I’ve now seen a couple of pieces about World, makers of the Orb eye scanner that vaguely resembles, well, an orb. They’re pitching eye scans as a form of digital ID, with the use case (since the guy they were pitching it to this time writes for PC Gamer) of online gamers proving they aren’t bots.

A few months ago, they were making a similar pitch to Reddit about user logins.

And a few months before that, at a higher point in the AI hype cycle, they were (funnily enough) pitching the idea that people could give their World ID to a bot to signal that it was acting on their behalf.

…because their first pitch – in which they’d be minting the new One World Currency and handling a world’s worth of somehow-AI-powered Universal Basic Income transactions, and everyone would be using eye scanners to access their Worldcoin wallets – fell flat. A lot of the attention people gave it, IIRC, was skepticism about what World really wanted with all the eye scans they were collecting.

The most charitable way to look at World’s Orb is that it’s a solution in search of a problem – this company has an eye scanner that looks like the thing that possessed Rosamund Pike in a music video, and they’re looking for someone, anyone who’s interested in buying it. A few years ago their pitch was blockchain and UBI, then AI, and now, with the verificosis epidemic surging, it’s verification.

(Give them a few more years, and they might be pitching it as a way to personalize advertising.)

Oh, and given the number of countries World and its Orbs have been investigated or restricted in, any game dev, social media platform, or other online business that demands a World ID from its users would be cutting off chunks of its potential customer base…