Don’t Wait On Meta To Deliver The Metaverse It’s Here In This App And Available On Your Phone

The promise of the metaverse is very complex. How can our immersion across a virtual world change we way we think about our physical world and interactions, and visa-versa. Simple games like Pokemon Go have shown us how to share common experiences on two devices next to each other in a game. Now imagine being able to do that inside a building as you try and find the right place where a restaurant is in a huge building.

Now think about that challenge in vertically very dense cities like Hong Kong where there are thousands of buildings over 100 meters tall. Navigating vertically up and down these buildings is near impossible.

Here are six highlights from the podcast conversation:

· We are thinking about the experience of AR in the wrong way, and we should be leading with the actual value of the experience and not the idea of a synthetic world but actually we should focus on synthesizing the two worlds with overlays on a cell phone.

· In an increasingly urban dense environment, the real challenge is not so much how to navigate horizontally but how to navigate vertically through the building.

· Imagine being able to go into a grocery store and an AR app can geo locate you and let you find the latest price offers or where the bolognaise kit is on a shelf. This is perfect example of the 3D world coming to life in a very simple way for everybody.

· This expression of AR may be the lifeline retail has needed to re-invent itself around its three core principles of discovery, research and personalization with somebody next you are sharing the same experience in real time or from another destination seeing and experiencing what you are. Think of this idea like using the cell phone in the same way 3M built the Post it notes for. They make 90,000 of those post-it notes every minute. The new variety, the cell phone using AR is in our hands right now.

· Manifesting one’s experiences through the mind of others is the premise of AR and the metaverse. However, the killer app has still alluded us, until now. The challenge in a three-dimensional world where most of a journey in a city might occur inside the buildings more so than from building-to-building means navigating in a complex and dense space. Take the simple example of food delivery in Hong Kong. 70% of the food delivery time is spent navigating in the building.

· Think of how many hours are spent commuting each day in city like Beijing. Beijing has 5m cars on the road and the average commute is 2 hours. that’s-2,000 years of human productivity lost every day. imagine having this type of near instant (faster than .2 seconds) method for calibrating where cars are constantly in positioning connectedness. Imagine how many human hours could be re vectored because of this use of AR.

· At a deeper societal level, the act of sharing experiences is a key way we share language and memory. This is potential under current of power inside the idea of AR.

The traditional view of AR involves a heavy device on the head or over the eyes. Most of these devices have failed because the experience is barely believable when compared to the physical world we live in every day.

Reversing the problem statement to focus on bringing real world needs into a synthesized experience opens a far wider lens for what is possible (retail, emergency services, real estate, education) at a very low cost using existing devices (the tens of billions of them we all use every day in our hands).

Auki Labs is building a persistent AR metaverse. The powerful ConjureKit SDK allows app developers to effortlessly create social augmented reality. However, this is first step into a completely new set of human experiences that will affect us all by 2033.

They will become the norms and not the exception Nils Pihl. is a behavioral engineer, inventor and cyberdelic transhumanist specializing in the intersection of modern technology and human behavior.