An interoperable communication library for the spatial internet.

The Connected Spaces Platform is a library that provides developers across a range of languages and platforms with a means to build interoperable, cross-reality, multi-user applications.

It comes in the form of an open-source client-side library, effectively encoding in binary form the standards by which applications can interoperably communicate with one another. Standards that we can all contribute to.

Today, when you visit a web page on your laptop, mobile, or desktop computer, it looks and behaves the same no matter how or where you’re accessing it. There is a consistent user experience. This is made possible by adhering to web standards and ensuring interoperability across various platforms allowing us to build websites and applications that function smoothly, regardless of the device or browser being used. Interoperability is vital for the next internet too.

Yes, it is free to use under the Apache License 2.0. This is a permissive license whose main conditions require the preservation of copyright and license notices. Contributors provide an express grant of patent rights. Licensed works, modifications, and larger works may be distributed under different terms and without source code.

Spatial experiences should work across multiple technologies in harmony, bridging applications and devices so that we can move beyond a series of disconnected islands. But currently, users have to switch identities, devices, and interfaces to navigate between different platforms. And organizations that want to build these next-gen experiences often need to develop and compile custom experiences for each platform, and then try to string them together with a hodgepodge of cloud services. That sucks.

The Connected Spaces Platform provides a solution for this. It gives developers across a range of languages and platforms a means to build managed, live, persistent, interoperable, cross-reality, multi-user applications, which talk fluently with other CSP-backed applications.

It allows your application to communicate interoperably with other spatial web applications via an API that you can use to both understand and describe changes occurring in the spatial web. That’s much bigger than just describing a scene.

The API has been designed to allow applications to work at a high level of abstraction, one that can be easily integrated into modern game engines and real-time renderers. It reasons about users, permissions, spaces, entities in your space, and the changes that happen over time to them.

Internally, it handles the heavy lifting of ensuring that what your application says is happening is heard and understood by any other CSP-enabled application.

It handles all of the actual incoming and outgoing traffic for you, all of the schemas, the DTOs, the RESTful endpoints that should be hit, and efficient transaction mechanisms for highly performant multi-user experiences. It maintains connections, handles user authentication, and token management. It takes care of ensuring scripted interactive experiences just work, in a Turing-complete execution environment and affords integrations with external services such as third-party authentication via Google, Apple or Discord, VOIP via Agora, commerce via Shopify, event ticketing via Eventbrite.

The Connected Spaces Platform both defines and implements the protocols for all of this, in a freely available and functional library that can be used today.

CSP is a client-side library that allows your application to interoperably talk to cloud services. It’s not the services, but a Rosetta Stone for communicating with any other CSP-enabled application via services. The specific set of services that CSP is pointed at is immaterial.

Naturally, we have developed our own set of services to facilitate the development of CSP. While they rock, they aren’t (and shouldn’t be) the only ones that CSP can be pointed towards. CSP is agnostic to the actual root URIs it is pointed at. It just requires that those services follow a consistent interface, one that is well documented in the repos.

Given such a set of services, CSP accelerates the development of spatial web applications that natively and automatically will just work with any other application that uses CSP. Not just at the scene description level, but at the transaction level, the scripting level, the user identity level, the permissions level, the access control level, and the ecommerce level.

All of it, working interoperably with other apps, across a range of languages, with no effort from the developer.

The Connected Spaces Platform can be used by web developers, Unreal Engine Developers, mobile app developers, and cloud services developers.

We’ve always been careful to keep it agnostic of asset formats because that’s the key to interoperability. We acknowledge that we cannot know what formats future client applications will prefer. The Connected Spaces Platform reasons about the notion of assets, and is aware of their Mime types. It ensures that the asset is correctly uploaded and downloaded, and that it can be referentially linked with other content, but that’s as far as the platform goes when it comes to formats.

All information is on our repo on GitHub.

In order to provide robust, persistent, real-time connectivity, the Connected Spaces Platform must be connected to a set of Cloud Services that offer common things like identity management, storage, multiplayer services, and the like.

A developer could create their own services, or integrate their own unique combination of third-party commercially-available services…as we did in our early days. Or we can provide access to Magnopus Cloud Services, which are ready-made to support CSP.

We have gone to great lengths to optimize our services to minimize complexity and costs to host and use, but whether built and hosted by the developer or accessed through Magnopus, there are naturally costs associated with the consumption of services, as with any utility like electricity or water.

For development purposes, we will be offering access to our cloud services free of charge so that people can try out the system. We will apply some reasonable limits to traffic and storage in order to be conscious of costs. Included with this is access to documentation and support.