At LAMINA1, Neil Stephenson will target “helping get artists, and other value creators paid properly for their work, helping the environment […] and seeing a truly open Metaverse get built,” Peter Vessenes noted.
LAMINA1 to Focus on 2D Screens, Not Augmented Reality
Neil Stephenson, the author who came up with the term “metaverse” about 30 years ago, is launching a new metaverse-focused blockchain known as LAMINA1.
In addition, he has revised his vision for the Metaverse, indicating that the experiences will be focused on flat 2D screens. This means that it is taking a different approach from augmented reality or virtual reality tech through headsets and lenses, which are being proposed by Microsoft and Meta.
Stephenson is a fiction author who first brought about the idea of the Metaverse in 1992 in his science fiction novel known as Snow Crash. Away from writing, the 62-year-old served as a futurist for an augmented reality (A.R.) company known as Magic from 2014 to 2020.
In the Wednesday 8th May Announcement, which was made by Peter Vesseness, an O.G. crypto investor and former Bitcoin Foundation chairman, he has teamed with Stephenson to develop a layer-1 blockchain, LAMINA1, which will serve as the “base layer for Open Metaverse.”
“A place to build something a bit closer to Neal’s vision — one that privileges creators, technical and artistic, one that provides support, spatial computing tech, and a community to support those who are building out the Metaverse,” Vessenes wrote.
At the moment, the details of the project remain scarce, but Joseph Lubin, the Ethereum co-founder, made the following comment:
“Neal brings his vision, wisdom, experience, and some core goals: helping get artists and other value creators paid properly for their work, helping the environment […] and seeing a truly Open Metaverse get built instead of seeing the Metaverse vision co-opted by monopolies.”
Vessenes indicated he will be working hard to get the blockchain on its feet as fast as “the necessary governance, technology, node operators, I.P. partners, artists, business partners, and funds up and running.”
In the 1992 novel, Metaverse is an urban environment accessed through V.R. headsets and a worldwide network of fiber-optic. Some of the themes include constant ads, centralized control, and social inequalities. Real estate is also part of the fiction novel.
Stephenson indicated that he never espoused high-quality video games reaching consumers on a large scale in the future. “Thanks to games, billions of people are now comfortable navigating 3D environments on flat 2D screens. The U.I.s that they’ve mastered (e.g. WASD + mouse) are not what most science fiction writers would have predicted. But that’s how path dependency in tech works,” said Stephenson.
The respected author went ahead and indicated that modern game development is still centered on screens for developers and consumers. Therefore, he aims to adopt a hybrid model that covers both AR/VR and 2D screens, as opposed to V.R only.
