Geospatial and the Metaverse

Announcer:

Today on Building the Open Metaverse...

Nadine Alameh:

It's been interesting observing this generation. And as soon as I started to see what these guys are doing with their online environments... And note, I said, online environments, not online games, it's truly online environments. I started to actually complain why us adults, professionals were using Zoom and Google Docs and PowerPoints to collaborate when I see my kids having almost real life interactive experiences with their friends online in worlds that they build. So my journey to the metaverse, you said, Patrick, I think it's like Rome. All roads lead to Rome, all roads lead to the metaverse.

Speaker 1:

Welcome to Building the Open Metaverse, where technology experts discuss how the community is building the open metaverse together. Hosted by Patrick Cozzi from Cesium and Marc Petit from Epic Games.

Marc Petit:

Hello, and welcome to our show, Building the Open Metaverse. the podcast where technologists share their insights on how the community is building the metaverse together. Today, our guest is Nadine Alameh, the CEO of the Open Geospatial Consortium. Nadine, welcome to the podcast.

Nadine Alameh:

Thank you, Marc, for having me.

Marc Petit:

And of course I'm with my co-host, Patrick Cozzi. Patrick, how are you?

Patrick Cozzi:

Doing great, Marc. So, Nadine, it's an honor to have you on the podcast today. I'm a big fan of your work and the work of the OGC community. To kick things off, we would love to hear a bit about your personal journey to the metaverse.

Nadine Alameh:

I'm very happy to be here, Patrick. I'm a fan back at you and I think everybody knows that.

Patrick Cozzi:

Why, thank you.

Nadine Alameh:

So the journey to the metaverse, I have to say, I had to listen to the previous three podcasts that you recorded to get a hint of exactly what is the metaverse and when we talk about a journey, it is like, are we there yet? Where are we on this journey? So that's a difficult question. But philosophy aside, I may not know exactly what the metaverse is, but I do know that it has to do with this virtual platform, some sort of shared virtual platform, fully immersive platform, that looks like the real world, that we can access in different ways. And that there's this concept of crossing between the virtual and the real world, the physical world. And I also know that the metaverse is becoming reality because, well, my kids talk about it all the time. We've seen Facebook, so it's really now mass market.

Nadine Alameh:

But also as a professional, I know we've got advanced mapping, advanced 3D computing. We have the AR, the VR, the simulation capabilities. So from that context, if all of this stuff is the metaverse, my journey is actually from two different places that converge. One of them is the geospatial angle. So Marc mentioned the Open Geospatial Consortium and I'll tell you more about it later, but from the geospatial angle, having been in geospatial since I stumbled upon geospatial by luck, really, when I got selected to go to MIT to study GIS. So it wasn't a deliberate decision, but in many ways, I think now that this metaverse... For those of you listening, I'm doing my quote unquote with my fingers, this metaverse that we're talking about, isn't it the realization of everything we've been working on for the longest time? So it's almost like the journey is happening on its own. So that's one.

Nadine Alameh:

The other angle is my kids, my two boys. So ages 9 and 14. Poor guys, I bring them up in every one of my talks, but they're part of my life, especially in the pandemic because we lived, we actually lived together day and night. It's been interesting observing this generation. And as soon as I started to see what these guys are doing with their online environments and... Note, I said online environments, not online games. It's truly online environments. I started to actually complain why us adults, professionals were using Zoom and Google Docs and PowerPoints to collaborate when I see my kids having almost real life interactive experiences with their friends online in worlds that they build. So my journey to the metaverse, as you said Patrick, I think it's like Rome. All roads lead to Rome. All roads lead to the metaverse. So here I am. I don't know.

Patrick Cozzi:

I like that. I like that.

Marc Petit:

Okay. So tell us a little bit about OGC. OGC is about standards. What do you think are the standards that are currently managed by your consortium that are the most relevant for the metaverse, those virtual worlds?

Nadine Alameh:

So this is a multi-layered question. And I speak in layers and in zoom levels because we're geospatial, we're mapping people because I think the very first layer is, what is geospatial? So if we're talking about this metaverse being an extension of the real world, and there's this cross we said between real and virtual, that everything is happening in space and time. I think that's what geospatial is to me. How do we represent everything that's happening in space and time? How do you encode the satellite imagery that you use as a backdrop to your environment? How do you encode the buildings in 3D or any object? How do you encode these cars, these moving objects, the sensors, and how do these things interact with each other in the metaverse and in the real world? I don't care.

Nadine Alameh:

So is this vehicle on this road and is it going to hit this other vehicle when they're going at this speed? Is this drone over this airspace? Is this aircraft intersecting this other airspace? How are people next to each other? The contact tracing part, which raised this visibility of location and geospatial. So all of this is geospatial. Any map that you see anywhere is geospatial. So I'm just trying to set the context. So geospatial, if we say it's location, it's space and time and the relationships... And I emphasize, by the way, time, because people don't catch on to the importance because you guys are the experts. I think what I hear, the lowest hanging fruits of the value of the metaverse in the professional world... So not my kids' world, is running these simulations quickly and cheaply in the metaverse so that you can make decisions in the real world, miles of driving cars in the metaverse or, I love this, understanding since COP26 is happening this week, understanding the impact of climate change policies on your local, just lifestyle.

Nadine Alameh:

So that's the ultimate killer app for the metaverse. So I did not answer your question. I know. So you asked about standards.

Marc Petit:

But I think it was important to take the time to establish that. Geospatial is not something we talk the most about. This is not the hottest topic when we talk about the metaverse, but it is going to be one of these foundational technologies. And your tagline for the consortium is “making location count” and knowing where things are and what things look like and having those layers of data on top of each other, which, as you pointed out, using the graphics technology that we have, and using AR technology, it's going to be much easier to consume that.

Marc Petit:

That we have and using AR technology, it's going to be much easier to consume that data, location-based AR, we can... So it's really important that people understand the foundational role that GIS data is going to play in, at least for the real world, for Tatooine and Pandora, we may have different solutions, but for planet earth, it's going to be absolutely foundational.

Nadine Alameh:

Totally.

Patrick Cozzi:

Marc, on that note, I mean, as we build more and more in the Metaverse, I mean, does the line between the physical and digital get more blurry? And does the line between geospatial and say, simulation, does that blur? I mean, Nadine, what do you think?

Nadine Alameh:

I think that's what we're aiming for. So when you say, I love, I think one of you earlier said community, right? That's why we're all coming from different backgrounds to build, again, I call it This Metaverse, not The Metaverse, because I really don't know how many and what it is. But that's totally the ultimate blurring of all boundaries, because real life- it has no boundaries, right?

Nadine Alameh:

And if we're modeling or if we're extending our real environments into the virtual, then it's totally blurring the lines. And to me, that's how we blur the lines. We're blurring them by collaborating, right? Because it's multidisciplinary just because it is.

Nadine Alameh:

And then by, which is the piece that's close to our mission at OGC, by helping bring data, and we say any data, so that it integrates together, it works together so that it creates, it supports the simulation that you mentioned, Patrick.

Patrick Cozzi:

Cool. Marc, should we go back to your questions about the-

Nadine Alameh:

I totally derailed Marc.

Marc Petit:

That's okay. So we're talking about existing standards. So you want to maybe mention some of the ones that are relevant for the Metaverse?

Nadine Alameh:

Yes.

Marc Petit:

And then we can fast forward to the future a little bit, and then we'll take another, take a look forward to say, what else do we need to do? 

Nadine Alameh:

All right. Now we're talking. I'll focus. So here we go. I think,  within the OGC, that's the Open Geospatial Consortium, or sometimes I say the C is the community, the mission is making geospatial or location... I say location because it's more relatable to people sometimes. But geospatial information, we call it FAIR, right? Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable.

Nadine Alameh:

And so you do this from our perspective to make data more integrable, which I don't even know if it's a word or not, but let's assume it's the word. So you do it with the glue, right? And the glue is those standards. And so where we're talking from the geospatial perspective, the standards that come to mind, again, the low hanging fruit, to create this foundation for this extension of our lives, the 3D is the first thing that usually comes to mind, right? Because you're talking 3D, because life is 3D.

Nadine Alameh:

So, and Patrick is more of an expert than me in this. So 3D Tiles, right? So how do you stream and render this massive 3D content, right? Because we're talking real world. I mean, we're going big with the Metaverse in terms of scale and the amount of data and what we want to do with it, so you've got to have that standard to support it.

Nadine Alameh:

You put that aside and then you think about, what I see in OGC, there's another standard called the I3S which is the scene layers. So how do you, again, package these large amounts of distributed, guess what, 3D data? So for mobile, for the web, right? Because we're going to be living, we're going to interact with the Metaverse with our phones, with our goggles, with our Alexas, I don't know. Right? Literally we don't know.

Nadine Alameh:

And then I have this list that I was looking at earlier on the OGC website of all the models. Because we're having to model, right? The real world. So models for cities, that's CityGML standards for, again, 3D virtual cities. You got IndoorML or IndoorGML. Same thing, how do you model the indoors? Because we're not just talking about the outdoor spaces. There's the underground. We're working on an underground model because actually a lot of stuff is happening. That's a whole other podcast.

Nadine Alameh:

And then you got the easy stuff, I call it the easy stuff because it applies to more than the Metaverse. The APIs. So how do you get maps? How do you get 3D data? How do you get tiles? How do you get styles? How do you get routes, right? For navigation. You've got the Augmented Reality Markup Language. What's the new thing as well? GeoPose, which I'm not an expert in this, but it has something to do with the position and orientation of objects with respect... So this...

Nadine Alameh:

Honestly, okay. Maybe here's why I went around the world with you, Marc, on this question, because if everything is related to space and time, doesn't this mean that everything we're doing in OGC actually applies and I don't have to list the subset?

Marc Petit:

Yeah, no, absolutely. And I think the question to me, because we know that GIS, it's... Governments are... I mean, if you look at the companies and the institutions that support OGC, I mean, these are all of our governments, big spatial agencies, big corporations, so it's an established player now. So the question in my mind is, can you, through your standards, so I'll make it personal to you, Nadine, can you with your standards represent the world out there?

Marc Petit:

Do you have the right scalability to have the right granular representation so that that could be actually one of the representations of the built environment and of everything else we do? So do you think that you guys have reached that point where that is a viable place for us to invest with our data and is going to be here to stay? Because the Metaverse is something that we want to build for a long time. So do you think we have reached this level of maturity?

Nadine Alameh:

Oh, Marc. This is a tricky question. This is a trick question because...

Marc Petit:

It was not meant to be though.

Nadine Alameh:

Because I'm so tempted to say yes, right? A big yes.

Marc Petit:

Okay.

Nadine Alameh:

But... But, so yes. We have... What is GIS, is 50 years old, right? As we celebrated this 50 years recently in a couple of years. OGC is 27 years old, so you've got a huge foundation. Foundation of knowledge, of science, right? And reference systems are not a joke. And the GPS and the positioning. So there's a lot of detail that people don't see when they see a map. So that part is covered.

Nadine Alameh:

But it's also changing because you should hear our standards officer talk about how Australia is shifting one meter every year and this is us keeping up with those shifts to make sure that your buildings are where they are and you navigate and all of that.

Nadine Alameh:

So you have a foundation of experience, of tools and of products and of knowledge and of people. But this is I think is why the question is tricky, it's not enough, right? It's not enough because here we are, we're bringing... Right? You guys, especially you, Marc and Patrick, you're bridging those worlds between geospatial and gaming. So there's the whole... I mean, I don't know. Hollywood does some amazing stuff with 3D. So you tell me what we're missing, right? And how do we bridge these worlds?

Nadine Alameh:

But I think our power is exactly what you said, Marc, with geospatial because we have supported government organizations in critical decisions, in safety critical decisions. I've been in aviation, and those standards and those technologies are actually what keeps your planes from not hitting each other in space. And it's the same technology that governments all around the world, they give maps to their soldiers on mobile devices. That's us, right? So you got all of that, but you're pushing it to the next level. So we have a foundation, but when we talk metaverse, just like the real world, there are other puzzle pieces.

Marc Petit:

Mm-hmm (affirmative). From our perspective, and Patrick and I discuss often about it, our goal is to, for me, I'm an entertainment person, so I want to drop a camera in the geospatial data and shoot a movie. Okay. So I want that level. But I think there is a whole new set of use cases, when every one of our objects, drones, vehicles, cameras, have computer vision cameras on them, we are going to have to train those objects. And so we need a representation of the world that works with those sensors from a human height. From a plane, we're good. So solving that quality at street level, I think is probably the next frontier. And so we can talk about the capture of that data, but I think before we talk about this, do you think we can represent it? If we were to capture the data, are we confident that the geospatial industry can actually handle it?

Nadine Alameh:

I think you got the expert group, the global expert group, who, yes. That part I'm confident about, because I see our value as, we accelerate what we are trying to do because we know how to do it. So that part, I'll say yes, not a trick.

Marc Petit:

Look, I'm convinced of it, but I want you to say it. 

Nadine Alameh:

I declare that I agree with Marc that the geospatial community has a lot to offer: operational, tested, at scale. And I honestly, I'm not just saying this, you have a community who wants to do this because we want to get out of the bubble. So this is such an amazing timing, when the pieces are coming together. So, yes.

Patrick Cozzi:

So if we could go a little bit on this tangent from the standards, I always talk about, it would be a dream to have a Fortnite-like experience, but with a capture of Philadelphia, or a capture of New York city, but modeled down to that detail the way you interact with it in Fortnite. So Nadine, I'd love to hear, from a data capture perspective, how you see that unfolding.

Nadine Alameh:

I'm trying to think because... One thing that's for sure, we have so many new ways of getting the data, of capturing the data. I think everybody's following all the space companies and the specs. And then you got the AI that... So when you have data from space to, what? Like 10 centimeter level? You can actually get your 3D and more, you got the whole internet of things, the sensors capturing that information, like you said, from cars, from our phones, from any wearable device. And then you got the whole crowdsourced part.

Nadine Alameh:

So I think our problem, honestly, is keeping up with that data and making sure that actually it works together, because I see data. Everywhere you go, there's just data, data, data. But at the same time, I hate to bring this up and depress people, but you look at any disaster, flooding, wildfires, and I'm talking in the developed world, and we still don't find the data that we need, and we cannot access it, and all of this. So we have the means to capture, we have the representations, we need to keep at it. I mean, I know OGC is working with the discrete global grid and the new reference systems and this GeoPost thing. We just need to get better at bringing this data together.

Patrick Cozzi:

Yeah. I agree. I think there's a lot of different data sources, and then the ability to fuse and then coherently stream that out, it's super important.

Patrick Cozzi:

So, Nadine, look, I loved your statement that, hey, all OGC standards are relevant to the metaverse. I think that's a great perspective. And then, I do believe as the metaverse advances, that there are going to be new standards that are going to be necessary on many fronts. And I love a pragmatic approach to developing standards in promoting an open and interoperable ecosystem. And I believe OGC has some interesting tracks, such as the community standard track. So I would love if you could share a bit about your perspective on pragmatic standards development, developing them quickly, but also not developing them too quickly, that would be really interesting.

Nadine Alameh:

Yeah. So I would echo Marc, what he said earlier, maybe not on this call, but I know Marc said it at some point, that we're building something bigger than any of us, and this is truly a unique opportunity for all of us here. So we need to make sure again that the pieces fit. And we go back to standards, and if we're building the metaverse, then it's standards for so many things. And it's not just the metaverse that's moving quickly. Everything is moving quickly. So we do have that challenge of how do I get a standard fast enough but mature enough? And I think we're doing a few things. And again, you guys... It's not Patrick and Marc, but everybody who's listening, you have to let us know if we're on the right track.

Nadine Alameh:

So things like... I think we're doing a few things in OGC. One is the development process for the standard itself. We're making it just way more agile. So the standard is not this document that's built by a committee, but it's by developers for developers, we're calling it. So it's from the ground up.

Patrick Cozzi:

I like that.

Nadine Alameh:

I like that too. And it becomes that the standard really becomes the documentation of something that works and that people have agreed on already. And then it's usable. That's how it's quick. And I think by involving the community this early on, they catch up together on the changes. The other one is, of course, what you mentioned Patrick, about the community standard, which is just realizing that there's so much that we need to do, and that these standards can come in from everywhere because we may be the experts, we are the experts at geospatial, but we're not the experts at every domain on earth, especially when we say geospatial is everywhere.

Nadine Alameh:

So these standards, to actually solve any problem, you're going to need different ones. So sometimes they come from a community. A good example, so Patrick can talk a little bit more about the... See? Now I have to interview you. So Patrick can talk more about 3D Tiles. The other example was the IMDF, the indoor mapping format, data format from Apple, same thing. And that's developed by a community, not necessarily the geospatial community. It's developed by a community that's geospatial related, and then tested, implemented. It's not an idea. And then it becomes mature, and I think this is how you balance quick versus mature.

Nadine Alameh:

And the last point I need to say is collaboration, collaboration, and I think OGC is very good at this. We have to collaborate. That's why I'm happy that in the SIGGRAPH event, we had Khronos. We collaborate with the AR cloud because you have to. If we're saying geospatial is everywhere, we got to talk to everybody. Does that answer, maybe?

Patrick Cozzi:

It does. Spot on.

Marc Petit:

So do we want to talk about future standards, Patrick? Or have we covered that already?

Patrick Cozzi:

I think we covered it pretty well. Nadine?

Nadine Alameh:

Yeah. I mean, again, this is when I have to ask you, but I'll give you a pass. I think we're scratching the surface on 3D. And I know, Patrick, you're releasing 3D Tiles Next. I don't know if you want to say a few words about that. But also, I think we're scratching the surface on the AR-VR, right? We're also scratching the surface on what we call GeoAI, the artificial intelligence. I have a list, yeah, and this is where I need to hear more from people, honestly.

Marc Petit:

And I think the other part that's interesting, because you mentioned gaming and geospatial, it may not be obvious for people to say what's the intersection of gaming and geospatial is, I think. The way to think about it is game engine gives the geospatial people a presentation layer, a way to present the data that makes more sense of all of those data, because we have interactivity. We can implement those layers, and we've had a lot of graphics for the past 25 years, but I think a game engine is the ultimate form of commodity-type graphics at the level of performance and the level of visual fidelity that makes the consumption of that very, very complex dataset. Now, obviously, we've seen digital twins of entire cities like Wellington, and now you can navigate, and navigate to the place and display the data that you need.

Marc Petit:

So this concept of digital twin powered by GIS data, actually, I think is very powerful, and that's a bit of a game changer. It's not disruption in and of itself, but it's the fact that that graphics power is packaged with the game engine with the kind of features that it needs, and it's widely available on the hardware that's widely available, like phones can run a game engine. I think that intersection is where we have this perceived acceleration around GIS, but it's just that it has become easier to consume the data and the complexity of the data that you mentioned earlier.

Nadine Alameh:

Yeah. If people could see us right now, we're actually all nodding heads, because you bring it together very nicely. And at the same time, it takes me back to how we started this podcast. Like when we talk about digital twins, I feel like we've always talked or wanted to do the digital twins, but now we can. We actually can.

Marc Petit:

You can show them.

Nadine Alameh:

Yes.

Marc Petit:

You can display them in a way that -

Nadine Alameh:

Exactly.

Marc Petit:

- any human will understand them.

Nadine Alameh:

All right. Yeah. Before, we were crazy, and now people are seeing why we're so passionate about what we do.

Marc Petit:

Actually, the geospatial community is a great community of passionate people. In a sense, they've been doing important stuff, but they haven't been in the spotlight yet. But I think with the metaverse, and we were discussing earlier how mapping is going to be a very important discipline, because laying things on a map is a great way to access any form of data, actually. It could become one of the primary interfaces, so you guys have an important future ahead of you.

Nadine Alameh:

Yeah. I say yeah, we're in the right place at the right time. And I'm going to quote you, Marc, what you mentioned earlier in another call. But Marc said something that I wrote down, that the map is the interface to everything, and that's exactly why we're here.

Patrick Cozzi:

Marc, do you have any surprise questions before we wrap up?

Marc Petit:

No, I've already...

Patrick Cozzi:

Nadine, we covered a lot of ground today, no pun intended. Anything we didn't talk about that you wish we did?

Nadine Alameh:

Ooh, I do, actually. I do have two topics, and I'll be very quick. Because one thing is the ethics part, the ethical use of the geospatial data or maybe any data. I think it's a big topic. That's, again, another podcast by itself. And the other one, it's maybe a question back to the community. Ready Player One, that movie, my kids made me watch it when it first came out. And when I talk about the metaverse, usually the reaction is like, "Is this it?", and I just really, really, really hope that it's not it. I think part of what we need to talk about is, it's not it. Talking about the use cases and the value of the metaverse in a positive light and the applications, I think it matters to me, bringing it back to your first question about the journey, as a professional and a future user of the metaverse, but also as a mom. These are the two topics which I think, again, as we build this community for the open metaverse, we need to keep it in mind.

Marc Petit:

Patrick, I did save one question for an eventual future podcast. It's about the ownership of the data, which is a rat hole I didn't want us to go in today, but one day we're going to have to tackle this one, when you fly drones over cities and capture buildings and who owns that data? It's for another episode.

Patrick Cozzi:

And the licensing of it right now is very fragmented and very different from capture.

Marc Petit:

Yeah, absolutely.

Nadine Alameh:

Yes. Good luck with that.

Marc Petit:

Yeah. Well, thank you, Nadine. But be careful, maybe we invite you back. Any organization or person that you think we should, you want to give a shout out to today?

Nadine Alameh:

Oh my God. I'm going to laugh out loud right now. I apologize to all the listeners, because I swear, I'm not doing it because I'm on this podcast and I would urge anybody to hear me in any other talk. I usually give kudos to you guys. I give always kudos to Cesium and Patrick's team.

Patrick Cozzi:

Wow. Thank you.

Nadine Alameh:

You're amazing champions of geospatial and the geospatial evolution, and I always mention this collaboration, Cesium and Epic Games, because you guys are genuine community builders. You're helping many people bridge their expertise, and you always talk about openness and interoperability, which just gives me hope. I'm really not saying this because I'm on this podcast. I seriously always give kudos to you guys, because you are exemplars of collaboration and experimentation and interoperability.

Marc Petit:

Well, thank you. Thank you. What you're showing there is you're a poor judge of character. Thank you. It's nice, but-

Nadine Alameh:

I mean it, though. 

Patrick Cozzi:

Thank you.

Nadine Alameh:

I really mean it, yeah.

Marc Petit:

Well, Nadine, it was great having you with us today, Nadine from Open Geospatial Consortium, people making location count, people that are doing very important work for the metaverse behind the scenes. Hopefully, we get to talk to you again on other topics. Thanks for being with us today.

Nadine Alameh:

Thank you for having me again. This was a lot of fun and I hope others enjoy it as well.

Marc Petit:

Well, we want to thank our audience, Patrick. I think we launched the podcast publicly and we've got some great feedback, so we want to thank you. All the listeners, tell us what you like, what you don't like. We're doing this because we're passionate about it. We're not pros about it. We do our best, and so we're very open to feedback. I've seen a few videos on YouTube, when you say hit the subscribe buttons. The same for us now. We have to use that famous sentence. Please subscribe, rate, review. Tell us something. We want to hear about you, and any ideas about topics we would like to cover on the podcast is absolutely welcome. Again, we're here to showcase. We're technology showcasing other technologists. It's nerdy by design and hopefully everybody enjoys it.

Nadine Alameh:

Well said.

Marc Petit:

So with this, thank you, everybody. Thank you, Nadine. Thank you, Patrick.

Nadine Alameh:

Thank you.

Patrick Cozzi:

Thank you, everybody.