From pages to spaces: the internet's evolution and a new era of interoperability
Today, the internet is a series of connected pages. You move from one link to another, viewing two-dimensional pages on your device. It’s not how humans were built to reason about the world, but it’s a self-evident truth that it revolutionized how humanity communicates.
But as with all things in life, technology evolves.
With hardware such as Orion, Vision Pro, Quest, and Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses now available/actively being developed, it’s increasingly easy to imagine that the internet of tomorrow will no longer be a series of connected pages, but a series of connected spaces. A spatial web.
As humans, we're hard-wired to reason about the physical world – it's in our DNA. When we interact with objects, we have expectations about how they'll behave. When we change something in the real world, we expect it to stay changed. We expect others to see the same thing in the same place, and we expect our interactions to have meaning.
It stands to reason then that a spatial web should behave like this too. A spatial web introduces not just a literal third dimension, but also a means to, finally, meaningfully connect our digital and physical realities. It's not just about making the internet 3D; it's about bringing it into our physical world in a way where it behaves and reacts to you based on the same paradigms as reality.
That might sound impossible with today’s technology, but it’s not. With the Connected Spaces Platform (CSP), a platform we designed to support the concept of an interoperable spatial web, the idea of giving users a way to reason about the digital world as they do with the physical world isn't science fiction; it's engineering, and many of the technical challenges have now been solved.
For instance, the services required for a spatial web aren’t that different from those we depend on today; user accounts, asset management, geolocation, VOIP. Stuff that’s been around for decades. Sure, there are new ones that need to tie into those (such as for handling large volumes of users in persistent worlds, and anchored digital realities superimposed over the physical world), but it’s feasible. And not just theoretically feasible - we’ve proven it works with our own Magnopus Cloud Services (which we’ve designed to plug natively into CSP).
So we know that with a set of spatial web services backing it, whichever those are, CSP allows for many users to be co-present in the same physical space, all of whom are seeing a digital layer superimposed over reality, at the same time and in the same place. And when someone changes something in that digital layer, others can see the same change in real-time, and it persists, just as the marks we make on the real world do. That's incredibly powerful.
But communicating that idea has been a challenge. Blog posts, documentation source code, none of them really cut it when it comes to conveying the value of this idea. Much like VR, it's tough to fully grasp this concept with words alone. You can't truly understand how it feels to be in a VR experience until you put on the headset, and you can’t really appreciate the impact of a persistent spatial web without seeing it for yourself.
Companies like Epic Games have successfully shown the power of first-party titles as a vehicle to visually demonstrate the value of the software underpinning it. It’s been a key factor in Unreal Engine’s widespread adoption across the gaming industry; creating many outstanding examples that have allowed people to truly understand what can be achieved with the technology.
Which is where OKO comes in…
OKO
So, what exactly is OKO? Functionally, it’s a set of applications we've been creating over the past four years, all built leveraging the Connected Spaces Platform. Of those, we have three that are publicly available.
A Unity-based iOS app for capturing reality and supporting co-presence through AR.
An Unreal Engine plugin built on top of CSP's C++ API. This allows experienced Unreal users to create best-in-class content with the tools and workflows they're already familiar with, and easily bring that content into OKO spaces.
A web browser-based app that leverages CSP's TypeScript API, providing users a frictionless way to access or even build their own spaces on any device, anytime, anywhere.
Since all of these applications are built on CSP, and since interoperability is itself a core value of CSP, they all communicate seamlessly with one another (despite being built in different engines, tech stacks, and languages). Using the best features of each engine and platform, they make use of nearly all of the features of CSP, and so are a wonderful testament to what’s possible with the library.
So, if you want to understand whether the features and concepts in CSP might be useful or valuable to you, you will find your answer through OKO.
Let’s be clear though, OKO is not a game engine like Unreal or Unity. It’s not a DCC tool like Blender or Maya. It’s not an open-source editor like Godot or even an asset sharing platform like Fab.
OKO is a suite of entirely interoperable apps that enable creators to build things like digital twins, virtual production scouting, and cross-reality events. And with OKO, they will all be interactive, persistent, and connected; synchronized across realities. OKO is a spatial web ecosystem and anyone can create an account for free.
It’s been a journey to get here, and the path we’ve taken is worth knowing about, because it tells you where we’re going.
We’ve been fortunate to be in this space since the beginning. Through a lot of hard work, talent, and more than a little luck, we’ve gone on to work and deliver on some of the most challenging and interesting problems when it comes to mixed reality and cross-reality.
The OKO journey started with the World Expo in Dubai and a wonderfully evocative brief from Her Excellency Reem Al Hashimi: “Connecting minds, creating the future.” We wondered: “Could we share the experience of the physical site with people around the world, and connect them across both?”
With the support of the leadership of Expo to pursue this ambitious vision, we assembled a diverse team of over 200 engineers and artists, working across seven countries. Together, we created a city-scale cross-reality space where on-site and remote visitors to Expo 2020 Dubai could connect in real-time in shared experiences.
As you might expect, there isn’t a lot of off-the-shelf tech to solve a problem like that. To deliver the project (which at 4.38km², four years on, is still the largest ever anchored digital twin) we had to build a lot of tech from scratch. And after we were done, it became clear to us that a lot of what we had invented was incredibly powerful. That a less opinionated version of the technology would be transformative for a whole range of industries.
And that’s when CSP and OKO were born.
Since then, we haven’t stopped building them. As the industry changed, and the projects rolled through, we’ve continued to learn about what makes sense in this space, what problems need solving, what problems don’t (also interesting!), and through OKO, we’ve expressed our opinion on how to solve those problems. To date, we’ve mostly built OKO for us; we don’t expect it to be all things to all people when it comes to the spatial web, but we think it will help many see what’s possible and build their own.
One notion we increasingly get asked about is digital twins. Typically they’re hard to create, hard to deliver, and even harder to anchor to reality with their physical counterpart. Why can’t creating them be turnkey?
It’s satisfying to answer those questions with OKO, because as a spatial web ecosystem, that’s one of the things it does really well. Being able to capture a real-world environment, anchor it, and bring it into Unreal to work on it, all in the space of five minutes still feels like magic to me and I work on it daily.
As you might expect then, we frequently use OKO to create digital twins for a range of purposes; from diverse environments and industries to projects for our clients, and even ourselves.
The internal ones are my favorite. For demos and internal meetings, we have two digital anchored recreations of our own offices. Built with OKO using Unreal, accessible via our Unity iOS client or browser-based web client and anchored to the real-world office in AR.
Any change anyone makes to the digital office, stays. Anyone can visit at any time and be co-present with anyone else. Even if one person is physically there and another is not. Cross-reality meetings are a hoot.
It often blows people's minds when they see it in action.
And what gets me really excited is that none of this is hidden Magnopus magic. None of this is gated away. It’s accessible to anyone with an OKO account. We’ve taken everything we’ve learnt from every mixed reality project we’ve delivered and found a commonality that lets us, and now others, move faster.
I could rhapsodize all day about OKO and how awesome it is. But I’m not a salesperson, just someone who’s been fortunate enough to have caught a glimpse of the future.
So, instead, just go play with it. The spatial web is closer than you think.
