Share your vision.

Auki Labs is creating a decentralized protocol for

collaborative spatial computing.

Our decentralized peer-to-peer positioning

system will give every cubic millimeter an
address, replace the GPS system, and enable a
persistent and privacy-preserving metaverse.

We are on a mission to help every person and

device find their place in the world. Literally.
TABLE OF CONTENTS

WHAT’S WRONG WITH AUGMENTED

REALITY?
Dive deeper into what has been hindering augmented reality adoption.
PREDICTING THE FUTURE OF REALITY
A series of predictions of where spatial computing will take society.

WHAT’S WRONG WITH SPATIAL COMPUTING?

Examine difficulties and dystopian outcomes of centralized AR clouds.

THE AUKIVERSE: A MEASURED RESPONSE

Introducing the Auki SDK, its modules and the Aukiverse concept.

DESIGNING THE AUKI TOKEN ECONOMY

Learn how the Auki token will radically impact spatial computing.

THE TEAM
Meet the cyberpunks building the future of human communication.
 *Pokemon GO by Niantic Studios.
All rights belong to the respective owners.

WHAT’S WRONG WITH

AUGMENTED REALITY?
 *Pokemon GO by Niantic Studios.
What’s wrong
WHAT’S WRONG with
WITHAR? All rights belong to the respective owners.

AUGMENTED REALITY?

AR IS NOT SOCIAL
It is prohibitively difficult to share an AR experience with other participants.

SLOW CALIBRATION
The current state-of-the-art method of collaborative depth map/digital twin
calibration takes 20-60 seconds, creating a large barrier to entry for joiners.

DISCREPANT POSITIONING
As a result of the fuzziness of the depth maps, participants can only place
the AR world with a relative precision of several centimeters.

SMALL SPACES
The leading provider of shared AR experiences only supports a maximum of
8 participants.
 *Conceptual rendering.
All rights belong to the respective owners.
WHAT’S WRONG WITH
AUGMENTED REALITY?

NO EMBODIMENT
Objects in virtual worlds can only be interacted with through digital
interfaces. You are not embodied in the virtual world. Lacking gesture and
body tracking means the world does not interact with you.

WALLED GARDENS
Experiences in AR are not interoperable, meaning you always have to
choose which narrow augmentation of the world you wish to apply.

AR IS EXHAUSTING AND JARRING

From slow calibration, to indirect and inefficient interfaces, to lacking
intersubjectivity – augmented reality quickly goes from exhilarating to
exhausting.
WHAT’S WRONG WITH
AUGMENTED REALITY?

Positioning
AR is
Networking
neither
social nor Embodiment
interactive
Interoperability
 *Conceptual rendering by Artur Sadlos.
All rights belong to the respective owners.

PREDICTING THE
FUTURE OF REALITY
 *Conceptual rendering.
All rights belong to their respective owners.

THE HANDHELD
ERA
Humanity has one foot in the doorway. Even with all its limitations,
augmented reality has captured our imagination. In this handheld era, AR is
accessed through a digital looking glass offering us a narrow window into
the augmented realm. We are limited in our ability to interact with both the
real and the virtual, having only one hand free for either.

In the handheld era of augmented reality, we are on the outside looking in,
seeing the world through a narrow peephole with one hand always tied
behind our back.

Our handheld devices have only a rough sense of their position in either
world, and shared AR experiences are warped by the dissonant perception of
each participant.

And yet we dream. The market is already estimated to have grown to well
over 20 billion dollars annually.
 *AR goggles by MAD Gaze.
All rights belong to their respective owners.

THE WEARABLE
ERA
We have opened the doors of perception and planted both feet firmly on the
other side. With both hands free to interact with the real world, the barrier to
entering virtual worlds is drastically lowered.

Primitive gesture tracking and simple single user applications gradually give
way to more immersive and interactive experiences that can be shared with
friends.

Networks of devices and people orient themselves in the virtual world

together, and parts of the virtual world are starting to become persistently
anchored in the real world.

As people spend more time in the augmented world, we start adding the
virtual to our identity. Increasingly, how we are seen in these semi-virtual
worlds becomes a reflection of how we see and express ourselves.

The market for AR is estimated to reach 340 billion USD by the year 2028.
 *AR lens concept by mojo vision.
All rights belong to the respective owners.

THE INTEGRATED
ERA
We spend more time in the augmented world than we do in the information
sparse desert we once called reality.
Objects in the world are much more than tactile and visual in the integrated
era of augmented reality. Depths of information and human emotion is
projected onto the canvas of the augmented world.
Many layers of virtual worlds are firmly anchored and persistent, and people
choose which layer of the world they wish to inhabit. Vast worlds of virtual
real estate are bought and sold, creating a market bigger than that for
physical space.

Our own identity and how we view those around us is inextricably linked
with the personas we have crafted for ourselves. We have reshaped our
civilization and have collectively embarked on a journey towards a new
destiny for our species.

The word “market” no longer meaningfully captures the immense impact

that augmented reality has on humanity.
*Interactive advertising in Blade Runner 2049.
All rights belong to their respective owners.

DEATH OF THE DISPLAY

The wearable era starts ushering in the end of physical displays. Persistent
and precise augmented reality makes the digital display redundant, and
allows for all content to be personalized.

By the dawn of the integrated era the notion of physical displays is already
becoming anachronistic and quaint. Computers are sold without displays,
and no one has owned a television set for years.

VIRTUAL KINGDOMS
The rendering rights for physical spaces can be bought and sold, creating a
potential trillion dollar market. Rendering in the augmented world is
regulated and monitored.

ADVERTISING REINVENTED
Personalized ads can appear virtually in physical spaces, generating new
revenue opportunities for business owners. Impressions can finally be
tracked in the physical world, and every advertising opportunity is
optimized.
 *Concept rendering of a vertical city.
All rights belong to their respective owners.

LEAVING
FLATLAND
As our cities grow bigger, they reach up towards the heavens and deep
underground. Two-dimensional maps and representations of the physical
world no longer make sense. Human settlements are measured
volumetrically rather than by area.

The GPS system is relegated to an obscure backup protocol, inaccessible

within the towering urban landscapes. Location needs to be expressed as a
position in space.

Vast fleets of automated vehicles and delivery drones navigate these

complex and crowded three-dimensional environments at incredible speeds.
Human pilots are the exception rather than the rule.

The positioning and mapping protocol of the future is peer-to-peer,

collaborative, terrestrial and fast.
 *Concept rendering by Alex Feliksovich
All rights belong to their respective owners.

SOLVING FOR [X, Y, Z]

Before any of these visions of the future can materialize, there is a massive
problem that needs to be tackled: spatial computing.

The foundational problem at the heart of the future AR metaverse is that

electronic devices only have a vague sense of their literal place in the world,
making them unable to reach a consensus about how to navigate or even
render the metaverse.

For a persistent AR layer to be constructed on top of the world, one must

first solve the problem of positioning. There’s no way around it. GPS will
never suffice, as it needs line of sight and won’t work in dense urban
environments or indoors. The nature of WiFi or Bluetooth frequencies
means that triangulation can never reach the required accuracy.

Devices must know their exact 3D coordinate, not just a rough

approximation of their longitude and latitude, to be able to enter the
metaverse.

To build the AR metaverse, you must first replace the GPS and solve the
problem of spatial computing.
*Concept rendering by Getty.
All rights belong to the respective owners.

WHAT’S WRONG WITH

SPATIAL COMPUTING?
*GPS satellite by Gary Cope.
All rights belong to their respective owners.
WHAT’S WRONG WITH WHAT’S WRONG WITH
SPATIAL COMPUTING? SPATIAL COMPUTING?

THE BLIND PURSUIT OF VISION

In a desperate arms race to solve the trillion dollar spatial computing
problem, everyone from Apple, Google and Microsoft to Snap, Niantic and
Meta are embracing the digital twin approach to device positioning.

Billions of dollars are already being deployed, and dozens of acquisitions

are being made, to try to recreate a 1:1 digital copy of the world that,
combined with computer vision, can help devices find their place in the
world.

But is their approach sound? The strategy will take many years to
materialize, and is incredibly vulnerable to disruption. Read more.
*Conceptual rendering.
All rights belong to the respective owners.
 *Concept by Geoffrey Vaudou.
All rights belong to the respective owners.
WHAT’S WRONG WITH
SPATIAL COMPUTING?

CROWDSOURCED PRIVACY VIOLATIONS

The digital twin has to be crowdsourced, but who owns the rights of 3D
scanned interiors of our homes and offices? How comfortable are we with
surveillance capitalists monetizing our most intimate spaces?

SERFDOM AS A SERVICE
We are not being compensated by these large corporations for participating
in the crowdsourcing efforts of the digital twin.

COMPLEX STITCHING
A crowdsourced digital twin will be very difficult to stitch together, and any
imprecision in the stitching is inherited by the positioning. How does one
solve the chicken and egg problem of creating a precise map without precise
positioning?

THE INTERNET OF THINGS LEFT BEHIND

How will devices without cameras access this new positioning paradigm?
We do not believe a system that neglects IoT can truly win the spatial
computing arms race.
 *Conceptual rendering by Ash Thorp.
All rights belong to the respective owners.

THE AUKIVERSE:
A MEASURED RESPONSE
THE AUKI SDK

Reinventing augmented reality

The powerful Auki SDK allows app developers to effortlessly create social augmented
reality experiences. By providing turnkey multiplayer networking, instant calibration, a low-
latency asset cloud, cross-app interoperability, embodiment, and new ways to monetize
content, the Auki SDK is an essential tool that addresses the most important pain points of
creating augmented reality experiences.

SDK COMPONENTS

Manna Hagall Ur Odal Fehu Dagaz

Positioning Networking Embodiment Interoperability Rewards Topography
 THE AUKI SDK

Manna - Instant Calibration

Our patent pending instant calibration method gives

AR developers unprecedented ability to create social
experiences. Peer-to-peer positioning ensures
Mathr - Human, relevant relative positioning without awkward or time
ability, intelligence consuming preparations.

Hagall - Networking

Our bespoke distributed networking engine makes

developing spatial multiplayer experiences
effortless. Participants are automatically routed to
This live unedited footage shows a prototype of the Incos by Matterless Studios, an interactive
Hagall - Hail, the most cost-efficient networking provider, who virtual pet experience, using the Auki SDK to create a seamless experience.
transformation earns tokens for hosting the networking service.
THE AUKI SDK

Ur - Embodiment

World-class monocular 3D reconstruction allows your

users to reach out and touch digital objects, even
without a LiDAR. Unlock a richer world of spatial
Ur - Strength, interaction and create experiences on a bigger canvas
physical power than ever.

Odal - Interoperability

No matter which Aukiverse app your friends are

using, you can seamlessly invite into your world.
Our sophisticated asset store keeps assets in a low-
Ur module: 3D hand reconstruction with strong depth cues in 60 FPS on a mobile device,
Odal - Heritage, latency cloud environment that makes it possible from a single RGB camera source.
estate, ancestry for all Aukiverse apps to be interoperable.
 *Self-driving robot by Starship Tech.
All rights belong to the respective owners.
THE AUKI SDK

Fehu - Rewards

Our map-to-earn API allows app developers to

discover Aukiverse mapping tasks, so they can
mobilize their user base to earn tokens by doing
Fehu - Wealth,
prosperity, cattle
validating measurements or capturing 3D data for a
crowdsourced digital twin.

Dagaz - Topology

The Dagaz component captures and reconstructs

the environment for both ad hoc sharing and
persistent digital twins, allowing AR experiences to
Dagaz - Day, sunrise be more accurately positioned and more faithfully
and vividly rendered.
THE AUKI SDK

AUKIVERSE LIVE DEMO

Three entirely different codebases (two mobile apps and a web app) are
calibrated into the same space, all viewing the same art asset with
synchronised animations.

A third phone instantly calibrates into the space by simply scanning a QR

code on one of the other devices.

The third phone is running a debug app that renders a blank phone where
each other phone is. This is not done with computer vision, rather each
phone is self-reporting their position and orientation in the Aukiverse.

The third phone spawns animated clocks into the shared space,
demonstrating the precision and synchronization of the Aukiverse.

Asset interoperability by Odal, instant calibration by Manna, and networking by Hagall.

 *Warehouse concept by unknown artist..
All rights belong to the respective owners.
THE AUKI SDK

COLLABORATIVE SLAM
Auki-enabled devices and robots can lend each other a helping hand and get
a better grip on their position in the world thanks to our real-time
collaborative layer on top of the devices’ native SLAM and other
positioning modalities. Lightweight semantic and topographical cues are
communicated and compared live over the air, reducing drift and improving
positioning accuracy through shared awareness..

PRIVACY AS A PRINCIPLE
We don’t need to know what your bedroom, warehouse or private corners
looks like. Own and manage your own digital twin and sensitive
topographical data in a place you can trust. Whether you self-host or store
your data in our cloud, your domain is only accessible to the trusted parties
you specify. Your data is not our business model. Read more.
DESIGNING THE AUKI
TOKEN ECONOMY
DESIGNING THE AUKI
TOKEN ECONOMY

FOREWORD
The invention of independently tradable tokens has enabled some pretty
remarkable conceptual opportunities for the organization of labor. The
lowered cost and reduced latency of resource allocation that cryptographic
tokens unlock in turn allow us to architect solutions that take advantage of
one of the most creative forces in the universe: natural selection, or the
market. .

Just like deep learning allows a computer to solve a problem it does not
understand, the evolutionary power of the market can optimize performance
in ways that centralized planners cannot. The AUKI token will be used to
distribute resources within the protocol, and to incentivize the market to
iteratively improve the quality of the network. We believe that this will give
us the power to not only design the network itself, but even help craft and
influence the behaviors that govern it, allowing us to memetically engineer
and cultivate the ecosystem.

The technologies that change the world the most are the ones that change
human behavior. At Auki Labs, we take the concept of memetic engineering
seriously. In this whitepaper we hope to demonstrate how the proposed
AUKI token will make possible a more efficient, scalable, and even more
ethical spatial computing protocol than could conceivably be built by a
traditional corporation.

-Nils Pihl, CEO

 *Simplified diagram of token economy. Non-
binding and non-representative.
THE AUKI TOKEN:
OVERVIEW

The foundation of the Auki token is a circular economy where the protocol
rewards the decentralized service providers, or helpers, with AUKI tokens Apps
for work performed. The fundamental value of the token is backed by the
demand for the positioning protocol, as participating apps have to use the
tokens to get access to the service.

Apps pay a dollar-denominated amount of AUKI tokens based on service Exchanges

consumption, and a portion of the service fees is paid out to the protocol and
its helpers, and another portion of the service fees is burned.

A fixed token-denominated amount of tokens is then minted every month,

giving the foundation additional means to allocate resources towards Protocol
improving the protocol.

Both apps and helpers will need to stake tokens to participate in the network
and be eligible for rewards, allowing us to build a tokenized reputation
system, strong market incentives, and robust behavioral loops that will Burn
increase the quality of the protocol and the demand for the service.

This simplified diagram simply highlights the overarching concept, and is

not a representation of the final ecosystem with its many different kinds of
helpers. Helpers
*Delivery drone concept by Honda.
All rights belong to the respective owners.
AUKI TOKEN UTILITY

REPUTATION MANAGEMENT
A real-time protocol for collaborative spatial computing cannot afford to
wait for time-consuming transactions to clear before work can commence.
Every millisecond counts, so a token-based reputation system allows the
protocol to serve traffic in a more timely manner, and to batch transactions
together to reduce network load.

Participating entities need to stake an amount of tokens to gain trusted

access to the protocol. This disincentivizes undesired behavior on the
network, and allows the protocol and its participants to automatically punish
or slash malicious actors.

App developers, devices and other robots need to stake tokens to get
network and domain access, and can be slashed if they abuse the system. For
example, a delivery drone might need to stake its reputation into a delivery
contract and promise not to deviate off of an agreed-upon path through a
domain. This allows the domain-owner to trustlessly interact with the robot
delivery, without worrying about exposing sensitive data or assets to a third
party.

Node providers and other helpers also need to stake to be eligible to serve
traffic, and can be slashed if they fail to deliver the service they advertised.

Utility: Latency, scalability, trustlessness, behavior management

*Server farm by unknown photographer.
All rights belong to the respective owners.
AUKI TOKEN UTILITY

PREDICTIVE SCALING
It is hard to predict bursts of traffic in a protocol-layer network, and it is
crucial to be able to automatically scale the network down during lulls to
reduce cost, and to scale it up during bursts to meet demand.

App developers can opt to stake additional tokens to signal the amount of
traffic they anticipate, in exchange for discounted network fees. This allows
the app developer to manage their costs, and the protocol to balance the
amount of rewards to offer for hosting additional network nodes in the right
geographic areas. This predictive signal from the demand side allows the
market to respond on the supply side, enabling more efficient resource
allocation.

The lightweight nature of the Hagall networking nodes will enable

independent actors to dedicate spare computational resources to servicing
the protocol without specialized hardware. These actors can respond to the
predictive traffic signalling and automatically dedicate resources when they
are satisfied with the scale of predicted demand in their geographic area.

This network of decentralized service providers have the potential to

outperform traditional data centers in terms of both cost and latency.

Utility: Uptime, scalability, cost, latency

 *Photo by Dong Wenjie/Getty Images.
All rights belong to the respective owners.
AUKI TOKEN UTILITY

CROWDSOURCING THE DIGITAL TWIN

Creating a digital twin for visual positioning and AR requires very large
amounts of data. Thanks to the accuracy of Auki’s positioning protocol it is
possible to collaboratively generate this data over time. Any device with a
camera that is navigating in a domain is a potential collaborator, and the
token allows the protocol to offer rewards for contributing to the
maintenance and construction of digital twins.

App developers and domain owners will be able to earn tokens for
contributing relevant and desired positioning data towards the public digital
twin maintained by the foundation, and could even choose to pass those
earnings on directly to its own users to incentivize participation. DISTRIBUTED AND DECENTRALIZED
Network latency is a determining factor for the accuracy of the collaborative
We believe a crowdsourced digital twin for the public good is superior to positioning. To reduce latency, the Auki protocol enables and incentivizes
one generated and owned by a surveillance capitalist organization. The Auki the hosting of local micro-servers. By rewarding these servers in tokens
protocol and its accompanying token allows us to incentivize the community based on how well they serve local traffic, the protocol uses the free market
to collaboratively create an alternative and superior positioning utility that to help decentralize the backend, reduce network latency and increase
does not undermine the privacy and civil liberties of the population. uptime guarantees. We also believe that these decentralized local micro-
servers can be more economically efficient than traditional cloud providers.

Utility: Scalability, data quality, privacy Utility: Latency, uptime, scalability, cost, trustlessness
*Hong Kong by Manson Yim.
All rights belong to the respective owners.
AUKI TOKEN UTILITY

LIGHTHOUSE MANAGEMENT
To collaboratively construct a high-quality digital map of the world, you
need trusted reference markers to allow for separate topographical maps to
be accurately stitched together. If these reference markers, or lighthouses,
are placed on moving objects, for example, then the quality of the domain is
radically reduced.

To disincentivize poor or malicious placement, each lighthouse will be

registered as a non-fungible token and will require some staking to serve as
the basis of its reputation and to make its owner eligible for protocol
rewards. The protocol rewards will be proportional to how often the
reference marker is used, and this will generate market incentives to place
trustworthy reference markers in areas of high demand, accelerating the
construction of digital twins where they are most needed.

This community-generated scaffolding for the digital twin will enable the
protocol to construct a superior digital twin for the public good, and gives us
a chance, as a society, to solve the positioning dilemma without falling
further into surveillance capitalism.

Utility: Data quality, behavior management

 MEET THE CYBERPUNKS
We have assembled an absolutely world-class team of veteran operators and
engineers that have helped build some of the most incredibly advanced and
scalable systems out there.

Every single person on the Auki Labs team is an expert in their field, with a
long list of accomplishments to their name, and now we are joining forces to
tackle one of the biggest and most audaciously difficult engineering tasks of
this century.

THE TEAM We earned our battle scars building scalable and real-time systems at
companies like Apple, Daimler, Google, Microsoft, KaiOS, Tantan and
Lalamove, and we’ve built everything from robotics operating systems and
neural interfaces to real-time social apps with over 20 million active users
and advanced predictive analytics for Fortune 100 companies.

We’re a distributed team, true metaverse natives, recruiting only the top
talent from all over the world - and we are unified by the belief in our
mission: Helping every person and device find their place in the world.
MEET THE CYBERPUNKS

Nils Pihl Ted Östrem Santeri Aramo

Founder & CEO Founder & CTO Founder & COO

Serial entrepreneur and recognized thought- A veteran of the highly competitive demo Forged in the furnace of international
leader in user engagement, Nils helped scene of the early 2000s, Ted is an expert in luxury commerce, Santeri is a disciplined
popularize memetics as a tool for DevOps and scalable systems. management professional with expertise in
understanding and driving behavior in the fashion, brand management and
digital era. He’s been an integral part of building merchandising.
everything from an OS for robotics to the
From Apple to the World Bank, he’s been real-time auto-scaling infrastructure the Santeri manages our international
enlisted by titans and startups alike to world’s 3rd largest dating app. operations, stakeholders and partnerships.
decode behavior and drive change.
Cyberpunk credentials: Cyberpunk credentials:
Cyberpunk credentials: Award-winning hacker that came to China Built a fully automated physical storage
Helped give a primate direct neural control on an Olympic athlete visa. startup, employing no staff.
of a computer game in 2009.
Holds a patent for using AI to detect human
Crafted successful propaganda campaign emotions.
for Weibo that helped propel them from
50m to 500m active users.
 Dr. Steinberger Dariusz Jose
Chief Scientist Unity SDK Rendering Lead

Internationally recognized expert in A veteran of the digital entertainment Passionate computer graphics expert that has
cryptography and computational mathematics industry, Dariusz has made software and been pushing the boundaries of AR since
from Tsinghua University, John is working on games since the 90s. He leads the SDK 2006. José has done everything volumetric
the magic that underpins our positioning creation efforts at Auki Labs. rendering for medical applications to
consensus. Hollywood visual effects.
Cyberpunk credentials: Wrote games in
Cyberpunk credentials: Authored and Assembly, and made his first augmented Cyberpunk credentials: Building his 3rd
programmed automated digital tools for reality game already in 2012. rendering engine from scratch. Made
learning calculus. automated digital avatars before it was cool.

Dr. Gao Matthieu Oskar

Computer Vision Backend Site Reliability

A leading computer vision researcher from Versatile fullstack engineer with expertise in Infrastructure and DevOps wizard that’s kept
the prestigious Jiaotong University in blockchain and DevOps. Matthieu is building the lights on, at scale, for massive companies
Shanghai, Zhongpai leads the computer the massively scalable services that will like Tantan and Lalamove. Oskar manages the
vision research efforts at Auki Labs handle shared positioning and interoperability uptime of the Aukiverse and its services.
in the AR metaverse.
Cyberpunk credentials: Founded and ran a
Cyberpunk credentials: Uses psycho-visual Cyberpunk credentials: Hacked and successful eSports community for a decade.
temporal manipulation to embed invisible QR distributed games on a private server he built
codes in digital media. himself when he was only 14.
 Andy Agnes Curtis
Software Human Resources Cybersecurity

Passionate software engineer with expertise Experienced HR manager with expertise in Curtis is a senior infosec engineer with a
in virtual world creation, precise and shared international talent acquisition and degree in cybersecurity, formerly with
augmented reality, and the Unity game management, Agnes helps scale, cultivate and Optimizely and Microsoft, where he honed
engine, Andy is coding our in-house operate the remote workforce of Auki Labs. the skills to keep the Aukiverse protected and
applications. safe from attacks and exploitation.
Cyberpunk credentials: Helped assemble
Cyberpunk credentials: Wrote Rightful several world-class distributed engineering Cyberpunk credentials: From junior to
Ruler, the world’s first sports-grade AR teams. veteran at breakneck speed, Curtis emerged as
streaming tool for tabletop games. a leader on a team of 300.

Admir John
Performance Physical Products

With almost three decades of experience, Serial entrepreneur with two decades of
intimately involved in each iteration of the experience in eCommerce, sourcing and
web, Admir uses his deep understanding of production. John manages the production and
computer science and networking to optimize distribution at scale of the physical products
Aukiverse performance. that anchor the Aukiverse.

Cyberpunk credentials: A natural machine Cyberpunk credentials: Founded and built a

whisperer, Admir thrives at the deep level smart fermentation oven that allows for
where software meets hardware. distributed production of complex food.
MEET OUR PARTNERS

TRIBE CAPITAL
The future of augmented reality is not
speculative, but inevitable.

We need not ask ourselves if this

vision of humanity will come to pass,
but rather what part we will play in its
inception.

One day we will build and inhabit all

the castles of the imagination and
Auki Labs is on a mission to lay their
foundation.
In the cyberdelic future artists will rule, because the
world will be made of art.

-Terence McKenna, 1991