 everyone, and welcome back to the 3.30 to 4.00 p.m. session of the 2017 Open Simulator Community Conference. As a reminder, you can see the full schedule of the conference and see what's coming up tomorrow at conference.opensimulator.org. Feel free to tweet your questions to atopensimcc, and you can also use the hashtag, hashtag, O-S-C-C-17. For this next session, it's called re-evaluating our understanding of content creation in 3D virtual spaces. And our speaker today is Ramesh Ramlal. Ramesh has a PhD in computer science from Lancaster University UK, a BTEC computer science and engineering from Kanpur, India, is an award-winning immersive virtual learning environment pioneer. And during the past 15 years, he designed and implemented virtual reality applications involving 3D sounds and virtual touch for diverse user groups ranging from individuals with cognitive and physical challenges to health care providers. Prior to his adventure in the private sector, he was an accomplished academic researcher in areas that include computer-supported corporative work, human-computer interaction, assistive technologies, and telemedicine at universities in Mauritius, England, Scotland, and the United States. He has published extensively in the aforementioned areas at mainstream academic venues. He is currently the CEO and CTO at Deep Semaphore LLC, an e-learning and simulation solutions company. And I will pass the mic over to Ramesh. Hello there. You know, thanks for this introduction. I think I should make it a bit shorter next time. All right. Well, you know, I mean, you're supposed to write a good one. Anyway, so the title is re-evaluating our understanding of content creation in 3D virtual spaces. I've been using OpenSame for quite a number of years and I had an understanding of what content creation was and it seems that it has evolved over time. I just wanted to share, you know, a few thoughts with you and see, you know, where I'm coming from. So I'm going to start with just a few questions to get us started. You know, it's just like a tool I'm using here to make us think a little bit. Okay, so the first question I have is, is content creation in 3D worlds largely an activity mostly relevant to 3D modellers, programmers, building or scripting enthusiasts? Or is it a little bit more than that? Does content creation always precede content use by end users? Do designers always have to build it first before users are allowed to come? Why are we not seeing OpenSame adopted massively by casual end users? And I define casual end users as users who don't want to have anything to do with 3D content authoring or programming. Okay, but then that's like in the morning I was listening to a discussion and those were supposed to be, you know, the one number one differentiating factor, you know, for OpenSame. The next question is, is content created by end users of a lesser quality than content created by professionals? In fact, in a number of years back, even currently when often in forums you'll find that, okay, you know, this scene doesn't have very good content to look at. It's not, you know, that nice, I mean, we should have bring in professional content creators that we have like, you know, a really great looking world. And in fact, this attitude has actually informed how some companies, you know, are moving forward. And, you know, you can see, you know, Sansa and, you know, HF, etc. So the question is, what qualifies as content really? So let's bring up the next slide. I promise that I'm not going to make this, you know, too theoretical on this. I mean, initially I thought I would, but I was, you know, just creating slides like crazy. And I thought that, you know, like 15, 18 slides about content definition is a bit mad. So I just like, this is the, you know, the next one would be, oh, wow, okay, let me see what's going on. All right. So this is the graph I just wanted to share with you. And, well, I hope you can zoom a little bit in and see what's on display. But I wanted to show, for example, if you consider the vertical column, and what we are trying, I'm trying to display here, if you look at the percentage of content created in the whole 3D virtual universe, that's everything. Just imagine that you are considering all kinds of worlds, you know, on mobile phones, on HF, open sim, Sumerian, and other kinds of virtual worlds. And then you have the, on the horizontal axis, you have generations of virtual environments over time. And what I wanted to show, that's what I think, you know, things might evolve over the years to come. I think that if you look at the vertical lines, like a snapshot in time, you'll find that, just remember the first time you logged into an open sim environment. So you appear with your avatar, and let's say it's an empty region. There's nothing there, just the ground in the sky. And if you want to see, you know, at that point, what's the amount of content that's been created by designers and programmers, and the amount of content that you have created just by existing and appearing in that world, you can actually see that, you know, it's fairly easy to understand that there is much more work and energies that has been spent in developing what you're experiencing at that moment. And you have not started creating anything, anything yet, other than representing yourself. And if you type high, maybe that little piece of high text is your content that's being produced. But what I think will happen in the future is that if you remember, I'm talking about percentages here. We will see more users creating, you know, content beyond just, you know, chatting or texting or animating the afterwards. Or even if you are, remember, we are considering all kinds of virtual environment, even if you are going around shooting at things, changing environments by shooting and destroying your environment, those, those can be considered as casual content, you know, that you're creating in terms of information, you're changing the world and maybe making it more interesting for others. But that's just the casual content creation part. But over time, we'll find that better tools will become available that will actually empower users to start having much more influence in those environments. And that's what drives all our designs, you know, throughout. So in the previous talks for OSCC, I talked about the Resmila system, which we won't have time to discuss today. But today is another little object that we designed that will kind of illustrate what I'm trying to, to point out, okay, in terms of what we consider content and how we can actually get more users, create content and turn the whole OpenSim platform into a mass facing one, just try to bring in users beyond our traditional community of users, which mainly by and large, are designers and people who are familiar with advanced editing tools, okay. We'll revisit this graph at the end of my presentation. That's another graph and you might see that it's actually the trend lines look very similar. Maybe there is a kind of relationship between those two slides that I've just shown. But if you look at the evolution of productivity of a user, you know, for actually, this would stand true for any application. And if you actually have to spend a lot of time to learn an application before you can actually use it, then I wouldn't count this application as being like a productivity tool because you're spending so much time learning about it and then what you produce, I mean the amount of time left that you have to produce and everything is so small that that becomes the learning becomes like a bottleneck, okay. So over time you want to actually improve things, you want to increase the percentage time users spend creating, generating, assembling, modifying things that they actually want and you want users to spend less time having to learn and use tools. So let's zoom into a specific tangible example and then try to anchor those ideas in this example, okay. Let us say we have, you know, the task of creating a 3D virtual museum. Okay, just consider this task problem and what we are trying to do, the two things that we need in order to achieve this task is to go find forage for information about whatever topic of interest you have chosen and then once you get those information, the second step is to organize the displays to present the information in a 3D space, okay. So the question that I can ask, we can ask ourselves says how would we do it in OpenSim right now and then how might it be done in the future? Actually, we have already done it so but you know, just as an example, but we can have many more different iterations in the future, but just to separate those two. So in OpenSim, you can imagine people going and looking for all these information on the web, I swear, recording, creating content and then they would create the museums, you know, the traditional way pushing, pulling primes or importing mesh objects and things like that and then the set of the museum. Okay, what's a slightly different way of doing this? So let's remind ourselves of the broad objectives, okay, that we set for ourselves. Our goal is to provide users with an application that will allow them to create a 3D virtual museum as easily and as fast as they would create a PowerPoint presentation. Sorry for this metaphor but I didn't have anything else. I do know PowerPoint is not the big deal and in some quarters it's even hated but I couldn't find a better example. So we want to bring down the workload for using tools so that users can spend most of their time and resources, cognitive otherwise, to actually craft their presentation. Okay, let's say that percentage of total time for the task allocated, let's say that's like 95% and you want the percentage of time to actually create the museum environment to be only five person, that is, you know, like you're creating the 3D objects, you want, you want, that's your target. So that again, users get to spend more time on the actual things, finding content and focusing on what they really want. Okay, so if you have 100 minutes to create the museum, you'll have 95 minutes to create, to find the media you want and then you have five minutes to organize this content into your, into the 3D museum and then bring your friends in or, you know, visitors and things like that. So this is an object that we built, it's like a one-prem mesh cube, it's kind of an interesting object and inside the cube just imagine that you're going to have the museum inside it. Okay, I'm using museum as a metaphor, it could have been like a poster, setup or anything but I thought museum was more generic and the inside surfaces of the cube are actually images that's obtained from Google Street View. Okay, pretty much you just have to specify the location you're interested in and that's going to bring all the images in and recently, you know, we found that all images work, at least that's created both by users or by Google, even images that's been produced before so you can actually see the same object across different times and let's go and see the next slide. On the picture on the right you can see that there are partitions on the floor. Just imagine you're in the museum and you see all these partitions and it's like they are surfaces on which you can place media, it can be pictures, it can be video, it can be text and you can place them in that museum and then you have a hood in that application. Oh wow, five minutes remaining, according to my watch 15 minutes, I've spoken 15 minutes. All right, so you have these pictures and text that you can use and you have a hood that allows you to pick those objects and just place it. There is no inventory access at all, everything happens within this cube and then you get to you have the possibility of loading various templates that would set up any kind of design you want in any kind of way somebody has decided to place those those different partitions in that space. So the museum that I created here was for a specific topic, it was the Manhattan project like during the Second World War people were involved in designing the that the first two atomic bombs and I spent my time just finding those information very quickly and added all this information inside the 3D space and I can walk around in that 3D space and bring people in and they can follow the story. In fact, this space is like a 3D mind map of the curator of these information things. All right, so you'll find if you look very closely at those images there are a number of buttons like the ring the circular disc those are if you click on those that would actually bring an immersive panoramic view of events that happened at that location. So in this case, I am actually facing posters talking about the American Japanese internment and you can actually click on these discs and bring up and see the actual buildings that they were living in and you can go inside the buildings and it's all in an immersive environment. You can have different types of templates that you can just click and load and it's pretty much like you know you're loading a powerpoint slide template and you just add text or images and you just click and produce your presentation so it's the same idea okay, so in this case as well you can see that there are some text templates that you can add information in and you know the images and things like that and you can create very quickly you know the museum piece. Okay, so what are the advantages of this approach? So first we have productivity gains and then you have you know collaborative opportunities raised so if you look at productivity gains, users are able to create the 3D virtual museum quickly in the same time they would have spent to create a powerpoint slide presentation and content can be produced more the content that's produced that's something that I've experienced when I create like a museum this way I can actually remember the whole thing in that space. I know which section has which information and it's a great memory aid for me if I am to give a presentation but because I can navigate in my head and see which posters are displayed where etc. So that's a different experiment for another day when we are going to look at memory loss etc. So if anyone is interested in doing that kind of research get in touch with me because we don't have time to do those types of studies. The second part is about collaborative opportunities that's too obvious so I'm going to move to the last slide the one before the last again to speed up transfer of information from the desktop the browsers or anything that you do on the 2D desktop you have extensions that we have developed for Chrome and you can just click on those extension and all that information gets sent directly in world so that saves you the time to actually import no well you don't in our system we we never need to import pictures you don't deal with textures everything is URL based and you know so everything is automatic the only thing you focus on is content you want to present the objects are produced automatically you know you can load from templates you don't even need to arrange objects if you don't want it if you are more adventurous you can create your own arrangements and save it as a template file that you can share with somebody else so what I was trying to get out here is let me drink some water here well you see what I was trying to say is that the evolution has to be like you're trying to move this green bar to the right you want users to be to be to actually have a bigger share in content creation than developers that would be the sign of a successful system that would be the sign of a successful platform and that's where the creativity needs to go what I am seeing is in the industry and elsewhere millions billions of dollars are being spent on focusing on other on things other than that okay so it's a great opportunity for us to focus on these things and you know and try to move things forward thank you for your attention is there any question all right remesh thank you so much very informative and we do have time for a question or two does anyone have a question you know and I wanted to mention while we're waiting for a question the setup ahead of time for the museums is fantastic and it really helps create spaces so nicely that's a great idea just one thing the object that I've displayed here these are actually itself like a resmila library object so if you use the resmila system you could actually have bring all the various you know many students in at the same time and create their own little you know as it were the little museums and then you have one big museum that you can visit together etc so it's well whatever I presented here was is linked to the bigger system that we presented in you know in the previous years um but do feel free to get in touch with me send me an email to r.remlll at gmail.com we really need more people you know and I'll be happy to add more people to our team thanks and we do have a question from Matilda Matilda is asking what was the part about the uploading easily there is no upload yeah no upload at all all the images that you see they're displayed that's straight from a url right if it's even if you have you know you're not dealing with textures you're not dealing with with those type of things so inside the museum you have like a library of objects like panels that you can place light sources that you can place um you know you have little mini browsers that you can place and and point to places uh all the surround views that you see that's point straight to google street views so you don't upload anything great and um give me the uh email again please so I can put it in here for everybody I'm just going to type in it's already okay there we go all right all right thank you so much for joining us and will you be in a booth then after this for people to ask other questions if they come up with them um actually I'm going for dinner right now okay but you can email him your questions if you have them that'll be great sure all right well um thank you remesh and I wanted to remind the audience again um coming up at 4 30 we have a session entitled mocap dance library an animation resource for transdisciplinary arts research in the metaverse and also encourage you to in the break uh stop by the different expo sims um os cc 17 poster expo is on os cc expo three region um and you can try all the different ones so thank you again and we will see you back here at 4 30