 Okay, I have 10 a.m. SLT, Pacific Daylight Time, or 1 p.m. Eastern Time for those folks that are on the East Coast, and the movie was totally confused and said, I don't even know what I'm supposed to show up, so I said, come in 15 minutes. So thank you all for coming, and I appreciate that we've got a good showing here. East Coast of where? East Coast of the United States, Phil, you know I'm an American like you. All right, so for those of you, I'm just going to go over my procedure. And first thing is, I'm Dr. William Schmack de Bergen, Real Life, Day Miami in Second Life, and we're fortunate to have a co-presenter today, Linda Kelly, Delia Lake of Second Life. I've known Delia for years now, and it's a pleasure to co-present with her. And this started off, I was talking to Chantelle at one of Bergen Bistro's Sunday mornings, and she goes, you know, I just went to virtual world's best practice in education, and there was some cool things that we discussed, not necessarily science, but Chantelle said, oh, there's a bunch of people that wish they could have gone and just couldn't make it. So she said, would you please do a recap for us, and I said, of course. So that's what we're here for. So the first thing I'm going to say is I am monitoring the Neobai chat, as you can tell, and I will do my best to respond to comments or questions as we go along. Please don't text bomb the local chat because I can read, but scroll so fast. Sometimes I miss good questions. And the other thing I would say is, if you notice the slides are towards the back, underneath there's a box that says click here to get the notes and link the slides. So first thing I'd ask you to do is click on that box, and for zero lindens, you get my contact information, my email, you get a link to the slides if you want them. It's also got links to, if you weren't able to go, a lot of the talks were video taped by a thunder, a good friend of mine, Kim Harrison, and if they're on YouTube. And I put the links to the keynotes, and I'm going to be talking mostly about the keynotes today from virtuals best practice and education, but I'll also hit on some of the other events. Delia is going to hit on the immersive experiences called tours, she'll say something about that, as well as she did, I'm proud to say Delia represented Science Circle proudly with a tour of the wetlands. I went on it and she did a fantastic job. So congrats on that. For those of you that don't know, here is an overview of the conference. It's called the WBPE, virtuals best practice and education. I've been going to it year after year. It's the largest free online conference held during the spring is 10 by educators from all over the world. It's held in second life for the most part, although there are free conference excursions as also the quadruviums are really a lot of fun because there are more discussions than there are talks. Like I said, if you weren't able to get to the conference, grab the note card and it's got a list of the YouTube videos and one of the things I'm going to stress is I've been going many years, no doubt in my mind, this was the best virtuals best practice and education conference I have ever gone to. And during the stock, I will explain why that is. So I was debating about what to do because Berrigan and I decided we were going to do a discussion of the metaverse and I was sort of balancing, you know, are we just going to be saying the same thing and I don't think so. But the metaverse was a dominant theme, okay, to this conference. There were a couple of key notes that focused on that specifically the first one, there were a number of other presentations that were going on and a lot of people put the origin of this term to Stevenson's book, Snowcrush, in 1992 where he described his characters wearing special goggles, we call them VR headsets these days, in order to enter 3D virtual worlds as avatars, he coined terms like res, which of course we use today in Second Life and other video games. So that was, and I know there are some people, I talked to Kiers George and he said he thinks that the term metaverse was used earlier than 1992, but a lot of people give Stevenson the credit for that. And keep this in mind because there was a lot of discussion about what do we exactly mean by the metaverse and what do we not mean or maybe it sometimes means this, but it was good to get that out in the open. Another one that came up and this was discussed last week was Matt Paul's book, The Metaverse. Really good book, I'm reading it now, I've gone through about a third of the way and there's a lot of discussion about what the metaverse will look like. Matt Paul, coins, the term we did this last week, I'm just going to give a recap of people that weren't here. It's a massively scaled and interoperable network of real-time rendered 3D virtual worlds that can be experienced synchronously and persistently and by an effectively unlimited number of users with an individual sense of presence, dead, history, entitlements and so on. I've been reading as well as I can. There's an idea that Matt Paul gets as persistence, that once objects are created, they don't already exist, yeah, Astra, they stay around and we've all seen this in second life and we read something on our home, whatever, it's tend to be there. Stevenson also said he wants objects to be able to move among virtual worlds and sure we could probably do that and probably we can. If you're a developer and you buy an object, like I bought a dinosaur, I'll be talking work I'm doing with dinosaur rich later, if I buy a dinosaur, as long as I convert it from one format to another, for example the DAE format, I can bring it into second life. If I convert it to FBX, I can bring it into Unity. If I convert it to LGTF, I can bring it into three web worlds, because I own it and I can move it wherever I want. I'm a little concerned about buying something in second life and then exporting it to other virtual worlds, especially if I've paid for it, there's an issue of copyright that's involved there. Steve or Matt Paul talks a lot about that he wants a massive sort of definition of the metaverse and I'm a little concerned about that for a couple of reasons, but he does in his book talk about the lag about issues with technology. I was just at a concert, a really good one last night, and we had 70 people on the Sim and people were crashing like crazy. That's on second life and to me it's tough getting a lot of people into a virtual world. Okay, so let's get to some of the talks. The first one was Tom Burstoff, who was an anthropology professor at the University of California, Irvine, and his focus was almost entirely on the metaverse. He said we need to get past the hype. He started to redefine some things, like virtual reality, he didn't like the term VR. In fact, he said you don't even need that virtual reality to have a metaverse. And he redefined VR as SI sensory immersion, which to me is the same thing as VR. If I put a headset on, I'm immersed in that environment. I can't see the outside world. And that's true for sight, but eventually this sound and so on will be using other senses as well. So to me it was a semantic argument that he was using. I did like his definitions. He said the metaverse does not have to be interoperable. It doesn't have to be massive. He said chat, GPT, we all know that as AI, is not necessarily part of the metaverse. Zoom is not the metaverse because it doesn't involve a 3D virtual environment. One of the things that I did like, he said, is that the metaverse will lower our carbon footprint. And it did that with the virtual best practice and education conference. We didn't jump on planes and so on. And waste energy driving to a central venue, we just logged in. And computers use a lot less. And yeah, Delia, feel free to chime in here either in local chat if you want to say something or you want the voice, happy to do it. So I like- Yeah, a couple of short things here. One is- Okay, sure. I got to disagree a little bit with Tom on this and the sensory immersion because although we have a partial sensory immersion, there's no sense of smell. And there's no real kinesthetic sense of touch. There's a- If we bump into something solid, you get a warning, you get a notice, you get a bump back, but you don't have the same sense of touch as I have when I am hitting my keyboard, for instance. Yes. Yeah, what I would say, and there's a game that I'm playing right now called the Room VR, A Dark Matter. And boy, they use not so much touch, but the ability to pick up things and manipulate objects. If you want to see how VR is really well done in a game, using the hands and moving things around, play that game, it is addictive. And it's got some really good- It's got a nice virtual environment of an archaeology museum and so on. Just a really good example of using hands in VR, which I'd love to learn how to do. Okay. Anyway, Tom brought up, he said, metaverses and network of virtual worlds. Sometimes they use VR and AR, sometimes mobile devices. I like the use of the qualifiers. Usually employing avatars can include games, formerly owned by profit companies and so on. All right. The cool thing was, having gone to the conference, I was able to IM Dr. Rostoff and ask him more about his presence and his comments. And one of the things that I asked is, do you think that the metaverse will only be owned by large corporations? And he goes, no. He said, I don't see any reason why educators and other people can't launch their own smaller metaverses for their own purposes. Totally agree with that. The technology is coming down. You all know I use Unity. You give me Unity plus a plugin called Extremeality to get multiplayer functionality, chat and avatars. And then if you want to get fancy, you'll even support VR and a photon server and boom, you've got your own metaverse. And fully customizable, I'll talk a little bit more about budgets in a minute, but it's not hard to do anymore. I could throw up a metaverse in the afternoon once I've got the content in Unity. So I'm glad we're going to be moving in this direction rather than everybody thinking that you have to be something the size of meta to launch your own metaverse. Last week, I talked about what happened when meta tried to launch horizons with some poor success. The next network was Alex Humphries, who's a journalist in England. And she talked about gaming, fine education. She was very interested in what happened with COVID. And mostly it was a pretty down talk. She talked about how schools weren't ready for the pandemic. They didn't have internet hardware and so on. And the nice thing was, during her talk, I was able to go into local chat and I said, if you want a really good example of a school system, a country that was ready for the pandemic, look at Sweden. Their schools had internet. Everybody, all families in Sweden, had internet from what I'm told. Students had either iPads or MacBook Pros, really nice machines, too. And students and teachers were trained to use them prior to the pandemic. So when COVID hit Sweden, it was like, what's the big deal? I even had a teacher from Sweden that verified, said everything that I was saying was absolutely true, living in the country. And that was the thing that I didn't really get was, why don't we look at success stories rather than, here in the US, we had really poor results? All right, then we have a speaker from Greece. And I'm not even going to try and pronounce his name, because I know I'm going to butcher it. He talked more about the metaverse in a general sense and pondered whether metaverse is going to be good for us or bad for us. And maybe we'll take a vote in a minute. They took a vote at the conference, but I never learned the results. So we're going to do one here in local chat. And he had some discussions about the idea of the metaverse really goes back to Plato. Plato said that all reality is virtual, although he didn't have fancy technology. He said that there was some sort of imagination that's involved in it. You look at the ancient Greeks and look at Pandora and Panacea, is the metaverse going to be a Panacea where it's going to solve all of our problems, or is it going to be like Pandora's box that is going to release all these plagues on society? And then he listed what some of those might be. By the way, if I'm going too fast in local chat, if I'm not giving enough time for these slides to rest, let me know. I tend to speak fast and click fast, but I know sometimes it'll take a minute for you to see. All right, so some of those dark sides of the metaverse that he brought up that were concern, privacy issues, are we letting too much information out? Is it a physical distraction from real life events? Are we isolating ourselves? Or perhaps we're overloading ourselves with too much contact. There were studies that have been done that have shown that men that have more than 250 friends, whether it's in real life or online experience headaches, it's not a good thing. I'm looking at my friend list. I'm over 300, so I'm in trouble. Women that have too few contacts feel lonely and deal with isolation. Increase in body weight, oh, that is so true. I hate to tell you, but I went up two pants sizes since I've been spending more time on the internet. Information overload. And not everything works in the metaverse, and there have been a lot of universities that tried building real life universities, even in second life, only to find failure that people just didn't want to come to them. So there were some of the problems. There was this slide that he threw up that I thought was really amusing. It shows a teacher using the metaverse for educational purposes with a bunch of the students. And you'll notice that all the students are frowning, and the keynote speaker asked, why do you think that might be? And he threw out a couple of possibilities. And the answer that he came up with was that the lesson was so overwhelmingly good that the students were sad that it was over. That teachers might become so effective teaching online and virtual worlds on the metaverse that their students won't want to go home. Wouldn't that be a terrible thing? So I thought that was a amusing cartoon. You had narcissism. All right, what can I tell you? OK, so this is some of the wrap up, some of the uncommon truths that the speaker talked about. The metaverse has ancient roots. He brought about Plato. We've already talked about that. The metaverse is still under development. It's changing as to what it is. It can have dark sides. Normal learning works in the universe. You've got to get in touch with students' personality before you can conquer their minds. We need more immersive learning in educators. Motivate students. Oh, we always try and do that. And study the past to create the future. Always look at the past, see what mistakes we made. All right, so it is now time for the audience participation part of the program. OK, the keynote speaker and I are curious as to, do you think that the metaverse is going to be good or bad for education? So what I want you to do is punch into the local chat. Gee, if you think the metaverse will be good, and be if you think the metaverse will be bad, all right? Come on, wake up. Oh, Phil wrote it out. Good, all right, here it comes in. Oh, we've got a bunch of optimistic people here. Mostly good taglines are so, so good, good. Don't know, good. What is this GB, Max? Could be good if done right. Don't know yet too early. All right, so most of you are optimistic. I'm going to add to the list my energy. Dilya, you want to vote? And she's OK, good. So we're optimists here. That's great. Well, I think that if we didn't believe that, then we wouldn't be on Second Life, I guess. So it's sort of audiences sort of skewed. All right, you've seen some definitions of the metaverse. The one that I threw out last week, I'm going to repeat again. To me, the most important definition of the metaverse is it's a virtual world, OK, that link together which participants develop real world relationships as friends or colleagues to implement projects. I think that's the most important thing. And I've tried to explain to my family, I'm visiting with them why I spend so much time online. I say to them, well, there's many problems that can be solved quickly and easily. And I gave some examples of that. I had a problem with my taxes rather than calling the IRS. I talked to a friend who works for the IRS and was able to get in touch with them a lot faster than a phone call. So there are plenty of examples where I think we're going to see people using virtual worlds more effectively and being more productive. And I think we'll have a lot more fun in the process. OK, some other things that were discussed. We don't spend the whole time on the metaverse. I was told that there's going to be a new Masters of Science program in immersive tech that people will be able to sign up for to learn about VR, AR, mixed reality game design. And it'll be in an international program. And I think it was that Greek University that was going to launch it. And I asked a question about that. And I was surprised to learn that there was going to be no tech skills required, that it would not be a program for developing tech skills to create on these platforms, but just to learn how they could be used in education. So I sort of felt mixed about that. I think that educators should be able to communicate with technicians, if not necessarily actually contributing to the creation of content. There was a quadruple where some of the presenters talked about how teachers need to develop more of the content that's going to be in schools. Linden Labs gave a discussion session as well. And here are some of the cool things that they're talking about. They're working on a mobile viewer for Android. Oh, thanks, Phil, for throwing that in there. A mobile viewer for Android, iOS, and Chromebooks. And when asked about how they were going to pull that off, they said, second life would run in a cloud. And then you would just stream the graphics to these low-powered computers. And I think that would be crucial for getting it into education. These viewers will have limited functionality. For those of you that are tired of the standard avatar, Linden Lab is as well. And they are thinking of when somebody signs up for a new avatar in second life that you'll be able to get a full mesh avatar with some choice of clothing, not as much as you would from, say, the marketplace. It was brought up, well, what do we do about students? And there's always a concern about pedophiles getting into educational sims. To that, Linden Lab said that you'll be able to whitelist who can enter a sim that you've created for the purpose of education. So Midori Linden is still very much interested in K-12. My comment to her at the conference was, that's great. I think the low-hanging fruit is professional development. And I used the example of patio plasma, gave me an update on Pluto, and then I went in the classroom and presented it to my students. And this administration was absolutely floored with the information I was giving the students. And where did you learn it? And I sit here at Science Circle on second life. So to me, I see that as one of the best uses of this technology. All right, there was one session, and of course, there was discussion about artificial intelligence. There was one on using it to generate art. And I wasn't quite clear about what the teacher was doing. I get the feeling that the students were just punching in terms into a Google search engine and getting images. I didn't think that they were actually using true AI. That wasn't clear at all, although there are some really cool. Yeah, there are really cool programs that are out there. Chat GPT was brought up in sort of the general sense about, is it going to be used for cheating and so on. I didn't get a feel as to anything definitive about that. It's still pretty early. And people are playing around with it. Go ahead, Delia, if you want to say something about Chat GPT. There was ongoing conversation out of that art presentation. And it seemed that what they were doing was pulling images of artworks off the internet and doing some combos and morphing and stuff like that. Interesting, but the comments and the worry was that they were pulling off current practicing artists with copyrighted art and using those. And so how much can you do that and take someone else's work? When is it fair use? And when is it not fair use where you're just stealing? So there was a lot of ongoing conversation that happened out of that particular presentation. I think that that's a real concern about Chat GPT. I tried it for the first time at the conference, said give me reasons for why the Civil War was waged. And unless you specifically ask it for references, it will not give you those. But if you say, hey, give me what's the cause of the Civil War and references, then it will do that. So I don't know how well it is at citing information. You know me, I'm interested in virtual reality and virtual worlds. Unfortunately, the session I wanted to go to was canceled. There was an interesting discussion of Stanford University. They are limiting their students in the virtual reality headsets to 30 minutes, which probably isn't a bad idea, as we're still learning about the effects of VR on eyesight and brains and so on. The other discussion of virtual worlds that cropped up was that you should not rely just on one platform. For example, All Space was shut down recently by Microsoft. I didn't know that. I used to use it, but I haven't used it for a while. So evidently, some of these fade out. OK, so I mentioned that I thought this was the best virtual worlds best practice in education session ever. And the reason is instead of people just getting together and talking and socializing and going dancing in the evening, there was some real hard core. Let's try and create content and lesson plans for real life schools to use. And one of the best ones I went to was Gather Town. I only recently have found out about this last summer, but it's an interesting program that allows you to blend Zoom-like video conferencing with a virtual world. Quickly, and nearby chat, I want to see if you're still awake. Type of why if you've heard of Gather Town and if you have not. Anybody heard of Gather Town? All right, so we got some lies. I didn't know either, OK? And this is cool. Now granted, don't expect really high-end graphics. You could tell this looks the virtual world. So it looks like something out of the 1980s with little sprites. But you know, you've got a little avatar and you can walk them around and you go to a table and somebody's there, you can open up a video window and you can chat with them like Zoom. So there are some cool things that you can do with it. I know the Sternberg Museum out in Kansas has already adopted Gather Town for their official virtual world program that they're going to be using at their museum. And it's pretty easy to set up. I haven't done it yet, but it's something they were demonstrating how to do it in life. 40 minutes or something, you can set up a virtual world in the other town. So not really tough. So that's what I liked was that people were actually talking about creating content and creating resources, which I had not seen in a previous virtual world as practice and education conferences. And now I'm going to be quiet for a minute and let Delia talk about some of the pre-conference tour and immersive experiences. Go ahead, hit it, Julia, and let me know when you want to go to the next slide. OK, so I did two immersive experiences for this conference. The first one was a pre-conference event, and that was on our Science Circle platform above the too hot, too dry, too wet, where a number of people have been. There are landmarks here. You can go visit at any time. But Chantal and Max were there. And I'm trying to think of other people who were there during that. Periodically, I add to that. I upgrade it. So it's an ongoing experience. But one of the things that got me thinking about in this conference that I hadn't thought about before is that while the immersive experiences are, I believe, very important to have a more complete sense of what the data is, you do have memories from it. But there's not an ongoing follow-up or reinforcement. And so I'm thinking now, and I'm not quite sure how this might be done. And I know there are other game platforms, but combining something like these virtual experiences with something like the One Huddle program. So One Huddle is a platform that you use on a smartphone. And I use that in my RL business. And it has series of questions. So if you were using, say, the Sky Platform for a course, and you wanted to have some kind of follow-up and reinforcement, there are ways that you could do that, but I hadn't thought about gamifying some of these things before. So I'm going to explore some of that moving forward. And people are welcome to go up and experience this for themselves if you haven't been up there. We can put a landmark into chat, but go visit. And I think there are teleports here to go to that platform, I believe, from down here. Next slide. We'll go on to the next slide, so we have plenty of time here. And so the second tour I did was from the Science Center that Max and Dodge curated. And it was a wetlands tour. So the original wetlands was, the framing of it was done by already. And so a number of us contributed to it. But what I added was not only some of the plants, but also a lot all of the animals there. And the original idea was to have it a mid-Atlantic US coastal area. But if you want to get an experience, you have, I believe, leave room for people's own experiences to play into this. So I wanted to make sure that somebody who came from Australia, or somebody who came from California, or somebody who came from Argentina would also have a way of relating to this walk. And I think that's something we need to do if we're doing immersive experiences anyway, to make it easy for people to get themselves into the situation. But again, I'm thinking if this were used for an educational course, and there's a lot, I mean, you really could spend a whole semester on any wetlands area, to have the reinforcement with gaming that are question gaming that would come external the second life. And have the opportunity for people to not only continue to learn from what was presented, but also go back and find things that they might have missed. So those are some ideas that I came away with from this conference that I hadn't had before. Okay, and like I said, I went on Dilly's conference, her tour of the wetlands, and really enjoyed it. And the part that I enjoyed most was the otters, the river otters that were there. And that's because my son loves river otters. And one of the things that I found, I actually got a flyer from this organization, River Orders, AmericanRivers.org, where you can actually sponsor a project where they rip out old dams that are just sort of slowing down the flow of rivers that make it hard for the otters to make habitats. So I plan on donating to that. So and I talked to Dilly about and she thought that was a great idea. You know, so throw that out as a way that you can take action. And you saw us see these animals swimming around virtually and you almost feel for them. So anyway, I really enjoyed that tour, Dilly. Okay, one of the things that's the last thing I want to say here is that I think that the potential is enormous and we're only beginning to tap it. And as you know from the things I've done here that I try to use the capabilities of Second Life and of the three-dimensional geospaces and the experiential part of moving around through things in a way that helps people see new things, learn new things, identify with things, have questions that you wouldn't necessarily get if you were sitting in a lecture hall listening to someone talk. So I think that we have an opportunity to do an augmented kind of learning that you just don't get if you show up in a classroom all the time. Okay, so one of the things that was really cool is a lot of discussion of network and collaboration. There are some people I only see once a year at virtual world's best practice and education. It's like a time when everybody says look enough we're going to stop real life teaching and whatnot and we're going to get together and talk about some things. All right. And one of the things I did before the conference was I put together a prospectus. Many of you know I'm working with the fine folks at Dinosaur Ridge to create a simulation of the late Jurassic ecosystem and I put that in my profile. Well, I created Google Doc and then put the link in my profile, which was great so that people could see what I was doing. And I got a lot of good feedback. I'm going to show you some of those comments in a minute as to what people were saying about that project. I was able to talk to technicians, not only educators, but technicians attend this conference. So I talked to Helena, who many of you know, and I think Helena was involved in the building of a lot of the sims for the virtual world's best practice and education. And I said to you, Helen, I need your help. I need somebody that could help me rig and animate my dinosaurs in this project. I will even pay you to do that. And she said, oh, I'm exhausted. So she said, you want to talk to this guy named Ron or goon, I'll give you his contact information. And it worked. And sure enough, I met this guy and he's been great. So it was an opportunity for me to get help for a project that I need. And that's what I love about Second Life. And I talked with Dr. Marie Vans at Colorado State University. I talked to the organizers, Ellie and LV. And I'm getting some feedback. Oops. Okay, it's gone. And they're all for it. Next year, they want to make virtual worlds best practice and education, transition from just a place we get together and talk about stuff, socialize to where teachers can get together and collaborate on projects and come up with something, a resource or lesson plan for use in schools. And I think that is a great step forward. For those of you that don't know, you're welcome to hit my profile and you can read the Google Doc. But basically, last fall, I went out to Denver and was able to get a tour of Dinosaur Ridge. And basically, I'm coming up with a virtual simulation. What would be like to go back to the Jurassic, see Stegosaurus and Allosaurus and all those cool dinosaurs animated. And I've got various different versions here. I've got I had a VR one, but it needs to be updated. I can do multiplayer. I can do Mac versions. I can do PC versions. I even started putting a little bit of AI into the dinosaurs, which is really cool. So when you go in there and you get too close to them, they start charging you, which is a lot of fun. The idea is to create a case study of what it takes to create and implement a metaverse for educators in a traditional organization. And I'm already starting to get some feedback on that. I ran into problems at Dinosaur Ridge. There was a fire there. They had to evacuate. So the staff had to get out. The good news is I talked to the director and he said there wasn't a lot of fire damage done to the welcome center and the discovery center in Denver. There was a lot of wind damage that they've got to repair, but that's manageable. And if you want to know what sparked the fire and created all this havoc, it was the same electricity that powers virtual worlds. They got a power line down by high winds, hit that dry grass and poof fire started to spread. So technology, I guess, could be good or bad for implementing metaverses. Okay, so here's some of the comments. I got a lot of good feedback on this proposed project with Dinosaur Ridge. A lot of people are sort of interested in seeing where it's going to come from a variety of different universities and so on. And last week, I started to discuss the virtual Jurassic field trip and I got two people from the Science Circle group saying, I want in. How do I get the software? And so I contacted the Museum, the Virginia Museum, they're funding it and I contacted Dinosaur Ridge. And they said you may release the software to scientists. Hey, that's you guys, who are willing to beta test the software. So if you want in, if you want to see what it looks like right now, what I need you to do, if you haven't done so already, would you click the box below the slide projector in there, you'll find my email, please email me, do not send an I am email me. So I have a list of who's getting this. And I need to know what platform is, are you going to run it on a PC, you want to run it on a Mac, VR isn't ready yet. I have a VR version. It needs to be updated. I'm mainly focusing on a single player version, trying to get all the content in and I'm getting a lot of good comment from the experts in Denver. So I'm trying to get that up and I'm going to Virginia next week. So I'm not going to have a lot of time to work on. So if you're interested, drop me an email and I will get you the link if I can today. If not, I'll try to do it as quickly as I can. And there's one other thing. Here's, if you want to see, if you want to see what it looks like, I already showed you one screen capture. Here's a screen capture from the multiplayer version showing me giving a tour. I think this is to the director of dinosaur Ridge. And some of the animals that are in there, I'm trying to get all of them animated. That's one of the, one of the parts of the project we're doing now. Most of them are. And there's, as you walk around, one of the things that dinosaur Ridge wanted was a, how do we know what we know? So as you walk around to these dinosaurs, it will not only show you a recreation of what the Jurassic was like, but it will also, there'll be a pop up like you can see in this slide, which will tell you, you know, what fossils they found in Denver. You know, was it dinosaur footprints? Was it dinosaur bones? Whatever. I got permission from the Morrison Museum to take pictures in the museum and incorporate in the software. So you can see, and that's crucial. One of the things I learned when I went to the Morrison Museum, I saw the actual first stegosaurus fossils that were ever found. And there's only three of them, and they're not very complete. And when Neil Marsh, the first paleontologist saw them, he didn't know what to make out of it. He thought it was a sea turtle. That's how far off he was. So anyway, those, those fossils are in the software. You can take a look at them. All right. And the last thing I've been playing around with that I got at Denver is Path of the Titans. If you want to see what Operative, you think what I'm doing is cool. Check out this program. This is a commercial program on dinosaurs. This is what I'd like my software eventually to look like, although it's a lot more funding to it. But I'm starting to play this. To me, this game is what I think the metaverse is going to look like. It's going to be beautifully rendered, beautiful avatars. You can play the role of a dinosaur. You get a lot of choices, which dinosaur you want to be. And they're able to animate. They're walking around. It's fully multiplayer. So you can go in with a friend and you can be an allosaurus and somebody else can be a stegosaurus, something like that. And you could explore this environment. Full voice functionality is in it as well as text chat. So you can contact people. You know, one of the things that was discussion was, you know, how do you pay for what's going to be the concerns? You can buy Path of the Titans with crypto. I was shocked. It's the first video game I've seen where you could use Bitcoin to buy it. I bought it with a credit card. But this game, I think, is a really good example of what's coming forward in terms of the type of quality of VR and metaverses that we're going to see. And they are in development. They've got a crowdsourcing site, but they seem to be doing pretty well about it. I like the direction this is going. So anyway, that's what I have to say. And we are at 144. And if you have any questions about what happened in virtual world's best practice in education, or if you want to talk more about the metaverse, feel free to do so. I'm going to Virginia for the rest of April. And I've already been asked to speak once more about the metaverse. So there's certainly more to be said about this, probably at the vertex in May. Do you have any questions, comments, or do you have anything more that you want to say? The only thing that I wanted to add in here, and this is not about the conference, but yesterday at VWC, Max gave a presentation on genome island. And this is another example, which I mean, she and her people have done a great job also. One of the first, one of the early immersive things that I did that was not an environmental one was go inside the cell there. And this was years and years and years ago. But I still carry that with me the first time. And I have been back a number of times since. So there are lots of ways that you can create educational experiences that are very, very important. And I just wanted to put that out. But if nobody else is talking, I'm going to ask another question. To the people who are here, what kinds of educational things would you like to see here in Second Life? How would you like to have things run here or in any other virtual platform? And what have you done that you really liked that was fun for you to do and that you engage with other people in using it and doing it, making it? You know, one of the things I would say about this is, and I like Delia's question, is I think that's the direction we should be going. You don't have to be a technology expert to get into this game. And working with Dinosaur Ridge, I work with a wide variety of people. Everybody is expertise, PhDs and paleontology, right down to people that are just tour guys that are just running around Dinosaur Ridge and giving talks. And there's one woman there, Katie Bradley that I want to point out that is not, I know she knows Dinosaur Ridge well, but she's not, she doesn't have the expertise, but she is really good with sound effects and music. And she does the podcast. And I asked her for help. And she gave me a great website for finding sound effects and music for free that I'm using in the software. And see if I can find it. I can't find it now, but email me if you're interested. I'll see if I can pull it out. I want to read emails. I want to have more time. So anybody could be a participant, I think, and give ideas to the metaverse, to virtual worlds. Yeah, Phil brings up a good example about the collaborative part. One of the things that I learned from this project is one, educators don't like talking to technicians. I don't know why, but we don't. And the second thing is the few that do write into problems. I was setting up a session between technicians and educators and scientists, and I found something very interesting. The technicians wanted to use Discord, and the educators wanted to use Zoom, and the technicians didn't like Zoom, and the educators overall didn't like Discord. I mean, there's a fundamental problem if we're not even agreeing on what tools to use when we want to collaborate and end up, I asked the technicians to Zoom in and I'll try and figure it out. I've got a roommate that's pretty good on it, and he was able to join us. But that is a problem if we're not even using the same programs for online collaboration. That brings up another issue that was touched on in the conference, that we only talked about in a very narrow way, and that's the interoperability. And it's not just the interoperability from one 3D platform to another, but the way all of the support technology that we would use. And how is that going to work? And is that a facilitation or a barrier to collaborating? I find that I have to use a whole bunch of different technologies, which doesn't always make me happy. I would like to have only a few, not 10, for communicating. Does anybody else have any more comments for us? Otherwise, we are going to be ending early, whichever happens here. Did everybody get a copy of the note card, please? It's got my contact information in it and a link to the slides and links to the YouTube videos if you came in late. Grab that box. It doesn't have my notes in it. I didn't get a chance to put together notes, but pretty much you heard I was reading off of the slides. So if you had trouble with sound, you can pretty much get the main gist, what I had to say from the slides. Yeah, I just thought of one more thing here that I would mention. And that is I've been working, you know, doing a guest session for the last couple of years now with a university in Turkey and a university in Ireland. And I have taken them, the students over to the of this observatory and we've done an undersea not only tour, but really discussion. And that brings up another aspect of working in education in virtual spaces. You don't have to be co-located. So one conversation was a young woman who is actually in Uganda and is a student at the Turkish University in conversation with somebody who is at the in Irish University. That couldn't happen in a lot of platforms. That could not that's unlikely that that would have been happening in the solid world where we spend a lot of our time. So that the richness of conversations with people who have entirely different experiences is another enormous value of doing education, running educational events here in Second Life or in OpenSim or in other platforms where you can engage people from around the world. Okay, I'll see more questions in local chat. So I'm going to wrap this up and thank Dilya and thank all of you for coming and participating. I appreciate it. I wanted to share the good news about BWBPE. Yeah, let's keep this conversation going and if we run across other ways that would be an enhancement to what we are already doing, let's share that information. Let's build on this. And thanks everyone. Have a good day or evening, depending upon who we are.