A reference Open Spatial Computing Platform (OSCP)
At our second “State of the AR Cloud Symposium”, and our first anniversary as an organization Open AR Cloud announced an ambitious plan to design and build an open platform for the next era of computing.
Thirty years after the idea for the World Wide Web was initially proposed by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, our Managing Director, Jan-Erik Vinje, outlined plans to build the core pieces of what we have named the Open Spatial Computing Platform (OSCP). Before the end of 2020 OARC intends to build reference implementations of the core pieces of an open and interoperable spatial computing platform for the real world. This we belive is the best way to achieve the vision of what many refer to as the “Mirror World” or the “Spatial Web.
The three core functions of the OSCP:
GeoPose - know exactly where you are and how you are oriented: Provides the capability to obtain, record, share and communicate geospatial position and orientation of any real or virtual objects with 6 degrees of freedom. Like the URL links information, GeoPose can link the real and the digital world. The intention is to use it extensively in standards, protocols, services, and clients on the platform. Last year Open AR Cloud alongside our founding partner the Open Geospatial Consortium took the initative to establish a working group to develop a universal standard for GeoPose. The group started its work on the 24th of January 2020.
A locally shared Machine Readable World : Provide users and machines with a powerful new way to interact with reality reality through the standardized encoding of geometry, semantics, properties, and relationships (linked data) of a dynamic reality at their location through a Reality Service that speaks a "Reality Modeling Language".
Access to everything in the digial world nearby : Through a local listing of references in a “Spatial Discovery Service” you will have seemless access to content, services, applications communication channels that are available to you at your location, not totally unlike a DNS, but operating in a more distributed way by focusing on referencing local resources.
It is essential that this platform is designed for all of humanity in all its diversity and does not become a walled garden controlled by one or a few large corporations. Many of the world’s largest companies are currently investing heavily in this type of technology, but they might not be the best custodians of important things like the rights to privacy and freedom of individuals.
The type of distributed architecture that is ideal for a ‘Spatial Web’ could unleash opportunity and prosperity around the world because spatial data, content and services are most valuable at its origin. If done right, OARC believes the Spatial Web will empower individuals, local businesses and communities alike to be in charge of their digital lives and economies!
The proposed system architecture has been developed by members of OARC working groups over the last few months and is based on the open AR Cloud framework laid out in the first State of The AR Cloud Report released on the 28th of May.
As part of this effort, OARC presented a plan to the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) to develop a universal standard for geospatial position and orientation (Geopose) to represent 6 degrees of freedom of real or virtual objects in a shared geospatial frame of reference. Members of OGC have voted in favour of establishing this working group. On January 24th 2020, the OGC GeoPose Standards Working group held its kick-off meeting and has now begun the process of developing the standard.
OARC believes geopose will be a fundamental building block for an open and interoperable Spatial Web, Geopose is as essential to real-world spatial computing as the URL is to the web. The same way URLs are a standardized way for information to link to other information, geopose will provide a universal way to connect the digital world to the physical world and vice versa.
By it self geopose will be extreemly useful, but a geopose standard alone does not constitute a platform anymore than the URL standard alone consituted the World Wide Web. The real “magic happens” only when we have put together the sufficient set of platform parts needed for this to start to scale like the open web platform once did.
Status update - plans, new partnerships, top talent and fundraising
Designing and building a reference implementation of the OSCP would be ambitious for any organization. We fully realize we must extend our team, scale up our operation and raise funding to be able to achieve the “Minimal Viable Platform” we have outlined. To realistically be able to reach our goals by the end of 2020 our organization must transition from its volunteer only roots to one that enables top talent to design and build this platform as their dayjob.
To that end we are putting together a group of Technology Development Partners from the industry to contribute to the platform services and protocols, as well as ,Use-Case Partners to help develop high value solutions that stand to benefit greatly from the platform. We are recruting top talent to join the teams that will work on different parts of the platform as well as implementing the initial use-cases. For funding this endevour we will create a special OSCP Sponsor Program, we are persuing major R&D grants in EU and the US, we have just launched a donate feature on our website, and we intend to launch an exiting crowdfuning campaign early next year along with a major public outreach campaign that we hope can go viral.
Stay tuned for more updates in the comming weeks!
Participate, be a part of history - make a beautiful dent in the universe!
We are exited about the people and partners already part of this journey, but we need more hands on deck and more rocket fuel to power this mission! This is where you or your organization enters the stage. Don’t let this chance to do something exiting, meaningful and important pass you by!
For more information contact info@openarcloud.org