The biggest tech trends of 2022, according to over 40 experts — from fastcompany.com by Mark Sullivan
Startup founders, Big Tech execs, VCs, and tech scholars offer their predictions on how Web3, the metaverse, and other emerging ideas will shape the next year.

We asked startup founders, Big Tech execs, VCs, scholars, and other experts to speculate on the coming year within their field of interest. Altogether, we collected more than 40 predictions about 2022. Together, they offer a smart composite look at the things we’re likely to be talking about by this time next year.

 

From DSC:
An interesting approach.


Gaimin has developed an innovative solution to a modern computing problem — from innotechtoday.com by Corey Noles

Excerpt:

Rather than spending billions of dollars on building dedicated resource farms, Gaimin.io are accessing the worldwide gaming community, and utilizing and rewarding this global network of untapped, globally distributed resources of 1.5 billion processing power providers, connected by high-speed internet connections, which can be aggregated, consolidated and then utilized to satisfy any of the myriad of profitable current, and future, needs for processing power.

The Gaimin.io project connects the world’s largest supply of GPU processing power, which belongs to the 1.5 billion gaming PCs in the global gaming community, with the rapidly growing, worldwide demand for massive processing power.

 
 

Web 3.0 vs Metaverse: What’s the difference? — from homo-digitalis.net by Fabian Schmidt

Excerpt:

So what is Web 3.0?

On Twitter, a user asked if someone could explain the term in baby talk. I thought one answer was good:

    • Web 1.0 = Read
    • Web 2.0 = Read/Write
    • Web 3.0 = Read/Write/Own

This is a sufficient simplification to gain an initial understanding. Yet a bit more information is still important.

Let’s get one thing straight right away. As with all things in the making, there is not yet a clear-cut definition of Web 3.0. Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the classic web, thinks of the semantic web as the next big step.

Since 2020/2021, there is another idea of Web3, and it is inspired by a new form of technology: Blockchains. At its core is a new wave of decentralization.

Besides decentralization, other key topics related to Web 3.0 include Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAO), Non-fungible-tokens (NFT), and Decentralized Finance (DeFi).

The metaverse is a digital world that is meant to feel as real as possible and can represent all concerns of human existence. From leisure to work.

Fabian Schmidt, Homo Digitalis, 2021


Bill Gates: Most Work Meetings Will Happen In The Metaverse In 3 Years — from vrscout.com by Kyle Melnick

Excerpt:

“Within the next two or three years, I predict most virtual meetings will move from 2D camera image grids—which I call the Hollywood Squares model, although I know that probably dates me—to the metaverse, a 3D space with digital avatars,” said Gates in the post. “Both Facebook and Microsoft recently unveiled their visions for this, which gave most people their first view of what it will look like”.


Adidas to enter the metaverse with first NFT products — from dezeen.com by Rima Sabina Aouf

Excerpt:

Adidas has announced its next collection will be a mix of digital and physical items, and will be sold as NFTs produced with collaborators such as Bored Ape Yacht Club.

Titled Into the Metaverse, the collection will comprise virtual wearables that buyers can use in online platforms, but also the physical clothing to match.

It is Adidas’ first collection of NFTs, or non-fungible tokens – essentially, digital collectibles with proven authenticity. NFTs act as a blockchain-based certificate of ownership, allowing pieces to be authenticated, bought and collected.


How Coinbase thinks about the Metaverse — from blog.coinbase.com by Brian Armstrong & Alex Reeve

Excerpt:

Primitive Metaverse platforms are selling virtual land for millions of dollars. Billions more are being invested in Metaverse startups. And Mark Zuckerberg recently renamed his entire company to reflect a focus on building the Metaverse.

Recently, our team put together an internal presentation about the Metaverse, who’s working on it, and how crypto will help make it real. I thought the presentation was well done, so I’m sharing most of the slides here.

Like Matt[hew Ball], we define the Metaverse as:

The future of the internet: A massively-scaled, persistent, interactive, and interoperable real-time platform comprised of interconnected virtual worlds where people can socialize, work, transact, play, and create.

The Metaverse is the distant evolution of Web3. In its most complete form, it will be a series of decentralized, interconnected virtual worlds with a fully functioning economy where people can do just about anything they can do in the physical world.

Who is building the Metaverse today?

 

If the vision of the “Web3” comes to fruition, how might these developments impact the future of lifelong learning? [Christian]

The next age of the internet could suck power away from Big Tech while living on the same backbone as cryptocurrencies. Here’s what to know about Web3. — from businessinsider.com by Katie Canales

Excerpts (emphasis DSC):

  • Web3 is the next generation of the internet and will exist on the blockchain.
  • It will be decentralized, meaning it won’t be controlled entities like Facebook or Google.
  • Twitter, GameStop, Reddit, and VC firm a16z are all putting resources into building Web3.

One aspect of the metaverse is that users will hopefully be able to go virtually from platform to platform with one single account — just like we will in Web3. 

And NFTs, one-of-a-kind tokens representing your ownership of a virtual good, could be more easily bought and sold with cryptocurrencies within a space like Web3. 


From DSC:
How might “Web3” translate into the future of lifelong learning? Here’s one vision/possibility:

There could be several entities and services feeding one's cloud-based learner profile

Each person would have a learner profile/account that could seamlessly log into multiple education/training providers’ platforms and services. The results of that learning could be stored in one’s cloud-based learner profile. This type of next-generation learning platform would still need subject matter experts, instructional designers, programmers, and other team members. But the focus would be on building skills — skills that an artificial intelligence-backed interface would demonstrate are currently being requested by the modern workplace.  This constantly-being-updated list of skills could then link to the learning-related experiences and resources that people could choose from in order to develop those skills.

The following vision/graphic also comes to my mind:

Learning from the living class room


 

Teaching in the ‘Metaverse’? Roblox Looks to Make It a Reality — from edweek.org by Benjamin Herold
With millions in new grants to STEM organizations like Project Lead the Way, the gaming platform is moving into K-12 education.

Excerpts:

Hoping to expand its presence in K-12 schools, gaming company Roblox announced this month a new $10 million fund to support the creation of online learning experiences that take advantage of its platform’s unique way of letting users play, explore, and socialize in an endlessly evolving virtual world.

Roblox aims to play a major role in the emerging metaverse. Expanding into classroom education is a key vehicle for making that happen, Kantar told investors at a November conference. The company’s stated goal is to reach 100 million students worldwide by the end of the decade.

Making such inroads with K-12 schools, however, is no sure bet.

Also see:

Roblox Education

 

VRJAM -- the metaverse platform for music

The VRJAM metaverse platform is coming to transform the world of live entertainment 

VRJAM, the UK’s leading creator of live music experiences in virtual reality, today teased the launch of the VRJAM platform, a revolutionary new metaverse events platform and NFT creation solution. 

To bring the VRJAM metaverse platform to life, VRJAM has partnered with market leading NFT software developer Enjin.io to launch a rich virtual reality world that offers a host of new solutions for artists to render and monetize their music and live shows in amazing new ways using NFT’s, blockchain and immersive technology.  

The VRJAM platform promises to open up completely new ways for both fans and artist to experience live music events and represents the next step in the evolution of live music. 

Ownership of this virtual world will be shared by a guild of globally recognised artists and record labels who will cooperate to create value and define new possibilities for music inside the metaverse. 

VRJAM’s metaverse platform offers solutions for true live performance using technology that is years ahead of other similar platforms. It provides unsurpassed user experience and offers fans, artists and labels an array of unique features:

VRJAM's metaverse -- a vivid virtual world built for music

At the heart of the VRJAM metaverse platform is a blockchain based trading and finance system, VRJAM Coin. This revolutionary new cryptocurrency will create ways for both artists and fans to earn money inside the metaverse and promises to create entirely new business models for artists, venues and labels at a time when their traditional ways of making money have been turned upside down by the Covid 19 pandemic. 

The VRJAM cryptocurrency is backed by investment from 5 of the world’s leading blockchain specialist investment and venture capital firms, demonstrating the exciting potential of VRJAM’s tech.

The VRJAM platform is scheduled to go live in early 2022, follow on social media to stay up to date.


From DSC:
Hmmmmm….might this type of thing spill over into the worlds of teaching and learning? More direct-to-consumer (learner) types of offerings? Will this open up the doors for new methods of earning a living or for  those interested in building a teaching & learning-based brand?

Alternatively, will this impact what actors, actresses, and comedians will be able to do?


Addendum on 12/2/21:


 

Why AWS’s move into private 5G networking is game-changing — from zdnet.com by Zeus Kerravala
As the cost of SIM-connected devices decreases and eSIMs become more common, the industry could see a big move from Wi-Fi to 5G.

Excerpt:

One of the notable announcements at Amazon Web Services’ re:Invent 2021 conference [on 11/30/21] was the unveiling of AWS Private 5G, a fully-managed service enabling businesses to deploy their own high-capacity mobile networks. The service is designed to be used inside buildings as an augmentation of — and eventual replacement for — Wi-Fi.

 

Also see Matthew Ball’s Metaverse Primer (excerpt below from this page) — with thanks to Annie Zhang for this resource:


“The Metaverse is a massively scaled and interoperable network of real-time rendered 3D virtual worlds which can be experienced synchronously and persistently by an effectively unlimited number of users with an individual sense of presence, and with continuity of data, such as identity, history, entitlements, objects, communications, and payments.”


Jacob Navok: Computing and Network Needs of the Metaverse — from hellometaverse.fm by Annie Zhang

Excerpt:

to progress towards this vision of the metaverse, jacob is focused on tackling the hard problem of improving concurrency. how do you get millions of people to concurrently be participating and interacting in one live experience with no lag? 

he breaks this down the problem into two components:

  1. limitations of the traditional network to handle multiplayer experiences: coordinating, say, positional data of where you and all the other players in a game, gets very complicated, especially when latency needs to be low. meaning, if you want to see everything that everyone is doing at all times, coordinating the traffic of that data is very difficult

  2. with more connection, internet speed slows: the internet was not built for true real time communication, but rather optimized for cost and routing efficiency. when you load a fb page, it’s okay if it takes 10 milliseconds, but when you are in a shooting game, a delay of 10 milliseconds is a matter of life or death


Everything You Need To Know About The Metaverse — from protocol.com by Janko Roettgers

Excerpt:

Silicon Valley has a new favorite buzzword: Ever since Mark Zuckerberg announced earlier this year that Facebook’s future would be in the metaverse, everyone has been rushing to figure out what a metaverse even is. And when Facebook rebranded as Meta in October, metaverse fever swept the tech industry. From Microsoft to Nvidia, every company is suddenly in the metaverse business, and seemingly overnight, countless people became metaverse experts.

But what actually is the metaverse? Why does it matter, and who needs to worry about it? If the metaverse is truly “the next chapter for the internet,” as Zuckerberg put it, it’s important to understand and define it so as not to be caught flat-footed when (or if) the metaverse wave catches on.

 

NVIDIA OMNIVERSE: Creating and Connecting Virtual Worlds

A NEW ERA OF 3D DESIGN COLLABORATION AND SIMULATION
NVIDIA Omniverse™ is an easily extensible, open platform built for virtual collaboration and real-time physically accurate simulation. Creators, designers, researchers, and engineers can connect major design tools, assets, and projects to collaborate and iterate in a shared virtual space. Developers and software providers can also easily build and sell Extensions, Apps, Connectors, and Microservices on Omniverse’s modular platform to expand its functionality.



Also see:

 

10 great Chrome tips for teachers and educators — from educatorstechnology.com

 

Americans Need a Bill of Rights for an AI-Powered World — from wired.com by Eric Lander & Alondra Nelson
The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy is developing principles to guard against powerful technologies—with input from the public.

Excerpt (emphasis DSC):

Soon after ratifying our Constitution, Americans adopted a Bill of Rights to guard against the powerful government we had just created—enumerating guarantees such as freedom of expression and assembly, rights to due process and fair trials, and protection against unreasonable search and seizure. Throughout our history we have had to reinterpret, reaffirm, and periodically expand these rights. In the 21st century, we need a “bill of rights” to guard against the powerful technologies we have created.

Our country should clarify the rights and freedoms we expect data-driven technologies to respect. What exactly those are will require discussion, but here are some possibilities: your right to know when and how AI is influencing a decision that affects your civil rights and civil liberties; your freedom from being subjected to AI that hasn’t been carefully audited to ensure that it’s accurate, unbiased, and has been trained on sufficiently representative data sets; your freedom from pervasive or discriminatory surveillance and monitoring in your home, community, and workplace; and your right to meaningful recourse if the use of an algorithm harms you. 

In the coming months, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (which we lead) will be developing such a bill of rights, working with partners and experts across the federal government, in academia, civil society, the private sector, and communities all over the country.

Technology can only work for everyone if everyone is included, so we want to hear from and engage with everyone. You can email us directly at ai-equity@ostp.eop.gov

 

Legal Technology: Why the Legal Tech Boom is Just Getting Started — from nasdaq.com by Casey Flaherty and Jae Um of LexFusion; with thanks to Gabe Teninbaum for this resource via his Lawtomatic Newsletter, Issue #136

Excerpt:

In quick succession, legal technology finally saw its first IPOs:

With private money pouring into legal tech startups and based on our own conversations inside the industry, we at LexFusion expect more IPOs on the horizon. Thus, a primer on legal tech as a category to watch. This Part I summarizes the legal market fundamentals driving unprecedented investment in enabling tech—much of which extends beyond the boundaries implied by “legal” as a descriptor.

A pivot point appears to be upon us. Considered unthinkable a decade ago, US states and Canadian provinces—following similar reforms in the UK and Australia that have resulted in the first publicly traded law firms—are rapidly creating regulatory sandboxes to expand current rules limiting (a) who can provide legal services and (b) who can own those businesses.

From DSC:
One can see why #AI will become key. “…the projected CAGR for global data volumes is 26%—to pt where ‘the amount of data created over the next three years will be more than the data created over the past 30 years.’ This data explosion complicates even standard legal matters.”

Gabe also mentioned the following Tweet, which is relevant for this posting:

 

Could AR and/or VR enable a massive 3D-based type of “Voicethread?” [Christian]

From DSC:
What if we could quickly submit items for a group to discuss, annotate, and respond to — using whichever media format is available/preferable for a person — like a massive 3D-based Voicethread? What if this type of discussion could be contributed to and accessed via Augmented Reality (AR) and/or via Virtual Reality (VR) types of devices?

It could be a new 3D format that a person could essentially blow all the way up into the size of a billboard. Think, “Honey, I shrunk the kids” type of stuff.  

Input devices might include:

  • Augmented Reality (AR) glasses
  • Virtual Reality (VR) headsets/glasses
  • Scanners
  • Smartphones
  • Tablets
  • Desktops and laptops
  • SmartTVs
  • Other types of input devices

For example, a person could take a picture of a document or something else and then save that image into a new file format that would be vector-based. I say a vector-based file format so that the image could be enlarged to the size of a billboard without losing any resolution (i.e., wouldn’t become grainy; the image would remain crystal clear regardless of how big the image is). I’m thinking here along the lines of “Honey, I shrunk the kids!”

Other thoughts here:

  • The files could be accessible online for attendees of classes or for audiences of presentations/webinars
  • The files could be displayed on the walls of learning/presentation spaces for marking them up
  • One could manipulate the 3D image if that person was using a virtual/immersive environment
  • Users should be able to annotate on those images and/or be able to save such annotations and notes

A question for phase II:
Could this concept also be used if virtual courts take off?

Hmmmm…just thinking out loud.

 

What Will Online Learning Look Like in 10 Years? Zoom Has Some Ideas — from edsurge.com by Stephen Noonoo

Excerpt:

This week at Zoom’s annual conference, Zoomtopia, a trio of education-focused Zoom employees (er, Zoomers?) speculated wildly about what hybrid Zoom learning might look like 10 years from now, given the warp speed advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning expected. Below are highlights of their grandiose, if sometimes vague, vision for the future of learning on Zoom.

Zoom very much sees itself as one day innovating on personalized learning in a substantial way, although beyond breakout rooms and instant translation services, they have few concrete ideas in mind. Mostly, the company says it will be working to add more choices to how teachers can present materials and how students can display mastery to teachers in realtime. They’re bullish on Kahoot-like gamification features and new ways of assessing students, too.

Also see:

An Eighth Grader Was Tired of Being Late to Zoom School. So He Made an App for That. — from edsurge.com by Nadia Tamez-Robledo

“I could not find anything else that exists like this to automatically join meetings at the right times,” says Seth, a high school freshman based in Walnut Creek, Calif. “Reminders are just really easy to ignore. I’ll get a notification maybe five minutes before my meeting, and it’ll just sit there and not do anything. [LinkJoin] interrupts whatever you’re doing and says, ‘Join this meeting. In fact it’s already opening, so better get on it.’”

 

 
© 2024 | Daniel Christian