I’ve always wanted to participate in a State of the Net, so it was cool to debut with a lightning talk on the policy implications of spatial computing. A time crunch and some presentation rust on my part led me to give the last third of the talk with blast processing enabled, so I wanted to share more thoughts and my deck.

A few takeaways:

1. The “metaverse” may have cratered on the tech hype cycle, but I remain far more bullish on spatial computing. It’s more than an Apple-fueled buzzword, but even if that’s all it was, devices that understand physical space portend value use cases that are more self-evident than NFT-backed t-shirts on legless avatars.
2. Spatial computing — and the underlying flood of spatial data it requires — raises major and under-appreciated policy questions. We are talking about technologies that will capture and understand physical space at a centimeter-accurate level in real-time 24/7. I see major privacy issues, but there are also big safety issues and property rights challenges.
3. Companies are not getting “photos” or “videos” of our environment as we would understand them, but that doesn’t mean this information cannot be incredibly revealing. Imagine a universe where everyone knows the placement and size of your furniture, whether you have a wheelchair or crib in your living room, or the precise layout of your bedroom or bathroom. Analyzing this environment could reveal all sorts of things. Furnishings could indicate whether you are rich or poor, and artwork could give away your religion.
4. Nuisance and trespassing lawsuits in the wake of Pokemon Go offer some idea of what we’re going to need at scale, and that includes time/manner/place restrictions, rights for homeowners, and robust complaint handling processes.

If interested in the subject, primers from Cathy Hackl and Avi Bar-Zeev are useful reading. My complete presentation as a PDF is accessible here and a more detailed white paper co-authored with the IAPP’s Cobun Zweifel-Keegan is available here.