Chain Reaction

By Arnaud Marthouret

If you’ve become comfortable with an internet populated by social media, video or image sharing sites and similar apps, resign yourself to the fact that those days of Web 2.0 are coming to an end. Web3 and the metaverse are already here and looking to shake things up.

In fairness, it’s early days still and there are probably as many definitions of what web3 and the metaverse are as there are technologies underpinning them. That said, an attempt at summarizing the coming paradigm shift may look like this: on one side is a collection of technologies and software aimed at clawing back privacy and control over personal data that has been given away to big tech in the development and proliferation of Web 2.0. On the other side is the metaverse: a network of 3D virtual worlds focused on social connection in an effort to amplify how we move through and interact with the world around us through the widespread adoption of virtual or augmented reality.

“If you think of Web1 as the days of dial-up, usernames and passwords; Web 2.0 is the age of social media and login gatekeepers like Google and Facebook; and web3 will likely be the age of, hopefully, user self-sovereignty where we do away with usernames and passwords and we have a one-click connection to any and every website that will recognize us and we have control over that one user profile. Ideally,” says Jaime Derringer, an NFT artist and currently Head of Community at tonic.xyz, a new fine art NFT platform for creators.

At this point, web3 is little more than a big grab bag of everything that vaguely promises to revolutionize the internet and how we interact with it, and the fog won’t lift until clear use-cases of these new technologies emerge and see widespread adoption. Some of these technologies are already inching towards mainstream, but we’re still far away from widespread adoption of these new technologies and services working together to enact the promise of a decentralized, privacy and user-focused iteration on the internet.

Saying the Same Thing

With the emergence of new technology comes new language. Here is a brief primer:

Web3: the next iteration of the World Wide Web, this time based on the promise of increased privacy, security and, most importantly, decentralization. This contrasts with Web 2.0 which saw the emergence of giant centralized tech platforms like social media, whose business it is to mine and monetize personal data.

Cryptocurrencies (crypto): first appearing in 2009 with the release of Bitcoin, crypto are digital-only currencies that arose from the cypherpunk movement’s desire to use cryptography to enact social change. In this case, to take the minting and management of money away from traditional issuers (typically central banks), with the promise that inflationary money “printing” would become a thing of the past.

NFTs: “non-fungible tokens” are unique digital identifiers recorded in the blockchain that unlike cryptocurrencies cannot be substituted, sub-divided nor copied, hence the “non-fungible” moniker. Unlike crypto, which is fungible (i.e. can be substituted and sub-divided), these are used as a form of certificate of authenticity for digital assets (e.g. an image or a video). They can also contain all kinds of rules and restrictions, effectively making them an easily verifiable and enforceable kind of contract for creators and manufacturers.

Words of Caution

We may very well be experiencing a major technological and cultural revolution, potentially impacting the way humans live, interact, entertain themselves, shop and do business. Exciting times, no doubt, and our instincts when interpreting the whirlwind caused by technological change is to look for tangible, specific applications. But before doing that, a word of caution: web3 can sometimes take on aspects of a speculative bubble. As with any new technological frontier comes the expected cohort of snake-oil peddlers, promising riches when all they’re selling is reheated ideas skillfully presented with fancylooking marketing material. Case in point: despite the promises of crypto evangelists, many were snake-bitten by the collapse of FTX, pointing to what some pundits are calling a golden age for scammers.

Conversely, many of today’s most ubiquitous and useful technologies came to widespread adoption by displacing older, less desirable technologies and slowly but surely transformed societies over time. It then comes down to discerning which applications have the potential to provide valuable and practical results and which are pure opportunistic drivel. In this context, a healthy dose of skepticism is always the best protection, and with basic common-sense principles in mind one can cast a critical eye at these technologies and start to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Some Promising Applications

With that in mind, here are some potential applications, technologies and services that look very promising especially for the architecture and design industries.

The metaverse: Some companies are creating virtual showrooms to make it easy to see a variety of products in a virtual space. One such company is Toronto-based custom wallpaper maker Rollout, which has created a virtual showroom in the style of a cliff-hanging lair for a villain from the James Bond franchise. Despite how cool it looks, it’s not the setting itself that matters. The real advantage lies in its ability to help their clients to instantly visualize all kinds of wallpaper in a virtual space, allowing for cycling through many iterations in a very short time.

While it doesn’t replace product samples and test applications, it has the potential to greatly enhance Rollout’s customer experience. “We see a need for online, immersive showrooms that help interior designers and architects use our catalogue of designs to showcase their ideas in integrated spaces to their clients, in real time,” says Jonathan Nodrick, founder of Rollout. “These technologies allow us to continually innovate and think bigger.”

The blockchain: Identity theft, privacy concerns and data mining by big tech are making the news every day. The blockchain has the potential to put users in charge of their data, with blockchain-based digital identities that would give individuals the power to decide with whom, when and for how long they choose to share personal information.

“People will have the ability to really seamlessly choose which pieces of their identity they pass along in order to transact with a brand, and they’re going to be incentivized to provide those pieces of information, rather than in the current state [of affairs] where Facebook knows every movie that you’ve ever watched and you’re really not profiting from it other than the fact that you can log into websites a little bit more easily,” says Andrew Lane, co-founder of digby, a Toronto-based digital design innovation company.

NFTs: One potentially transformative application for NFTs is the ability for creators to get compensated fairly for their creations and set the rules of what can and cannot be done with their work. “A loose definition of web3 is power to the creator,” says Tessa Bain, cofounder of digby. “It’s creating revenue opportunities for the original creator to see those in perpetuity, over the course of a product or service offering changing hands.”

NFTs give product manufacturers the ability to create certificates of authenticity to determine provenance and fight knockoffs, giving them an edge over counterfeiters. While that won’t stop people who don’t want to pay full price from buying reproductions, it will make it easier for customers to determine the provenance of an object and therefore ensure they don’t get ripped off buying fakes at full price or help them ensure resale value down the road, especially if they own a piece of furniture that is a genuine collectible.

Augmented reality (AR): while virtual reality (VR) is what most people focus on, AR holds more promise as another layer of information added to the real world. Imagine wearing glasses that can display information on the lenses. You could walk around while looking at information directly overlaid onto your surrounding environment.

Blockchain: the underlying technology behind crypto and NFTs, it is essentially a form of decentralized, encrypted record keeping that enables persistence through the existence of multiple copies of each record across the world; transparency, with public transactions, available for all to see; and security, with heavy encryption making the falsification of records theoretically impossible.

Below A still from the short film titled HyperReality by London-based designer Keiichi Matsuda, which explores (somewhat cheekily) how “technologies such as VR, augmented reality, wearables, and the internet of things are pointing to a world where technology will envelop every aspect of our lives,” according to the logline. (©2016 Keichii Matsuda)

The Real Deal

For as long as craftspeople have been designing and making products, forgers have been counterfeiting them. High-end furniture manufacturers know this scourge all too well, and now with the world shifting to a more digital marketplace issues of design legitimacy are evermore problematic. Toronto-based digby have stepped in to help designers and makers navigate this minefield with a new blockchain-based token product “designed to establish indisputable authenticity and protect intellectual property,” says its founders, Tessa Bain and Andrew Lane.

Called the digby Design Authenticator (DDA), it functions as “an irrefutable digital token to solidify the authenticity, offering a level of provenance not previously available to consumers,” and has entered the market with already one early adopter: Heller will be using the DDA on sales of its Vignelli Rocker , the last chair designed for the furniture brand by the late Lella and Massimo Vignelli in 2014 and now back in production.

What to Take Away and Leave Behind

A grand unified theory of web3 and the metaverse has yet to be formulated, but the key lesson is this: if the technology being considered solves a real-world problem for which no other solution exists, or what it offers is at least an order of magnitude better than what already exists, then it’s probably worth paying attention to.

If it has the potential to solve a real problem but is not mature enough to be implemented in the present, then it will need to be further developed, incurring costs and risks that should be carefully considered before getting involved. In all other cases, be wary of miracle solutions that haven’t been hardened in the forge of the marketplace, especially if they are only a proof-of-concept yet to be tested.

“The metaverse as I envision it is not here yet, but I see the internet as becoming the metaverse, or every website as its own mini-metaverse where all metaverse experiences are connected in some way,” says Derringer. “In a sense, I think it could simultaneously be a medium and a destination.”

The beauty of such an as-yet undefined new sector is that there is a little bit for everyone, so if any of these call to you, there is no harm in exploring, learning and if warranted, get involved in their development. An axiom that was true for Web 2.0 was “if you are not paying for it, you’re not the customer, you’re the product being sold.” All eyes will be on if web3 emancipates users from those shackles or just slides back to old habits.