The metaverse continues to be a runaway hype train. But though it’s been confused and conflated through overuse, it does hold legitimate principles for our connected future. For example, though the common connotation in online synchronous worlds, what about a “real-world metaverse?”
Instead of “embodied digital experiences” in shared 3D spaces (possibly involving VR) the real-world metaverse applies digital content to add meaning and depth to physical places and things (possibly involving AR). These “digital twins” could be truer to the Greek root meta which means beyond.
This is the thinking behind Localogy’s Place conference in September. And it’s woven into recent innovations and investments from companies ranging from Snap to Niantic to Google. For example, Niantic’s Lightship VPS is a platform for developers to build Pokemon-Go-like geo-local AR apps.
Land Value
Joining these players is Living Cities. Launched late last week with $4 million in seed funding from DCVC, Eniac Ventures, Anorak Ventures, and Matthew Ball, the company aims to integrate the digital and physical worlds. It’s still stealthy but wanted to come out of the woodwork to begin recruiting talent.
That stealth mode means that details are still a bit scarce, but the company explains that it wants to be a “social layer” for the physical world that taps into the spirit of cities. It will also incorporate web3 elements such as NFTs, presumably to create some value in the scarcity of digital assets.
In fact, the concept of scarcity has long led co-founder Matt Miesnieks’ work. The thought is that digital content (on the web at least), doesn’t possess the same scarcity that drives real estate and land value. So anchoring digital content to the real world can potentially make it more scarce and valuable.
Aspects of that scarcity concept were also seen early in Foursquare’s app. Badges had to be earned and there was only one “mayor” of a given location, which caused the designation to be enormously valuable in some cases. NFTs that are tied to real-world locations could be the modern-day equivalent.
Most notable about the company is its founding team. As noted, it includes Matt Meisneiks who’s a bit of a legend in the AR world. Most recently, he sold his spatial mapping company 6D.ai to Niantic so that it could cultivate some of the moves noted above. Meisneiks will serve as Living Cities’ CEO.
The team also includes John Gaeta who basically created, and won an Oscar for, the Matrix. He’ll be chief Imagineer, which is similar to the role he played in his former post at Magic Leap. And then there’s Dennis Crowley of Foursquare fame, hence the Foursquare ties noted, who will be head of product.
Discovery Engine
For those in the local commerce space (and web 2.0 fans everywhere), the founding member that jumps out most is Crowley. As founder and longtime CEO of Foursquare, he pioneered the web 2.0 version of a real-world metaverse – bringing social digital interaction to real-world locations.
In fact, Crowley told me in early analyst briefings during that period that the ultimate goal was to be a sort of local discovery engine. Rather than just actively checking into places for social dynamics and badges, the idea was to have a utility that proactively alerted you to noteworthy places and things.
The technology at the time involved smartphone push notifications, but the future version of that is a proactive ambient computing layer that notifies you of nearby places and things of interest. That could be a subtle whisper in your ear (which Crowley has worked on), or visual notifications in AR glasses.
The latter is the user touchpoint that will unlock a fully-actualized “real-world metaverse,” though we’re still years from consumer-viable hardware. This means that the companies working on a real-world metaverse are skating to where the puck is going. We’ll see if they’ve triangulated that path correctly.
And in the nearer term, we hope to see you at Localogy Place in New York in September.
