Exterior Space Documentation

Welcome to the Exterior Space Documentation. Exterior Space is the reference implementation of the manifold standard, a standard for mapping data to a virtual space. This page is for you to review the basic motivation behind Exterior Space.

Problem

The world today faces two problems, outlined below:

Current social platforms are centered around information. As a result, they define “social” in terms of how information is created, distributed, and seen. This leads naturally to mechanisms like feeds, followers, and algorithmic recommendation. These mechanisms in turn create two core problems:

Social fatigue: These systems implicitly force users to participate actively—whether consciously or not—because any post, by design, is created with others in mind. It is meant to be seen. While this works for content like announcements or promotion, it structurally distorts most forms of self-expression, shifting their purpose from personal meaning to public visibility. This mismatch causes fatigue. As a result, many people who do not want to perform for others become passive participants, or “lurkers.”
- A 2022 Pew Research Center study found that 49% of U.S. adult Twitter users post fewer than five tweets per month, categorizing them as lurkers. Only half of them reply to others’ tweets. Source
Short-term engagement: The nature of feeds, i.e., a broadcast timeline, forces people to catch up with what is happening now—otherwise, there is no way for information to reach them. This design forces platforms to optimize for instant, short-term engagement, which further intensifies social fatigue and suppresses long-term self-expression. Deep expression is non-linear and meant to be perceived as a whole, while feeds are linear and fragmented. Most users' posts quickly sink in the feed, and few people revisit content from even a month ago.

The Second Problem: Digital Assets

Let us first establish a fact about anything a user owns: an object’s connection to the user comes from context. A photo is meaningful not because of the data it contains, but because it is a record of a moment the user wants to remember. From this perspective, digital assets on the internet fall into two categories:

Platform- or Application-bound Assets: Examples include in-game items, stats, and experiences. These are assets with context—the context is a closed world provided by the application. These assets are therefore meaningful to the user, yet confined to that small world. Furthermore, these assets are controlled by the platform—meaning the user doesn’t truly own them. In practice, they can’t be transferred out. This fragments the user’s experience, as different pieces of them are scattered across separate, closed systems.
Blockchain-based digital collectibles: Examples include NFTs and tokens. These assets are, for the most part, without context for the general public: they feel distant from everyday users. For most people, they lack practical, daily-life usage scenarios and have no personal connection.
- by September 2023, one report claimed that over 95% of NFT collections had zero monetary value. Source

The core of two problems

The core of both problems is the same: how we express ourselves digitally in an online space. Self-expression—something that naturally emerges from context—requires a human-centered, open space to exist. Without a human-centered structure, it becomes a means to another end, no longer truly self-expression. Without openness, it becomes fragmented and deprivable.

Solution

There is already an answer to the question of how we express ourselves digitally in an online space. We already do it—in the real world. We express ourselves by arranging space, by making space ours. We bring back fridge magnets from a trip and place them on the refrigerator. We keep photos of loved ones on our office desks. We tape posters of our idols in our dorm rooms. We even think about which website should be first in our browser bookmarks. We express ourselves, instinctively, through space.

We propose building a standard for personal virtual space—one that allows everyone to capture their real-life experiences and express them as artifacts within that space.

Recording a meaningful event or organizing your home is an act of expression that is valid with or without an audience—and it is instinctive. Just like picking a souvenir during a trip and imagining how you’ll place it on your bookshelf. And when others visit your home, whether or not you're there, they might notice it. This restores expression to a self-oriented act, while also enabling natural, contextual, passive social interaction. And that, in fact, is how we usually come to know others—through shared experience and resonance.
Your space is one of your deepest forms of expression. Think about how you plan, design, and imagine your new home before moving in—you’re making the space yours, making it part of yourself. Once someone enters that space, all the artifacts within it present meaning non-linearly, all at once. They immediately reveal a sense of who you are, because the space is naturally perceived as a whole—as a context. A chair is not just a chair; it’s the one your loved one preferred to sit in while talking with you. It’s the spot where your pet always curled up to sleep. Your home is the accumulation of your experiences—and it becomes part of your continuing story.

This reveals a few core features of our system:

We help users create digital mementos to record their lives—just like how people pick or craft souvenirs—to establish a connection between the space and the user. This can be done via specific scenes or activities, like visiting a landmark or attending an event, or via everyday activities and daily life, like reading a book, watching a movie, or meeting a friend. A space begins when you bring a memento to it.
We build intuitive interfaces to help users organize their personal space—just like arranging trinkets on a bookshelf—to express context. The choice of placement and order is itself a form of expression: you decide to make it part of your space.
We enable live and asynchronous visits (with the owner’s permission)—just like reuniting with old friends or exploring new ones—to help users stay effortlessly connected to the people they care about. There’s no need to stay online or constantly think about others just to engage socially—and when a visit happens, it begins warmly and naturally.
We support a space and artifact discovery network—just like how we meet new friends by going to the same bar or concert—to help people explore others through shared interests rooted in real experiences, and in a non-linear way. Meeting new people and having new experiences is not an endless road with no direction—it’s an adventure through a forest, full of unexpected excitement.
We help users maintain a history record of each space—just like wanting to remember the time all your classmates gathered around a table before graduation—to help people remember, to solidify fragile and perishable memories. And we can now do something never possible before in the physical world: we allow users to turn parts of the history record into new mementos, or embed them into existing ones. The space itself becomes a story of who we are.

Assets

An open standard frees assets from closed worlds. Users are no longer confined to systems entirely designed by someone else—they can now participate, just as human civilization has always been built: by shaping the world to fit our own needs. This is the only way a personal space can truly adapt—as people grow, cultures shift, and the world changes. And when that standard is implemented in a way that’s accessible to anyone, anywhere, anytime, we unify assets and place them in the user’s hands. This ensures that users can always return to the home they own. We own, so we build. We build, so we own more. This is how growth begins.
We are naturally born into context—the largest and most universal one any human can have: our personal life. This personal context is how we collect mementos in everyday life: a framed drawing on the wall, a figure from a favorite movie, a music box gifted by a friend. And it’s within this context that we use them: a favorite character as a profile photo, a pinned quote on a social platform, a loved one’s photo as a wallpaper. Within this context, we begin to care, to connect, to make use. The context is everywhere—woven into everything we’ve touched. And from it, meaning emerges.

This also reveals how our system grows into an ecosystem:

We are building something that everyone can participate in. Artists can create their own furniture sets and avatar skeletons. Players can design their own quest lines and rewards. Diarists can craft new categories of mementos and personal records. Developers can extend the standard—into new interaction forms, asset leasing, AI companions, TRPG simulator, or things we haven’t yet imagined. Anyone can make their space a public place. Anyone can host an event—in the physical world or in their virtual space. Anyone can shape their space into the form they want.
We’re also building something that can be entered from anywhere. Visiting a space is as easy as clicking a link—just like opening a regular website. No sign-up required. You can access your space from your phone, your browser, your desktop—even set it as your wallpaper, so it launches when you turn on your computer. And the entry point isn’t just the device—it’s the moment. You can craft artifacts from anywhere: a reading app, a travel journal, a movie review site—or from the physical world, when you visit a landmark, break a bowling record, or simply spend time with friends. Your life is the context, and your space is what you have lived through.

Narrative: What we want to become

We consider space as a medium, and invite people to do something like writing: we write for ourselves, but also for friends, for the public. Writing isn’t something we do constantly, but we feel the impulse when triggered by thoughts and scenes—because recording our thoughts is one of our deepest instincts: to solidify something in our mind into the real world. Similarly, we are therefore:

A personal home, where people can shape a space of their own from their life experiences, and can always return to. And when people have homes that are easily accessed and visited, they naturally intertwine. It becomes...
A network that emerges naturally, not through algorithms, but through real connections between people. A network where people are not forced to be online and active, but can simply exist or explore. And when this becomes something we live within, we become...
An infrastructure—not a tool to complete a task, but a structure people live inside. A structure that shapes how they remember, express, and connect, just like writing.

If you want to learn more about the project, including opportunities, technical architecture, operations, cold start, business model, and TILE tokens, please visit operation page.

For more on how we differ from existing platforms and our thinking about spatial interaction and human expression, please visit FAQ: General.

For questions about our use of blockchain, and other challenges of our project, please visit FAQ: Challenge.

If you would like to explore the system architecture, core design principles, and key components of Exterior Space, please visit standard overview.

Exterior Space Introduction