“The future cannot be predicted, but futures can be invented.”
Dennis Gabor
SPACE is money.
What if, as we enter the post-digital age, time were no longer money?
What if it were space?
Not the dubious space of a virtual metaverse, but actual space?
Globalization, to resurrect a tired coinage, saw time and space converge as to be almost synonymous. All time was now. Everywhere was here. But as we see in the Twenty Twenties, reality is more nuanced. Location is still everything. Everywhere else is not here.
And if human beings have lived largely linear lives attempting to accelerate time in all things from transport and product development to instant gratification, how have they attempted spatial innovation?
As time disappears in a constant blur of speed, space still surrounds us. And most of it is dead space, empty air. Empty space is the world’s most abundant resource, and there are so many ways it can be utilized more imaginatively. This book is about four of those ways.
When I was a kid television was everything, and even cinema held sway. What kid was not entranced by the fizzing holograph of Princess Leia sizzling into being before our eyes in STAR WARS? Holography has been around at least as long as television, but unlike television it has not become a mass medium of communication.
Well, in the third decade of a new millennium that is about to change. For a number of critical reasons, spatial reality is about to actually be. Smartphones and goggles may be the immediate launch points for this spacious adventure, but be sure this is not about virtual reality per se.
Let’s not depart for the metaverse before we are done with the universe. And the universe is composed chiefly of empty space. You do not have to disappear into a pretend world to enjoy a better world. Augmented reality offers us a better clue here than virtual reality, because the latter is confined chiefly to the digital realm. Augmented reality, as the name implies, builds on the real world to take its effect.
A hologram may form part of an Augmented Reality approach, but the complete holography of spatial reality is still completely different. Imagine for a moment it is the year 1907 and you are watching the first feature-length movie on earth, THE GREAT TRAIN ROBBERY. For a change, a narrative action is continuously developed and audiences are enraptured beyond an initial few minutes. Now imagine a high-end spectacular film from this century such as AVATAR with all its special effects and consider the two movies in parallel. This is the difference between the state of holography yesterday and the near-future state it will soon reach. As we speak, we are rapidly approaching a world beyond VR and AR, a world I call the spatial realm where continuous narrative devices are deployed involving people, products, places and data to form a whole new mass medium.
It is a cliché to believe data is the new oil. Information is not the currency we exchange, not even actionable insight. The fuel the modern world runs on is human attention, plain and simple. Narrative is the kingmaker in the attention economy. Your narrative ability to connect one moment to the next – to earn and sustain audience attention – is key. Note that the word narrative and the word science actually have the same original meaning – to know. Science knows things through experiment, by a process of elimination. Narrative knows them through experience, by releasing feelings in other people.
There have been seven eras of human narrative to date, from poetry and drama to fiction, cinema, radio, television and the internet. The internet is still the dominant narrative mode in the world today – but it is no longer the emerging one. Note that as each new medium of narrative comes along, it literally sidelines the once-dominant one. Poetry, drama and fiction are not extinct but they are sidelines in the world’s obsessive focus on multi-media formats, audio and visual. Holography – a word that means “written fully or as a whole” – is about to become the eighth narrative medium of homo narrans.
“Your space can become a place – your location turn into a destination.”
Most of my life I’ve been attracted to scientific methods and the experimental approach. I’ve discovered things and invented things largely as a process of elimination. In the course of my career as an entrepreneur I’ve built and sold businesses connected with holography, whether involving people, products or places. But I’ve also discovered the narrative method beyond science that builds tribes and communities. It’s actually easy to invent something. The hard part is inventing your audience. Products are easy in fact. The difficult part of products is bringing them to meet your market and succeeding.
In fact, if you think about the difficult part of anything it involves attention. Most human performers, manufactured goods, cultural spaces or data sets fail not in themselves but for lack of an audience. Notice how, in English at least, we pay attention because literally that is the currency. The media, and social media in particular, have grown expert at stealing our attention through millions of lurid headlines and interruptive pop-ups – the thousand micro-thefts each day is made of. But earning my attention so I voluntarily pay it is something else entirely. And for me to keep paying attention, you must keep earning.
So far in history we’ve familiarized ourselves with holograms as special events, as stand-out incidents in otherwise 2D realities. Holograms catch our attention and focus our imagination for a while. But imagine for a moment a building which could dramatize its history through a series of holographic episodes, each triggered by tourists as they progressed along a yellow brick road inside the space. What if holograms were not only visual entities but aural ones, able to speak, listen and interact with us? What if human expertise – whether in education, medicine or sales – were widely available anywhere through the appearance of a human hologram? And what if the vast seas of unstructured and unused data we drown ourselves in every day were actually articulate and expressive as experiential holograms?
Motion photography revolutionized human communication at the close of the nineteenth century, and the twentieth gave us talkies, color, widescreen, wraparound sound and special effects. Cinema was compressed into television and streamed around the globe on every smartphone. A single invention evolved into a universal medium. The invention of the alphabet gave us written narrative in all its forms from poetry and drama to fiction and non-fiction. One enabling technology unlocks an Aladdin’s Cave of possibilities.
So it is with holograms and the spatial world. And why?
Because most everything fails. Most live speakers are not John F Kennedy or Martin Luther King. Most tourist destinations are not Paris or Venice. Most products are not the Ford Model T or the iPhone. And almost all data the world produces every day is ignored.
Most events are non-events. Most places are nowhere. In the words of Dorothy Parker, there is no there there. But empty space doesn’t have to be. The spatial realm promises to dramatize the empty stage, to entertain the empty retail shelf and to re-invigorate the empty venue. Your space can become a place – your location turn into a destination.
To define the spatial realm, it is the enrichment of real space through holographic people, products, places and data to become a highly immersive, interactive habitat. There are four grand stages in the development or evolution of the spatial realm and right now we exist between the first two. The first phase is the use of holograms as single entities or events in themselves. The hologram as display – an advertisement, a standalone memory. The next phase is the narrative turn, as storytelling informs groups of holograms and transforms single transactions into continuing relationships. In commerce, for instance, that means the focus shifts from the point of purchase to the entire customer journey from awareness to recycling. The narrative evolution of holography is about to emerge and it will happen very quickly given our current technological capabilities and devices.
The next phase after that involves participation – not just interaction but influence over the storylines and experiences themselves. The audience becomes an active playmaker. Once narrative holography has emerged, this next phase will also arrive very seamlessly – especially in fields such as education, healthcare, sales and tourism. The final and ultimate stage of holographic development is the creator stage – when the audience not only defines the narrative but creates it. This is the wish fulfilment of every audience that ever lived, of all the millennia of neural mirroring in every reader, watcher and listener. We ultimately do not desire to identify with heroes but become them.
Corporate bodies who have portrayed themselves as the protagonist in media over the decades have always failed at the box office for precisely this reason. Brands such as Apple that have understood their role in platforming the user’s identity have always succeeded wildly. Immersive holography will deliver a whole new spatial realm here.
“Time and space are not conditions of existence, time and space is a model for thinking.”
Albert Einstein
So I have written The Spatial Realm to invite you on an adventure. Like Scheherazade and her Thousand and One Nights, I sense an incredible odyssey in the making. Whether your interest lies in people, in products, in places or in data I hope to share my vision of a completely integrated and harmonized world where everything is written in full or as a whole. My venture MoonShot was created to leverage this magic carpet across publishing, studio creation and venture capital investment. Because digital to me is now the Old Economy, the challengers have become the incumbents double quick. The new economy or household is the real human world, enhanced.
The real metaverse is here and now, you needn’t pretend or escape. Goggles or glasses may act as the entry point, but not to take you away from here. Instead of elsewhere you’ll be really here, unlike ever before. You’ll be listening to a magical presence sharing their knowledge and wisdom, a miraculous speaker who can appear simultaneously across audiences. You’ll be trying out your new furniture holographically, able to ‘test drive’ that new sofa long before it arrives in physical reality. Spatial reality will not trump physical reality – it will prepare it. When you travel, the two hours you get to experience the Louvre or any grand factory of culture will come alive in experiential immersion better than any cinema event. Instead of zoning out as you try to digest reams of facts and figures, your data report will literally report any decision support back to you.
And these four component features of the spatial realm will not be distinct from each other. Human holograms can introduce product holograms, products and places can interact, data can merge with any element in the ecosystem. Imagine for a moment a retail space that outdid any online experience for its daring fusion of holography and real-world location. Imagine a cinema experience which was not only communal but immersive unlike any flat-screen visual performance.
The spatial realm returns us to the real world, brings us back from the distant horizon of virtual reality and its digital simulacra. It builds on augmented reality to create an entire spatial context around your audience. In the twenty-first century, metaphysics overtakes physics and the ideas of things become more valuable than their physicality. Holograms communicate the essential ideas of things before physics. Not only can a hologram captivate the attention of a would-be client, long before that it can inspire the imagination of the engineers who must build the thing in the first place. Holograms represent a complete language in themselves and progress beyond mere visual or auditory communication into intuitive immersion.
Space is money. But most space is a waste of money.
When a band are unable to perform through injury that is a waste of money. When your product is unavailable on the shelf, the space is wasted. When the museum is too big to navigate comfortably, the collections are a waste of space. When you have too much data to decide on, all of it goes to waste. The essence of value is focus.
Not your focus – theirs. What your audience focus their attention on, for how long, determines your destiny. Simply piling the gear up in miles of shelving is no answer. Imagine a world where individual attention spans were no longer taken for granted but honored. Where a guest or a visitor felt recognized and acknowledged by your space. Where a consumer felt remembered. Where a tourist felt delighted. The currency of holography, like the human economy, is attention.
In order to imagine real presence you must understand real absence. Most of your audience does not exist in the space you’re now in. Hell, most of your audience may not even be born yet – and for a performer that is a critical dilemma. Nothing destroys attention like absence. Unavailability of a product is real absence. They buy others instead. Product returns – a colossal issue in the digital marketplace – is real absence because purchases did not stick. All those returns – literally trillions in worth – tarnish the claims of online commerce and damage the environment no end. The consumer experimented with presence – and chose absence. Because there was no other way of imagining it.
Absence is when your star performer is too old or too incapacitated to perform in person – and you will never get to experience their shows. Absence is when you get to the Colosseum in Rome and the heap of bricks along with the crowds of lookalike modern tourists ruin your trip. You physically went there and still cannot imagine the reality. Absence is when you read the latest market report and your mind is a blur half an hour later, because the process of memory was a DIY job.
A century and a half ago a German sociologist called Hermann Ebbinghaus defined a Forgetfulness Curve to demonstrate this dilemma. The bulk of everything we learn about is lost instantly. The human being is a forgetful creature because Random Access Memory is precious. Facts we forget about, stories we remember. Holograms can convert absence into presence, knowledge into imagination.
In the book that follows, I want to explore the spatial realm in each of its fascinating components, starting with people. Human holograms are the ones we are most familiar with, and they have started with the celebrity level. But just as automobiles and telephones did not remain the prerogative of the rich and famous, these will become pervasive. Product holograms are also being experimented with currently, and again they will quickly become established as presales ambassadors. Entire places such as buildings or city quarters have not been dramatized as yet through holography, but for cultural, educational and healthcare habitats that is merely a question of when, not if. And the world of holographic data sets may seem space age-y to us today, especially as the nascent industry of data science emerges into being. But what lies beyond data visualization is data immersion and the intuitive performance of data sets as interactive holographic presence. Individual corporations and institutions will prefer one or the other component to start with, but pretty soon the advantages of all four elements in concert will become obvious. Spatial reality will provide us with the compelling logic to look beyond our smart screens and reconnect with the real world which has always surrounded us. Our young will see a reason to become involved in that real world again. Virtual gaming loses its allure when the world itself adopts gaming.
The word meta means beyond, of course. But maybe we are not finished with here yet. Maybe this universe is more of a multiverse. Time is money, but space can be money too. The spatial realm operates differently to the temporal realm of so much commercial activity to date. Spending time in a certain space is the golden key.
Dear reader, what is your certain space? Is it yourself, on a stage? Is it your team in a venue? Your products on a shelf or at an industrial fair? Is your space a building, a museum, a cinema or a tourist destination? Or is it a vast sea of structured but unknowable data? Whatever your empty or absent space right now is, reinvent and re-imagine it with spatial reality. Think of your space as a narrative event from your audience point of view. Weave episodic content around the spatial experience you would like to immerse your audience in. See your objective not as your performance but their experience. Narrate your talent, your product, place or data as a story. Don’t send a message, share a story. Don’t tell, show – and immerse.
Holograms are about to escape the confines of science fiction and glitzy advertising to become everyday immersive events. When their usage pervades our society they will be expected – just like websites. The first modern holograms are already in evidence in star appearances – Elvis may have left the building but has re-entered it. Before this new mass medium takes off like television or the internet, ask yourself – what have I to lose or gain here? What has our business to do with this technology? Most of all, how can we re-imagine the empty space that surrounds us to entertain, instruct and inspire? When the hologram is mobile, everywhere becomes a stage. One of the earliest forms of presentation was the Greek theatre – literally the theatron or place of seeing. Now, a generation after the introduction of the smartphone we have a new theatrical opportunity open to all. Do not confuse this with the metaverse because this is the real world, renewed. This is no digital escapism – this is cyber-physical fusion.
Space is money. And it’s your money.
“What is now proved was once only imagined.”
William Blake