Te Aotūroa (The Long-Standing Light)

Te Aotūroa is a body of work exploring the beautiful natural landscapes of Aotearoa New Zealand, their digital footprints and their connections to stories and peoples of new and old.

Each piece is built in a particular area of the country, with an examination of the local environment, its nature and ways of life. An overlay of the digital world in varying forms is imagined depending on the populous and development of the location.

The basis of this series is divided into three different pieces of work.

• Waimamaku Stream / Te Tai Tokerau

• The Haven / Te Tai-o-Aorere

• Plains of Old / Waitaha

With this series of works, I explored the merging of both the natural and digital worlds.
My work has always touched on this theme throughout the years. But being in a country like this, so far removed and isolated from the rest of the world, in all its natural beauty inspired me to focus on these elements with renewed awe. The art takes on the form of environments I got to call home during the year here, from the Northlands to Tasman Bay and Canterbury. The works, depending on location also explore local Maori lore and legends, from creation story’s to the tribes that got to call these area’s home at one point or the other.

Since I started making Digital Fine Art my work has always been visually digital heavy and I believe that is because of my experiences of the time. Generally, I would be making them whilst living in cities like London and whilst travelling in places like Florence or Edinburgh. I’d always try to push natural elements like plants/foliage and making it more nature-centric, but I found it hard. With this series Te Aotūroa, I feel like this might be the first time I have been truly able to work on nature elements because of the present experience.
Depending on the piece, the digital elements are prevalent or minuscule depending on the isolation experienced. In the first two pieces, the experiences were more nature-centric whereas the third was mostly in a city, which highlights more of a digital footprint.

Waimamaku Stream / Te Tai Tokerau

The first piece.
The sound of Cicada’s was deafening, the nearby water in the bay gently rising and fading with the sounds of birds and sea creatures.
The cicadas greatly inspired my direction with this piece. Pukenui and the Northland region was naturally very dense in foliage, with a very tropical and humid climate. I stayed here during the last month of Summer.

Waimamaku Stream tells a story of my renewed connection to a land I admire greatly. A retreat and a place of peace after years of urban settings back in the UK.

Waimamaku Stream takes inspiration from the tale surrounding Tāne Mahuta and the separation of the Mother and Father (Papatūānuku & Ranginui). Giving us the land and trees we see today. The sacred Te Aroha tree also resides in this piece, acknowledging key sights of the Northlands.

The Haven / Te Tai-o-Aorere

The Second Piece.
The Tasman area including the bay and the Abel Tasman National Park, all the way up towards Collingwood was an ecological treat. Te Waikoropupu Springs in particular was an extraordinary place. The spiritual aspects of the springs to the Maori left a lasting impression.

Nelson stood out to me through its history as one of the earliest colonial settlements in the country, and it’s easy to see it when around the town. The natural harbour when seeing it from the vantage points of the surrounding hillsides gives this feeling of awe in what nature can do and provide for us to use. A refuge for ships after months at sea, a new home for people looking for a new life.

The Haven comes as this admiration for the Abel Tasman area, its ecological diversity but also a real appreciation for the small townships of Aotearoa like Nelson.

Plains of Old / Waitaha

The Third piece.
I spent most of my time in this particular environment. Canterbury and Christchurch were where I was mostly based in my time here. My home away from home. A place I’ve become very fond of. Christchurch is the second biggest city in the country, but it still felt small. The Canterbury plains were central to this piece.

Christchurch is featured in this composition and gives the piece more of a digital footprint. From here the surrounding ranges that border the Canterbury plains take form.

This piece honours the Ngāi Tahu (People of Tahu) and the diverse culture Christchurch now embodies. Plains Of Old also pays homage to a structure in the landscape that is reminiscent of my home. Agriculture is a cornerstone of the Canterbury way of life, similar to the rural area’s of England and the expanses of rolling green hill’s that grow the food we eat. The connection between these ways of life somehow makes me feel at home despite being the other side of the world. A common connection of people and bloodlines through time.

Where Oceans Meet & Realms

Earlier this year I released The Core’s first spatial art piece and alongside it, the realm concept. Realms are to be thought of as worlds within worlds, a layer deeper than the main CORE experience.

A limitation I found when designing in the main CORE world was the ability to alternate themes and colourways, keeping visual direction consistent whilst building the interoperability of different zones. With the world being a bright white unsaturated dreamscape, it was hard for example to then develop an area within it as an open, green vibrant saturated forest. While The Core does have some blending between colour and value, I never wanted to drift to far from the main thematics of the experience. Thus, it was hard to create pieces of art that go against this creative direction and then be integrated into the main experience in the form of an installation or environmental zone.

This is where realms come in. They are portals to alternate worlds within the main experience. The observer is able to teleport or ‘transfer’ to another level inside the world. Which often tend to be quite different from the visuals of the main experience.

Where Oceans Meet was the perfect art piece to launch this concept, due to the variations in visual style. I feel both The Core and Where Oceans Meet’s visual direction align but having the blues of the sky and the water integrated in CORE as an environmental piece would have been hard to do.

WHERE OCEANS MEET

Released back in April of 2023. Around 7 Months ago as of writing this. This piece of art is one of my more important pieces released to date. I feel like it personally solidifies a visual direction I was working towards with CORE, but with elements of improved expression through colour and luminance work.

This piece of work was built during the Palazzo Cipolla exhibition ‘Ipotesi Metaverso’ and exhibition goers were able to experience this piece firsthand during its development, it was released a month or so later onto the streamable version for the public to see and experience.

It is deeply personal too. During this period I was made aware of an underlying health issue.
Generally and luckily, I have been mostly healthy throughout my life and have not had any major issues making me doctor/hospital bound or that required any medication. This has been the first time since I’ve had that bubble burst of being young and healthy forever and it has called into question my mortality.
Where Oceans Meet is a part of a lyric from one of my favorite musicians of all time - Architects. A song called Momento Mori. It features a quoted section of Alan Watts’s lectures on the present and change.

It follows long-time inspirations from Alan Watts and philosophical concepts around life, death, time, and the universe. The influence is quite stoic visually but through various meanings more Eastern which I think is similiar with most of my work.

Moving forward, standalone artforms that can exist as separate miniature experiences will be implemented as realms and can be accessed via portals inside the world, so when you are next walking around in there make sure to enter if you see something that looks traversable.

Kaewa

In a few months from writing this, I will be heading to New Zealand to live there for a while. The other side of the world to where I currently sit. I feel quite numb to the upcoming uprooting and enormous changes to my life, but I know soon that will be replaced with a feeling of both immense excitement and fear. Fear of whether what I am doing is the right thing to do and also a fear of the unknown.

While I know that these feelings are normal for most in situations like this - I know personally that the feeling of being in new places and being around new people and cultures is something that makes me feel alive and present. In these scenarios, time slows down for me. Visual and audio stimuli are received much more clearly. Moments are cherished and long to be forgotten. For me, they are the better moments in life. Exploring new horizons and not getting too comfortable are precursors to joy.

Kaewa comes at a time in my life in which the road ahead seems a little more unclear than it’s been in the past, and following a linear trail doesn’t seem like the obvious thing to do.

Kaewa is a Maori word and roughly translates in English to (to wander, roam). This piece reflects on the mixture of feelings leading up to this event in my life and the advent of exploration ahead. A fusion of euphoria, fear, mystery, confusion, and inquisitiveness.

This piece of work that I’ve been working on for the past 2 months uses my normal methods of world creation through Unreal Engine; using all the normal tools in VFX, asset and scene layouts and rendering. However, this was my first time directly utilizing AI inside the scene itself. To express the notion of there being more horizons and worlds ahead, in the portals I used a mixture of AI-generated imagery as different marker biomes in which the observer can be transported.

The merging of the CORE’s canvas with present thoughts leads me to this piece of art: Kaewa. A reflection of the possibility of seeing the worlds beyond our walls, an urge to explore and want to see more. This piece of work comes at a point in my life in which there is much anticipation and excitement for ‘the next stage’ and a new frontier.

CORE in many ways encompasses this notion; it’s open, and expansive and allows observers to explore new horizons. It’s full of possibility.

As I build out the platform and new worlds are added, Kaewa is the idea I will follow in search of new environments, new ideas, and new versions of the self.

One year of The Core

It’s been a year since I released the project CORE, one of my biggest pieces of art released to date.

This canvas continues to be a brilliant escape for my creativity. Whilst it’s been a fairly busy year for me in my personal life and in other areas of work. I have found myself coming back again and again to experiment, research, and make art in it’s spaces.

A year gives a good amount of time to think about a project like this and it’s meaning and purpose. I believe it stays true to the fact that it is first and foremost a piece of art as well as a journal for my passions and thoughts of the time. Capturing emotions and memories in a spatial state is somewhat of an odd notion but I do feel this is something that will become more and more of a commonality as we step into the future.

Here’s a run down of events and milestones in it’s first year -

The Core has had an incredible run of showcases having been exhibited on 2 continents. Firstly, The Core visited North America and was exhibited in New York as a part of the CADAF 2022 exhibition at Web3 NYC gallery on 5th Avenue. Secondly, and as one of the proudest moments in my career so far - The Core was exhibited at ‘Ipotesi Metaverso’ in the grand Palazzo Cipolla in central Rome alongside the likes of Refik Anadol, Pak, Sashastiles, fuse and Krista Kim.

Since its launch, the project has amassed a collector base of 270 people, mainly from the genesis collection released at the start of the project. The genesis collection of artworks is comprised of Essence, Arrival of the Source and Surrender.

Essence, a free mint of 500 editions, minted out within a few hours. Surrender was airdropped to collectors of prior artworks and supporters of the project. Arrival is the only 1/1 in the series thus far remaining in my personal collection.

I published the very first spatial art piece called ‘Where Oceans Meet’ which exists as a Realm inside of CORE. This piece of art essentially sits as it’s own playable world inside the experience which can be traveled to via a portal sitting in the main CORE experience.
Alongside this, the concept of Realms was released. Realms exist as subworlds inside The Core, they offer new ways of traversing spatial art that contain different themes and experiences.

Around halfway through the year I migrated the experience from Unreal Engine 4 to Unreal Engine 5. From a technical point of view, this is a big leap in helping me realize some of the artistic visions I have for the world and my art. The technologies that come with the new engine version such as Lumen allow me to use light in ways I’ve always wanted which were impossible previously. While the tech is still fairly new and expensive to run, it’s been very promising in my recent work. So expect much more crazy lighting directions and fidelity in new releases of the world.

The soundscapes crafted by Dreone for the world called ‘Auras of the Core’ have surpassed a total of 40k streams on Spotify. The tracks that underpin the rooted and mysterious nature of the experience called ‘Self, ‘The Core’ and ‘Revere’ have also been released on Apple Music. Working with Dreone is always a pleasure, as a listener of his work even before working with him, getting to collaborate on some of the rich soundscapes that occupy the space is a thrill artistically.

While the world sees many big events and pivotal upgrades, the world is constantly micro-changing. As I continue to work in it’s space the art that once existed may change or even be removed over time. I took a glance at screenshots and videos from its launch to where the world currently sits and it was a huge surprise. A lot of the changes have come around from the existing work in the world being built upon further as I’ve continued to expand on some of the ideas there. Notably, some of the technical changes such as the engine upgrade have definitely provided overall graphic enhancements.

To short summarise the year in full -

• Exhibited on 5th Avenue NYC at CADAF 2022

• 270 unique collectors of CORE artworks

• Launched the first spatial art piece in the world called ‘Where Oceans Meet’ alongside the Realm concept.

• Exhibited at Palazzo Cipolla’s Ipotesi Metaverso in Rome, Italy

• Migrated project from Unreal Engine 4 to Unreal Engine 5.

• The Core soundscapes ‘Auras’ crafted with Dreone streamed over 40,000 times on Spotify.

• Regular updates and entries to the space including improved avatar movement, spatial art, and graphics.

One year celebrations

As a celebration of the one-year mark, I’ll be releasing a version of the experience with some major changes from the past couple of months, along with a sneak peek preview of a new piece of art in development.

The Year Everything and Nothing Happened
(Artwork in development)

One of the big things I wanted to experiment with when I was first concepting The Core was the idea of replicating memories. The idea of revisiting memories or moments that have been crafted into a spatial state to be experienced is a fascinating idea to me.

A key memory stood out to me that I wanted to explore this concept with and that was one from the Pandemic Era. During the first lockdown I was living in London and on a sunny spring morning I walked from my flat in Clapton into central London, through Shoreditch, Finsbury past the Barbican, and Farringdon. It is still one of the most surreal memories I hold. Seeing a city that is normally so chaotic and bustling with life basically deserted and lifeless felt like I had been placed in a simulation in which we as a species had been wiped out or vanished. They are sights, not many humans see in their lifetimes.

My latest work ‘The Year Everything and Nothing Happened’ is greatly inspired by this particular experience I had. This piece of artwork will be a 2D composition with an experiential state inside The Core experience. This means observers will be able to collect this piece of art but they can also experience it.

Something else

While I’d love to share all the information I have, that wouldn’t make it quite as fun. There is something else being worked on for experience on the collectible side, something that captures evolution inside the project. But more on this when it’s ready.

Concluding

There has been considerable changes to the world recently, even on a micro level, randomly walking through the experience you may see some new features. A lot of it is in line with a particular direction my work is taking, both technically and artistically, if you catch onto these, expect to see them in new pieces of art in the years to come.

A year of The Core, thankyou Observers.

THE CORE

THE CORE launches today.

A trialing, up and down experience over the past 12 months finally comes to an end today with its release. THE CORE has been the longest amount of time I’ve worked on any canvas. It’s been an escape, a place to flow and work with, back and forth, a giver of lessons, a teacher, and a project that has taught me a lot about myself as I spilled the deepest depths of my soul into its space in the form of art.

THE CORE is a virtual and spatial art experience built around my art. All the art that I have ever made is tangible in this world, with the environments around these pieces morphing to house their guests. Telling of further story and narrative.

You can access it here: https://joshachaplin.com/the-core

THE CORE is centered around the ominous and abstract sculptural form that occupies the centre of the virtual world. It is a representation of the self (Core / Self) and an opposite to the sculpture ‘Creator’ (https://joshachaplin.com/digitalart/creator).

> more

The experience is a deeply personal delve into my own life and experiences, and the people that I hold close occupy the space in some form or another.

Around it, lies different installations of bodies of work traversing themes of the digital and natural worlds, data, philosophy, spirituality, truth and meaning.

Some you can buy in the form of NFTs, that already exist on web3 marketplaces, others remain off-chain and are purely for observing leisure. The work would also be available in physical format if requested.

The experience launches with 5 main areas.

• The Clarity Domes

  A distinct, vibrant and saturated section of the world that contrasts the dreamscape of the world itself. Here you can find paintings, more traditional work and the body of work called ‘The Condition’. This area symbolizes the connection to the natural and is a manifestation of a love for nature.

• Sculpture Houses

  Similar to The Clarity Domes, this section is inherently traditional and houses sculpture work. Only one house exists currently but in the future, this will change. This area is a manifestation of a meditative, peaceful and crafted way of life. Harmonious in the way it is approached.
  The centerpiece, a preserved and undying tree with a towering saturated presence over the achromatic world, is preserved and revered.

• The Obelisk

  This area houses the Creator sculpture along with a collection exploring a mini-narrative that links many of my pieces of work. This area embodies a spiritual and ruinous theme. Greatly inspired by one of my favorite writers, Sam Harris’s quote ‘I still considered the world’s religions to be mere intellectual ruins, but I now understood that important psychological truths could be found in the rubble.’
  To walk through this area is to walk through my thoughts and art on everything from spirituality, god, philosophy and truths. Which is an internally confusing and deeply interesting topic for me to explore.

• Meta Realms

  The more futuristic area of the lot. This zone houses my body of work that explores the digital realms or the buzzword ‘Metaverse’. The area takes the form of a transporter. Themes of exploration, infinity and possibility live here. Digital worlds are a big part of what I do as an artist and their place in the future is explored in this oasis of technology.

• Projection Halls

  Similar to Meta Realms, designed without the laws of the real-world to conserve the idea. The grand halls of projection adheres to present the works of art that warrant being on massive displays, slowly panning over the details and bloomed imagery. Two bodies of work live here - Future Landscapes and Reverence, both art that explores environments and landscape. The imagery will one day be exhibited in the real world the way it does here, THE CORE just beat IRL to it.

Although there are 5 main areas upon launch, there are still unlisted areas to explore and discover, some hold further stories and art. Some unlock further pieces of the puzzle. It is recommended to be curious and open-minded when exploring this world, follow your curiosity and let it direct you to a place of interest.

In the design of this world, I really wanted to forget about the rules and natural laws of the world we know. When designing architecture it is so easy to design based on known limitations. I wanted to break that mould. I designed with no restrictions in mind, because that is what the metaverse will be. It will be a creator’s perfect canvas, a medium in which there is limitless possibility.
I also reined it in, in areas. To respect certain ideas and themes. I felt there ended up being a striking equilibrium between the past and future, old and the what will be. Which I think talks a lot about myself as a person and the idea’s I hold.

I designed THE CORE to be a notebook of the digital age, to hold provenance for when I’m no longer around. To be still useable by people that have ascended my lifetime, they can experience the mind of an artist in a spatial state. Does this mean virtual worlds have a soul or a conscious footprint? Who knows, but I’m here to explore this and see how we can apply meaning to the architecture of our future lives.

While this is the end of this part of the journey, the beginning of THE CORE virtual world has just begun. The world will be a canvas I will come back to indefinitely, to touch up, adjust, destroy, and rebuild the space as new art and stories are to be told. With preservation and provenance in mind, THE CORE will be one of the biggest projects of my artistic career and will hope to tell a story of the self in a more experiential way.

Lastly, I wanted to thank DREONE, for the incredible soundscape work that he created for THE CORE, please check out his work here:
You can also listen to the official CORE Soundtrack on Spotify here: https://open.spotify.com/album/7K1TCkQMpPosKiHkcJJZ2h?si=Pmvi3TIsQXqngh-gzYxaTA

Meta Architecture

OVERVIEW

The metaverse is a persistent and continuous 3D virtual space, a new frontier full of possibility. It will allow for an added information layer to be projected onto the world around us, building on the information connection we already enjoy from our smartphones today.
It will unlock a layer of value upon the reality around us.

Today we already enjoy virtual worlds through reactive experiences like real-time games and more passive/observational experiences through film and animation.
These experiences allow us to transport to different worlds with their own unique storys.
Most of these experiences are isolated and there aren’t many examples currently of interoperability between them, however, they are important to the birth of an eventual metaverse that connects all things.

This post will talk about virtual worlds and the way they are made and distributed in the modern day. How the games industry plays the mother role and how the architecture for virtual worlds needs to be positioned correctly for an open, interoperable and persistent metaverse.

AR & VR

The metaverse as an experiential layer will be expressed through Augmented Reality [AR] and Virtual Reality [VR] experiences.
I would argue that most of it would be through AR and we will see a world where we combine the real and with the artificial, allowing for projections and visual mapping over the surfaces of the world that we know. Enhancing and providing a layer of information for everything from helping workers with daily tasks, providing entertainment through casted augmented characters in one’s own house or allowing artists to project their works over otherwise boring and lifeless buildings and areas of nothingness.

The field of AR like VR has been slow but it has had a few breakthrough moments. Pokemon GO and filters pioneered by Snapchat pushed the medium massively. The next big unlock will come from a universal and widely accepted piece of hardware that hits the notes of what the iPhone did for smartphones. Today we are still looking at Apple and their long-awaited Glasses as a potential catalyst.

Virtual reality is a replacement medium and is a method of complete transportation to virtual worlds. Immersion is key as it allows the participant to completely leave the real world behind. VR will lead the way for certain games, reactive films and storytelling experiences.
It will add an immersion layer to almost all forms of entertainment that we know today. I think that many will end up gravitating toward this medium in the future as one of the most effective ways to experience various forms of the arts.

I remain unsure of whether VR will be the primary medium of the metaverse as the barrier for entry is much more challenging for the average participant and there remains a slight disconnection to reality over prolonged use. But all it could take is a culturally accepted move towards VR or even a breakthrough in tech that would break down these barriers. I have used Ready Player One before as an example, but the Oasis as a world replacement social hub and almost Second Life experience would be enough to push this medium to primary.

GAME ENGINES

Design for virtual worlds currently requires systems of creators, programmers, animators and engineers to work in harmony. Game design in the modern day is the early forms and example cases for how the metaverse will be built.

Engines like Unity and Unreal are at the capacity to develop effective virtual experiences and have been for a while. Gaming has been a medium that has slowly made its way to a cultural powerhouse as of 2022 and in my opinion, is one of the most beautiful mediums of art in the world today. These engines are also being more commonly used as a way of crafting sets for films.

Game engines are experiential reality creators. They contain the framework to build everything from realistic environments to effective AI & physics calculations and do so in an all-in-one solution. They are incredibly powerful.
Hopefully not to be deployed as an inconceivable illusion like in the film The Matrix.

All of this was pioneered by the gaming industry and the culture that followed. From the early 2D games like pong in the 70s through to games like DOOM, these evolutions over time set standards for the game creation pipeline and has led us to the point where we’re at now.
Game engines will allow creators and engineers to birth the reality around us with the metaverse.

ARCHITECTURE

In this section, I will talk about the creation of worlds and the effective distribution of them as experiences known today. The architecture of distributing experiences cannot be applied to the methods of AR, which require a different toolset and methods of application. Instead, this section talks only about the matter of real-time applications.

Distribution

The most favoured method of releasing an experience has always been to simply ship a .exe via discs or make it available through online downloads through Steam or the XBOX and Playstation stores.

With the advent of web3, this is simply not the case moving forward. The dangers of making an audience download a .exe file in the web3 world today with the legions of scams and hacks is nigh near impossible to ask. Instead, a safer solution is needed.

While this doesn’t echo the wider market and the fact that central entities may dominate market share in years to come and allow for the normalised and integrated marketplace/download option to remain. A standard may be set in the web3 movement via a number of methods, which may shift the model away from what is known.

Webplayers and HTML

A popular method in the youth of the web3 movement. Most early metaverse protocols and experiences on offer use these methods. Using the WebGL and OpenGL (via hardware-accelerated rendering) standards with HTML. With this route, you can display basic but interactive games and social experiences in a way that doesn’t compromise the user via downloading any content, it’s accessible entirely via a webpage.

Some of these include Decentraland, Sandbox, Somnium Space and Cryptovoxels.

There are limits to this option. Without real use of a GPU through DirectX and HLSL (High-level shading language) creators are limited to the number of resources they can use to make the game come to life. This is predominantly a concern for graphics, but complex interactions can also be limited when the game is already under load.

HTML5 seemed to be incredibly promising in providing more resources to web player-based experiences. There are still limitations like with its previous generations, including memory requirements and downloads. The future seemed bright for this tech but in a swift move, Unreal discontinued HTML5 packaging support in 4.24 to give full attention and development to Pixel Streaming as a prefered and future-proof distribution method (More on PS in the next chapter)

A web player solution will never provide the experience that completes what we can imagine being the metaverse, but it serves as a great distribution tool for the early concepts of a decentralized internet.

Pixel Streaming

A young but incredibly promising technology. Similar to how you would think your movies and videos are streaming over the internet to your device from a Netflix server. Pixel Streaming is a method that allows the game to be rendered on the cloud and streamed directly to any device. The connection isn’t one way, however, as with a movie streaming solution you only need to download, with games and interactive experience there is input and output. Player inputs via direction keys, interaction buttons and movement inputs. In return, the cloud machine feeds this into the running application and returns the download stream. This is a continuous cycle, a continual conversation with the cloud computer.

Because everything is rendered in a virtual computer on the cloud, the only bottleneck to the experience is the participant’s internet bandwidth. This is where things get interesting.
The virtual computer is often much more powerful than most people’s home equipment whether that’s a phone, a desktop PC they bought 4 years ago or a mac. None of these has the necessary ability to run the most recent AAA games with raytracing and high fidelity realism.
Most specialized virtual computers can handle these loads, as long as the user has a good internet connection, they can enjoy the experience from anywhere.

Pixel Streaming is the distribution method I am running with for
THE CORE virtual world.

While we have a lot to discover and find out about just how powerful processing units become. It might and probably one day be a none issue and the ARM processing units in 10 years time, that fit into those AR glasses or wireless VR headsets are all that we need to run a reality similar in fidelity to what we know in the real world.
I could imagine a solution appearing in the meantime in which modern networking infrastructure improves greatly and with the advent of 5G, most experiential solutions could be streaming to a headset of choice without any issues of running a high-end game today.

A LANGUAGE FOR ALL

Currently, the metaverse as a concept lacks the required architecture today to be constructed. The building blocks of this new world still has some way to go in fact.

I once read a tweet from Tim Sweeney (CEO Epic Games) that stuck with me and got me thinking. It said something along the lines of ‘The language of the metaverse has not been invented yet.’ (I couldn’t find the actual quote.)

The next frontier of the web as we know would need a universal coding language for optimal interoperability and persistence. On the web today, all of its front-facing sites, programs and applications are written in numerous programming languages making it a difficult task to achieve a compatible all-in-one social virtual space.
There is no standard for separate entities to abide too.

Most languages can’t talk to each other directly.
There are too many walls and workarounds to achieve a high bandwidth cross-communication between applications that is needed.

Whatever the metaverse ‘will be’, just like the web today there will be a huge range of applications covering many different operations and needs. Hence, there needs to be a language that compiles all of these requirements into one universal solution that can be used to build the medium out.

Very similar to languages, there is a huge interoperability issue between real-time applications today. Something the NFT world today doesn’t understand is that a particular asset needs to be redesigned for almost every individual application that they are implemented in. If you own say a sword via an NFT or simply through a traditional MMORPG asset database, to use that sword in another game the developers of that game will need to create this asset to the guidelines of their own production template. You can’t have a COD weapon in a mobile or VR game, budgets and processing power doesn’t allow it. Due to the diverse specifications of hardware and languages in the world today, it creates an incredibly difficult environment for interoperability.

Moving forward, unless the desired universal programming language is implemented or open-source hardware unit standards are made. There will have to be a hard priority between every major party that is focused on building to establish thorough pipelines and standards for everything ranging from digital assets, virtual world resource requirements and cross-language communication.

DISTRIBUTED GAME ENGINES/CLIENTS, SERVERS & NETWORKING

In a traditional multiplayer game today, we use a basic client and server partnership. The client on the participant’s machine does the rendering and input & output. The server calculates all connected clients and determines the world state i.e. where projectiles are flying, if that body really got hit, is the building occupied in a king of the hill game mode?

This has been the optimal way of doing things basically from the beginning of multiplayer gaming. It is effective and streamlined, but it is limited. It is limited because there is a central entity. This central server calculates everything, it can only do so much before the calculations surpass its resources. This is why you can only have certain-sized maps with certain-sized teams and certain caps on AI and event processing. Similar to the issues of mobile games having limited resources as discussed previously, with this example because there are so many factors to consider in the server processing, there are limits set on nearly all areas of a game and this ends up having a knock-on effect that generally makes all areas of a game lean conservative in building approach.

Distributed systems like Improbable’s M2 may provide a solution to this issue. They use a novel distributed worker system that dynamically scales. Breaking it down, a worker can be a player’s client (game on PC) or the physics engine, AI node or logic node. It is customizable so even the games weather system can be calculated entirely by a worker. This system can run workers that range from a few to hundreds if not thousands. With the information now flowing between many points instead of one, you have more bandwidth and the ability to process more information and faster. This architecture is incredibly important to unlocking 3D virtual spaces with participants in the millions/billions.

While there is still so much more to figure out in networking architecture to support virtual worlds with participants covering most of the world’s population. The standards seem to be aligning with scalability and flexibility in mind to meet the needs of what the metaverse ‘will be’.

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

We are well on the way to achieving the grand visions set by pioneers of the XR movements and novelists as early as the 1970s. While there is still so much more work to be done, there has been an incredible amount of progress in the fields of gaming, graphics engineering, web3, the cloud and infrastructure. Putting the goal in our grasp.

One thing I would like to see is more collaboration on setting standards between parties. We are already seeing this between some of the biggest companies in the world, forming metaverse interoperability alliances to work these issues out. There is also a web3 equivalent that focuses more on the open and decentralized equivalent. https://twitter.com/oma3dao

The biggest advancements will come from a direct address or collaborative work on a new open and language powerful enough to build a virtual world on top of our real one. As well as an open standard for hardware units in AR and VR headsets. If these are achieved, progress on the building of the metaverse will be accelerated vastly and would be accessible without centralized hardware gated control. It would be what the pioneers intended it to be, an open and free new world for all.

Reverence

When I started working with landscapes in my digital art, it was always about how I could best represent the natural world in the digital. I explored the use of height maps from satellites and topography datasets and converted them into dynamic and shifting sculptures through one of my earliest pieces of work mountain_landscapes.

Sometime after, this work gave way to form Future Landscapes.
A collection of work that takes that information and displays it in a binary and digitalised version of a real-world landscape with a long-time inspiration from photogrammetry and point cloud processes.
This work really tried to explore the conversion and what an environment meant in the age of the metaverse.

But something was missing in my approach to showing the beauty of the natural world. While most of my work explores the bridge between the real and the digital and what things may come to be like. I lacked a way to explore the raw beauty of what we already have. As a child and growing up into my 20s, I adored the natural world. A lot of my early art in games showed this, advocating for exterior and vegetation-heavy game environments rather than artificially built corridors and houses.

In my explorations of using landscapes as a medium, using Unreal Engine I was able to combine them with VFX to create colourful and organic abstract compositions that reflected certain moods, feelings and thoughts on the world that surrounds us.
After a few compositions came out of the engine, I knew that this could be a new body of work that focuses on landscapes with a slight siding to the natural.

And so the birth of the Reverence Collection.

I find through the natural world I achieve most of my grounding and clarity in life. It has always been an anchor for when times get tough and for when I needed inspiration. It is also a place where I do a lot of deep thinking and inherently a lot of my ideas and values correlate with it.

Reverence is born from deep curiosity and appreciation of what we know and these compositions hope to reflect and provide a grounding and reflection that I have experienced over the years to the observer.

The beauty in simplicity

An address on the use of point clouds and particle VFX in the digital arts.

My earliest experiments in digital art as an alternative method of expression came from point cloud and particle VFX aesthetics. From my work in game design, I always thought the objects I had scanned and implemented into a virtual environment used an interesting process and captured a shifting of what we would call matter or a tangible asset from the real to the digital. A shifting of dimensions or a change in reality.

To anyone that spends time in photogrammetry capture software, they are aware of the birthing of a digital asset from data ‘points’ from an array of reference; being a set of photos or video.
What interests me the most is this exact procedure. Creation.
I see these points as an abstraction or a foundational layer to the digital world, the games we play, the landscapes we walk on, the assets we hold. When you break it down, everything has data points, whether directly scanned or not. They can be vertex normals, vertices, all acting as foundational integrity to everything we map in digital space.

This inspired the collection ‘Future Landscapes’.
The creation of the foundational level of environments in digital worlds. Its purest and most abstract form, the 1s and 0s that the computer reads and writes. Points of integrity that provide collective structure.

In ways, it inspired a lot of my work before with my sculpture project ‘mountain_landscapes’ and short film ‘An Intangible World’. While both were not designed with the data point and foundational integrity thought in mind, they were created with mapping the digital realms in a simplistic and abstract form.
Both are incredibly important works from my years of research and development in game design, the metaverse and world analogy.

I really believe a point or a particle is truly a beautiful visual. On its own and as a collective, a point of light encapsulated by a void and with form in its structure. It depicts the notions of life/death, substance/void, yin and yang. A theme of contrast.

The shape can be manipulated, commonly though it is a circle and this in my mind is the one I speak of here, but due to the nature of a texture being squared in real-time applications, they can be stripped back to this and in the projects I work on data thought, this aesthetic fits beautifully, rather than harmonious circles creating structure they can be squared bytes and code.

An almost perfect representation of a whole and logic, something and nothing; an abstract for the digital worlds to come.

The Metaverse [initial thoughts]

As I write this, I’ve been working towards or been a part of the building of this new global frontier called the Metaverse for close to three years now.
I’ve worked on virtual world projects, VR experiences and games. I’ve been a part of the early NFT community as an artist, and a collector. Dabbled in smart contract development and invested in blockchain technology. I’ve worked on it commercially, as a part of a team, and at times on my own.

The more I think about this new paradigm the more it grips me. My entrance into the crypto and NFT space at the end of 2020 I think really opened my eyes to what was coming.

The potential of DAOs (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations) through proper governance and consensus, could have the means to replace some of the institutions and centralized forms of control we see today.

We will see player and community-driven micro-economies appear. Early versions of these exist - $WHALE and the play-to-earn game Axie Infinity ($AXS) are great case studies for how web3 will revolutionize the social-economical dynamics in the years to come.

Combining the potentials of these two together, you might expect the metaverse to be an open system. Ran entirely by communities with common and shared goals. If, of course, the first movers that onboard the mainstream are not walled systems from the likes of Facebook. Open decentralized worlds in VR and overlayed over normality through AR, with creator economies promoting incentivized engineering and creation, may well birth entirely new ways of living.

One thing I believe will occur is the realization and true potential of the gaming medium in the years to come. Already a behemoth of an industry overshadowing film and music, it is only getting bigger and more powerful. The Metaverse will be the gamification of reality, an extension of what we see in traditional gaming simulations today. Its roots and foundations are being built by the subcultures of the internet, gaming being a massive part of this. The creators of these new worlds will be level designers, game developers, and world builders.

It’s easy to see how much power resides in the gaming industry when you see the way things are heading. The very foundations of the metaverse will be developed with the tools used for game development. Game engines like Unreal, Unity and CryEngine are world creators. With incredible toolkits for environment design, character animation, AI and storytelling that will be used to develop experiences in VR and persistent visual spaces in AR. Bridging the gap between reality and immersive medium. Enhancement and experiential seclusion.
Saturation and interface improvement.

There are walls and indecision as of current, but they will eventually come. After all, it’s operating on outdated models that limit innovation and make player bases unhappy through DLC focus and corporate priorities. It’s a model begging for a shakeup. To give more control, ownership, and incentive to the player is the next step, and the shackles of venture capital funding will be eradicated by the simplicity of the economic freedom that DeFi presents, funding for innovation alas will be open to everyone.

The players will own their characters, skins and assets they would normally purchase separately, remaining in an uncontrollable walled database. Free to use in other applications, interoperable and of value to the wider metaverse ecosystem.

The Metaverse brings with it a chance to establish new ways of life and build a new system. It will revolutionize gaming, fashion, finance, and art (in many ways it already has). Give more power back to communities and people. Through DAOs it will realize true, open, and fair democratic processes.
It of course, like anything, comes with its own issues to confront. But these are challenges to embrace and I believe it can be done and done so in a brighter, collective orientated, and more considerate way.

Designing VR experiences in VR

A project I was working on towards the start of this year, just before the world was gripped by the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic was the first time I had used the methodology of virtual desktop set ups in order to create new content. This new tech allows for an individual to position themselves in a virtual working space, with a 360 degree display ability, enhancing productivity, focus and efficiency.

The software I was using was VR Toolbox: 360 Desktop (https://store.steampowered.com/app/488040/VR_Toolbox_360_Desktop/) along with a Steam Index headset.

The ability to have multiple virtual displays supplementing your main real world displays meant that I could do everything from referencing mood boards in the design phase, tracking performance data of an application and read articles when taking a small break from development. Even virtual conferencing and design feedback sessions felt a little more co-operative and present, in which the inhabitants of the virtual space although alone in their own space, shared sentiment of a connected idea.

Of all things however, the focus you receive from shutting yourself off from other visual distractions was one of the main positives for me. For an Artist, reaching flow states is desirable, the realm of effortless but precision free-flowing design, it’s where most of us go on to do our best work. With this set-up I almost definitely entered a lot more of these ‘phases’.

MY SET UP

My main display would contain the core elements which was Unreal Engine, supported by design software on my other main display - either Maya, Substance Suite or any other useful design elements. I would then supplement these with around five other display’s of other useful visual boards, story elements, data and articles. For some people this would not be ideal and it could potentially reverse and be more of a distraction than a sentiment to focus. That’s fine and I know we are all different, sometimes I would even reduce the supplementing displays at times, it’s highly customizable and that’s what makes it great.

I found this worked for me however and 2-3 hour sessions in the headset felt very productive.

THE FUTURE OF WORKING?

Using this tech and seeing it’s upsides and potentials, I couldn’t help but think the world was eventually going to adopt it in greater scale and that it could become a core component for any computer integrated task. In the early parts of lock-down, there was a lot of talk about it’s uses for the new remote working culture, connected working hubs in which people could navigate task’s in a shared space and not just mimic office culture but enhance it.

Some months later, Oculus and Facebook along with their focus on the second generation Quest Headset made Virtual Desktop streaming one of it’s highlights.

It will be interesting to see how this develop’s in the future.

I don’t think I’m one that would advocate a complete replacement of real world interaction, but small stints of focused work cycles is where I see this new tool coming in nicely.