A decidedly creepy but maybe ahead-of-the-curve business opened next to Macy's on Geary Street Thursday, across from Union Square Park, where a set of high-tech orb devices scan your iris and let you prove your own humanity.

The Apple-esque, spare storefront is from World, a venture launched six years ago by OpenAI cofounder Sam Altman and Alex Blania, and DeDe Wilsey offspring Trevor Traina is also involved, with the mission of creating an anonymized, blockchain-based identification system for people to use online. The necessity of it is something we'll come to understand more and more, the thinking goes, as more AI bots infiltrate gaming apps, dating apps, and more — a World ID, like the Twitter checkmarks of old, means you are a verified human.

Of course there's a crypto angle being played here too — the company was previously called Worldcoin — and maybe they're hoping to succeed where Facebook failed, by launching a network where you can store both an anonymized ID and your cryptocurrency, and maybe there's a messaging platform in there somewhere?

Anyway, it's all fairly shady and obscure for the moment, but at six storefronts around the country, World, or World Network (the former is what we knew them as when they were hunting for Mission Rock office space two months ago) will be marketing this idea of getting yourself scanned and setting yourself up on their network as a verified human, with a World ID.

There was a launch event for the company and the crypto coin at Fort Mason last night, as the Chronicle reports, which featured a pop-up kiosk with the scanning Orb Minis — the space at 281 Geary is just 5,000 square feet, next to Louis Vuitton. And Altman spoke about the idea for Tools for Humanity, the larger company behind World, and the orb devices.

"Way before ChatGPT … we were both very interested in AI and what that was going to mean," Altman said, per the Chronicle. "It was clear to us … that we needed some sort of way for identifying, authenticating humans in the age of [artificial general intelligence] — we needed a way that we could know what content was made by a human or by AI. We also talked a lot about the need to include a financial network of some sort.”

World is partnering with Visa on a debit card that will be offered to World users this summer, and they're partnering with Match, the company that owns Tinder and other dating apps, to use their verification system.

And Blania told TechCrunch that the Orb Mini devices, as seen in the Union Square store, may eventually serve another purpose, as a mobile point-of-sale device.

After the Union Square store opens, other World scanning outposts will be coming in Atlanta, Los Angeles, Miami, Nashville, and Austin.

World has been testing out its scanners and performing all of the company's initial scans — they say they already have 26 million users, 12 million of them verified — in other parts of the world, and that has drawn some criticism.  A 2022 MIT analysis said World had targeted primarily low-income people in developing nations with few legal protections — and TechCrunch previously described the Orb as "a spherical 'Black Mirror'-esque imaging device that captures users’ irises and high-resolution images of their bodies and face." TechCrunch also reported in 2023 that hackers had managed to steal the passwords of World employees, giving them access to the biometric data that the company had collected to date — so, Black Mirror indeed!  

We'll have to wait and see if this catches on, but World seems confident, and has recently decided to lease a four-story, 90,000-square-foot brick building at 600 Townsend East, a former Airbnb office, for its headquarters.

And this is another example of a company betting on Union Square, and future foot-traffic, for their retail presence, so that is good news for Union Square — especially with the fate of Macy's still up in the air.

Previously: Sam Altman’s Other Startup Reportedly Looking to Lease 60,000 Square Feet In Mission Rock