 everyone and welcome to the one o'clock session of the 2020 open simulator community conference. You know in this session we are happy to introduce the topic grid architecture. Our participants are Andrew Stricker better known as Spinoza Quinnell and hey it's me, Lear Lobo. My last name is Cynthia Colloyne. There we go. Dr. Andrew Stricker Spinoza Quinnell is an education and innovation analyst with Air University and he conducts research in advances and cognitive sciences and artificial intelligence for innovative applications in professional military education. His research addresses augmented cognition and developmental growth in reflective mindsets and contemplative practices. Dr. Cynthia Colloyne Lear Lobo is a professor of doctoral studies at Colorado Technical University and a software engineer who supported Air Force Space Command. She conducts research at virtual harmony and dreams of strengthening the future of virtual worlds. She worked on the design of Bar Karma, a TV series sponsored by and led by Will Wright, the lead designer of the games The Sims, SimCity and Spore. Spinoza and Lear with Apollo Segal received the $25,000 grand prize for their space simulation, the Mars Expedition Strategy Challenge in the Federal Virtual World Challenge. Please check the website found at conference.opensimulator.org for speaker bios, details of the sessions and the full schedule of events. The session is being live streamed and recorded. So if you have questions or comments during the session, you may send tweets to at OpenSimCC with the hashtag pound OSCC20. Well, welcome everyone. Let's begin the session. So Andy, you know, I have to admit the reason we're up here is I kept thinking, you know, the way we're doing things seems to be a little different than what I see in other grids. And of course, I'm having such a fantastic time teaching my virtual world class for St. Martin's University this term that I wanted to share our great architecture. Andy, over to you. Okay, great. Well, as always, it's a wonderful pleasure to be with the OpenSim community. Always look forward to the opportunity to get together with everyone. I guess between Lear and I, we've been working on this grid for almost 13 years off and on. We got started helping the Air Force get involved with immersive 3D worlds and we kind of grew out our work with other educators and some of you've heard about us from time to time. But this visual we have on display here, you know, I like because, you know, there's a lot of mechanics that go beneath the surface to support the kind of immersive experiences that we all value when we come together in communities. And we'll talk more at our later panel session about the community work. But if you move to the next slide, I'll kind of highlight what the grid really serves. And I'll just be brief because I'll spend most of the time on the slide after this one. But this is a visual that we'll talk about during our panel, but the architecture serves a purpose. You know, we're sort of like a Radio Shack enthusiast with all the technology. But at heart, we really value what we can do with each other in the spirit of our shared experiences. And in the OpenSim community has given us a wonderful environment in which to put together. You'll see here in this visual that among ourselves that have been involved with virtual harmony over the past several years, we've got people that write the stories and the scripts for envisioning what we can put together in our 3D spaces. And then we've got people, and I'm kind of one of those, we're an architect where we love to design and create, you know, the kinds of interactive models that are put out into the virtual spaces. And then we've got people that, you know, help create the simulations. And the simulations, you know, do a lot of things with supporting how we collect data and the kinds of ways that people are learning about the STEM or the STEAM areas. And we, as Lear talked about, we support our students as well as some nonprofits. And we have a lot that we try very hard to create, you know, the learning simulation so that they're fun and engaging. So, as Lear mentioned, our dear, dear friend, Barbara Truman, she couldn't be with us. She's not doing well, but she's our inspiration. We represent her in the center image in the middle. We've worked on this Mars simulation for quite a few years with NASA JPL, and we have a version of it in open sim as well. But Barbara is always there and inspiring us to take our imaginations further with the other possible. So, I just wanted to show this slide to kind of say what our architecture really is doing to make things possible. So, let's talk about that. Now, let's just wait for just one moment because you brought up such an important point. At the top of the slide, you guys will notice it says hybrid cloud grid architecture. But what you see underneath is about people and emotions and content that comes alive. It's like when you read a book and the book caught you and drew you into it so deeply that you became the story. And that's what Open Simulator does for us. It's not just a place for creativity and for visual visualizing all these amazing experiences, learning opportunities, or even cool scenes from history, from fantasy, from whatever. It's the fact that it changes us. It strengthens feeds our spirit. It makes us joyful. And that's what we're trying to convey. Now, Andy, by the way, drew this slide. And so for someone who scripts and does mesh design and does amazing planning of our simulations and all, this is a wonderful way of depicting how we feel and how thankful we are that you are here for each one of you, how you contribute to the Open Simulator software, to the viewers, to the research, to the learning experiences, every one of you, you're part of us. And we wanted to thank you. Now I'll go on, Andy. Great. Yeah, I'm so glad that you show your thought and reflections on that because you have a wonderful way of sharing the deeper purposes and what we're trying to do with the architecture. Thank you. This visual is a high-level view of all the different parts that go into the grid architecture. And as Lear has talked about, it is a hybrid architecture. So we have components that operate in the cloud. And then we have components that operate on Linux servers independent from the cloud, but they're interconnected. And so we move data back and forth. On the far right-hand side, you can see the 12 grids that we currently have operating around the clock. And so we've got many more grids. But these 12 grids are the ones that seem to have durability in the things that we've been developing over the past several years in our simulations. And so the things that we try to do is figure out between multiple types of platforms, how best to support the learning simulations that we design, develop, and employ. And some of the things I'm going to share, I know quite a few of you have been working with at various levels of details and so forth over the years. So some of this won't be that novel, but we have, over the past few years, have OpenSEM as our home base. And then we sub-plant some of our simulations with the use of Unity. And one of the things that we really like about combining OpenSEM and Unity is there's so much that we can repurpose. And particularly in the data that we're collecting with our Unity SAMs and our OpenSEM, that goes into a dashboard. And I'll talk to that here in a minute more in the details of what we do with our dashboards. And then many of you know, of course, the mesh models, we multi-purpose them across the Unity platform and OpenSEM. And so we find that even with our scripts between OpenSEM and Unity, we have great benefits with repurposing the scripts as well and C-Sharp. So that's a wonderful way and how we can support the immersive aspects. And also with our Unity components, we often offer a lot of interfaces through the web browser. So people, while they're in a particular OpenSEM environment, can access some of the web interfaces as well. And so if you look at the left-hand side, you know, as we span this kind of hybrid structure, we have, you know, put a great deal of effort in the data of collecting data from users, storing that data, and having that data be actively used in a reciprocal way back into the simulation. So even though the data is being stored in dashboards, the data also feeds back into the simulation in the ways that people interact back and forth with our devices. So we do use, you know, AWS is our cloud platform and all of our servers, even the ones off the cloud and on the cloud are Ubuntu Linux servers that we're employing. And so that has really served us very well keeping things on Linux. We've been able to keep our grids running. I don't think, Leera, I don't think we've ever had any grid really go down. We've taken grids down to update certain things, but we've had tremendous, yeah. That's true. Yeah, it's been pretty good. The reason I'm chuckling is I was teaching one Monday night and all of a sudden the server dropped right as we were going on break. It was back online five, 10 minutes later and Andy says, well, we had a Linux update. Right in the middle of the class. And it was so fast and so wonderful. I had to laugh. But no, we haven't had any downtime. And that's like a miracle when I teach three hour blocks with 14 students, 13 students in an undergraduate and graduate class. And we are very busy, very active. We got a lot of content. And so this grid architecture has really been transformational for me because I don't have to contend with a lot of lag and I don't have to fight the server resources. Now I have to admit, I can render or res a whole bunch of content. You know, those of you who know me know I normally have 200,000 pieces in my inventory. Right. So I will, I will in my enthusiasm, pull a lot of stuff out. And I can certainly slow things down a little bit. But that's almost by design as opposed to the server responding that way. Anyway, the link to the slides is in the text chat. So if you wanted to look at them a little easier, if you're having trouble seeing them, please take a look there. Back to you, Andy. Yeah, we always see to end up trying to squeeze as much as we can possibly squeeze into our slides, real estate space. But that's a good thing you've done to make the slides available there. Thank you. So so when you when you go to the towards the middle of the slide, you can see more of the details of the types of services that we offer in our virtual machine. So all of our all of our grids are operated as independent virtual machines and with shared databases. And so and we package the virtual machines with, you know, authorization services from Amazon, as well as the email services and and the types of things that you normally would expect, you know, with web services like Tomcat and secured sign on. And we have a couple of interesting things that we've added fairly recently with Lambda. So we've got scripts that don't really run behind the scenes that only run when when we call for them through Lambda services. And then we implement it, the learning record store that has helped us with, you know, moving data back and forth between our unity and our open sim environments with experience API calls. And then one of the things that's really interesting that we got involved with is integrating some of our Python work. And so we've got several things running behind the scenes with our neural nets that support our work. And so you can actually go out there and see, you know, through our Mars simulation, the how our neural interface operates. And so we've been we've been fine tuning that for almost two years now with the AI applications, but now it's grown. And it has now an AI bibliography that's collected and meta tagged that supports the AI engine for feeding research articles back to the users on the types of challenges associated with long duration human spaceflight. And then we also have a neural net that supports the predictive capabilities for our players where it will actually help instructors see, you know, what is the predictive levels of the simply that based on certain data that we've collected on our players that would be helpful to know in advance if they're having troubles going from different levels of our of our Sims. It is a really nice interface for giving that kind of data back. And the dashboard is entirely web interface. So across all of our Sims, you can you can you can see the performance data of our Sim players and get it extract out that data for, you know, research analysis and SPSS packages and so forth. So it's very, very capable that it sends out the data in all kinds of different formats for people doing research. And we've had several of our students over the years use the environment for their, you know, research projects. I'm gonna get a word in because we only have a couple minutes left. And I want to make sure if anyone has questions, go ahead and put them in the chat. I'll actually pay attention to it again. Right. And secondly, I don't know if you guys are looking at the right hand side of our slide, but you'll notice all those little scenes you see there. And I'm sure Andy has illustrated this, but I was posting our slides, right? Are the 12 grids we've been talking about. And each one of them strikes a mood or explores a moment in history or works on the mission to Mars in the space program, works on complicated and complex challenges or reflects on the past and what we can learn from it to shape our future. And I just wanted to illustrate that that's been a real place of healing for us. And I'm going to do a plug for our next session, which is in 30 minutes. We're going to give more detail, not that as much on the tech side, perhaps, so that we might do some, but more on how we use these grids in new and interesting ways. And one other thought here, when Andy explained to me, we're using the Mariah database and how we can replicate that and how we can stabilize. I don't know if he's told you, he's running all this on a Mac server with 32 gigabytes of RAM, right? I don't know about you, but I don't, we don't run 12 grids on a Mac server, you know, running Linux. And so, and he's kicking it from the farmhouse, right? In the, in the, in the south, in a lovely spot. And we're going to show you a little bit of what that means to us in the next hour. Well, Andy, we have one minute to wrap up, and I'm looking at the text chat, but I don't see any questions at this time. Over to you. Okay, great. The, the, so, so what's really nice about the Mariah database, it uses a MySQL protocol. And it has a capability to deal with large data blobs. And so we can actually gain a pretty significant improvement with how our data is, is moved back and forth using the Mariah DB protocol for, for MySQL. And we're also using the born shell mode when we call up all of our grids and activate them. And so that has gave us benefits too with the advantages with our CPUs. And so that's, that's pretty, but we can, we can, we can do a lot. I'm so sorry to interrupt you, but we're now at the end of time. And we did have one question that I'll answer as we're signing off here. And it is from Kevin. He asks if we're posted online somewhere. And Kevin, as you know, we, we keep the ports open to hypergrid back and forth. And we do have some security up. So we have an interesting set of experiences with our hypergrid experiences. And we'll talk about that in the next hour. If you want to come visit us, let me know. And I will certainly give you an invitation to join us. And you can try out our simulations or do things, but we're not published in CVL or on Hyperico or any of the public sites to answer your question. How do we integrate? Oh, and the question, yeah, you want to handle that? The question on, yeah, the question on the integration of Unity and OpenSim is done through our data architecture. So, so, and our scripts. And so what we have is a really cool situation where we can, we can have a combination of Unity applications running with the OpenSim. And we use Unity as appliances. So we have appliances that people interact through the Unity, I mean, through the OpenSim larger simulation. And they, and they, and they use like either a Unity mobile application appliance or web application appliance. And, and then also, you know, we'll pull data out of Unity that's stored and feed it back into OpenSim. So that's how we do the integration. So it's all about OpenSim. And we just think of that as a tool. Well, thanks, everyone. I'm going to turn it back over to the moderator, who is me and say, Hey, thank you for a great, where's that hook when you need it, right? Thank you, Andy, for a terrific interview.