We’re about to finally get the “Here Web” — MWC2024
I got to moderate a fantastic session at MWC today, what it made me realize as I spoke to the speakers, and then doubled down on when they spoke is that we are entering an era where we will see an entirely different challenge in connectivity. The session was titled “Ink, Wear, Touch: Evolution of personal tech”, but really should have been titled “The Here Web is here” a term coined by Bill Joy at the turn of the millennium.
What is the “Here Web”?
Back when Bill created the idea he was positing the idea that it was the Web that you could access via a device that you always had on you. Back then it was just about accessing the internet, but as the years have gone on the “Here” web has transformed from being about accessing “WWW” to about the network of connected devices that bring experiences and engagement to people.
So this is an entirely person centric network in which all of the devices need to collaborate to deliver a unified experience.
Living in a Spatial World
First up presenting was Cathy Hackl, of Spatial Dynamics, the “Godmother of the Metaverse”, someone who has spent a lot of time in that world and was talking about Spatial Computing and the importance of real-time vision models in the future.
A really great presentation that went through a rapid-fire story of how we got here, and really importantly what “here” means in this new world. The slide above is the one that Cathy shouted out as “the one slide to take a photo of”, so here is the close-up.
The two big takeaways from me on Spatial Computing, which is very different to VR, were first the importance of the front-facing sensors as a way to create an active, real-time, model of your surroundings. Creating a real-time digital twin for your physical reality. Secondly is just how important computer gaming will be to this future world, I’ve talked about this before as to why I think GenAI would succeed, because I could see how computer games could actually use it, and the old phrase that there are two industries that drive technology adoption… the other one is gaming.
Cathy talked about the coming wave of Gen Z and Gen Alpha who are used to maintaining relationships in the virtual world that older people are not, which gives another dynamic to this shift. She did also talk about the risks and pitfalls of this new world and how there are a lot of things that we, as a society, will need to guard against. The basic point was simple though: we are going to see an explosion in spatial computing, driven by approaches that consider vision of surroundings to be fundamental.
Getting Touchy, Feely
Next up was Tom Carter (who’s 2018 new years resolution of “writing a blog” didn’t seem to make it out of Q1) from Ultraleap, and Tom talked about touch, about how fundamental it was, he referenced someone who had lost their sense of touch and the challenges they faced, for instance you can’t drop coins in your pockets, because without touch you can’t grab them out again.
Tom talked about how touch is often used as a single sense thing, not just the pockets example, but also how you look away before hitting the lightswitch. He talked at how touch can be used to create less distracting interactions and provide dynamic feedback to people in a way that audio cues cannot. He showed a great example of someone running their hand over a bonsai tree and virtually giving it sun, and therefore feeling warmth, or raining on it, and feeling raindrops.
He talked about how touch had to be thought of as part of the whole experience, not some crappy add on after the fact, and that was a really important point. You will need people who can design immersive experiences and understand touch. A top tip from Tom was that “less is more” when designing touch interfaces, that doing a little but well is much better than doing a lot of stuff to an average level.
Getting the content there
Last up we had Valérie Allié from InterDigital, and her topic was all about how you get the content there. So how do you get from the Internet to the Here Web, getting multi-modal, multi-dimensional content from a producer to the individual.
Here Valerie talked about the work she is doing on the new MPEG standards, which will include spatial, volumetric and haptic information encoded directly within the stream. She talked about how these multi-dimensional information streams rely on the devices existing for the individual, but in a way where everything can work together, back to those three dimensions that Cathy talked about, and the way that Tom talked about the importance of a seamless experience.
Valerie did say this would require a significant amount of bandwidth, but that the work her and her team are doing in creating new techniques and having them incorporated into standards is helping to decrease that. She also talked about the importance of consistency at the edge, the need for everything to be delivered to all devices as a single coherent whole, so it is experienced as one thing, not lots of slightly different things.
In this she talked passionately about the need for a new generation of designers, people who could design and build these multi-sensory experiences, to be able to create content that genuinely lets people stand inside it. I thought this was particularly interesting when thinking about Spatial rather than Metaverse computing, the latter being a purely digital experience but the former being both a combination of digital and reality.
The Here Web is nearly here
The end result of these presentations had me really thinking about the evolution of the “Here Web” from being about a single device (the phone) to being a person centric environment where all devices need to collaborate as a person centric whole. To collaborate from the perspective of the person, and to do so in the context not of a disconnected digital only Metaverse, but as an integration and augmentation of the physical world around them.
There are challenges that this world will bring, with the technology being able to present different views to different people, reinforcing biases or undermining collaboration. But it could also revolutionize the way we learn, the way we play and the way we are entertained. What is clear though about the Here Web is that this cannot be a series of individual devices, each with their own “pyramid” based around the company that sold it to you. For this future to work those devices need to be able to collaborate together, at the human edge, to present a coherent real-time experience. Otherwise everything is like a film where the visuals are half a second off the audio track, nobody enjoys the experience, they are just concentrating on the issues.
The Here Web requires us to think differently about the human edge, creating a world where multiple devices, and indeed the environment around the person, can be molded into a single coherent, person centric, engagement experience.
