Original Article Title: "Zeno's Digital Twinning Ideal and DeSci's Technological Democratization"

Original Article Author: Eric, Foresight News

Over a week ago, DeSci platform Orama Labs successfully completed the token launch of Zeno, the first project on OramaPad. Zeno provided 500 million ZENO tokens for the launchpad, representing half of the total supply. OramaPad required users to stake their PYTHIA tokens to participate, and this "opening act" attracted a total of $3.6 million in PYTHIA staking.

Orama Labs aims to address the inefficiencies in funding allocation and resource distribution in traditional scientific research. The solution involves funding scientific experiments, validating intellectual property, resolving data silos, and implementing community governance, establishing a path from research to commercialization.

OramaPad's first project adopted the Crown model, meaning the project needed to have a robust business logic framework and/or strong Web2 domain technical development capabilities. Additionally, its product had to be highly practical, which Orama refers to as OCM (Onboarding Community Market). Unlike a simple meme issuance, Orama essentially provides a replicable on-chain transformation path for Web2 enterprises or teams with mature business models and technical capabilities. The first pioneer, Zeno, is no exception to this.

The Hardcore Tech in Documents You Can't Understand

Zeno is an immensely ambitious project. It is so vast that if you only look at Zeno's documentation, you may not fully grasp what the team intends to accomplish. It was only after communicating with the team that the author understood the full extent of this cyberpunk-style story:

In summary, Zeno aims to overlay a multi-layered virtual space for intelligent entities such as AI and robots onto the physical space of human life. This allows all "intelligent entities," including humans, to coexist in the same space.

Imagine this scenario: one afternoon in the future, you are lounging on the balcony chair, enjoying a leisurely time. Inside the house, there is an AI butler connecting all the furniture and appliances, along with a humanoid robot busy with household tasks. Suddenly feeling a bit bored, you want to play a virtual passing game with your other two siblings at home. You put on your VR/AR glasses, and in the world of the glasses, the robot appears human-like, while the AI existing only in the network transforms into a humanoid form. The robot sits on the sofa, and the AI sits on the floor. The three of you pass a virtual basketball, discussing what to eat for dinner that evening.

This is Zeno's ultimate vision, allowing carbon-based sentient beings and silicon-based intelligences to coexist in the same physical space.

The cyberspace many of us imagine may be a purely virtual space, such as entering a new world through VR as depicted in the movie "Ready Player One"; including our current interactions with AI, which are also carried out through flat interfaces like computers or smartphone screens. Zeno, however, hopes to directly transfer these virtual spaces into real life, creating a state of "overlay between the physical world and the digital world" where digital content is as "real and tangible" as physical existence. This integration enables humans, robots, and AI to achieve natural interaction in a real-world setting, establishing a mixed reality ecosystem where the virtual and physical coexist, facilitating human-machine symbiosis.

Of course, the world we see may not be exactly the same as what robots and AI perceive. For instance, you may not want a robot wandering into your study at will. In the world as seen by the robot, you could lock the door to the study, and only when you "unlock" this "door," could the robot gain permission to enter the study.

Centered Around Spatial Anchors

Living under the same roof as artificial intelligence may sound very futuristic, but there is one major prerequisite—you need to establish a real-world model in the virtual world to enable programmability.

This requires you to first possess real-world reality capture data, which is also a key focus of research for numerous companies, including those in autonomous driving technology. Take autonomous driving, for example; if you have reality-captured map data of an entire city, AI driving systems do not need to roam the streets with a vehicle to learn how to respond to different situations; they can directly simulate on-road scenarios in a lab environment to continuously self-improve.

Although the above is not what we call "spatial overlay," it is indeed one of the vital applications in establishing a real-world model. Zeno's ultimate vision cannot be achieved in a single step. Its initial priority is to collect reality capture data.

Zeno has already launched a program that allows users to use their everyday devices to help capture spatial data, supporting two types of devices: robots and glasses. As for smartphones, the team mentioned that Google's ARCore is mature enough and does not require custom development; users can directly use it after confirming device compatibility. The spatial data collected is used for algorithmic space construction, developed in-house by the Zeno team.

The core of building coexistence between the real and virtual worlds revolves around spatial anchors. From a technical implementation perspective, the real world cannot be directly programmed; the connection between the real and virtual worlds is established by linking anchors in the real world and mapping out a virtual space based on physical space. Metaphorically speaking, for robots and AI, the real world is like the ocean in the dark of night, and these anchors are individual lighthouses, illuminating every area for silicon-based intelligence in the real world.

Zeno's first step in achieving its "ultimate goal" is to establish a full-stack platform. In addition to everyday electronic devices such as smartphones, the platform also utilizes professional equipment such as LIDAR, 360-degree cameras, and RGB cameras on mobile devices or XR headsets for data collection. The team states that the Zeno platform will have a powerful cloud-based visual world model and computing system that can process gigabytes of raw sensor data daily for large-scale areas (city-level / global-scale) and build indexes for fast spatial queries. It will also be able to concurrently process data for small-scale areas (room-level / anchor regions), achieving high-throughput real-time processing.

Furthermore, the system is designed to be self-learning, continuously optimizing through high-quality and third-party data. In the future, it will support hundreds of spatial queries per second, providing precise six degrees of freedom (6-DOF) positioning results, shared space anchor creation, rapid 3D visual reconstruction, real-time semantic segmentation, and other scene understanding functions. It is highly scalable and can be widely applied in various scenarios such as AR games, navigation, advertising, or productivity tools.

Verified spatial data and the spatial intelligence infrastructure layer it builds can be accessed by various decentralized applications for tasks such as autonomous driving route planning, end-to-end model data training for robots, generating verifiable self-executing smart contracts, spatial-aware ad distribution, ultimately enabling spatial data-driven decision-making and upper-layer applications.

Who Is Behind Zeno?

Compared to some Web3 projects with vague visions, Zeno's goal, while sounding complex, is very practical. The reason the technical implementation is detailed in the project documentation is that team members have deep expertise in this field.

All of Zeno's team members come from DeepMirror, which is Acujii Technology. If you are not familiar with Acujii Technology, you might have heard of Pony.ai, which is listed on the NASDAQ with a market capitalization of $7 billion. Harry Hu, CEO of Acujii Technology, was previously the COO/CFO of Pony.ai.

Zeno's CEO, Yizi Wu, was an early member of Google X and contributed to the development of products such as Google Glass, Google ARCore, Google Lens, and the Google Developer Platform. At Acujii Technology, they led the overall AI architecture and the development of the World Model.

The Zeno core team also includes Taoran Chen, who previously served as a research scientist at Horizon Robotics, holding dual Ph.D. degrees in mathematics from MIT and Cornell University, and Kevin Chen, who previously served as the CFO of Horizon Robotics and held executive positions at Fosun Group, JPMorgan Chase, and Morgan Stanley.

For the Zeno team, venturing into Web3 is more like a bold attempt by a tech-savvy Web2 team. The team introduction states that the ZENO token will be used to incentivize users providing spatial data and teams or individuals adopting the infrastructure development tools, applications, and games built on Zeno. In addition to the 5 billion tokens distributed in the launchpad, the team reserves 3 billion tokens, while the remaining 2 billion tokens will have liquidity pairs with 100 SOL obtained through the launchpad event on Meteora.

Horizon Robotics-developed AR and game-integrated spatial application RealityGuard

When asked why they chose Web3 as their battlefield, Zeno told the author that spatial data itself is a highly decentralized digital asset that naturally fits the Web3 environment. The spatial data collected by Zeno itself will be tokenized in the future and expanded through transactions using the ZENO token as currency to enhance the circulation of ZENO within the ecosystem, with tech companies in need of spatial data naturally being the buyers. As for more applications of ZENO, they will be further explored as the project progresses.

Through Zeno, it is believed that the role of the DeSci platform has been materialized, and science is not necessarily an abstruse and purely theoretical discipline. The democratization of technology, similar to Xiaomi, and lowering the threshold for technology value investment are also important values of DeSci's existence.

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