Welcome to our talk. I am Starr Brown, and I am pleased to introduce Bob Gorley of
OODA Datalink, and I am the executive director of the XR Village, and you're joining us today
to understand, from fiction to reality, the history of the metaverse and XR.
Thanks, Starr. And Starr, first I want to say thanks for pulling together the XR Village.
For those of you who haven't done it yet, please sign up for our Discord,
because there's going to be a lot of persistent content in the Discord,
including things like these slides that we'll put there.
And the XR Village has got a Capture the Flag going on right now, and some demos with some
advanced technology that's really awesome. What we'd like to talk about today is the past,
present, and future of the metaverse, and some threats to the metaverse.
We thought I'd start with some slides that I'll quickly go through just to talk about my view of
the threats, and then Starr and I will have a discussion on the topic. Sound about right?
Sounds good.
Okay, let's do it. So the topic of these slides is defending the metaverse,
and I wanted to give you just an overview of what I'm trying to capture in these notes. If
you want a copy of this, just send me an email or come to the Discord server for the XR Village,
and I'll post these there that you can download. So we are going to talk about the metaverse and
what it is and what it's not, and how that relates to XR. We're going to talk about then
the key threats and some ideas of mitigating the threats. And we're going to talk a little bit
about the history of this stuff. Before going further, I wanted to talk about the history of
XR. XR, meaning virtual reality, extended reality, augmented reality, all together,
has a long history that I think actually starts in science fiction.
There was a 1935 science fiction story called Pygmalion's Glasses, which outlined what the
metaverse is talked about today and what XR is talked about today. Science fiction, a nice short
story, but it was really an exciting vision of what could happen if you can put on goggles and
be in a different world. And that's what we're building and experimenting with today in the XR
village. But there are threats. And that's what we wanted to get into with this presentation. I
say there's five threats, but I'm going to talk about a sixth one that I learned about today.
And with your feedback, maybe there's more. We need to talk about the threats so we can figure
out how to mitigate the threats. The bottom line up front, we are building through extended reality
a new system, a metaverse, a new wave of technology. And it is not going to be more
secure than the current waves of technology. The three waves as we see them, the first wave was
the Internet itself connecting computers and servers together in an interoperable way. The
second wave of Internet technologies is the mobile revolution based upon cell technologies
that included mobile devices and all the applications that came with that. The third
wave that is now being built is this XR wave. It's a wave towards the metaverse.
It really is the future. The first two waves are still going to be there for a long time,
but the third wave, the XR wave, is what is being built right now and is why this village is so
hopping over here. Next, please. So what is the metaverse? You hear metaverse frequently. My view
is don't lock into anyone's specific definition. It's far too early for that. But what is being
built is a massive, scalable, interoperable network of networks and persistent virtual
reality and augmented reality worlds. That metaverse is being built, but it's not here yet.
We have hints of what's coming, and I'll show you a few on the next slide. Next, please. So these are
some of the hints that we're seeing. I don't think of any of these as the metaverse. They're just
indicators of what's coming when it's all linked together in a scalable, persistent way. You have
all seen the business collaboration tools and the education collaboration tools. I think you've
probably all seen the games that are out there that can be accessed through any computer or mobile
devices through extended reality, augmented reality, virtual reality. You don't have to have
the goggles, but the goggles help a lot too. You have also seen the other tools that are being
the games like Roblox, Fortnite, and others. The digital twins in the business world you've seen.
These are all hints of what's coming, but it's not the metaverse yet. Next, please. The metaverse
is coming, however, and that metaverse of tomorrow is going to impact so many industries,
as you can see over in the XR Village, and get hints of what is coming, including just about
anyone who needs to work with data for a business or professional reason, but also anyone who likes
entertainment in a nice 3D interactive way. It is going to be a trillion dollar industry. Next,
please. I'd like to jump in and share that we have a live working model of a digital twin
scenario in collaboration with ICS Village. It's off the rails, and you can interact and
explore practical uses of this novel technology. You remind me of another thing that I think we
should have told these folks about, and that is BadVR. BadVR is awesome. First of all, it's a
great name for a company, but Bad stands for bring all your data to VR, and there's a demo
in your village. There is all new ways to visualize real-time with spatial packet capture
directly into the goggles, so that in your living world, you can see Wi-Fi signals,
other cellular signals, RF signals, and so on. Awesome. The way the business analysts look at
this trillion dollar industry is shown here. Next, please. Now, I want to talk about the
threats, and when I built this, I was thinking of five major threats that are coming in the
metaverse that are not being dealt with yet, in my opinion. Now, running a village, I want to
be able to take input from everybody in the village to see if this covers all the threats or
not. I did hear of a sixth one today I want to tell you about. Brief review of these threats
being built, I mean, that are impacting the metaverse. There's new privacy threats we all
need to worry about. If you have a device on your head, and that is collecting data and moving that
data to the cloud, there are privacy issues that we need to sort out today. There's the issue of
languor. What happens if you put on devices and it just pulls you into this world in ways that make
you want to detach from the real world? And if too much of that happens in society, what's going
to happen to all of us? And that relates directly to the third one, the onophrenia, which is an
inability over time to distinguish what is real and what is not real. A very serious threat.
Absolutely. There's new fraud vectors. If someone can know so much about you, including what you
really desire, it's going to make it easier for them to commit fraud against you. And then I list
the last one here of unleashing demons. The worst of human spirit may be tapped into and brought out
in ways that are not good. Now, I wanted to talk about the sixth threat, Star. It's one that
it really didn't dawn on me, this threat, until conversations this morning about the future of
all this technology. And it's the threat to us humans and our livelihoods. Now, this relates
to far more than just XR. This is XR plus artificial intelligence plus overall better
automation and technologies. And we see what's going on right now in Hollywood to screenwriters
and actors and actresses. And this is a serious threat to them. But it's also a threat to
journalists. It's a threat to truck drivers. It's a threat to those who work in agriculture
and the mining industry. This is another threat we need to think about. The future of XR. Is that
a threat to us humans? Which leads to the need for frameworks to solve these threats. And I'll
just rapidly push through these frameworks. I believe personally we need to think through what
does everybody need to do to mitigate these threats? And I'm looking for open ideas here. So please
get a copy of these slides off our server. Read through this. Give me your feedback. How do we
address these threats? I've put in suggestions for individuals, communities, companies, governments,
and academia. And we don't need to go through all of this right now. It's my suggestions,
things for people, us to do. We need to keep learning. Go ahead and hit the next. For communities,
the communities like DEF CON community, what do we want out of this new world of extended reality
and virtual reality and enhanced and augmented reality? We need to figure that out. For companies,
companies have a role to play here too. They really need to be building in security that
meets our requirements. So I interject here. The thing with building, you hit a keynote for me,
and the point is that we need to start thinking about building products, software, hardware,
and policy better by design from the beginning so that we avoid problems in the future. Yeah.
Yep. Cool. There's a role for governments. I don't want the government in our VR, but they're
going to be there. And also, I think there's a role in our government in pushing back against
hostile nation states that are going to be in our extended reality. So we need to decide what we want
our government to do in this world. Yeah, absolutely. The entire purpose of XR Village
is to drive better public policy. No one likes being told what to do, but the reality is that
for society to function, we all need some set of regulations. A framework is a good place to start,
but we need to get collectively informed, educated, have a little fun, but then go make the rules
better. Make the rules we want to see because we're in a position now with emerging policies
and other legal representations in Washington and beyond that these conversations are happening. So
now is the time to scream to make sure that we can inform better public policy for tomorrow.
Yeah, what a great goal, and it's a great opportunity to engage with this village,
which gets to this recommendation list here. Join our Discord server, come meet with Star over in
the village, and get engaged. And that Star is kind of the end of the graphics, really,
if you wanted to transition to the discussion portion of our time together here. Yeah, I think
the time is now. I don't know how to make that go away, so we're going to live with it.
But the point is, how many people in this room knew what extended reality was before sitting down?
You knew the umbrella term. That's wonderful, because every single person with the exception
of one has said, I have no idea. I've talked to thousands of people so far this weekend,
and in a room of computer people or security people, I might expect that you'd have more
understanding of at least what the umbrella encompasses, so that we can understand the
vulnerabilities that lie ahead to help. You know, and Star, I think this is one,
it underscores for me that you are a pioneer, and the other village founders, and I'm very glad
this is starting. It was here last year in a small way, but now you've really grown. And I think
next year, you're probably going to be connected to every other village, it seems like. It seems
like it. And to be honest, a lot of our current setup came because it takes a village, and that
is the theme for the year. And we wouldn't be here without having been accepted as an adjunct
to other appropriate areas, from biohacking, to car hacking, to ICS and beyond. Policy, of course.
This year we're standing alone, and we have pretty, pretty solid interest in the topic, so
I'm really here to ask the community to contribute, to think about how the metaverse
and how living outside of what you can touch can be affected, and think about the naughty
things. Think about the way we can tell people what we need to fix today. Right, I think that's exactly
what I think needs to happen, too. If we want our technology to serve humans and make the universe
better, we need to figure out what these threats really are and then how to mitigate them. And I
love the way that you said we're informing policy, because we have direct connections now into the
policy world. We are. We're making great leaps ahead in some regards, but we are still talking to
each other. We need to get to a position where we can include and educate, and I think
we're really at the right time to do so. Another thing I noticed about your village is
there's a lot of young people there. It is. This morning I think everybody was maybe
a little hungover, and that's awesome, but we have a lot of children this
morning in this equipment, and really becoming some of the best demonstrators. I have
a seven-year-old grabbing Wi-Fi bars out of the sky and giving bad VRs demo. They latch on like
this. They adopt like this. This is why we need to think about this. I work largely in the education
space, and I've encountered many teachers who are actively using AR in the classroom, VR in the
classroom. They've been doing it for five years. They have zero concept. Who is looking backwards
at their children in said classroom? They didn't even know it was a thing. They didn't know that
data was stored. They didn't know that data was perhaps viewable in ways that they might not
expect. So things beyond... there's temperature sensing technology, and I'll just leave that there.
So it's a pretty interesting field to put on glasses and see something that we're not all
realizing is being seen. And can I put you on the spot and ask you for a real definition of XR?
Because I'm not sure I'm using that in the proper way. And how do you define XR? I tend to think of
XR as being an umbrella term. So for me, it's less about the metaverse. And I think working
through you, it makes me really think beyond hardware. So I think it's XR encompasses AR and VR
along with the associated virtual worlds. Wonderful. That's great. Well, I really think this
village is contributing already. And I'm wondering if we can entice more people into the Discord
server, if we can persist this dialogue between DEF CONs. Absolutely. Absolutely. So join us on
Discord, XR Village. You'll find our information on Twitter and on the slides. And not those
slides, though. So we'll come over. We're down yonder. We'd love to have you come play and then
come see the demos and check us out. Cool. Thanks.