 Hello everyone, and welcome to the 1030 a.m. to 11 a.m. session of the 2019 Open Simulator Community Conference. In this session we are happy to introduce a presentation called Pilgrims, Professional Identity and Leadership Growth in Metaverse Simulations. Our speakers today are Lear Lobo, Spinoza Canal, Delightful Duangle, and JJ Drinkwater. Please check out the website found at conference.opensimulator.org for full speaker bios, details of sessions, and the full schedule of events. The session is being live streamed and recorded, so if you have questions or comments during the session, you may send tweets to at opensim.cc with the hashtag OSCC19. Lear is going to introduce our panel, so welcome everyone, and let's begin the session. Thank you, Galen, and welcome everyone. You've heard us speak before, and we're a close-knit group that's been working together since 2008, and I want to introduce Dr. Andrew Stricker with Spinoza Quinnell. He's an instructional architect at the Ernie University, and he's our mastermind, scripter, and mesh designer, and you name it. And then there's Barbara Truman from University of Central Florida, who's into transdisciplinarity, and she's a graduate faculty member, and she does simulation and training. JJ Drinkwater is speculative fiction, so if you like science fiction or speculative fiction, she's a librarian for that, and gives us amazing resources for our work. Without a curator, without someone to archive our work, we would be a little bit lost. We'd be creating tons of content without thinking about its relevance, and then there's me. I've been in virtual worlds and in virtual reality research since 1995, and many of you know I've taught 52 classes in virtual worlds, and this is my 280th presentation. Andy, over to you, presenting pilgrims. Thank you, Lear. As always, we're very honored to participate in the conference, and we've been working on this set of simulations for a period of time, and it's come together recently, and so we're very excited to be able to share it with everyone. The thing that we're trying to do with a set of three simulations, and we call it pilgrims, because it's just kind of an acronym for professional identity and leadership growth, what we're trying to do is get out of way to use these immersive 3D environments to help people develop in very deep and profound ways with how they see themselves in their professional practices. Whether you're in medicine or other professional disciplines, we want to be able to help people really have a lifelong mindset for the importance of them developing and learning. As you see in the next visual, we have this model that comes from the Center for Creative Leadership, and they've been helping us to really apply our thinking about how to grow someone horizontally with all the right competencies about knowledge that they need to have in their practice, but also to grow vertically in the depth of their understanding about how to deal with enormous challenges and complexity as you mature in your practice. And so if you look at the next visual, you'll see a kind of a model that we've been working on that gets at kind of a way to grow people. And so this work has come out of Columbia University in Harvard, and they've been looking at this model for over 30 years as they develop people in the professions. And so one of the things that we're very fascinated with is what does it take to help people go from level three where most people are at in their professional work to levels four and five that have this kind of really unique set of qualities. Bob Sternberg, who was at Yale, he had done enormous research on these factors of your intelligence in your life, where you're able to see the relationships in a much deeper, profound way as you tackle the challenges in your practices. He often talked about it as a level of wisdom. And Barbara's work has really shed a lot of insight into these levels, your transdisciplinary perspectives. And I want to ask Barbara to share some of her thoughts about this. Yes, when I saw this model, when I saw these levels that go from completely independent to fully interdependent and transdisciplinary, this fits so perfectly for what research universities are looking at for team science. So it may be developing professional identity that can be used in the military, but it also has educational applications as well. And of course, we know that to be able to even create these kinds of virtual world environments, we need, it's a team sport. We need talent from multiple disciplines. But how do the environments themselves help us grow and not just acquire knowledge or competencies? That's what this model is about. An open simulator has been so central to bringing the pieces together. Oh, absolutely. What we really are excited about is how these levels, as you matured, your understanding of them, bring about an experience so that you relate, not only how smart you are cognitively, but also the moral ethical dimensions of how your decisions impact others. So we're wanting professionals to really understand this profound connection between your cognitive capabilities and your moral ethical reasoning and how they go hand in hand. Now, as you see here on this visual, we use multiple grids to present these simulations. And we have a set of three, and they're all interconnected or integrated. They share common data sets. And we also have recently in the past several months put in a neural network structure across the simulations. And what this does is it helps to predict based on what you're doing in the simulations, a pattern associated with your choices and decisions and feeds that information back to you in some really interesting reports. And we're also making the three simulations, the follow that developmental model that we showed you earlier. So as you go across the Shackleton simulation to the DC3 crash and the space enema, you're actually have presented with opportunities to grow at each of those stages. And I might add, for example, with the Shackleton survival simulation, we have really benefited from the work of Dennis Perkins. Dennis Perkins has done some amazing research at Yale University over the years about what it involved for Ernest Shackleton to survive a horrific anartical situation where his crew was trapped in flow ice. And it's amazing study of the types of leadership characteristics and qualities that involve what we have just talked about with not only do you have to be smart, but you also should be caring about the people that you're leading and the ethical elements of your decision. And as you move into the second simulation, you get a chance to practice what you've learned as you're being assessed on your particular character strengths and qualities of your leadership decision making. So and I'm going to ask Lear to share a little bit about the second simulation because she's really been helpful in helping to shape the kind of dynamics of what people do when they're involved in this DC3 crash. Go ahead, Lear. Well, what I was interested in was the user experience. The DC3 crash we're modeling here and I don't remember the exact number. It's United Airlines and it was it was a study of crew communications. Not everyone died on the flight, right? So we have a flight where let's say there's 173 passengers or so and over half of them die. And of course, I don't know about you guys, but whenever I fly, I'm always wondering what's the right seat to be in just in case things don't go so well. You know, can can you relate to that? So I so I was very interested in the user experience for having this crash and when Andy created the first model for it, I was teaching classes and I said, Andy, it would be great if we had a little model that would give students an experience that we could then talk about. And next thing I know in Cheetah, he had created this, this mesh model that we could then crash. And of course, we started up in the air, because then I said, well, you know, it's on the ground, I really need it to crash, because there's something very alarming about falling, you know, and feeling like, okay, now I'm stranded. So I need that sense of experience to feel a sense of realism and urgency. So then I when I'm confronted with 20 objects or whatever that might be, and of course, I'm mixing up simulations here because we play several games with the same environment. So that's important to know we create environments and then we repurpose them in many different ways. Yes, Andy. Thank you. And the third simulation is you work your way across. You get into this opportunity to travel to Mars. And this builds off our first Mars simulation that started off in Second Life and moved over to OpenSim a few years ago. And we've kept evolving that simulation and adapting it. And actually, it's grown in greater capability. So you start off and you fly to the International Space Station that you see in the image here. And from there, you take a Mars transport to get to Mars. And you have the opportunity to really challenge what you can do with your facing complex choices and decisions. And I want to jump into our approach to really give you a sense of the storyline, because storyline in our work really matters. We want the narrative to really capture people's imagination. And on the next visual, you'll see our comic book structure that we've used. And this comic book is electronic and online too. And so this helps people to get an orientation to the simulations before they come in world. So here you see on the front page of the comic book, an entry into the three simulations at what we call the Expedition Club. And it is here that you learn about some of the backgrounds associated with the shackle to an exposition and what they had to deal with. And you get a chance to explore. And as you look at the next comic page, you can see that as you're looking around in the Expedition Club on the left hand side, you're presented with this really unique opportunity to go to Elephant Island and to figure out, you know, how did these 26 men survive in these horrific conditions for so long? And Shackleton had to go on to get help and assistance. And he was gone for several weeks. And they didn't even know whether he would return to rescue them. And so it's a fascinating, captivating simulation to go through. And we use these seals to map out how you would actually deal with such challenges. And we try to get the participants to envision what it would be like to plan as you evolve in your professional development, these kinds of really unique opportunities to, you know, grow and deal with crisis situations or other problems with your teams. And so these simulations can be played as an individual, but they also can be played with teams. And we actually prefer that people come in with their small teams to play these simulations. Next, on the next visual, you can see that when you, as you move from the Shackleton simulation, and like what Lear was talking about, into the DC3 crash simulation, you start off in this plane and you end up in the Antarctic too. And all these items are strewn around the crash site. And you have to go to the items as part of a team and prioritize their usage and how they could be used and rate them. And as you're doing your work, your, the team's progress is being displayed on a board. And you actually get a chance to provide your rationale. And the simulation is evaluating the quality of the team's rationales for how they're going to plan for their survival. On the next one, you'll see, as you, as you start off and you're working your way through this into the third simulation, you end up at a grid that we called Huffman. And so we blend the history of early avionics into this simulation. So you have a chance to learn about the story of flight and the Wright brothers. And then what I really want to highlight, and I'm going to ask JJ to say a few words here, but we, we meld together science fiction into now the experience. So as you move into simulation number three, we're going to help people to experience. What is it like to have your imagination ignited through science fiction to inform the, the, the, the part of, you know, how it imagines your, your possibilities for the, for the science. So we think this is a very key element of the design. And JJ, would you like to share a few words about the things that you've done with this, this simulation with your science fiction references? Um, yeah. So Mars was the perfect place to bring science fiction and speculative fiction in. Before 1900, much speculative fiction was about going to the moon. After about 1920 or 1940, it all shifted to Mars. So there's this giant body of what might we find on Mars. Um, the bibliography gives you a way to get a giant overview of that hundreds and hundreds of titles. We also have a smaller one. Um, and not only is the bibliography available as a plain old bibliography, there are works scattered around Huffman and around Mars. Um, that you can, you can come across and just have a moment to pause and think about all of the things that Mars has been and done and said in the human imagination. Well, in the mostly English speaking human imagination. Much. And you can see in the comic book pages here that what we've done is, is, as you travel on your journey, we're slowly melding the science fiction into the possibilities for the future. So you'll see a little bit of the current capabilities that NASA and the commercial space industry has evolved with the booster rockets are able to return back to earth. And so as you're participating in this simulation, um, you can be part of the launch crew. You can be on the rocket. You can be on the space station and experiences. And as you, as you travel from the international space station to the Mars orbit, you're put into this Mars orbiting station. And from there, um, you get ready to actually go to the surface of Mars. And as you go down to the surface of Mars, you get to see some of the, you know, the work that's being done with these, uh, ways of thinking about the Mars, uh, orbiter landers that are being planned for the, for the future. And then below the surface, uh, there is an enormous, uh, infrastructure that you can explore, you know, so you learn about the medicine, the challenges of traveling to Mars and the effects on the human cognition, the body. Um, and then you'll get a chance to actually look at some of the technology issues of, of sustaining life on Mars and the science around Mars. Um, you know, where, how we might be able to support life on Mars and the issues. And then what, as you get towards the end of the simulation, you get the chance to explore the caverns of Mars, right? And all the, uh, interesting parts that might be, uh, in facing us as we, as we look at what's below the surface. And here now, the science fiction really begins to, to take off. And, and, uh, as you noticed in this, uh, last page of the comic, uh, the story does not end, but it does really, uh, get fascinating because what you see there in that little blob in the lower left-hand corner is actually a model from MIT. I won't give away, uh, the secret to what it is, but there's another grid. It's called interstellar. And from that interstellar grid, you actually get really deep into science fiction. So by the time you wrap up the three, uh, simulations, you've been on quite an expedition. Well, thank you, Andy. I'm afraid we've run out of time. We're gonna open it up to questions now. So can I have the questions? Thank you, everyone. Thank you, Lear Spinoza, Delightful, and JJ for a terrific presentation. As a reminder to our audience, you can see what's coming up on the conference schedule at conference.opensimulator.org. Following this session, the next session will begin at 11 o'clock a.m. in this keynote region and is entitled, State of the Open Simulator Community. Also, we encourage you to visit the OSCC 19 poster expo in the OSCC expo three region to find accompanying information on presentations and explore the hypergrid tour resources in OSCC expo two region, along with sponsor and crowd funder booths located throughout all of the OSCC expo regions.