 Hello everyone and welcome to the 10 a.m. to 10 30 a.m. session of the 2020 Open Simulator Community Conference. In this session, we are happy to introduce a presentation called A New Dimension in Grid Hosting. Our speakers are Steve Levine and Myron Curtis. Steve Levine is one of the founders of A Dimension Beyond Inc. He has been involved in virtual world since 2006. For since he first got into Second Life, he wanted to host virtual worlds on his own servers and now he does. Myron Curtis, a.k.a. Dark Eagle Darkstone, is retired from the Bute Glenn Community College and is a presenter at the Science Circle. He is CEO of A Dimension Beyond Founder, a developer, and owner of the virtual worlds grid. Please check out the website found at conference.opensimulator.org for 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 atopensimcc, wish the hashtag OSCC20. Welcome everyone, let's begin the session. And if we don't have time for questions, they will take questions at their booth number 13 in the Expo 3 region. Welcome Steve and Myron. Well, thank you. I guess we should start. Lucky Booth number 13. You can find it by it has a big cube like this rotating cube that's on the stage. Well, but much bigger and if the cube on the stage, if you want information about us, just click on it. Myron and I both have over 15 years experience in building virtual worlds and hosting them. Myron does own the virtual worlds grid, which is served on our servers. Right now we host OpenSimulator, DreamGrid, Halcyon, and CyberLounge worlds. We can do custom servers, website hosting, and more. Myron, you want to talk about some of your experience? Yeah, certainly. You know, I've been involved this from the beginning and I've watched it evolved. And there are a lot of things that we've been discussing over and over really at these conferences that are really kind of stagnating us. One of the first things, of course, is the fact that it's really difficult for people to get connected to a virtual world these days. They're used to having everything in a browser. Like a lot of people, we've tried to create a web-based virtual world. And that really has not worked out very well for anybody, at least not for me. So lately, I've been thinking about the possibility that maybe we should just create a web browser that also is able to browse virtual worlds. And that's something I'm looking at now. But in the meanwhile, our industry is at a very important crossroads. Unfortunately, due to a pandemic, a lot of people are looking at virtual worlds now as a way of getting back to normal. And we have a huge opportunity here, but we have to find ways to get people in. And we've been building these worlds for a long time. It's time to make sure that people know about it. So we have a huge PR issue in front of us and we need to start working on that. Well, this is part of the reason why we got into hosting. Hosting does two things. One, it makes it easy for people to get into virtual worlds and actually having their own grid. The other thing is that hopefully down the road, it will provide us more money for our development efforts. But we have our own servers on a redundant backbone connection. They're in a data center down in Phoenix, Arizona. We looked into the whole thing of servers. We could have rented space on the cloud or we could have rented a server from somebody else. And we kind of came to the conclusion that me as the bean counter, this group decided that, hey, we'll do our own server. And so we've actually got it so that we can have that server and not pay crazy amounts for it. So we've got this really excellent server. And we're hosting virtual worlds on it. And so one of the things we host is DreamGrid. And DreamGrid is rather interesting. Fred has done a wonderful job with it and made it really easy to use. It actually takes OpenSim and makes it so almost anybody can use it. So what we do is we do it a little differently. When we sell a server for OpenSim, most of our OpenSim servers are on DreamGrid except for Virtual World's grid, which Myron does in his own way. And but the thing is, we give you total root level control. When you get a server from us or a grid from us, you actually have a full Windows desktop for DreamGrid that you can go in and do anything you want with your grid. We're not doing the one click type of thing because we figured that people wanted a little bit more control. And part of that is I'm kind of a control freak. I don't like to have to go and put in a ticket every time I want to do something. So here we take it, we give you that server. You can do whatever you want with it. We also have custom setup with everything you need. Whatever you need, we can do it. And so we have lots and lots of help available to you. There's help files that go with DreamGrid. There's also a whole manual, PDF manual that we put on the server for you. It's basically very easy to do. So the other thing is we sell our services by what you're using on our server, how much CPU, how much RAM, how much hard drive space. So you can start out with a pretty small, like little 10-region server, or even a two-region server if you wanted to do that. You can start out with a really little server and expand it up. We have one grid there called Aeros Resort that started out small and kept growing. He's now up to a region equivalent of, I think, over 150 regions. And every time he needed a little more and we watched what the server was doing, we just added it to it. It was very easy. So if you want to, things like updates and all that are quite easy. We also can run the grid web page there with JOpenSim running on Joomla, which will give you all kinds of information about the grid and whatever else you want to put up there. The next thing is Halcyon. Halcyon is something that Bob Curtis does. We have several Halcyon grids right now that we are hosting. We can create a Halcyon grid of any size. We have a starter little single server Halcyon grid that we put together for people that want to try it out and see how it all works. And actually, Bob is working on a system right now that is a marketplace, the Mundo's Market. So then Halcyon grids will be able to have a marketplace, kind of like the Kitely marketplace. Cybelounge is another thing that we're in the middle of. When Myron said we don't have a good web world, I could argue with him on that one. I'm quite deeply involved in the design and working of Cybelounge with Dieter, who is the actual owner of it. It's a 3D world that is totally web-based. A Dimension Beyond is a North America distributor and part of the development team. We can host just a region for you or a whole grid of any size. It's a very feature-rich, stable, and extremely secure environment. Everything is encrypted. The other thing is, in a lot of ways, it has a lot more features than OpenSim has right now. The only limit to Cybelounge is it's running in a web browser. And the web browser will only handle so much. We also have, in Cybelounge, we have a couple of universities in Germany that are using it for their distance learning and are quite successful at it. Myron, do you have stuff you want to add to that? Well, I really think Cybelounge is probably the closest thing we've had to a working web-based virtual world that has a lot of features in it. And you've told me recently that you can now do some building in there and starting to work on the avatar appearance and abilities. So yeah, that's growing fine. And I like that. When I was talking about before about the failure of web-based system so far, I was really referring to the fact that you don't have a lot of, well, what do you call it, gesturing and other things that we're so used to. And we really need something that's simpler to use. But the second two things that we have are addressing here is, like you said, control. And the third one is basically mobility, being able to go from grid to grid, very much like an internet. And that's hypergrid. And we're getting that slowly, but surely in Cybelounge. And that's going to be huge. We have hypergrid working in Cybelounge right now. Oh, that's new. Cool. Yeah, that just come up in the last week. Deeter's been working on that. And you can go with your avatar from server to server, keep your same avatar, go wherever you want in the Cybelounge world, or in the Cybelounge metaverse, I guess. So yeah, we keep on looking at these little things. We put them onto the roadmap. And we're working on Cybelounge right now. Cybelounge is in late beta. We're working towards 1.0, probably in the spring. And so we've got our little list of stuff we want to do. And I think it's going to be really, really good. It's huge. So yeah, that's the big thing. Cybelounge is really cool, because it's very simple. I mean, it will even run on something like a Raspberry Pi. And you could have your own grid running on a Raspberry Pi, which is a very small computer. But I see some real growth potential here, and possibly even something to go on beyond OpenSim. Yeah. Some of the things that we also want to talk about are free meeting spaces in Cybelounge and OpenSim grids and free regions available for schools. Earlier on in this conference, we had different instructors talking about wanting to have a space and a place to work. And needing servers and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But we've got them. And I'm more than willing to help people that need space. We've got grid space. We've got region space. We've got Cybelounge space. Let's get together and do something about this. Get you guys going. The other thing is we can do custom conference hosting for any size group because it's really easy. We've got servers. We've got the technology. We can do region design and execution. We've got people who are really good builders working with us. We also do web hosting if you'd like that because when you have a server, you can serve all kinds of stuff. But the main thing with our hosting is we do it in a different way. And we give you the power to do whatever you want with your grid. That's basically it. Anything more, Myron, that you want to say? Yeah, actually, there is. What we're doing is what a lot of people are trying to do. I think we're taking a slightly different approach to it and giving people basically a virtual machine that they can run their system on and have complete control over it. That's wonderful. But the one thing that all of us are failing on is getting the message out to the general population. It's classic. We build it and we expect everybody to come. And they're not going to if they don't know about it. So we have to come up with a way of marketing what we're doing. Kylie is kind of doing that a little bit. And Second Life is starting to do that pretty well. But the rest of the open sim worlds are kind of falling behind on that. And that's something we really need to get together on and find a way of marketing our industry as an industry to get people involved in it. And basically, we need to find out what the world wants and offer it to them. OK, I'm sorry. Oh, go ahead. That's OK. That was very interesting. We are out of time. And I just want to remind everyone that you can ask Steven Myron questions at their lucky booth number 13 on Expo Region Number 3. Thank you. I would like to thank you again, Steven Myron, 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 10.30 AM in this keynote region and is entitled, Understanding Lag in Firestorm. Also, we encourage you to visit the OSCC20 poster Expo in the OSCC Expo 3 region to find accompanying information on presentations and explore the hypergrid tour resources in OSCC Expo 2 region along with the Surreal Museum region and the sponsor at Crowdfunder booths located throughout all of the OSCC Expo regions.