 Ramesh Sharma, Ramallah. Ramesh currently leads Deep SEMA for LLC and E-Learning and Simulations Solution Company for the past few years. He has had the pleasure of working with a team of advanced virtual world designers to develop the Resmola Composer for Open Simulator. Please check out our website found at conference.opensimulator.org for speaker bios, details of sessions, and the full schedule of events. This session is being live streamed and recorded. So if you have questions or comments during the session, you may send tweets to at OpenSimCC with the hashtag O-S-C-C-21. Welcome everyone and let's begin the session. Hello everyone. You will see click to play media on the display and if you can try to do that so that you see the video that we have prepared for you and let us know if you can see the video click. Hello there. I hope everyone is doing well. I am Ramesh Ramlal, Lead Designer for the Resmola Development Team. Today I am going to talk about our new offering. The Composer app. We know that content creation friction is the number one challenge for users who may be discouraged by the amount of time and effort it takes to create what they need. This app addresses precisely this problem. And by content, we not only mean text and image displays but also 3D objects, rooms, buildings, cities and even non-player characters that interface with state of the art AI conversation systems. I feel it is important for the record to describe the foundation of our approach. Let me take a few seconds to address the elephant in the room. Why are virtual worlds so cool again? This might be puzzling to some of us. There are many reasons why this might have happened. Of course there was the pandemic which might have been a catalyst but I believe there might be more to it. It could be because we started understanding how social media companies monetize our attention and data. So we now see companies that have to pivot in order to stay relevant or to justify the evaluation. We also saw an eruption of blockchain technologies, crypto technologies and add to that our awareness that to a large extent we now realize it is indeed the attention economy that fuels the internet. So it comes to no surprise that the capital allocators are salivating at the prospect of the enormous attention control they could exercise because after all, the one who can control attention can also control behavior. So these days we keep talking about the metaverse and the omniverse. And most of these efforts, if we dig deep enough, will uncover a race to create a universal platform. But as many have pointed out, it is unlikely that a single company, regardless of their mortal resources, can come up with the right questions and address them most efficiently or effectively. Most fundamental questions regarding virtual worlds still remain open. You know, for example, we still have not resolved issues such as the importance of fidelity in virtual environments. We don't talk much about the obtrusiveness of hardware interfaces, the effect on our physiology and so on and so forth. But let us say, but in any case, for us, let's see how we can contribute to this emerging ecosystem. Let's see how we can make a meaningful impact with our relatively limited resources. And that's precisely what led us as a team to create this new Composer app, okay? So we started with one main question. How do we reduce friction in content production and consumption in virtual worlds? I started by considering how content is created in the real world. And in order to do so, I had to explore the foundation of how languages are created, how design processes take shape, how perception happens within the constraints of cognition. And then informed by some of that understanding, I came up with a story first approach to virtual world design. I argue how every human experience created or consumed can be viewed through the lens of stories. And then we can apply the same principle to virtual world design. And we will see together this approach in practice. What are stories? Here are a few examples. This will help us understand what I mean by the word story. We can see here how a mathematical equation expresses a story in a very compact and efficient way about a beautiful, complex fractal. In short, stories used representations that emphasize selected parts of the world and connect them in a way so that we can reduce complexity to a level of simplicity that we can digest cognitively. We can see how a small set of musical notes, we only need seven, can generate a whole artistic domain, music. Notes can be grouped into scales, chords, and so forth. And in order to yield auditory objects of higher complexity, these in turn become summative building blocks in their own right. We can connect these blocks to create soundscapes, songs, operas, et cetera. In short, we can either start with representations that we can assemble into higher level constructs or start with higher level constructs and break them down into simpler parts that we can reorganize to express something new. Or we can do both, navigate from simplicity to complexity, come back, iterate to finally lend on an alternate perspective, a perspective that needs to be evaluated for its expressivity or utility. In a nutshell, we are searching for the most expressive language to create stories that can be experienced passively or interactively as individuals or as a collective. We are now going to see examples in practice because as I said in the beginning of my talk, I wanted to spend some time talking about the foundation. So I did that and now we are going to look at examples. So check this building out. It's a complex construct. But if you look closely, it's made from simpler parts and we have organized these parts in a module. We can have, by reassembling these objects, we can create staircases, seating arrangements, beautiful domes. And this building that's in front of you was inspired by the way by the Taj Mahal. In short, the modules we are using for this build constitute the building blocks of a language that we are using to tell an architectural story. And we can apply the same approach to so many different things. So let's check out the whole region. We can see the water themes, the water fountains, the flow round, the landscaping. All that has been created from simpler parts. The water fountains are interactive objects. They can be started and stopped, et cetera. The display, the poster on one side of the row of fountains also originates from modules and they have been placed there and loaded with pictures and text. And I'm using these pictures and text here to support this presentation. So as you can see, everything that exists in this world has been generated and assembled by a simple app which fetches objects from modules as needed. The user can have as many instances of the app as needed. This needs to be emphasized. You can have many instances of the composer app spread out on your land and the app talks to the modules in order to fetch information about these objects. And when you sign into an app, it generates a hood that displays the current set of objects that is available. The composer app further facilitates building tasks by providing functionalities such as snap to grid, snap to object. We also provide facilities to minimize camera movements when exploring a virtual space. All these control points are available on the hood. The productivity gains that we experienced will really be on our own expectations. We could reduce building times from weeks to days, from hours to minutes. So that's really a very significant improvement in building speed. Our approach increases the utility of virtual plots of land. That's something else that we noticed. And subject matter experts find more time to spend on educational content than on building. But this doesn't apply only to educators. It can apply to other activities that you might be interested in. So how can you help us so that we can help you better? The easiest way to start is to get your hands on the composer app. The composer app is currently available on Kytlay and we are really trying to reduce, make it as easily accessible as possible. So the cost is the lowest that Kytlay allows at the moment. So please visit the Kytlay market to access a copy and explore the application. The URL to the relevant documentation and YouTube video channels are available below. Once you become familiar with the application, you may want to create your own modules of objects. And slowly you will come to understand this story first approach for designing the primitive parts. You can, of course, develop your own principles for creating those parts. Then there are many different ways in which you can share your content. You may choose to share the files that capture your creations with colleagues or friends, though you may create modules that you may want to share with others. So there's a lot of opportunities here to create a network effect to grow this approach and to speed up content production. We are really confident that this approach is likely to accelerate content creation as a whole for the OpenSim community. If you find this information useful, please don't hesitate to contact us and we will do our best to meet your needs. And thank you for your attention. So... And are there any other questions as we wrap up? What an amazing thing to watch. We want to make sure we get all of it later. Thank you. One more question. I know you guys are seeing things in chat and... I think I probably missed the mark here in my talk. Yeah, it's probably not enough time. Ah, it's okay. Well, that's okay. They can come back to the rest of it and it was so interesting. Thank you so much. Oh, that happens all the time. There is a question. Where can we see live demos of the composer in world? Would you like to address that right now? Oh, yeah. Next week, anyone who wants to see live demos, just send me an IM. I'm going to put my email address up and I'm going to have one to one session with them. Excellent. Thank you so much, Remis and John. This was a very informative and interesting presentation. As a reminder to our audience, you will want to check out conference.opensimulator.org to see what is coming up on the conference schedule. You won't want to miss our next session, which will begin at 4.30 in this keynote region and is entitled Justice, Literacy, Critiques, and Cultural Landscape. Also, we encourage you to visit the OSCC 21 Poster Expo in the OSCC Expo 3 region to find accompanying information on presentations and explore the hypergrid tour resources in OSCC Expo 2 region along with sponsor and crowd funder booths located throughout all of the OSCC Expo regions. Thank you again to our speaker and the audience.