This is a dream come true.   An immersive geospatial experience that brings gaming mechanics to real life applications.

I have been waiting for these technologies to collide for years.  In 2000 I worked with a team at Lockheed Martin to patent a solution that leveraged OGC (Open Geospatial Consortium) concepts as the foundation for a virtual battlespace awareness.   Now OGC is one of the primary driving forces behind Metaverse standards link.

Metaverse, and specifically Unity 3D development platform, is providing a bridge between the virtual space and reality.  This technology empowers application developers to rapidly create virtual worlds.  Meta and Apple are creating VR/AR tools to interact with these worlds.

Augmented Reality (AR) breakthroughs are now colliding with OGC data and the Metaverse.  Real geospatial imagery and derived feature sets are being integrated into this virtual space.  This integration is being heavily driven by AI technology.  The ability to ingest, interpret and synthesis geospatial data into virtual environments is the key.  

Wow,  I cannot believe I'm able to say this is actually happening.  

The last piece of the puzzle is finding ways to capture this information and make it available to the masses.   Well, that is where blockchain fits in.  Specifically, I'm talking about smart contract based technology like Ethereum.  Polygon just announced their partnership with Google to bring this technology at scale to the masses.

Smart contract blockchain technology can represent "Things" with immutable state and behavior.  These "Things" are stored in a decentralized and highly accessible manner with no central control.  The Metaverse comes alive when there are lots of "Things" to contextually view and interact with.  In today's world these "Things" are called Non-Fungible Tokens (NFT's).

The last piece of the puzzle is the taxonomy behind NFT's that link together these universes.  Schema.org and OGC in conjunction with Ethereum provide the most mature metadata standards to draw from.  To complete the picture industry needs to standardize on how we represent "Things".  This is sometimes referred to as the "Semantic Web".

Well, you have it.  These are the types of thoughts that keep an old man up at night.   We are at a juncture where the dream of immersive engagement is becoming reality.  I encourage everyone to embrace this disruption and find ways participate.  It will be a ride.