Paul, the VRENAR project is something I had visions of and endeavoured to do whilst I was working on a UAV/VR related PhD project.
The project met some serious hurdles, the biggest of which was loss of an open source VR compatible virtual world, in January of this year, which I was intending to build on. It was called High fidelity (TM).
The High Fidelity company is a profit based business, it still exists at its website https://www.highfidelity.com/. The founder of the business is the same chap who created the highly successful Second Life(TM), Philip Rosedale, hence the demise of High Fidelity came as a surprise.
The other problem that finished off my immediate plans is described here:
That said, I still believe that this is the future, even if we/I don’t do it, and it isn’t named VRENAR, someone will do it sometime, it has to happen sooner or later, and the world will be such a better place for it.
Essentially, the system is AR (Augmented reality), the wearables of which become our personal computing devices, and which monitor, interpret, and administrate the world according to our reactions to it.
That might sound dystopian, and is certainly spun as such by proponents of the status quo, but at its heart, it is fundamentally different in that the platform itself is non-profit, which changes everything.
After all, the alternative as we can see is all things being profit driven, which is resulting in the real dystopia.
The phenomenon of a world’s population contributing all of its potential wealth towards an infinitesimally small minority of “Elites” is a bizarre situation which seems to have come about almost by accident.
As a Professional Systems Engineer in large scale defence and aerospace, of more than twenty years, one thing I’ve learned in System Design, is that one must include the interests of all stakeholders in the design, otherwise it won’t fly much further than one can physically throw it.
The main stakeholders in any social media system are the public, yet we can see this was not taken into account by any social media system that currently exists.
In truth, a societal system which is truly designed as democratic, will be non profit, as it has to be, to be for the greater good, rather than for the good of a few, or even that of a sizeable community (such as seen in colonialism).
In the VRENAR system design, instead of the user’s valuable data being taken and used to make profit for others, it is instead monetised in the platform and paid directly to the user, by a non-profit Ai personal assistant assigned to, and advising the user.
At the heart of the platform is contractual blockchain technology which contains some basic rules enabling the public to construct a complete societal system, where their data is interpreted as a form of continuous voting.
All users can propose bounty projects, which are assigned an initial value by the project creator, then evaluated by the public, where their inputs are gathered almost without any effort, and where they are paid for that evaluation.
Successful projects are those liked by the public, increasing in value.
Projects increasing in value, pay a continuous, increasing dividend to the creator.
Where a proposed bounty project gets to a value that either the owner or another party is happy to carry it out in return for, it is executed by that party, where the funds for the bounty are automatically generated by the platform, and paid to the executing party.
Unsuccessful projects are those disliked by the public. Disliked projects, and the associated dividend will decrease in value, through zero, increasingly going negative until they are removed by their creators, effectively fining creators failing to remove them promptly. Disliked adverts and other creations would automatically fall into this category.
Creations could be treated as bounty projects which are never redeemed, resulting in positive dividends for creators of all kinds of things, both real and virtual, as long as they are seen positively by the public.
The only external input to the system is a source of power. If this is from a scaleable, natural green source, such as solar, then beyond a certain point, the system becomes self sustaining, expanding as necessary by bounty projects as needed for expansion.
Above is a general overview of the top level salient points.
The technology exists, including the required Systems Engineering techniques, to get from those points to a working system.
All that would need is sufficient financial and government support.
Responsible governments would pick this over, and implement it if found to be feasible. But they would be doing that knowing that they were effectively making themselves redundant.
If only politicians thought like Engineers!
There are many posts in Medium charting my mindset, and the system design throughout the history of VRENAR, as it went through several stages of concept design, including a SysML model specification. This still exists, and could be developed further using the same techniques, to automatically generate much of the required executable code of the system.
But, in addition to a suitable source of funding, the issue of a suitable VR virtual world still remains.
With those things as they stand, I have until now pretty much stopped work on VRENAR, concentrating instead on smaller things, such as are needed for my own immediate basic living, in the absence of VRENAR implemented.
The VRENAR website is still up, but badly out of date, having moved on somewhat now from the rosy place it seemed to be at the time when I first starting working on it in earnest.
Also, I stopped monitoring the vrenar.io emails when it became significant effort to sort out junk from genuine enquiries.
That’s where it’s at.
If you see any possibilities, I am most happy to offer whatever help I can, but it would not be much, as explained in the “Rule of fear” story above, I am now literally struggling for survival myself, and was so already before the current worldwide crisis.
I can almost hear the capitalist cries already… Loser! :)
But that is where they would be wrong. Folk understanding the benefits of sharing, as opposed to profiting, as seem to be multiplying now, know that the best non-profit projects never die, they just go dormant for a while, until picked up again, by someone or another, under one guise or another.
