PROTOVERSE

Protoverse is a metaverse protocol. At a high level, protoverse is an
abstract virtual space. It is designed to be accessible and open to
everyone. It achieves this by describing the world abstractly like so:


    (room (shape rectangle)
          (condition "clean")
          (material "gold")
          (name "Satoshi's Den")
          (width 10) (depth 10) (height 100)
          (group
            (table (id welcome-desk)
                   (name "welcome desk")
                   (material "marble")
                   (condition "new")
                   (width 1) (depth 2) (height 1)
                   (light (name "desk")))

            (chair (id welcome-desk-chair)
                   (name "fancy"))

            (light (location ceiling)
                   (name "ceiling")
                   (state off)
                   (shape circle))))


Since this is an abstract description, we can "render" it in many
different ways. For example, with natural language:

  $ ./protoverse parse example.space

  There is a(n) clean rectangular room made of gold named Satoshi's Den.
  It contains three objects: a welcome desk table, fancy chair and
  ceiling light.

This is important for accessibility. If we want the metaverse to be open
to everyone, we need some way to describe what is going on in this
abstract space without a visual rendering.

Another reason we prefer a high level description is that we want objects
in the metaverse to be friendly to our machine overlords. The metaverse
should be easily programmable with scripts and bots. A high level
description also allows us to reload the space quickly, while keeping
higher level-of-detail bits cached from previous loads.


PROGRAMMABILITY

The protoverse uses WebAssembly (WASM [1]) to enable computation for
clients interacting with the metaverse. WASM was originally devised as a
generic virtual machine for the web, but it is general enough to use for
cases beyond that.

With WASM you can use any programming language to code the metaverse.
protoverse comes with an embedded WASM interpreter that can execute WASM
code.  You will be able to augment clients to render your space in
greater detail, show HUD elements, create multiplayer games, etc.

You can already do a lot without client computation, for instance, your
space could be served dynamically, which you could periodically fetch to
get updated description of the room. This would be equivalent to "refresh
the page" on the web, except due to the level-of-detail nature of the
protoverse, you wouldn't need to refetch the entire room. The client
could cache models and other details that have been previously fetched.

The default, high-level description of the room could include position
information, so you will be able to see things that have moved when you
"refetch" the state of the room. State updates like this could be a bit
jarring, so most likely you wouldn't want to reload the room for position
updates, these can be served via "object state/position update" network
messages.

What you do with these network messages could be handled automatically
for simple cases by the client, but otherwise could be handled by WASM
code served by the protoverse server.


THIS REPOSITORY

The goal of this source repository is the be the "linux kernel" of the
metaverse. Developers shouldn't have to deal with low level details of
the metaverse, in the same sense that linux application developers
shouldn't have to think about the details of TCP/IP when building their
applications.

This repository serves as the "monorepo" of the protoverse.

Goals:

* Zero dependencies. Ideally we will avoid linking to openssl as well.
  The metaverse should move on from certificate authorities if possible,
  opting for a trust-on-first-use model instead. Ideally we would use
  something like the noise protocol for securing communications. We can
  support this at the protocol level if it makes sense.

* Cross platform. We should try to support all platforms. Right now we're
  prototyping in linux, but the metaverse should be open and accesible to
  all platforms.


DOCUMENTATION

You can find further documentation under docs/


REFERENCES

[1] https://webassembly.org