Frequently Asked Questions
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The Connected Spaces Platform
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An interoperable communication library for the spatial internet.
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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.
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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鈥檙e 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.
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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.
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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.
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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鈥檚 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.
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CSP is a client-side library that allows your application to interoperably talk to cloud services. It鈥檚 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鈥檛 (and shouldn鈥檛 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.
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The Connected Spaces Platform can be used by web developers, Unreal Engine Developers, mobile app developers, and cloud services developers.
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We鈥檝e always been careful to keep it agnostic of asset formats because that鈥檚 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鈥檚 as far as the platform goes when it comes to formats.
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All information is on our
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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鈥s we did in our early days. Or we can provide access to 草莓视频在线 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 草莓视频在线, 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.
OpenUSD
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At first glance, USD and CSP may appear to be doing similar things. They鈥檙e related but are two very different things.
USD is an interchange file format built to structure scenes of spatial data. CSP is a middleware engine that enables the managed transmission of spatial data. That spatial data can be stored in a USD file or many other formats.
As a simple analogy, if USD is the 鈥淗TML of the spatial web鈥, then CSP is the HTTP.
CSP is an application-side library, built for the spatial web, that does the job of handling fluent communication with other applications for you, the developer. The specific spatial data that is communicated between applications is still for you to decide. It can be stored in, or derived from, a USD file.
CSP is agnostic of any underlying asset formats. Any applications written that natively support USD can take advantage of all CSP functionality. This includes user management, group management, avatar integration, real-time interactions, continuous, persistent spatial transactions, and integration with external services.
CSP can enable developers wishing to use USD to rapidly stand up fully interactive solutions, with users, objects, external integrations, real-world anchoring, interactivity, and persistence across platforms.
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We can鈥檛 say either CSP or USD is 鈥榖etter鈥, because they solve different problems, and they can both make each other more useful. The functionality that CSP provides complements the USD format on its journey to mainstream adoption.
Tenant IDs
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You are a tenant鈥 a tenant of 草莓视频在线 Cloud Services (MCS), which underpins CSP. Your tenant ID is how your application is identified by our system, like a calling card. If anything tries to get into or out of our services without a tenant ID, it鈥檚 Stranger Danger!
A Tenant is also a section of the database that鈥檚 reserved for you and your work.
Consider an apartment building. The building is MCS. A tenant is like the address of your apartment in the building. All of your accounts are there, your spaces, your assets, etc. Anything you want to store in your apartment must be addressed so the mailman knows where it goes.
While not an authentication or security token, you should still exercise caution when sharing your tenant ID. It is unique to you and your application(s). You don鈥檛 want anyone impersonating you or squatting in your apartment.
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If you want to develop a custom application using the Connected Spaces Platform in conjunction with 草莓视频在线 Cloud Services, you'll need a Tenant ID.
However, you don鈥檛 need a Tenant ID if you鈥檙e just experimenting with the Connected Spaces Platform. In this instance, you are free to use the tenant IDs referenced in the CSP samples 鈥 CSP_HELLO_WORLD.
Please note that anything made using that tenant ID will be available to others and may be deleted or overwritten.
If you have concerns over IP or are looking to do a longer-term evaluation of CSP, it鈥檚 safer to make a new Tenant ID.
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No. Once you submit the form with all the pertinent information, our system will generate a unique ID.
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Sort of. A Tenant ID cannot be changed once it鈥檚 generated. If you want to replace an old Tenant ID, you can submit a Github request to delete it, and then you can create a new one. However, data from one Tenant cannot be moved into another, so getting a new Tenant ID would require you to start over from scratch.
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Your tenant is used to initialize CSP. It is defined in the . Please see the example projects in the for more information.
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Head to
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Once you submit the form, you will get an email prompting you to verify your account. Your tenant is ready to use as soon as you have verified your email address.
If your email is not verified within 72 hours, you will need to use the forgot/reset password endpoint to resend it.
Tenants without verified tenant admins will be deleted after two weeks.
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Yes.
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Yes, but Tenants cannot share data or accounts. They are islands unto themselves. However, there is no limit to the number of Tenants you can create.
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No. At present there is no way to migrate data/accounts/etc from one Tenant to another automatically.
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Not at this time.
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No. Tenants are an infrastructure/permission construct. They are not the same as groups or organizations, which have the concept of membership. You can be a Tenant Administrator, but that just means you can access any data or user without it being shared with you specifically. This is useful for any troubleshooting or administrative tooling.
Returning to the metaphor of the apartment building, a Tenant Admin is like the person on the lease. Ultimately they can police what happens in the apartment, but they鈥檙e still not the building landlord and they can鈥檛 make structural layout changes.
The Tenant Administrator is the one you made when you created your tenant.
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As of Aug 2023, the staging environment is email domain-restricted. That means only the domain of the email address you used to request a tenant is allowed to create an account. For example, if you requested a tenant and your email address is @happypuppytown.co, only people with @happypuppytown.co email addresses can log in.
Tenant requests submitted without a company or from an email with a default domain like @, @, or @ will not have this restriction.
You can request additional email domains, be added to the allowlist, or remove the restrictions by submitting a Github issue.
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No. When you are ready to use CSP in a production capacity, contact us to receive a production environment tenant. Your data and accounts will have to be remade.
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Not for the Tenant ID. Your Tenant ID will be the same in all environments.
Until you contact us for a production Tenant ID, the only environment you will be able to access is Staging.
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For development/staging: https://ogs.magnopus-stg.cloud
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When you create a Tenant, you are automatically assigned as the Tenant Administrator, and an account is set up for you.
If you鈥檙e having trouble signing up, please try using the 鈥榝orgot password鈥 method to reset your password or re-verify your email and access your account.
If a tenant admin account has not been verified after 2 weeks, the tenant will be deleted and you will have to make a new one.
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Yes. There鈥檚 no limit to the number of accounts you can make in a tenant, however, there can be only one administrator. The administrator is the account created at the same time as the tenant.
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Tenant administrators can see all data created in the tenant, regardless of if it鈥檚 been explicitly shared with them. They can lock user accounts and delete them if necessary.
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Yes. You have an unlimited number of spaces to play with, but are limited to 5 concurrent users in a space at a time. You also won鈥檛 have access to third-party integrations like Eventbrite or Spotify. For full usage of all the good stuff on offer, you鈥檒l have to get hold of a production tenant by getting in touch.
Connected Spaces
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Right now we live in two disconnected worlds: a spatial physical world (concerts, museums, offices) and a generally-flat digital one, (websites, apps, videos). Living between two different worlds like this is unnatural for humans. We鈥檙e spatial creatures 鈥 scientific studies have validated that we understand information and enjoy experiences much better when they interact with us and our environment, rather than being flat.
As spatial display and computing technologies progress, and we grow the standards and adoption of the spatial internet, we need a better way of uniting physical and digital spaces. We see these bridging blocks as 鈥楥onnected Spaces鈥.
Terms like 鈥楳etaverse鈥 and 鈥榃eb 3.0鈥 have become confusing. While many people consider the Metaverse to be an interoperable network of virtual worlds, we believe the spaces of the next web will exist anywhere between physical AND digital worlds.
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