---
title: The Grid Part 4
description: Part 4 explores ideas and potential use-cases around connecting together digital snapshots of physical world spaces.
image: https://i.imgur.com/KGr0pzt.jpg
robots: index, follow
lang: en
dir: ltr
breaks: true
disqus: xrdevlog
---

# The Grid Part 4

{%hackmd theme-dark %}

###### tags: `devlog` `photogrammetry`

> "At the fringes of all this light, Hiro can see the dead organic colors of the hillside. The soldiers are trying to push it back with their searchlights, trying to bum it away. He is about to bury himself in it, become a single muddy pixel in some airline passenger's window. Plunging into the biomass."


The Grid is a research project for building a new kind of city for the digital population. This edition is dedicated to thinking about ideas and experiments around [**the map**](https://hackmd.io/@XR/maps#Earth-20) where the physical world is digitized.

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## Intro

If the internet were a place you could visit and walk around in, what would it look like? How would it work? Who owns it? How would you design a city for the society of minds?

- Grid Part 1: https://hackmd.io/@XR/grid
- Grid Part 2: https://hackmd.io/@XR/grid2
- Grid Part 3: https://hackmd.io/@XR/grid3
- Studios: https://hackmd.io/@XR/studios

[Part 1](https://hackmd.io/@XR/grid) navigates projects, infrastructure, and prototypes involved in designing a digital city owned by its users.

[Part 2](https://hackmd.io/@XR/grid2) features early prototypes of a digital city inspired by reading Snow Crash and Burning Man. It's exploring a place where art, commerce, and culture may flourish.

[Part 3](https://hackmd.io/@XR/grid3) dives into interoperability experiments with Cryptovoxels, extending the reach of the blockchain world into multiple other platforms.

I believe the next Renaissance will be mostly digital. Cryptovoxels might be the Florence Italy of this next Renaissance, having attracted many brilliant minds and creative artists in the crypto / VR scene to establish a home on the Origin City grid. It's probably the largest virtual art gallery in the world at this point.

However, much of the world has no relation or even awareness of this platform. They exist on the other grid, in the physical world. Over 50% of the world's population is packed into cities that are made of steel and glass, not pixels and voxels.

Even so, I don't think size matters. Florence Italy wasn't a particularly big city at the peak of the Renaissance, yet it's influence was felt through milleniums. It was the quality of the creators and thinkers of the time that it attracted, as well as the patrons, that gave rise to the city's historical fame and influence.

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## Digi-physical Spaces

Traditionally its been difficult for artists to imagine the possibilities of mixed reality, let alone show it, outside of their surroundings. We now have methods to import 3D models from anywhere on Earth into game dev environments.

This has multiple awesome collaborative use-cases:

- Planning for creating your own ISP
- https://startyourownisp.com/posts/relay-sites/
- Artists can use it as a base for imagining mixed reality cities of the future
- Prototype large scale AR applications with VR
- Virtual production sets
- Mixed reality social network

Here are some links to information about what is used to capture these spaces and how they are useful to various industries.

- https://matterport.com/industries/architects-engineering-construction
- Camera that was used in many of the indoor examples
- https://www.autodesk.com/solutions/bim/benefits-of-bim
- Overview of Business Information Modeling (BIM)
- https://paracosm.io/px-80-overview
- Handheld color LIDAR scanner
- https://leica-geosystems.com/en-us/products/laser-scanners/scanners/blk360
- Smallest and lightest imaging laser scanner of its kind
- https://www.wework.com/ideas/office-design-space/using-lasers-to-capture-the-tiniest-details-of-a-workspace
- WeWork 3D scans every building they own [archive](https://web.archive.org/web/20200416115117/https://www.wework.com/ideas/office-design-space/using-lasers-to-capture-the-tiniest-details-of-a-workspace)
- https://www.mapbox.com/ - APIs, SDKs, and live updating map data for developers
- https://developers.google.com/maps/billing/gmp-billing

---

### Bay Area

**Watch this video!**

<div style="padding:56.25% 0 0 0;position:relative;"><iframe src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/479594729?color=ffffff&title=0&byline=0&portrait=0" style="position:absolute;top:0;left:0;width:100%;height:100%;" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; fullscreen" allowfullscreen></iframe></div><script src="https://player.vimeo.com/api/player.js"></script>

This video is an overview of most of the bay area places in the current collection.


#### Internet Archive

- https://hackmd.io/@XR/internetarchive
- https://github.com/madjin/internet-archive-vr





---

#### Omni Commons

https://hackmd.io/@XR/conf







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#### DNA Lounge

https://hackmd.io/@xr/dna




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#### Noisebridge

- https://hackmd.io/@XR/hackerspaces#Noisebridge
- https://github.com/madjin/noisebridge-vr


---

#### Starfish

https://hackmd.io/@XR/starfish




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### Los Angeles

#### Downtown



Virtual reality projection mapping


#### NSL

- https://hackmd.io/@XR/hackerspaces#NSL
- https://github.com/madjin/nsl-vr

New location




Old NSL



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#### Hollywood

https://hackmd.io/@XR/studios



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### Toronto

- https://hackmd.io/@XR/hackerspaces#HackLabTO
- https://github.com/madjin/hacklab-vr

Old location of HacklabTO



Hackerspace


House of VR (VRcade)


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### New York City


Currently have a reconstruction of the NYSE, made in Unity


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### Chicago


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### Seattle


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### Vancouver


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## Multi City

Idea: what if we brought cities closer together like a jigsaw puzzle to create a megatropolis? Or perhaps extract landmarks into an original yet familiar design, like how Rockstar designs GTA cities where the fictional places in the game have recognizable parts of California.






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## Islands

**Internet Community Maps: https://hackmd.io/@XR/maps#Internet-Cities**

Land air sea


### Sky Islands

**Buy models**: https://www.cgtrader.com/3d-models/floating-island


- [W&W ft. Kizuna AI - The Light (Official Music Video)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtU_sb4jYE8)
- https://gyazo.com/2cad15475a3708367b907fd8362ffb30.gif

---

## Digital vs Physical

The physical world is expensive and really hard to edit.



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## Community First

The thing I've come to appreciate with these experiment is the immense value of the people. The community is layer one in building the grid, everything else comes is secondary. In the next dev log about The Grid we'll look at strategies for building online communities.

**Tweet: https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1269178671086006273**

**Tweet: https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1269179509456044032**

**Tweet: https://twitter.com/gregisenberg/status/1279833340904947712**