests we wanted to trademark it but never did. Does anyone have earlier references to update my chart?
Is there a better or more genuinely descriptive term that isn't already polluted with schemes and extrapolations? Yes, it's broad. The universe is spatial. People are spatial. Computing should be spatial too.
It is literally "the fusion of the digital world and the real one."
Is this the term we've been looking for?
This image (above) is from 1992/93. As far as I can tell, Robert Jacobson, Ph.D. (and friends) first used the term "Spatial Computing" in our startup Worldesign (never trademarked). Bob had been at the HIT Lab with Tom Furness prior and I wonder if anyone else had used it there?
Before anyone mints themselves a new "spatial computing expert," or accuses Apple of copying others who came before, keep in mind that some of us in the field have been trying to bring about these changes for at least 30 years.
As far back as 1968 (also the year I was born), there were two competing visions introduced in the same year: 2D windows+mice (from Englebart and company), and what Ivan Sutherland called "The Ultimate Display" (later termed "augmented reality" by Ronald Azuma).
The former ideas proved much easier to mass-adopt from the 90s to today, while the later has taken 50+ years to get right.
Avi, notably, was also a very early Second Life developer at Linden Lab, and as I write in Making a Metaverse That Matters, was literally in the room where it happened -- that is, when the Metaverse started going from Neal Stephenson's science fiction vision to becoming a de facto product roadmap in the early 90s:
Does OpenAI Actually Prohibit ChatGPT-Powered Sexbot Avatars in the Metaverse?
One point raised by readers of my story about the inevitable arrival of ChatGPT-powered sexbot avatars in Second Life: Is this even allowed by the service's owner, OpenAI?
Stone Johnson, creator of the Uma bot that I interviewed, answers the question this way:
In other words, the sex bots' "minds" are powered by ChatGPT, but ChatGPT itself doesn't power the bots' sexual/physical/proprioceptive features. (Which suggests a fascinating if kinky new twist to Descartes' mind-body problem.)
In any case, OpenAI's Terms of Use displayed here actually don't mention anything that prohibits sexual content per se:
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Posted on Tuesday, May 23, 2023 at 03:08 PM in AI, Comment of the Week | Permalink | Comments (4)
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