 Welcome to the second half of Saturday here at the Opensim Community Conference. My name is Mal Burns and this is actually going to be the first of two slightly related lunchtime discussions as it were. And our theme for this one at least is to look at the new open source and interoperability. This is something that really emerged recently. I know all of you, well maybe you don't, but maybe you're still in shock over the behaviour of Mark Zuckerberg, but the metaverse, whatever it now is, has been very much in focus and it seems that every corporate body or game body under the sun is apparently building their own metaverse, the implication being that there are, it's now plural. Charlie Fink put it rather well when he said, well there's small m's, lots of them, but there's only one big n. Personally speaking, I now refer to everything as cyberspace again. Basically, you can't put the word thee in front of it, so nobody can sort of take possession of the cyberspace or anything, it simply is. And I think that has been the problem with the latest attempts to define the metaverse and everything, because we make a noun out of it and therefore it needs a descriptor. Anyway, this is sort of just anecdotal here. What of course is quite vital is that in this growing expansion of the cyberverse, whatever you want to call it, is that open source remains strong. This has been the case with the web and all sorts of things online going about when. You have the commercial players often who really just hijacked a lot of open source stuff that's been done already. I must say there's some of that going on at the moment, but we really feel, and I'm sure everybody here at this conference, although our concern is largely with OpenSim at the moment, looking beyond the platform we've got here, the model that this platform represents is as an open platform. And well, just as basically being an open platform, it's this model that we want to hang on to. And in many ways, I also think that whilst people are saying, oh, it looks primitive and it's like second life and blah, blah, blah. I think that OpenSim, in many ways, is a great template for the future metaverse or whatever it's going to be called. We have interconnectability. We can jump between regions, simulators with the hypergrid. We can communicate across the hypergrid. We can have asset servers and serving our avatar and other assets literally on our own computer and just jump in online to everyone to go. And sure, on the surface, it looks a bit second life-y and whatever maybe looks a bit dated, but the power, the potential under there in the OpenSim code is still a landmark, shall we say. Anyway, one of the major, they have a Discord channel, we'll get to that in a minute. One of the major concerns I'm seeking to look at the new open source is an organization called OMI, Open Metaverse Initiative. Yeah, they've got the N word, I know, but never mind. And they've been holding, oh, a lot of meetings recently and they've got a lot of different working groups working on different areas. None of them are specific to OpenSim, of course, but they are kind of aligned to what we do. While the other people who have been present at these meetings, so to speak, is Adam Frisbee, who you all know is a co-creator founder of OpenSim here, and of course he's behind, well, Science Space and Break Room, that's the one, get it right. But he's been turning up there with what I can see as a considerable interest in the movement, if for once, of a better word. In Kenzo, otherwise known as Eva Henning, is here because she really is the, while the principal spokesman, or spokeswoman, I should say, for Eva, sorry, OMI, all these short, better things itself. And finally, we're also joined by Dale Glass, who is a really a principal operator over at Vacadia. Now we had a panel which included Vacadia last year. Vacadia is also to the greatest extent open source. It's particular code-based, is built on Philip Rosedale's High Fidelity, when it was a 3D world. Almost everything is set in voice, I think, in High Fidelity, got open source. So Vacadia have been pursued now. There's a couple of other people using High Fidelity's code, but they're not necessarily open source in the same way. So I'd like you to welcome you all here. So welcome, Eva. I can't call you in. You can call me Eva. That's totally fine. And I apologize. I wasn't expecting to be using this username here. So I had a little bit of dysphoria. We talked about that earlier, but it's great to be here with you today. This is, I have not been in any of these open sim worlds in a few later or in any of these spaces for a number of years. So it's really great to come back and explore here. And Mal, thank you for that intro. I sit as one of the three co-chairs at Open Metaverse Interoperability, which is a community group with the W3C. And we're really focused on the connecting tissue between all of these vast worlds. And we think of these galaxies and how they all fit together. And sort of thinking about the vastness of Metaverse as many different ways of being, many different ways of working together, many different realities, and different visions of what that can be. And so we're excited to be here with you and to share some of the work we've been working on in Open Source R&D after another Metaverse. I'd say wonderful, wonderful to have you. And I must say, I mean, over and beyond your meetings, I mean, I keep finding you all over the place, you know, sort of, you may not have been in here, but you've been in an awful lot of other worlds and different things, talking online recently. So yes. And it's funny, yeah, I feel like I know you as Ivo now, even though, you know, in Kenzo, I definitely knew in the old days, but it's almost, you're like a different person now, but never mind that, never mind that. And beings and avatars and these different worlds. So it's great to be here with you today. Yeah. Okay, your voice is cutting out slightly there. I hope we don't have a problem. Okay, I'm going to move across to let Adam introduce himself, I think. Adam, welcome. Thank you for having me. I think I've been here to a regular, regular staple at these events for the last couple of years. It's nice to be back. And I think that it's interesting to see how open source and the open source philosophy could shape the future of virtual worlds in general. Like Omi has an interesting ideas. I think that there's still quite a few problems that need to be resolved if you want this to be successful. So I'm really happy to sort of elaborate on that as we get into the discussion. Okay, fair enough. Now, I'm not, I'm very happy to adapt with you because you're a particularly techie. I mean, as well as being a CTO. You know all this code stuff. And I think, well, aren't they talking about their GT FEs and whatever? But yes, I will come to that shortly. Finally, I'm going to welcome Dale Glass. So Dale, I've already introduced you as being a primary mover over at Vakadia. Maybe you'd like to elaborate a little bit more there, especially about the open source aspect. Well, thank you for having me here. Yeah, I'm a bit new at this. And I've not actually done very much related to open cement quite a while. So yeah, my first time at this conference. But yeah, thank you. Right. So let's see. Well, do you probably already know we are a fork of the now dead high fidelity, not the one that exists currently, but the previous one, which is confusing. So yeah, we picked it up a couple of years ago and still working on improving it and maintaining it and trying to turn it into a better platform. Back when I found it, I thought it was and it had an amazing potential and it was a real pity that it actually died shortly after I found it. So I decided, well, that couldn't be allowed to stand. And well, if there were other people that were going to work on it, I will definitely join them and try to keep things moving. And so here I am. Wonderful. Well, I've got fond memories of high fidelity as a 3D world as well. It was another one that showed a lot of potential. And I almost regret that Philip sort of took it down when he did. I mean, I mean, he's got very confirmed change of opinion these days. But, you know, I keep wondering if it's still been going when COVID came along and we were being forced into online, you know, presence and whatever, whether it maybe stood a better chance. Well, yeah, it was terrible timing really. Yes. That's so slow, as they say in England. Right. Okay. Now, before I move on, and none of you would actually be privy to this, but just before this thing, there was a private Q&A with the developers in a Jason region here. And it was getting quite far as hard when we had to stop it. Basically, a lot of people were criticizing OpenSim for not having good documentation, or if indeed any, and, you know, having that feel of being, you know, a bit antiquated, and more importantly, security concerns, which the technical side of which, again, I have no idea. But obviously, they were finding sort of holes in it that made it very awkward to present to say the enterprise or companies. Possibly those kind of holes are things that already, you know, consumer interfacing world should also consider. But given that what you've all been talking about and doing, I'd like to actually address each of you in both your three worlds, so to speak. Oh, how can I put this? Is there a conscientious effort, so to me, to actually catalogue all these codes and the different strands that are emerging out of that kind of collective, so that as things progress, one can actually move back on that, and to Dale and Adam too, you know, do you really think is that something we should consider to be very important? I'll start with Eva. I'm happy to speak to what we've been doing to connect what Neil Trevitt at Kronos Group calls the constellation of standards that touch the open universe. So that includes things like WebXR and all of the open web experiences that we are beginning to see bloom in 100 different directions. That includes the GLTF's back and looking at the evolution of programmable 3D assets and how those can be embedded with much more information than what we have done previously with simple models and exchangeable assets. So we're often thinking about interoperability, and I want to take a quick step back here because we're thinking about interoperability to include asset exchange, identity, and avatar ability to move between worlds, and so sometimes that's referred to as meta-preversal, and that includes a number of these different elements, right? Can you take your identity? Can you take your inventory? Can you secure your data when you make that transition? So not just the addressability of a 3D world and moving from 2D to 3D in the way that the web is moving, but also how do we exchange metadata between one world to the next? So there's a lot of conversation happening between game platforms, between the Open Standards Groups, W3C, IEEE, Kronos Group, and others, and I'd love for Adam and Dale to give us more to how they've been helping to guide that process along the way. Okay, Adam, it's like musical chairs, haven't it? Yes, yeah, it is. Well, I think the original question is on the historical elements and obviously learning from past mistakes is important. I think one of the things we need to recognise in this industry is that we should be informed by the past by not bound to it, and by that I mean is that there's a lot of ways the virtual worlds work today, at the most successful ones, but it's the same way they've been working for 20-something years, and I think there's some evolutions of ideas that need to be considered as we build these things. But ultimately, yes, I do think that there should be an effort towards cataloging a lot of the old worlds, and what they did right and what they did wrong. One of the things that I have been blessed by is the fact that I've been in this industry for now about 25 years, and during that time I've had the opportunity to learn a lot of mistakes, and one of the things that we see typically with new virtual worlds, including from the biggest companies, Facebook's previous couple of virtual worlds spring to mind, where people are making the same mistakes that lots of early virtual worlds made, and really running into things that could have been avoided with a five-minute Google search on why did product X not succeed. That said, I think that in terms of the larger conversation we're having today, I think that the idea of actually having open standards and open interoperable working groups between people is very important. There's really only so many parts of a virtual world that fit together. When you bring things down to the sort of base levels, there's actually only about four or five different things that actually need to be standardized to build an open virtual world. You need to have content delivery standards. You need to have session protocol standards, so the ability to sort of distribute a same graph and make sure that's upgraded and uploaded to all the clients consistently. You need to worry about a couple of things like asset delivery handling and inventory and things like that, but ultimately there's not that many bits and pieces. So actually working towards an open standard is quite achievable and is something I think can happen, but obviously requires a lot of buy-in from a lot of players. Yeah, I think when Eva mentioned the last meetings they were getting a sort of collaborative interest in the Kronos group, I think that was very significant too, because they are probably the name that I think of most when it comes to the high-end sort of industry involvement as it were. Dale, your thoughts on all this? Well, so let's see. First of all, kind of a bit of a disclaimer, I suppose. I'm not sure if there's much of awareness of how we work, but we're not a company. The KDI is pretty much a volunteer group made entirely of volunteers. So even being at least theoretically on the top of it, I don't really have the capability of giving orders to anybody. I can of course ask for a favor or something, but I'm very careful with such things, because nobody is an employee, including people, members of the core group. So for that reason we are not going to make any kind of banning promise regarding which is our official direction or what not. There are certainly people with interests in various things, but we don't force anyone to work on anything, and it's basically in the end up to somebody being personally interested in picking something up. Sure. Right, but yeah, definitely there is some interest in standardization and interoperability and compatibility. Yeah, we use GLTF for instance, so yeah, that's one area of interest. We use common codecs with actually implemented support for the opus codec in Vrkeria, which is something high fidelity didn't have. High fidelity actually has something of its own, which is proprietary and not compatible with anything else. It has interesting characteristics, but yeah, it's closed source, so not good for us. We've also looked and a member of the community also looked into the underlying protocol for Vrkeria, well high fidelity or what it was. It's based on something called UDT, which is a standard and does have an implementation, a standard implementation, but our actual implementation is not entirely standard. So yes, so there is that one issue with one of the things that we probably have to do at some point is bringing ourselves into compliance with the actual standard. But since we're actually kind of not properly implementing the existing standard, but at least it's not our completely novel invention. So the possibility of bringing things into compliance is a possibility. All right, so on matters like OpenSEAM, well I think there's not much hope of very much exchange except for things like models, textures and so on, because it's a completely different foundation. So we're not using the same protocols. We don't think there's ever going to be a possibility of somebody teleporting from Vrkeria to OpenSEAM without effectively earning two different programs underneath. Yeah, I'll also ask quickly, well I'm Bacadia, because I know this was the case with high fidelity. I don't know how much we would consider this to be part of a template, but earlier on we had, for the works speaking about Outworld, and I have an installation like 25 regions and they run on my own local computer, not the one I'm talking on now, in fact just a spare one. But it means the server with all my assets in OpenSEAM and my avatar and everything else, it's on my own computer and it travels out with me. Essential stuff travels out pretty fast across the hypergrid, other stuff is a bit slow and some stuff I can never get when I'm out on the hypergrid. But the idea that my world and the interface of my world as it were is on my own system, it's like being in my room and in the real world I go out my door when I want to go somewhere. So to me, having my OpenSEAM installation on my own computer is not much the same thing in cyberspace terms, I just go through what portal actually or something to go to the location I want to go to, do what I want, pick stuff up maybe and then return home into my own computer and then log out from there. It also reduces a lot of stress on the server that I might be visiting because I visit there as a presence, but I don't necessarily bring all my assets with me, I only really bring the essential stuff. So I think that is still the case with your Platformdale, isn't it, that the user basically has a kind of offline starting point and then they move into the online component? Or have I got this wrong completely? Or have I just confused things, no end? Okay, well I'll also ask, I mean this is not a question for either or Adam's own platform, but both Eva and Adam, if you've got any comments, do you think that is an important part of maybe generating a sort of part of the infrastructure by which, you know, a mass market of people could enter a mess versus whatever you call it, for example, could the Windows desktop or the Mac desktop actually be the portal you move outward from? Absolutely. The web-based experiences are one of the easiest ways to scale to the globe because if you look at the number of VR headsets out there, it's not going to be through browsers, it's going to be through other mechanisms, not just through VR. And if you're thinking about what is the easiest, most portable and lightweight way to do that right now, we look at, you know, there's a number of web XR-based experiences that are being tied together, for example, art galleries that work across more than one platform and have built agreements around moving from one platform to the next. Now those are very early stage sort of alpha level experiments, not even beta yet, right? So this is early stage stuff I would say for most of us, most of the folks working on the web-based sort of portability and trans and traversal between worlds are maybe not aware of what has happened here for the last 12, 15 years now, right? I mean, this particular code base is one right place for experimentation for doing some of this as well. And I think there are ways in which we could bring our communities together to do more interesting interop experiments down the line. There's definitely some things happening between closed communities and sort of open web-based communities right now and agreements are being made. I think it's going to happen partially through federated, you know, small to medium-sized communities taking on sort of an anti-meta or a different meta-narrative approach. You know, there's lots of different ways to approach these spaces and I think we're going to see lots of fun iterations in the next year to come. Yeah, it's a bit of a be-all-and-of-everything really, isn't it? I mean, that's why the attempted definitions of the metaverse is being, whoa, everything. You know, everything that is in the organic universe is the metaverse. Interesting. I mean, another thing I'm wondering about, and it would particularly relate to smaller and medium-sized concerns and open sin, is whether maybe we can best perceive the metaverse or the cyberspace from the small bits piled on top of each other rather than the big overwhelming thing that's trying to, you know, suck things into it. In other words, you know, a Skype call could technically be, you could say, well, that's part of the metaverse because you could be having it in a virtual world or you could be having it in your desktop or you could be having it on the web and it is a form of communication, but it's a form of communication that is by and large audio and video only. It doesn't include avatars, but, you know, many, many spaces that people meet and even, you know, this, you know, we've got the club houses and what is it, Twitter spaces and we've got things popping up everywhere that are constantly running audio conversations basically that are probably as good as this, you know. Are those little things, for example, an independent asset or something like that, do you think maybe we should be looking at that kind of system? I mean, I remember Bruce Droy from Vast Park many years ago started an open avatar system. I didn't get very far, but basically his idea was like a marketplace, you know, they would host an avatar for you, they'd host assets, but they didn't give a will to use them in. They were simply the server that hosted things on your behalf that you could take with you, if you see what I mean. Right. And Ready Player Me is doing some level of that right now. I think we're absolutely going to see VRM, for example, become a much more open, not quite a standard, but adopted by many of us, certainly it's already been adopted major and becoming more so when you're looking at avatar portability. We're experimenting right now on a couple of departments. I think there's no real great single marketplace right now for open avatar experimentation, but Ready Player Me is definitely serving part of that. Yeah, for those who don't know, Ready Player Me, they allow you to take a photograph of your face on the web and they make an avatar for you, but more importantly, when you log into their site, it's like a destination guide for everywhere you can go and take that avatar. You know, all sorts of different companies, different worlds, you know, you just effectively teleport with your Ready Player Me avatar to wherever they, you know, it's acceptable. Sorry? Yeah, that just building on decentralized identifiers and these sort of open, that's not necessarily a marketplace, but it's becoming one very quickly. So I think we will see lots of marketplaces growing in the next cycle. Now Dale also mentioned that he couldn't see any way to say open sim here, where we're sitting as it were, would easily operate with something like the KDA, even though both are of course open source, but I have often imagined, I'm going far too old to build these things or even try, but I've often imagined say building a studio, maybe or getting a built-in unity or something like that and modeling it in such a way that I can put a duplicate of it in multiple worlds of my choice, but I'd hopefully have the same avatar in each as well. But more importantly, the idea I sort of had was whether it would be possible to put scripts and things like that in the build, embedded in the build, that would independently talk to other instances of itself, for example, even if that self was on a different platform, the container, like an object on the web, would be embeddable all over the damn place, but inside the container will be the mechanisms for communication with other instances of itself or just back-end things. Now how does Attractive Disaster, I'll put this one to Adam first, because he probably got a bit better grip on what I'm talking about there. Yeah, it's funny you mentioned this because I think just last week I volunteered to run the WASM, which is the WebAssembly scripting and working group for OMI. I think that it's possible to do. There's some limitations here, and I think that we need to also be aware of that until we have got a standard system that everyone is using, and I think that's very, very important actually. I don't think we should be focusing on a technology layer that is broken into lots of tiny little pieces and fragmented, and there's a reason for that. I'll come back to that in a second if you're interested. But in terms of scripting itself, the problem is that sometimes platforms have got different capabilities and get different feature sets. Sometimes they've got different ways they're accessed. Sometimes, for instance, they're focused entirely on VR headsets, whereas other ones may be focused on say a mobile touchscreen device, and then you've got lots of problems like how do you interact with these things? Is there a requirement for having hand movement simulated, for example? There is some lots of question marks here about how well these things would work if interoperated, but it is absolutely something I think at least the groundwork could be laid, and that's something I'm looking forward to championing over the coming year or so, particularly with that working group and others. All right. Yeah, so I'm kind of thinking here, well, on the level of script at least, we're not really interoperable with OpenSim in that we use JavaScript. So yeah, that's not exactly LSL. It's not .NET either. But yeah, there's certainly opportunities for lower kinds of interoperability. Even if you can't, for instance, teleport right from one world to the other, some things certainly could be done. You could do things like streaming video. You could interact, transmit chat data via scripts, certainly. We've got, for instance, support for web services, so you can embed just a web page anywhere inside the world. So that's one option. Can I interrupt? Can you embed a web surface on an avatar itself? Never tried, actually. No, I've tried it. Yeah, I know. I'll come back to that. Yeah, I can say that does work in Sciencepace. Yeah, well, back in the days, so I'll just interrupt you briefly if I can. Back in the days of, I guess it was Second Life, you know, avatars used to appear and they were white with the words missing all over them because they could find any of the kids. But people, you know, I used to have a t-shirt in Second Life and maybe a jumpsuit or something as well where I could, I could put media on the prim on the prim that was the costume or the body. And it suddenly occurred to me, I don't know where they really tried doing this, but, you know, all the future talk is about, you know, away from avatars and multiple holograms. If you had an avatar that was plain, obviously have some motion sense of any whatever for gestures, where the actual skin of the avatar was somehow mapped from, you know, this is not home computing stuff at the moment, but like 360 cameras could pick up, like the way they pick up 3D, you know, video shots, and they could map that texture to the avatar. So to all the extents and purposes, it would be your avatar would look like an hologram. But do you get what I'm getting at? So it's a lot of fun to do that. Hmm. I actually just got a message and people are watching the stream. So yeah, you can actually, yes, indeed, put a web surface on an avatar. I never tried myself, but... You know, sometimes these little things can be quite disruptive when they get going. But yeah, I actually had another kind of interoperability and suggestion in mind. So one of the strengths of our architecture is that the scripting can control pretty much everything. So you can create virtual avatars with scripting very easily. So for instance, yet one kind of way of having some sort of interoperability could be transmitting data about an avatar from one side to the other. You could reproduce movement and have kind of an avatar basically in the other place. I'm not sure how well that would work in practice, but something like that would be definitely possible. All right, incidentally, those of you that particularly know me, this avatar I'm wearing here is identical to my avatar in Science Space and Breakthrough. It's identical to my avatar in Vakeda, I believe, and Tivoli. And in fact, I think, and here, I think actually Sansa is the only platform I really use now that doesn't support this avatar. So, you know, there's some comfort in knowing that I've got a little of the same wherever you find me. Mo, is your workflow, what did you use as your base? Did you start in Ready Player Me? Oh, the avatar. No, this particular avatar, to be honest, I don't know what it is in the audience, but there's a chap here with Abagon who did it for me. We used what we did jointly. We went into, it was a piece of Adobe software, I forget what it was called, and, you know, he asked me what I wanted, and I said, Oh, a bit of red air, a bit of beer there, a leather jacket, because all these none of these are wearables, it's all parts of the overall mesh. And when we got it about right, we sort of exported it and brought it into OpenSim, and then I managed to upload that into Science Space. And yeah, then I uploaded it into High Fidelity when it was a world. And then when High Fidelity went away, I think I managed to find it by defaulting it suddenly, it was either in Vikadev or Tivoli or both. So, you know, I began to get familiar with it, you know, and it's because it's a single mesh, I mean, there are limits, I can't sort of put on OpenSim clothing on top of it, or it could, though it looks a bit, you know, but I keep wondering, well, what could I put in this mesh, you know, the mesh is like an outline framework with its texture and everything else, but there's something I had in second life years ago called the brain, and you had, you know, you bought it or whatever and you wore it, but it was worn on the inside of your stomach somewhere, and it allowed anybody coming to your virtual house to find out where on the grid you were by showing you on a map, because the brain was reporting your position anywhere on the grid, and it did other things, too, you know, so it was a good example of, you know, I'm wearing this invisible thing inside my mesh body that is doing all sorts of surveillance on me, I guess is the word. Right, let's get back a bit more focused on track here then. So, yeah, interop. I, Eva, you know, probably as much as I do, there was on our, on the doors, if I can get the window I need open here, is it called Red Eagle? It's on my grid there. It's from, so, do you know who I'm I mean? I do, I do. We have, so within OMI we have hundreds, almost a thousand active people in the Discord now, including platform holders, people who work for game platforms and companies, people who work on the association layer or on the standards layer as well as sort of every layer of the staff. So, yes, sorry, go ahead. Well, I'm referring here quickly to back, in fact, to hear it. Red Eagle PI, I think the avatar is called. He would have been here, actually, he's super interested in what we're doing, but if you've only got a look at his server and there's, I think they came more from gaming than virtual worlds, but they've got so many meetings and chats going on that, you know, you couldn't get here because one was finishing and another was starting all on their own server. But what I like to, they're called OCEM, and I wish, I'm trying to see if I can, not easy. But the main, the interest, here we are, right, there stands for the organization for cooperation on an ethical metaverse. And this is why the subjects want to bring up, even though he's not actually here, is, you know, the, it's very easy to look at these big corporations moving into things now and realizing that, you know, how meta, you know, is they were at war with the European Union, they're at war with the British government now. They've got the Trade Commission people in the States looking into them, but, you know, I wonder how on earth they get away with it. And I think it's Grady Butch who has the same tweet posted every day saying that Facebook is a profoundly unethical organization, and it all starts at the top. And he just, that's a standard daily tweet, a headline. If we're going to build open sources, stand to be something that can stand up to these big corporations. I'm talking in a more philosophical sense here now. How important is we, is it that we kind of build a kind of ethical foundation to all this, where we can actually maybe take the high ground and say to the likes of Zuckerberg, you know, we're, you know, we're in the right place. Okay, take it in certain folks. Let's start with Adam on this. This is a really interesting and slightly dangerous topic actually, to be honest. Yeah, because there's a there's an unspoken question of whose ethics are you going to be using here. Now, I think that it's fair to say that harvest everyone's data and selling it to the highest bidder is not going to fall into the boundary of ethical for most people. But I think it is something that to be very careful of. My ideal model for governance is always looking at the older internet governance. That is that sort of even still used today, but that sort of period that architecture was mapped out in the 60s, 70s, 80s in particular, that sort of divided the network up and basically gave everyone control of their own space. There was some basic rules for playing nice with each other when you connect to the larger environment. But generally speaking, it tried to stay out of these questions as much as possible. And I think that that's the right model today, because it always gives you the freedom to not use someone's product, not use someone's service and move to a different environment entirely. For instance, if you don't like Facebook or Twitter, you can use something like mastodon, which is open source and relatively relatively sort of grassroots, if you will. Yeah, that model is the thing to follow when it comes down to this thing. This is the second question you asked, which was sort of how do you make sure that that succeeds versus the one platform dictated by the one company? And the answer to that one is that you've got some tailwinds here anyway. A lot of companies learnt some lessons, particularly during the mobile software era, which we've just gone through, that it's really dangerous having one or two companies in charge of the entire ecosystem. With mobile, we've got that duopoly of Apple and Android, and you can easily see how the platform operators abuse their positions. Some of you is it more than others. I won't name names, but it's pretty obvious who I'm talking about. And there is a lot of tech companies who have had to fight with them over the last couple of years and have gotten very, very wary of signing up to being just a participant in someone else's walled garden. So I think that when it comes down to the metaverse, you're going to find that big companies are actually quite willing to latch on to open standards if it means that they're going to be able to compete fairly on their own without having to deal with platform operators. And if the standards are dark doing work, which of course is a major part of it. Yeah, I noticed for example, both Nike and Reebok have joined the so-called N-word, but they've both chosen to do it not to start their own platform, but to do it via, I don't know, Fortnite or something like that. So you're already getting this sort of corporate move in via a platform that's already there as opposed to people like Meta creating their own. Right. Do you have any thoughts on that particular topic quickly, Dale? We are running short on time here. Well, so in that regard, I think we have to quickly explain the differences here. Verkadia is very radically decentralized in its nature. We don't have agreed as such. We don't have an asset server. We don't have even a centralized account system. Basically, we don't have an account server, but its usage is completely optional. On all the regions are pretty much independent web servers. They exist inside the internet, but they are actually bound to each other. We don't even have crossing from one region to another. You can't teleport, but there's no sim borders like in OpenSea. Yeah, there's some of that flat world thing, mate. You can walk for hours. Yeah, in some regards, that's a disadvantage, but in the regard of making it safer for various different kinds of communities coexisting, I think it's a bit of an advantage. We, for instance, have no ability whatsoever to ban you from all of what is Verkadia. We could ban people from our own kind of organization regions. I can ban you from our development meetings, but absolutely nothing stops you from taking our code, setting up a server, and talking to whoever you want to talk to, including people who show up at our meetings. Basically, it's an imitation of the web. It's a bit like the self-hosted OpenSea Ministers I mentioned. Yeah, kind of like that. In some regards, it's a disadvantage in that we have difficulty hosting content, but we do think it's going to have an advantage in organizations. Okay. Right, well, I need to start wrapping. Evo, did you have any thoughts on the... Most of them in the chat, just on the staff of the conversation recommending the work of srsi.org. Obviously, Ken Buys work. And then thinking about protocols, as well as standards, obviously, there's a lot of interesting research to be done here. There's one of our colleagues at OMI, Dr. Kim Nevelstein, has published his doctorate on IPSME, which is a protocol-based approach. And he's getting interesting results, for example, working between Minecraft and other things. So there's some very interesting research. This is a right field for discovery right now. And I think our public are going to work on as all of you here are getting excited for your own research in your labs. You're right. It is an exciting time. Somebody of me is getting all over the place all the while, suddenly stumbling on things and thinking, oh, great, this is happening, even in the face of corporate takeovers and stuff like that. And these metaverse experiences are so vast. There are whole solar systems that might be meta-created or oculus-driven that I'm never going to go see. And that's great because not everything has to be interoperable for it to be connected and potentially available to everyone. And not just to see that we have it available. It's really accessible for everybody. Even something as small as a second life is vast because no one person can walk the terrain of second life in a lifetime. It's a square foot kind of thing. It is huge. You can jump to where you want to go. So no problem, but you couldn't walk it. Anyway, I'm going to have to cut you guys off because I've got about two minutes to wrap. And I did want to put out some pointers here. I've just actually got my Discord open. Firstly, just a bit of a plug, but it's an open source project really. Discord servers are wonderful things basically. It was built for gaming, but it works just as well for virtual worlds. I can even see, you know, I don't know, Sansar will have a channel, a server on Discord. Their users can talk together, but ultimately at the end of the day, maybe people will be able to jump from Discord to some kind of oil that would take them to a location in Sansar and the same with anything else. That's down the line, but there are so many of these servers around and they don't all just belong to platforms. Obviously, we've talked about Omi, which as a server, the OCEM, this is the ethical Metaverse people, they have one and one minute to wrap. I know I know, panic, panic, reacting to the background here. Oh yeah, and there's another server, which I haven't had time to ask anybody about here today called the Open3D Foundation and they have a Discord server. Yeah, and they're colleagues and friends of ours. We are really just fantastic collaborators all over the world and so we just want to invite you to be a part of that ongoing collaboration. The questions you're asking in the chat here are fantastic and they are exactly the questions we need to be asking around the sense of identifiers, around metadata, around privacy and around how we work together to do it. Yeah, okay, okay. If you can put it in chat for me, I'm terrible at reading chat while I'm actually broadcasting, so I can tell I've missed a whole load streaming by here. Thank you everybody for attending and hope we've been useful in what we've been talking about and everything. As I said, this is sort of a bit of a two-part thing. I'm going to be here at the same time tomorrow. I think maybe one of my buddies too would drop in, I don't know. But I'll be hosting one with Duzan Reiter and Dr Fran Babcock and the focus of that one will be looking towards the future from a global sense. Today's been more about the open source code and the basics, but where we're going generally is going to be more the sort of thing I talked with Fran and Duzan Reiter about. So I hope you're going to attend that one too and hope you've enjoyed this one. And, well, bye for now. Thank you to all of you, Ivo, Dale and Fran. Thank you for having me here.