I am the co-founder and founding CTO of the company Red 6 Aerospace (founded 2018)— www.red6ar.com — while Epic/Facebook/Google/Microsoft/Snap might jockey for position in the quest to establish/define the boundaries of the future Metaverse we just went ahead and built it.
We created a unique new form of military training — allowing real soldiers/airmen/sailors to train against and alongside any number of virtual adversaries.
I called the overall system CARBON (Common Augmented Reality Battlespace Operational Network) –the core idea was to allow physical entities (for the sake of argument F22s and F35s) to simultaneously see a number of synthetic entities — in the same place, at the same time, with the same physics.
In other words — it’s a multi-player video game in the sky.
The building blocks are broadly the same as the Internet (clients, servers, APIs, cloud, wireless mesh networks, always on mobile computing units etc). The differentiator is NOT the output format (screen vs. VR vs AR headset)
It’s real-world impact — either Physical Impact or real-time datasets that influence decisions.
Neither VR nor AR are a requirement of this metaverse layer — they’re just an advanced version of it.
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Psychological issues of Ender’s game scenarios notwithstanding — the fusion of an outdoor AR environment with a massive multi-player online gaming environment involving real-time datasets and real-world impact is a vital stepping stone to a useful Metaverse.