This Chapter collects the Functionalities of an M-Instance supported by this Technical Specification. Terms beginning with a small letter have the common meaning, Terms beginning with a capital letter are defined.
1 M-Instance
An M-Instance
- Is characterised as a set of Processes providing some or all the following functions:
- Sensing data from U-Locations using Devices.
- Processing the sensed data and producing Items.
- Producing one or more M-Environments populated by Items either imported or internally generated.
- Processing Objects from the M-Instance or potentially from other M-Instances to affect U- and/or M-Environments in ways that are:
- Consistent with the goals set for the M-Instance.
- Effected within the capabilities of the M-Instance.
- In compliance with the Rules set for the M-Instance and the applicable laws.
- May operate in a centralised or decentralised way.
- May be subdivided in administratively separated M-Environments.
- Monitors:
- The Rights held by Processes on Processes to Act on Items at M-Locations.
- The Entities placed at M-Locations with a Spatial Attitude.
- Should be secure, e.g., to prevent malicious Users from:
- Accessing the Account of a human who is not the human represented by the User.
- Taking control of a Process.
- Acting on Items for which it does not have Rights.
- Should withstand denial of service attacks.
2 Processes
- Process types
- Devices: they connect U-Locations with M-Locations and vice-versa.
- Users: they represent humans and are humans’ agents in the M-Instance or on Devices.
- Apps: they run on Devices. A User may be an App running on a Device.
- Services: they are generic Processes providing Functionalities.
- Certification
- Processes may be connected or imported to an M-Instance if they have passed Certification.
- Contracts may be imported to an M-Instance if they have passed a Certification Process.
3 Rules
An M-Instance may be governed by Rules that may include:
- The Personal Data retention, processing, and access policy.
- The Rights and Obligations, e.g., ethical behaviour of Users.
- The permission-based or permission-less access policy to M-Environments.
- The trusted or trust-less relationship between Users and M-Instance.
- The subset of required for each Account type.
- The sanctions applied to a User whose Actions do not comply with the Rules.
4 Registration
- A human, possibly on behalf of a legal entity, may Register with an M-Instance.
- The M-Instance may
- Request:
- A subset of the human’s Personal Profile.
- WalletIDs
- Users
- Personae
- Create an Account with AccountID including:
- The subset of the human’s Personal Profile.
- WalletIDs
- Users
- Personae
- Rights and Obligations
- Request:
- Personal Profile may have a scalable representation to enable an easy creation of a subset.
5 Rights
5.1 General Rights
Rights may include:
- The maximum number of:
- Users a human can deploy.
- Personae a User can be rendered as.
- Concurrent Users and Objects an M-Location can support.
- The ability to:
- Create persistent (as opposed to ephemeral) Scenes at M-Locations.
- Store, search, and retrieve Experiences.
- Develop economic activities.
- Book M-Locations for a duration.
- Support persistent storage.
- Connect with or import Processes to an M-Instance.
- Make Transactions to acquire Rights.
5.2 Perception Rights
A User may, depending on the Rights it holds:
- Perceive scenes at U-Locations as captured by Devices endowed with audio, visual, haptic, and BCI capabilities, and the spatial attitudes of their objects.
- Receive Messages from a U-Location as a result of an event there.
- Import audio, speech, visual, and haptic models.
- Perceive Entities.
- Render perceived Entities at a U-Location with spatial attitudes.
- Import Data and Metadata from and export Items to an Address.
5.3 Interaction Rights
A User may, depending on the Rights it holds:
- Interrogate a Process about its Functionalities.
- Interact with Entities.
- Send public or private Speech, Visual, and Haptic Messages to Users.
- Send selected Entities to a User.
- Place Entities with Spatial Attitudes.
- Animates Models.
5.4 Service access Rights
A User may, depending on the Rights it holds, perform or request a Process to perform:
- Author an Item.
- Authenticate an Item.
- Change the Rights of a Process.
- Discover Objects, Processes, Events, or Experiences.
- Find the Transactions involving an Asset under specified conditions.
- Obtain an interpretation of an Item, e.g.:
Request | From | To |
Extract | Text | Personal Status |
Extract | Speech | Text |
Translate | Text or Speech | Text or Speech |
Extract | Face and/or Gesture | Personal Status |
- Obtain Conversion of an Item from a Format to another Format.
- Obtain information about a Process or an Item.
- Obtain a recommendation of Processes or Items.
- Record all the Actions made by a User (Activity Data) at an M-Location during a time.
- Create a representation of a User’s network of connections with Items, M-Locations, and Processes (Social Graph).
- Posts an Item that can be Transacted (Asset) to a marketplace.
- Retrieve Objects, Events, or Experiences.
- Store Objects, Events, or Experiences.
- Formulate:
- The information it intends to obtain from a Service.
- The Rights it intends to acquire on the response of the Service.
- How the response should be rendered.
5.5 Acquisition of Rights
A User may acquire, or have as part of its Account the Rights to:
- Perform or request another User to perform Actions on Items.
- Develop an economic activity in an M-Environment.
- Make an Asset out of an Item.
- Make a Transaction on an Asset specifying which Rights to the Asset it grants to the buyer.
- Make an agreement with another user, e.g., via a Contract.
- Copy or Modify, i.e., change Data (e.g., by editing it) and/or Metadata of an Item.
- Change the settings and attributes of Entities of an M-Locations (e.g., SFX during a concert).
- Set the Point of View from which it perceives a Scene.
- Make inaccessible to any User an Item for which it has Rights.
- Make or request a Process to make Actions in its own or another M-Instance.
- Be rendered as one of the Personae uploaded at registration time.
6 Personae
A Persona may:
- Faithfully reproduce the visual appearance of the human.
- Have their visual appearance altered, compared to that of the human.
- Have an unrelated visual appearance.
- Display a presumptive Personal Status in speech, face, and gesture.
- Be driven by
- The movements of the human.
- A Process.
7 Locations
- An M-Location may be:
- Private, i.e., only a User or a group of Users have Rights to it.
- Public, i.e., a Metaverse Operator or a User grant anybody the Rights to enter, move in, and perceive the M-Location.
- Persistent
- Ephemeral
- A U-Location
- May require that a User hold Rights to Capture a scene, Render a Scene, or store Data at an Address.
8 Objects and Scenes
- An Object may:
- Be Virtual, i.e., Authored in an M-Instance.
- Be Digitised, i.e., Digital Twins of objects.
- Be Autonomous, i.e., Animated by a Process.
- Have Audio, Visual, or Haptic attributes, or combinations of these attributes.
- A Scene may be composed of:
- Only Virtual Objects.
- Only Digitised Objects.
- Partly Virtual and partly Digitised Object.
9 Identifiers
- All Items have an Identifier.
- An Identifier:
- Uniquely references an Item or a Process.
- May be issued by a central, distributed, or no authority.
- May have a Format accepted by more than one M-Instance.
- May enable to trace the Identifier of an Item back to the Item that spawned the Asset.
- May enable to trace the Identifier of a Modified Item back to the Item that spawned the Modified Item.