#1. Spatial Assembly with Keiichi Matsuda, Paul Hoover and James Powderly
Discussion about our Spatial Computing privacy rights
Welcome to the Spatial Assembly, an open conversation and bi-weekly discussion on the future of spatial computing, and how we can make sure it doesn’t suck.
The conversation at the first ever Spatial Assembly was as interesting as it was informative, including insights from Silka Miesnieks, Keiichi Matsuda, Paul Hoover, Avi Bar-Zeev, Kent Bye, and James Powderly. Many differing viewpoints came together and we encourage you to join in on future assemblies to really get a feel for the camaraderie.
In the following transcript you’ll see topics ranged from a proposed Mirror World Bill of Rights, the evolution of social interactions intermediated by spatial computing, and the ethical implications for public and private spatial computing experiences.
Let’s get started…
April 3, 2019 Transcript:
Silka: I’m Silka Miesnieks. I work at Adobe as Head of Emerging Design. I set this up with the encouragement of Keiichi Matsuda. The idea was to bring people together who are experts in the industry to talk about Spatial Computing, or “how to make it not suck” as Timoni West says very well, and I have got her permission to steal that line.
Keiichi: … whenever we can have a shared environment, where we have people producing as well as consuming things within the space, then we’re going to need systems of organization and systems of governance…
Keiichi: Paul Hoover is going to be discussing his Mirrorworld Bill of Rights followed by a short discussion. This Mirrorworld Bill of Rights is a really excellent start in trying to think about how we would start to build a set of principles into the type of world that we’re designing.
The Mirrorworld Bill of Rights:
1. One Reality for All
2. A World Public by Default
3. The Right to Digital Property
4. Freedom to Assemble
One Reality For All
Paul: The first [right] is One Reality For All. So the idea is that if we have Google, Facebook, Magic Leap, and Microsoft all making AR systems that don’t inter-operate with each other, then everybody in the same room, if they’re not wearing the same brand of devices, might not be able to see what the other people are seeing. You might not be able to have a conversation with them.
Paul: And so I was hoping that we could have a single, shared, open framework…
Keiichi: My question about that would be, is openness mandatory? Is that even enforceable? Is what we’re talking about something that is possible?
Silka: I think it would be very hard to make it possible. I mean, let’s think of some existing examples. The open source movement, that became quite successful democratizing coded for all, is still partly controlled/developed by corporations and enforced in part by government.
Keiichi: But could you stop people from making their own kind of inter-realities that exclude others?
Avi: Well, if you listen to the Khronos Group, they say that every successful open standard has a proprietary alternative. So I don’t think it’s actually feasible to say we’re all going to be open, because it just goes against how proprietary versus open works. It’s a dialectic between the two.
Avi: There are some precedents for this openness, such as telephone networks. You can have a private phone call obviously, but all telephones inter-operate with all other telephones. Nobody really has a network that doesn’t work with everybody else, and it’s because of the history of the phone system that that happened. It was mandated. It started with a monopoly.
Avi: We could come along and say all these devices must inter-operate. They must be capable of sharing realities, even if people decide to have private zones that are not accessible.
Keiichi: So really we’re saying that it’s in the best interests of everybody involved to make their systems as inter-operable as possible.
Avi: Systems could be more like AOL, where companies feel that they have an obligation to curate and, to make a great experience, feel that they have to exclude third party stuff that they don’t think is good enough.
Keiichi: That’s interesting because we were talking about that the other day, weren’t we? The idea of the AOL model where we’ve kind of broken into this new world now of all this different possibility, and it’s not a very curated experience and it could feel a little scary to people. So having a curated existence within it, a consensus reality, allows us to be able to exist on the same field.
A World Public by Default
Paul: The second [right] is A World Public by Default. This one is more about social norms. The default experience that we get in AR [now] is privacy, by default.
Paul: …we all saw how [private by default] worked with Google Glass and the Glasshole effect.
Paul: Meta wrote a really nice UX guideline called, “Public by Default”, talking about a part of our brain that gets triggered when we see someone interacting with something and we don’t know what it is. You’re always wondering, are they going to try to kill me, or do they have some sharp object? You don’t trust someone until you know what they’re doing.
Paul: So the idea is, could you make a system that’s shared first? So everybody could have a shared experience? Could we have it so that the things that they’re doing are public by default?
Paul: It’s not to say that you can’t have privacy, but I think privacy should be public. Meaning that, if you want privacy, then I should have some sort of barrier. I can make a privacy barrier for me, around me.
Paul: Let’s say there is a virtual privacy screen in front of me and you guys can’t see the object behind you. (Paul draws a screen in VR in front of himself).
Keiichi: But you’re still operating within the same virtual reality state, the same augmented reality. Just you’re partitioning it as you would the physical world?
Paul: Exactly.
Paul: It’s mostly around social norms and having people be able to have good conversations and good social interactions between each other. If I have no idea if you’re looking at me or if you’re looking at something in front of you that’s virtual that I can’t see, then now I won’t trust you and I won’t trust these glasses and I won’t trust anybody with these glasses on.
The Right to Digital Property
Paul: Number three is The Right to Digital Property. I got some good push-back on this one online earlier, but my general assumption was that if you own the physical space or are renting it or leasing it, you should be the one owning and managing the content that’s inside of it.
Paul: If you have access to your workplace network, and you’re in the building, then you should have rights to post stuff up on the wall, but if you walk into that building and you’re not secure or you’re not logged in, then you shouldn’t be able to see all the private stuff that people have posted. You could do that for spaces, too. Such as a room that you deem as yours or your team’s.
Paul: Then, I think in private spaces, like people’s homes, you would want those to be managed by the people in their homes. I’d like to apply the the fourth amendment to this, to say that corporations and companies shouldn’t be able to actually search your home without a warrant. Technically how that happens is a challenge. As a counter James Powderly said to me, “Well, if you do that you’re really just reinforcing the income disparities between the haves and have nots, the people who own land and will always own land and the people who will never own land.” I think that’s an interesting counter-argument.
Keiichi: I think that’s one of the interesting things about this idea of the Mirrorworld: it mirrors some parts of our society.
Kent: I just want to say Mark Pesce has thought about this quite a lot and formulated a thing called Mixed Reality Service, where it would be basically like a blockchain enabled way for people to declare their rights, and if they own land they could give people rights to other people to be able to do things on their land. So if you have land, and you want to give other people the rights to do stuff, then you could mediate it through something like what he calls a Mixed Reality Service. But, I think there’s a tension between free speech rights and property ownership rights, and that’s why I think it’s a dilemma. Because there’s arguments for both.
James: I think it’s more than free speech. I think it’s about public space rights versus private space rights. We are just not used to having this conversation in the digital realm because we don’t have digital public spaces. We have what you described Paul: privately owned public spaces where companies allow us to inhabit them in a public way… but of course it comes at a cost.
Kent: And I think that the example of Pokemon Go having games on the Holocaust Museum is a good example of that, it’s like an extreme case, but what do you do? How do you sort of navigate that? Should the Holocaust Museum have the right to say we don’t want you playing games on our property? So there’s going to be things like that, where how do you resolve that in an open standard way?
Avi: What you’re talking about with public spaces, I think, relates to the idea of the Commons in the real world, and there are some well established rules about the Commons.
Avi: But one of the things you saw in Second Life and you see in reality a little bit, is I might own the billboard next to your space and I can put whatever I want on it, but there are still limits as to what I can say or do. I can’t be defamatory. I also can’t necessarily buy the land right in front of your space to put up a giant wall to prevent people from seeing your space or getting in… Even though I might own that space, even though I might have my rights, I could also infringe on your rights because you’re nearby.
Avi: But then there’s also personal rights. Like, do I have the right to put a scarlet letter on someone else? Or put a note, attach it somebody that they can’t see, but then other people wearing headsets and running my permissions could see it?
Avi: It’s analogous to somebody owning property. We directly own our bodies and should have a right to be able to control how we come across to people. So it would be hard to say that businesses have that right but individuals don’t, or vice versa, but it’s not as clear cut as the 2D boundary of someone’s property.
Paul: Something that you said, I think it was Kent earlier, sparked a thought for me on, if you own space, digital and physical space, and then you want to share that with somebody else, what might that look like? So it’s kind of this private space that becomes public.
Paul: But what about all the space above a building? Is air space public space? Can everybody go fly around all the cities and play games up there or something? Should you be able to switch that layer on and see all the people up there? I would say probably yes, I think that’d be cool. But, you also wouldn’t want to allow everything as someone could put a big huge sign outside your building as a public defamation of you and your business. There’s got to be some rules or policing around that type of behavior.
Kent: If we’re familiar with sort of a map-based 2D version of property management, that could simply be extended to have some notion of elevation and you could say, you know, the rules of that system are entirely speculative. I’m not convinced yet that that’s the right approach, but I think you could just extend your third point to account for elevation.
Freedom to Assemble
Avi: How do we make sure that people can assemble if effectively every part of the world is owned? Some of it may be considered public and Commons, but how do we make sure that people can have their own private conversations in public spaces or public conversations so they can protest something?
Paul: Yes, that’s a very good question. Yeah, so this last right, Freedom to Assemble, is trying to say that there are these public spaces and, by default, these public spaces anybody can go to, and maybe there are some governing rules. You know, you can’t put up pornography or you can’t do certain things, and maybe that’s self-policed, but maybe not. But you should be able to travel there and assemble.
Paul: Yeah, where that border between public and private is, is blurry. Is the middle of a street a public place that everybody should be able to go in and dance around in while cars are driving?
Silka: There’s also the other idea of if you are physically present in someplace, do you have different rights than when you’re not. I mean, right now public spaces are public when you’re there, but when you’re not there … I mean an easier example is your own home. If you have it scanned and there’s art on the walls, digital art everywhere you want people to see, do you want them to be able to see it from anywhere or just when they come into your home? And you should have that choice to switch that on or off. That’s another level of control.
The Conversation Continues
The first Spatial Assembly was a success, though this transcript represents just a piece of the whole conversation. The many varying viewpoints for our future world of spatial computing highlight just how complex the future is.
Join our next Assembly: spatialassembly.eventbrite.com
Past events: medium.com/spatial-assembly/spatial-assembly-events-list
