 So the recording will be up on the website and possibly on YouTube channels. I'm going to start my video. And before anything else, let me say welcome to the identity working group. And this is the first meeting we have had since April. Due to difficulties in getting presenters and getting the whole thing moving. So before we start, we have two items. One is, of course, the antitrust policy of the Linux Foundation. We followed that antitrust policy and please read the details in the meeting page. The other item is the DCI pledge, which is basically all our welcome. Not only are all welcome, but we request that you be, you know, not disagreeable to people when you even when you disagree. Good debate opposing viewpoints are welcome, but not screeching and shouting and cursing or even denigrating people. So with that, I'm going to start my presentation. It has been a interesting journey to say the least to research this topic. And I'm also suggesting something at the end, which may or may not be the solution for getting out of these problems that we are in with respect to the metaverse. So I'm going to start the presentation. Sharing the screen soon. Okay. I'm trying to find out. Okay, here it is. To share the screen. Can you all see my screen. Yep. Yes. Thanks. That must be crazy. So first we start off with discussion or a description or let's say an overview of the metaverse itself. And then figure out why identity is one of the most important foundational constructs in this in the metaverse. So we know where we are. I've taken out the agenda because I'm kind of doing it in a very sort of ad hoc way. So if you think that metaverse was invented yesterday or was invented by Zuckerberg, you would be wrong, obviously. It goes all the way back to the statistical machine, which is similar to the concept of, you know, compressing information in a micro dot, which is what Samuel Goldberg invented. And then using a machine to search the, the information contained in the micro dot, which can be thought of today's internet and search engines. Then came Vannevar Bush, who so Samuel Goldberg is probably early 30s 1930s. Vannevar Bush is slightly later, and his concept of the memex, which everybody has heard about, which is basically a way to organize information and to search it. But these were all done before computers were even invented. So they employ analog methods. So when we come to Jean Baudrillard, who came up with the concept of hyper-reality, then Jean-Luc Godard's Alphaville is an interesting movie, which has, which basically shines the light on the metaverse as a bad place, meaning it is a dystopia. And so it are all of the literary creations that are in five and six and you, and arguably you can say seven as well. Of course, many of us are gamers. I am not one for the very simple reason that I exhausted my gaming. It's a urge very early in my career, where I played some first person shooter games back in the 80s for weeks on end. And then I said, I'm never going to do this again. Maybe the games are much better and much more, much richer, more with more things to do, but the real world is very interesting to me. So that's why I refrain from gaming too much. I mean, not even a little bit, really. So coming back to the dystopia, which obviously is the opposite of utopia where the metaverse basically is a bad construct. But I did read metaverse and how it will revolutionize everything by by Matthew Ball, which is of course, you know, talks about the metaverse as a something that has to happen soon. And will bring in lots of goodies, lots of productivity and everything else. But of course, it is focused highly on gaming. The last item here is Planet Labs. Planet Labs is a diner is a imaging company that has around 200 satellites. Which are this, which are less than 10 or 15 kilograms each launched by ISRO, which is an Indian space research organization and also by SpaceX. They map everything on the Earth's surface multiple times a day. So it's a dynamic data set. And there is a publicly available component of it. And I want to highlight that because if you want if you want the metaverse to become a reality, then we need more public benefit corporations like Planet Labs. You can join Planet Labs and download data from them. And of course, most of the data today is being used for things like climate change. You know, trying to trying to look at climate change trying to look at forest fires trying to look at various other global phenomena. You can actually get the data set, like I said. So this is a definition of the metaverse from 2013. Before mobile became ubiquitous. Before the invention. Well, maybe not the invention but HoloLens and the Facebook, you know, VR headset. It has the basic components of what is needed for the metaverse. It's a mechanism which needs to is needed to cause psychological and emotional emotion. It can be low fidelity because things like Minecraft, games like Minecraft or even Roblox have very low fidelity, but people can still get psychologically and emotionally. Immersed in that. The other feature is ubiquity. There are two types of ubiquity. One is, of course, the fact that you can accessible. You can access the metaverse from any existing digital device but later on Matthew ball claims that only 3D virtual reality will suffice. Ubiquity. Through the use of virtual identities. I mean the virtual identities remain intact. So ubiquity is two types. One is, of course, that whenever you enter the game or enter any portion of the metaverse, then it's as if, you know, your state is preserved. If your avatar is wearing certain clothes or you have certain badges, then they will resurrect and be available to you. The other is accessibility. Of course, accessibility is a tough, tougher thing because you need some kind of a device as opposed to the real world where you do not need any device. You're already in it. Well, you need perception. You need a virtual auditory touch perception. But most people have it. There are some people who are deprived of one or more of those sensors for them. The world is still the world. The third item interoperability is shown as a separate item. It will feed ubiquity and make it possible for the collective persona and the virtual identity to cross boundaries. That means go from game to game or from world to world without having to do too much to bring your assets with you or your persona or your specific, you know, avatar. And scalability, of course, it implies that you have to be able to be present in these worlds along with an unlimited number of people. And the game should not game or the world should not suffer. There are high bars. Which implies that there is no metaverse, the metaverse doesn't exist today. Okay. There are a whole bunch of definitions from the World Economic Forum, which has its own sort of a working group, which you can link to from this WEF. You know, it's a hyperlink. The EU has published a paper, but what seems to be constant is the persistence, interconnection and immersion. And now we see more of the virtual 3D world as being necessary. So, not to ball, of course, creates more characteristics, which are something like to be experienced synchronously, obviously for any world to mirror reality. It has to be experienced synchronously, meaning there can't be too much lag between your action and the result of your action in such a world. But what is interesting is, and the continuity of data such as identity, history, entitlements, objects, communications and payments. But what is not mentioned here is the fact that identity is what drives all of that other stuff. In fact, identity is what drives interoperability, ubiquity, and I already mentioned these. So, another way of looking at it is that by negating, which is of course my comment there on top, Neti Neti is a reference to a dueta where the Atman, the universal soul, is not, you know, there is a method of inquiry by which you approach it by denying, by negating what it's not, what it is, right? So, in that same spirit, Mateo Bala said that it's not a virtual world, it's not a virtual space, it's not virtual reality, it is not a digital and virtual economy. It is not a game, it is not a virtual theme park or Disneyland. It is not a new app store, and it's not a new UGC platform. User generated content, which means you're not only paying the game, the host of the game, but you also get paid if your content becomes popular. Thank you, Trendy. And so there are two visions of this, which is, you know, augmented reality, which is obviously like a Google Glass or like a HoloLens, you're looking at the real world, but something is overlaid on top of it, which gives you much more information. So in a certain sense, it is the real world viewed through certain type of glasses. And I'm sure that there are ways in which you can disappear entirely into a virtual world where, you know, the virtual reality world of Facebook, Facebook's main acquisition of which basically blinds you to the real world. You're strapped in and you cannot interact with the real world. Of course, there are hybrids. Matthew Baldwin does say that it has to be virtual reality, not just augmented reality to cause the metaverse. And notice that Gartner has come up with this whole slew of things that are the elements of a metaverse of a metaverse, right? But if you look at the elements, digital currency, marketing, digital commerce, non-fungible token, infrastructure, that sounds like a cop-out. I mean, it's, you know, infrastructure is just one of those words which can be used in any context. Device independence, gaming, digital assets, social and entertainment events, online shopping, workplace, social media, digital humans, NLP. But if you look at it, most of these items require some notion of identity. Some of them are stronger notions of identity than others. Yeah, Bobby, I'm going to come to that where I'm going to talk about all the different so-called meta futures that are waiting for us. So this is just Gartner's view. And I only took it because it seemed like an enumeration of all the things that we have just seen right here. So this is, of course, contains the first element which is, sorry, I have to go back. These are the, we are taking baby steps in these areas. Education where virtual classrooms which have been such a nasty thing during the pandemic, using Zoom, where interaction between the participants is very limited. Of course, limited to chat, limited to not a presence, you know, rich environment. So education has also gone up in cost by huge amounts. If you're talking about inflation, education has been inflated by around 1200% since probably the early 2010s. Medicine is another category, healthcare that has inflated. So in order to bring costs under control, people have started using things like telemedicine. And AEC, architecture, engineering and construction is another area because you can do simulations of actual, of the buildings and then use the feedback of people's experience or the actual fact of being exposed to the real world. In a sense, if you take Planet Labs data and start modeling extreme events in the past, how will it affect the proposed construction. The other is real estate, meaning selling real estate. You can actually place the buyer, I mean the seller into the, I mean, sorry, the buyer into the actual building and have them walk around. These are all available today, but very small steps. Industry, of course, when we talk about industry, we're talking about construction of factories, you know, and, or even items like modeling and air. Well, creating a virtual model of an airport, I think the Hong Kong airport has created one where you can walk around and experience the airport as it is at that time. In addition, the logistical constructs like for example, whether you can pull up with a truck to unload, to ship your goods, and so on, can also be looked at in this virtual airport. The other is of course lifestyle, which includes exercise. Peloton has some limited virtual reality where you're led in your exercise by a avatar of an instructor, and you're participating along with hundreds of other people who are doing the same, same exercise everywhere. Dating, dating sites, of course, and also experiences like, you know, you can go have a date in Paris on the banks of the Seine, or something like that. Weddings, of course, have already taken place in the metaverse, and sex work, which nobody wants to talk about, but which will get a lot of attention in the metaverse, especially if it includes feedback, haptic feedback, and so on. Entertainment, including sports, gambling, and events of all kinds, like concerts, presentations, fashion, of course, that allows you to wear the clothes you're about to buy on your avatar, and if your avatar is a pretty good representation of your body and so on, then you'll be able to see how you look in it. Advertising, of course, and governance, which is a strange thing to put in here, but this is by no means an exhaustive list. Governance, strangely enough, some of these, I think a parliament, the Turkish parliament is going to create a virtual space where the legislators can come together. Of course, it will have presence, more presence than it's today, and they claim it's going to happen in 2023, and the South Koreans have a metaverse initiative with more than 400 companies in it, and they're also talking about creating ways in which there can be meetings of companies, virtual meetings, and so on. So we have been talking about the metaverse versus a metaverse. If you noticed, the Gartner thinks said a metaverse. According to Bol, according to many others, according to even the 2013 paper, we're going to have the metaverse, which is similar to the internet. We don't talk about internet, we don't talk about, we probably talk about internet, multiple internets getting connected or smaller networks being connected, but it is never called the internet. Similarly, the metaverse is going to be not just confined to one thing, but includes everything that's out there. This is only possible, of course, if true interoperability has arrived and encompasses all possible virtual worlds with seamless transitions. There is a lack of a metaverse protocol. There are some limited protocols to do data transfer across multiple worlds. This is based on standards and, of course, derived from Pixar's USD, Universal Scene Descriptor. The other standards that are going to be there and other rails that are going to make this possible is some form of transition of identity from one world to another, or transportation or interoperability of identity, which nobody really talks about. I mean, they do a lot of hand waving over. Of course, the early papers talk about what is there today, which is OpenID Connect. Not today, but in 2013, OpenID Connect, those kind of technologies that were popular. And even Matthew Ball's book does not go into that in detail, although he does say that the metaverse is not here yet, but he is very optimistic about it. He hardly ever mentions identity standards like SSI or the DID protocol or the DID standard, which has been accepted as a standard today. And it's very important that we see how the metaverses can become the metaverse only through proper identity standards because almost everything that they talk about controlling interoperability has to have some kind of a notion of identity across multiple silos. So today the identity in the real world, we know that it is interoperable to a certain extent, except when you interact with digital platforms, it's still kind of creepy. But when I interact with my neighbor, when I interact with the people in my neighborhood, where the physical embodiment is what identifies me in a certain way. But when I say identities and edge product protocol, it is not just a collection of attributes, it's a collection of relationships with various organizations. But maybe the physical embodiment is much more collection of attributes, but even there, they keep changing. Some of them keep changing. Not all of them. And some of them are invariant. And that's what, you know, that's why we use some of them for bootstrapping our identity in a certain way. Genesis is about certificate, key documents, you know. So passport is a very interesting standard. There are passport standards, which allow you basically to go from country to country, which can be compared to the metaverses. The standards indicate what elements have to be in a passport and how they are to be presented. So it's basically a data interchange standard. And driver's license, similarly, as an international diverse license. Then we also rely on a whole bunch of identifiers. And of course, we have our own, the way we exist, like books, poetry, music, art or movies that we like, or that we produce the food that we cook or eat, the memorabilia that we strongly associate with ourselves, some special objects that we carry around with us sometimes. For example, I always, almost always wear a hat. You know, that is one of my extensions, right, my manifestation in the real world. It's not an avatar. So, what is needed to build the metaverse. And that is deliberate misspelling, of course. We have, according to Matthews book and other books, other literature. It is a, it's built on various things. For examples, for example, networks. Synchrony is not a feature of networks. In fact, the basic protocols are not synchronous at all. So just to insist on synchrony as a feature of the metaverse, you have to have a way to simulate synchrony. That means you cannot have too much latency in the interaction, which of course, implies sufficient bandwidth, especially if the worlds that we are viewing at the edge are rich. And then goes into the devices are different kinds of the primary device. Of course, is the 3D, you know, either the VR or the AR headset, you can also include mobile phones in it. I think secondary is everything that helps us to interact, including laptops, computers and so on. Tertiary is IOTs and other peripheral computing platforms, devices that we own, or devices that we have access to. Computing is a big thing because when you have bandwidth problems, the usual solution is to try to generate a lot of stuff on the edge instead of sending it all over. And then you have the apps versus browser situation. But I think those are all going to disappear with the arrival of the true metaverse. The virtual world engines, you know, that's the other part that's needed to build the metaverse. Then interoperability, when I say shades of what I mean is it is a spectrum. True interoperability is a holy grail, and we are always going towards it. And payment rails, of course, built on blockchain maybe. But today there are so many gatekeepers and they are going to be a real threat. Apple, for example, takes 30% of the cut. Steamworks takes 30 or 40%. I don't know where they came up with 30 or 40% of the cut, which is a lot. Which means that lesser amounts are available to the other participants who are actually building the stuff that goes into the metaverse. And of course the identity part I kept for last, but it's stuff that powers everything. I just put that in a stack here. This may not be the right approach, but I think this is what I've come up with. Where identity, of course, is what enables presence and what enables assets. Yes, Dan. Good stuff. And I see Jessica's online. Accenture is all in on this metaverse stuff. I call it meta curse, but when I probably metaverse, I say that it's a fancy user interface to enable access to one or more online applications. That's what I think of all this hype around the metaverse. It's a fancy user interface to access one or more online applications. So where does identity fit into that? Sure. Well, identity even today, when I go to access an online application, I use username and password. So I want to access one or more applications so I could do federated identity. I could use my Google identity to access one or more applications. Okay, throw a fancy user interface because I have an avatar, I have some virtual space. All right, fine. But that's identity to me. This is identity and access management on steroids. That's the metaverse to me in terms of identity. Okay, let me stop here because I'm going to go through what I have and you'll see that I, you'll see how I have suggested something. And then in the end there's a Q&A and you can, you know, you can raise these points. I take your point, but I don't agree with you. Right, because presence of multiple people in a world is not a fancy user interface. Multiple people and their actions affect me, my actions affect them. That, and in real time, that is not, I mean, yes, you can call it, everything is a user interface. Even my existence in this world can be called a user interface to the world. Without my perceptions, I'm lost. So in a sense, yes. But, you know, anyway, we'll go into that in a little more detail in the coming slides. So right now the identity part is supported by the imperatives of KYC and payments through certain platforms, which are used everywhere, like for example, Unreal, Unity, Helios, Teamworks, and virtual world platforms that are built on top of these. And they are attached to your assets, can be held by an intermediary. I don't know about that, but definitely Apple Store is a big block to the whole thing because of the 30%, which they, you know, they cannot be disintermediated. What they have is a cloud system with the iOS and App Store itself is a cloud system. There was a whole, slowly, you know, there was a whole court case against them by Epic Games. There was also, you know, lots of activity in the EU that is probably going to come after them for platform abuse. I mean, platform abuse is quite common because of the growth of mega growth of these platforms that have a lot of influence. And hence it becomes a total monopoly and you cannot get away from them. You know, the other one is Amazon. And the risk for identity in the metaverse is the same as in the real world. You can have an identity theft unwanted attention, predatory behavior, blocked identity. That means like, you know, I'm on Apple, Apple knows who I am, but they will not share it. Even with the consent, I think they block you from sharing too many things. Then the avatar integrity and identity of operator and controller sometimes is unknown. Like you're on some site and you don't know who's actually controlling this. So here comes the SSI and the metaverse where I am proposing that we could have the same three-legged stool, the holder, the verifier and the issuer. I haven't drawn the other part, which is I could have issuance in the non-metaverse world and then I can share those credentials with a smaller. So here M prime and M double prime are virtual worlds inside the metaverse. That's how I see it. And already the SSI stuff has already solved some of these problems, but I don't hear anybody in the metaverse world talking about this. Maybe because they're not familiar with this, maybe because they're all gamers and they come from, you know, a place where they bought stuff and they don't want to think about it too much. So here now we can talk about this properly. I hope you guys found it interesting at least. I mean, I'm sorry that I didn't go too much into the identity thing, but the main idea there was that identity without identity, the metaverse is not possible, basically. Right. Anyway, so if anybody else, Dan, if you want to continue your. No, thanks. Thanks a lot. It's fine. No, all I was going to say with, you know, I am where SSI comes in is, you know, you have your attributes within your wallet that you can selectively disclose in a secure, you know, fashion above and beyond the I am stuff, but I get your point that, you know, you, you know, and other differences the real time nature of your interactions affecting other people but again it's this. Yeah, it complicates it for sure but it's same basic your identity is still. Your identity attributes are still the basically the same, you know, once you're author, you know, authenticated and authorized for some activity or some access. Yeah, that's what remains the same in my mind. There is there is an additional additional problem in the metaverse which is basically, if you have an avatar. It is not just a, it's not just a presentation of a image, but it's a moving walking 3d figure. In addition, the avatar has all these accoutrements, you know, you could have, I mean, in the gaming situation, you get badges, you get all these other stuff. So, they are all sort of assets. So they can be present. They can be said to be data. And you can transport that data across multiple metaverses. And if it's possible, you know, I think there is going to be a lot of resistance against that because you don't want a fortnight is not going to want stuff from Roblox. You know, Minecraft is not going to take well to having stuff from fortnight, you know, those kind of things. But there is a whole spectrum of believability or presence. For me, you know, my, my, my son plays, used to play Minecraft and I could not get into that because the fidelity was very low, but he was accepting of it. And I can see why. So, even the so called presence of the, or the reality of whatever you're experiencing could be go all the way from lo-fi, you know, to very detailed renderings. And when you transport that across a couple of platforms, how do you deal with it? So what I want to ask, for example, Sandy, who's been in this, you know, he's in the media and entertainment scene and he leaves the subgroup dealing with gaming. So I wanted to ask him, is it just a fancy UI? Hey, thank you. So, you know, that's obviously a loaded question. Like you said, I think this, at the most basic level, yes, we can basically think about metaverse, whatever that shit, like, like, I'm in the same thing where like there's no definition, which can be 100% clear right now is something which is still evolving, nobody knows what shape is going to end up taking. But I do agree that it's generally speaking is the metaverse, not it's not like many metaverses. You know, whatever that shape that ends up taking. And generally speaking, the idea is that it's an ever presence virtual and augmented board. And it could be thought about as a really fancy application where you can have multiple, you know, basically literally like, like, in a way like an MMO or PG as we call them in gaming site because he massively multiple online role playing games. So that could be a manifestation, manifestation of that, or it could be like, like you said correctly, is is as much more levels levels of complexity because it's not just a simple game then it's actually multiple people in multiple communities interacting with each other, and everybody's actions having some sort of an impact somebody else, and also only involvement itself. The identity obviously is going to sit in the center of that because, you know, you take one ecosystem, and even if you take multiple virtual woods. You can actually have multiple avatars within different virtual woods. So then identity becomes even more complex because it could be just you, but playing two or 10 different people in the metaverse. So how do you tie all that together. That's where identity is going to become even much more complex. Yeah, I mean, I agree that, you know, I could be a tribal woman in one world. Another one could be, you know, as myself like the sort of representation of my own self like in the GitHub avatar. But anyway, looks like Bobby is putting a chat that Ledger Academy has several education based metaverses. I've been, I've been working with a private metaverse company that is again trying to be interoperable based on unity as the backbone. And it is for for me I set up different schools or different classes so I have one on in the blockchain arena, and I have Ledger Academy which does all the hyper ledger classes and just general information about blockchain. And they're open all the time, and these are different than the general metaverses although they're built on the same interoperable platform, they're just private and accessed with a code so like for instance if you want to go to the Ledger Academy you would have to go get the code off my website and then enter the metaverse that way. So instead of them being proximity next to another piece of property, it's purpose driven where you go directly in for that meeting that art show that class, or whatever your purpose is. Let me ask you a question. Suppose I get a certificate. Can I then take that certificate and go outside to another site, let's say, where there's a job fair, a virtual job fair. And can I present that certificate there. The technology is there yes so what would happen is most likely and again this is what I'm seeing the pattern is, is that you would earn a certificate and it would most likely be able to be shown up on your LinkedIn profile. But no matter where you go that certificate is part of and then if it's like in the NFT form it could be a certificate that sits in your wallet. Again, ID in the metaverse right now is wallet driven more than individual driven, like it doesn't matter who, you know what your your KYC it if you can attach to the wallet that has that avatar that piece of land or that you know clothing that you want to wear. You can use it if you can attach to that wallet. It's not accessible to you in the metaverse. Same thing with NFTs. If you have an NFT that's compatible with the metaverse, you have to access that wallet in the metaverse in order to play with that NFT or that avatar. Thank you. This is very, very helpful. Thank you. I mean, you know, it was kind of an educational journey for me. Although I am very familiar with a lot of the the plumbing. But it's when I raise my head above that and go slightly higher than I can see the landscape for what it is. It's extremely complicated. And definitely not there yet. You know, you know, in terms of the metaverse and the only way we're going to get there or get closer, let's say, is by adopting things like SSI, which can are no longer in the control of individual organizations and gatekeepers. So we choose what to put in the wallet issued by somebody who, you know, we interact with and we prove either our identity or some other aspect of our identity. Like I'm an expert in, you know, Malayalam language, I don't know, some, some other things that can then be transported and gain you admittance. So yeah, Alfonso has also put in a comment. And I think we're coming to the end of the session. We already passed one o'clock in New York. So I hope it was helpful. Hey, thanks. Thanks for a pen. Thanks very much was very helpful. Yep, thanks. Thank you, Dan, for bringing in your viewpoint. Yeah, yeah, no, I think we're gonna all be discussing this in depth quite often. You know, and yeah, interesting times we live in. Well, isn't that a Chinese curse. Yeah, you live in interesting times. You're right. You're right. Well, thankfully, we don't ascribe to that. So it's a good thing. Very good. All right. Thank you. Thank you. Bye bye. Bye bye.