For the non geo-nerds out there, GIS is a standard form of terrestrial mapping that was first coined as a term in the mid-1960s, but which dates back decades earlier.
Put simply, GIS is a spatial system that creates, manages, analyzes, and maps all types of data.
Or, more comprehensively:
GIS connects data to a map, integrating location data (where things are) with all types of descriptive information (what things are like there). This provides a foundation for mapping and analysis that is used in science and almost every industry. GIS helps users understand patterns, relationships, and geographic context. The benefits include improved communication and efficiency as well as better management and decision making.
ORA’s Protostar system is essentially a next-generation GIS engine which takes data from any terrestrial sensor or socio-economic index and terraforms a planetary hologram. This is a generative software which means that algorithms in its creationary engine ‘generate’ patterns and objects that are an embodiment of the data inputs that feed it.
[Just as clouds materialize from invisible atmospheric inputs—forming structures interpretable by meteorologists—we believe data visualization must evolve toward similar emergent, legible phenomena.]
The video below explains the Protostar components and how it uses cosmo-mimicry to build planetary data archives that also live-signal that data in generative, protostar-terraforming GIS.
You can view a more detailed product brief with images from our patent application for the Protostar, here.
While this has vast implications for 3D world-building and metaverses that are responsive (as opposed to 'canned' or pre-programmed game worlds), the immediate terraforming opportunity for a planetary Protostar is as a next paradigm GIS engine, with a fundamental architectural inversion: what if the map itself was alive?
GIS, even in its most sophisticated form, remains a static layering of data upon geography. It catalogs. It interprets. But it does not respond. Protostar begins where GIS ends: at the threshold of generativity.
Developed as a generative world-building system, Protostar introduces a four-part architecture capable of synchronizing spatial data, temporal patterning, and networked relationality. Its function is not to record the state of the world but to model the possibility space of its transformation.
Why does this matter? Because static systems fail dynamic conditions. In an era defined by cascading feedback loops—climate volatility, infrastructural strain, systemic risk—the need is not for better maps, but for systems that can sense, simulate, and suggest in real time. Protostar is one such system.
Our vision is that once the system is operationalized as a PaaS, users will be able to access a marketplace of pattern inventories from which to terraform their Protostars. For those who are curious, here are some slides of different GIS that can be generated for Protostar:
