Awhile back I mentioned how it would be really nice to be able to embed games such as those you can make that work with WebGL with various game engines. I actually provided a demo in my post to a working game in Unity.
Steemit being able to embed Unity WebGL builds.... Games anyone?
I believe that to truly compete that we do need to find a way to provide more interactive experiences if possible. Right now we have video, still images, text, and perhaps some day maybe something like sound cloud being embed-able. These are all current technology and are not at the forefront and they are not exactly interactive unless they offer people hints and send them on some virtual scavenger hunt for other posts, and things like that.
Image Source: Quora
VR and AR are likely coming in a big way. Anything that is interactive is going to likely come in the form of something embedded and ideally they will be using WebGL or something similar since Java is rapidly going the way of the Dodo, and Adobe Flash has already gone that way.
Image Source: Global Shapers
So what is the hold up? Well that is pretty easy. There are huge security risks in allowing just anyone to make a post on the blockchain and slap an embedded app, game, experience into it. If I can get you to run something that can give me the author of that application a lot of power. It is dangerous.
Image Source: Circuit Cellar
This is the main reason NOT to do something like this and it is a very good one. However, the world is still moving along and centralized services and social media ARE going to leverage this as they have strict control over what shows up on their sites.
For steemit to be competitive in that arena we too need this. So how could we do it?
What if we had agencies that were viewed as trusted and they were where these embed-able apps were hosted. They would need to act as a gatekeeper and vet these things before providing a link to the content. That content should still belong to the original author, and they could use it in their posts unless they encouraged everyone to use it. It would really be a use basis.
So if we had trusted agencies that could look at these things (perhaps with a fee paid to them by the author) and then if they approve they provide that author with embed-able code that can be used on the blockchain. The key here is that we would need multiple agencies, as putting it only in one would add another centralized point that could be exploited within a system we are intending to keep decentralized.
The key is this could work much like the image system works now. Only allow embedding if it comes from a trusted source in a specific format.
I do think this could be an important barrier that we should try to have a solution for in order to launch ourselves into the rapidly approaching future of what type of content people will be able to experience.
