 second afternoon, the final afternoon of this conference, hope you've had a good lunch. Those virtual sandwiches were rather tasty, weren't they? Still, we're now here to talk. My name is Mal Burns and we're going to be looking at the sort of, oh, the future and the past and sort of everything mixed up really in the light of the current chaos in, I don't like using the M word, I've gone back to using the word cyberspace, but I think if I said the M word you'll know what I mean. And yeah, so we called it back to the future. Never heard that expression before. I feel pleased with how that was. Anyway, anyway, joining me for this adventure, so to speak, are two people who certainly if you've ever been in second life back in the day and stuff, you will definitely know. First of all, Dr. Fran Balcock, I call her Dr. Fran. Yeah, I'm going by her tag. She's a woman of many names, actually. But yeah, she's been involved in many conversations recently, and she's very familiar with masses of virtual platforms. She's active on our clubhouse. She's active with us in Sansar. She's active in Vicadia. And those are just the ones we know. So welcome, Fran. Thank you very much, Mel. And thank you so much for asking me to be on the panel, and it's a delight to be with you and Dhu San and so many people in the audience that I recognize. Back to you, Mel. Exactly. Maybe open soon, but all the cool people are here, as they used to say. Yeah. Yeah. And also we have Dhu San writer, otherwise known as Doug Thomason, but I'll be coming in Dhu San is the name I'm most familiar with. Many people probably know him as the producer of an acclaimed show that happened a second life years ago now called Metanomics. Another metaname, I'll have you know, we have metamusic and a load of things back then, which Bayer Sellers used to host. And, you know, basically it was an interview show with some pretty prestigious people. And I currently, Dhu San has appeared again, should I say, in the Twitter streams and whatever, commenting on sort of what's going on now. And actually, I noticed we've got a few times making the point that we did it years ago, didn't we? So welcome Dhu San. Thanks. It's great to be here, Mel. It's like an old homecoming, seeing so many familiar faces. It's fantastic. Yes. It is indeed, actually. I mean, so what I was trying to dig up people to come on these panels and things, you know, sort of go, it's it's funny how a lot of the old timers, I guess, sort of reappeared, you know, while doing other things. And anyway, I'm on that later. Let's, I'll just let you both in turn give a brief overview of what you've done in brief, that is, and how you in fairly, very general terms see the sort of future panning out for virtual worlds, metaverse or cyberspace, whatever you want to call it. And I'll stop. I'll start with you, Dhu San, I think. Okay. Yeah, you know what? I feel like, isn't it great that the kids, I'm going to call them the kids, isn't it great that the kids are so excited about things we've been working on for 15 years? I mean, back in the day, there was MetaNomics, which you talked about. And we did such interesting work. We did a project with the US military actually to help military veterans recover from military recover from amputation. And we did that in Second Life. And it was called the amputee virtual environment support space. We did some stuff in Second Life with US Bank, just all kinds of like really cool, interesting projects back in the day. And it's it felt like there was a very long winter. When we went off in two directions, we either went off into social media. Yes, that's right. Gentle hair and virtual ability were involved. They were just amazing. I remember, God, what a great project. And I by the way, this is this is the first time that I've had proper back chat in a really long time. So I'm so excited to have back chat again. But it's you know, I think there was this kind of long winter for virtual worlds and the metaverse. I still call it the metaverse because my blog was called Ducanwriters metaverse. And we went off into direction, you know, we went off in two directions. I think virtual reality, learning about that new affordance and then social media. And I think in many ways kind of social media won the short term battle. But as Zuckerberg's shift back to meta, has shown the long term war is still going to be fought in immersive spaces. So the types of projects I'm working on now, I'm back to blogging. I'm doing a little bit of kind of work with the open metaverse interoperability group, which I know now you're involved with a little bit. Yeah, we had a project. Yeah, I've got a big project that I'm launching with avatars and I'll use the I'll use the dreaded NFT word. And yeah, so we can go that direction to if you like. Anyway, lots of I've actually lots of projects going on up. It's just it is an exciting time. And it's interesting to me and I'll just kind of throw this out there and then pass it over to Fran. It's interesting to me that to try to parse which lessons we need to bring from the past into the moment now. And which are my old preconceived notions about what the metaverse should be going forward. And I think that's in my journey over the last year is really thinking about are those old ideas that I had 10 years ago, are they still relevant? And that that I think is the challenge for me as an old timer. I think I've faced them in a chance for all of us, I think I mean, it's very important. It's not just to do with this business we're involved in here, so to speak. But life in general, you know, being open to new things and being willing to change your mind as time goes by. I mean, the perfect example at the moment is probably Philip Rosedale. The moment is sort of telling people, you know, you don't really need avatars. Some of the messages he's giving out of his office is that the ones he gave out when he was, you know, CEO of Second Life. But, you know, it's all tempered by what's happening now. Now, Fran, you also mentioned, like I said before, we came on air that we will come back to NFTs bit later. But you, for example, have been hopping around all over the place and you have been in the Helmets only job of what Facebook arises, isn't it? And I gather you may not be there much longer because you've been sort of encountered so many screaming kids and stuff. You know, less of a welcome back, but now it's been opened up, you know, is it like the Facebook type, you know, madness? Well, I don't know about that now. I mean, I think that, you know, we have to give it a little bit of time to see what it's going to be. And, you know, I'm someone who's like never on Facebook. The only reason I have a Facebook account is because I own a Quest 2. But my interest in, you know, you know, I started out like most of us here in Second Life. And, you know, you mentioned Philip Rosedale. Philip Rosedale was my North Star. And the reason why I moved from Second Life to High Fidelity. How many of you remember High Fidelity 3D? Okay, so Philip was so gung ho. I was in there like a few days after it opened. Philip was so gung ho on the idea of virtual reality and head mounted displays that the original High Fidelity did not even have a chat feature. You had to, you know, that was added later after users screamed and yelled and begged and pleaded. But Philip was so up on this. And what Philip has learned over time is that, hey, people want to be able to chat and text. And that maybe the HMDs are not really comfortable. For those of you who, you know, I still wear my Vive and my Quest 2. And I can't do it for more than an hour or two, you know, before I feel uncomfortable. So that's not really a way to do it. But High Fidelity had things that no other virtual world had. And that was the big issue. And this is where when people talk about NFTs and Bitcoin and, you know, and cryptocurrency and all that stuff. If you can't get more than 10 people into your world to look at the things you're selling, what's the point of having a business? High Fidelity was able to have almost an infinite number of people, almost like Snow Crash or Ready Player One. So, you know, that technology lives on. Mal mentioned Burkittia. I'm active in that. That is an open source world. You know, I'm also... We had Dale on here. Yeah, I was here for Dale's talk yesterday. So that's an open world. And, you know, I'm starting to lose my train of thought, so I'll shut up. But the thing is, I'm a hobbyist. I'm not here to make money. And, you know, I'm fine. You want to do NFTs. You want to do all this stuff. That's really okay with me. I, you know, I really love Burkittia. I also spent some time in Sansar, which was supposed to be Second Life Two, and is on life support right now. For those of you who don't know, yeah. I've joined you almost every year. It's Tuesday evening, isn't it? We normally meet up in Sansar to open my, but yeah, a lot of discussions are, is it still going to be here next week? In case you don't know that all of the devs and the staff from Sansar are on furlough. So there's, I mean, the things just running on its own, and there's no, there's no staff there. But I've spoken quite enough. I'll turn it back to you, Matt. Sure. Right, I'm losing my train too, and that's not on. I'm the host. Right, yeah. Now, I do sound also mentioned also in the back chat first earlier on about NFTs. Now, I'm not a big fan of NFTs. I call them non-fungible trinkets, as opposed to whatever the T normally stands for. It seems to me, I mean, there is a good use for things like blockchain and stuff. I can see for like security of passwords, security wallets and things like that, that may pan out, although the Ethereum's and stuff seem to be largely governed by major banks these days anyway. It's like, you know, the traditionals moved in to the virtual, but all these people bringing out, you know, it seems to me that people can, you know, find an old gif of something they did years ago and then turn it into an NFT and sell it for a fortune. But half the time these intangible goods are just that, you know, if somebody comes round to visit me in the real world, which is unlikely with COVID going on, of course, but I can't sort of show them like a painting on the wall or get a book off the shelf and say, you know, this is a price possession of mine and God, this cost me two million boners, dude. What do I do with an NFT when I've got it? Apart from go on Twitter and say, hey, I've got an NFT that sells for so much, is anybody going to buy it? And I think Philip again mentioned, you know, it's likely that a lot of these things selling for a fortune at the moment are just going to be worthless in a few years because they're not, they're not things in any way going to retain their value. There's been, you know, social media recently, there's been reports of, oh, I don't know, some guy bought, spent a colossal amount on an NFT of a virtual yacht. And what did you do, Xana, actually pointed out the same virtual yacht was available in Second Life for her pins? I don't think it was me, but I think I think we're misrepresenting the NFTs or actually. Yeah, carry on, give me a little bit about NFTs and so, yeah, from your point of view. Oh, I'm losing you, Xana, your voice is breaking up, is it just me or? Okay, Xana, your voice is actually breaking up a little bit, so we'll maybe give it a second to see if it's if it can get a stronger connection again. Meanwhile, I'll move to Fran, have you got any real thoughts on NFTs at all? Yeah, can you hear me? Okay, I have mixed thoughts, I think that there is a lot to say about buying art, that's really art that you can own, but if I'm buying something that's just a certificate to prove that I have ownership, I just saw someone paid $650,000 for an NFT yacht and in response to that, I posted a free download from Sketchfab to the person who posted it, I said, how about this? You know, when I tend to get snarky about that, but I do own, in full disclosure, I own some Bitcoin, Ethereum and some Dogecoin. And, you know, I don't know, I think that there's a lot to be said for having, getting the banks out of bank, out of money systems and that kind of stuff, but, you know, if I make something in the virtual world, I still have stuff selling in second life, I've never charged more than 25 lindens for anything that I make, you know, because I want it for the newbies, but, you know, I can sell that infinitely when I'm 100 years old, I can still be selling the same item because I don't have to make it again. So some of that, you know, some of that is a little bit unfair. If it's a one-of-a-kind, yay, you know, but I also own first editions of books and, you know, that's not an NFT, that's a real thing. I don't know, I think the verdict is that it's very hard to mint an NFT. There are some issues around how much energy it uses, all of those things need to be considered. I think it's a, it's something in its infancy and we don't know yet. So my, my long-winded answer is, I don't know. I think, let's see, maybe, do we have my bandwidth back? Yes, you know, it's the usual, it's the usual open centagal, all your settings. Are sort of misrepresented because they're confused with two things. They're confused primarily with the art, which is where NFTs, I think, began. And I would, I would propose that some of that as art, like the work that people is doing, truly is worth that value. Whether you agree with the way of transacting, you know, I mean, that's fine, we can debate that. But I think the misunderstanding about NFTs, there's two things. One is the spec, the rampant speculation. And we saw this in Second Life. We saw it back in the day of telehubs when people were bidding crazy amounts for land. And land is basically servers and servers are basically an infinite commodity. And so that, you know, I think there's this artificial speculation around scarcity. But the thing I find exciting about NFTs is that they are programmable in the same way that Philip Rosdale invented the Prim. If you don't relate to NFTs coming from Second Life or OpenSim, I would propose that you don't understand what NFTs make possible because what it makes possible is the model of the Prim, apply it on a global scale across the entire Internet. When you look at things like Ethereum meta, metaplex, and the way that they're extending the utility, yeah. Uh-oh, have you gone again? No, not again. Come back, too soon. Oh, you came back and you were so clear and now you've faded again. Oh, dude, we're going to have to be jumping back. But what are the things about, what are the things about this is that what Ducan is saying is a good use case for NFTs. There are people, anytime there's something new that people can exploit, they will. So it's really a caveat. Empto, a buyer, beware, be careful with what you're doing because there are people who will take your money and run. Yeah. Yeah. And it's very much the new thing, isn't it? You know, I heard a reference on why the post snake oil merchants, virtual snake oil merchants. There are also honest dealers in, you know, that really are selling, you know, priceless, one-of-a-kind things and, you know, I think people have to be careful consumers. Yeah. I'm not actually thinking. I think so. Yeah, welcome back, Ducan. Yeah. Yeah, I'm sorry, I keep cutting it. I'm trying to pair it with my pair it with my phone, too. I'm in Miami Beach, where I just, where I'm in unreliable life. Unfortunately, I think there's three bigger trends. Maybe just to put this a little broader. I think one of the trends is that the model of the prim where you are able to assign ownership and a value, whether that value is highly speculative and overpriced, I think over time that will trend back to what Fran was saying, the price will come down. You'll be able to buy NFTs for a dollar. They're going to figure out the environmental costs. They're going to be able to figure out gas fees. So that's one trend. Oh, I know I've been logged out of the SEM. We can hear you. We can hear you anyway. We'll just. I'll log myself back in. So one of them is, you know, the concept of the PRAM being applied at internet scale, I just think is so exciting. I'm not excited about the speculation and I totally agree with Bayer Beware for sure. The second big trend I think, and Fran also alluded to this, was that headsets are very uncomfortable. But that's going to change. I think within the next five years, I think that you'll have a relatively comfortable headset that you can wear for, you know, more than an hour. And that that will start to blur into augmented reality, mixed reality, or see through reality as well. And then the third big trend that I'm kind of interested in is how AI gets brought into virtual worlds. Oh, yeah. And, you know, seeing the ability to, for AI to create objects, create experiences, think about No Man's Sky, which is an entirely procedurally generated world. And now imagine, you know, Second Life being built at that scale with AI and procedural. Yeah, I just, before we came on air, I saw the BBC program, not Boris. It was called Click and they had a special on AI. And it really begins a bit scary when you realise that people are creating AI weapon that could be more more dangerous than nukes, but no radiation or anything. They just have the intelligence to target individual people or individual races or populations or age groups, you know. And, you know, I don't think it's been done yet, but the valid it can be. Well, but getting back to virtual worlds, I mean, I suppose, well, the things with the, well, with the original high fidelity that Philipp did, the 3D world, that did include blockchain style stuff in the backbone of its operation. So, you know, it was obviously something good there, but I think it was more, to me, I always saw it as a bit more along the lines of authentication, you know, value of goods. And I remember in Second Life, for example, for a while on, I think, yeah, it was, it was Brian Eno was in there for a while doing some sort of thing. And I got a limited edition Brian Eno moving painting on the wall. It just changes all the while. It's still got it in Second Life somewhere, I'm sure. You know, this is supposed to be a real collectible. And I guess it is, but of course, I couldn't take it out of Second Life and bring it to OpenSim, you know, which is where I got all my, you know, big houses for the bathroom stuff. So, you know, the issue here, let's move to this issue. In fact, the close shop nature of some of what you might call the Metaverse components, you know, Second Life is a wall garden. OpenSim is not, for example, Vicadia is not, but the other high fidelity I'll show you called Tivoli is sort of is a bit. So, you know, some people want to be fully open and other people want to have their sort of little niche and, you know, control the borders, I suppose, if you think of it that way. If you're back on, Duzan, you've got any thoughts on that? Wall Gardens versus the Open Web or the Openverse? Well, I certainly lean more towards open, but I'm not sure that everything will be fully open. And so, I actually think this is a really incredible opportunity for creators and that can be the creator of a small world or it can be some of the larger players like Epic, which says that it's quite committed to an open Metaverse. And what do I mean by being creative? I mean, one of them is the power of the avatar. And we see this with OpenSim. I mean, OpenSim has prototyped many of the things that people dream about for an open Metaverse. We can carry our inventory from section to section like from owner to owner within the OpenSim community. I think that our avatars, I have this concept that our avatars should carry around with them sort of permissions that rather than when we land in a virtual world needing to read this big terms of service and privacy policy, our avatar itself can be carrying around its terms to the world which the world can either accept or not. So I think we're going to see a mix. I think we're going to see things like sovereign identity emerge so that I can carry my identity from world to world. But each world may have its own rules about what my avatar looks like. I'd like to be able to carry my wallet. I'd like to be able to bring my bring my currency with me from place to place. But that doesn't mean necessarily that I'm always going to look the same. And unfortunately, I don't think we're going to end up one fully interoperable metaverse. I think we'll end up with a big swath of open interoperable metaverse and then a bunch of closed off. They'll call themselves metaverses. But in fact, they're just going to be closed off world gardens. But Charlie Fing refers to them as wolves with small lens and the capital. Because you can't get away from the word, but it might as well contextualize it. Yeah, I'm tempted to think that's in the sense of the metaverse in its meaning is that it be beyond actually is the dictionary meaning of the word meta. So metaverse is like the beyond verse as opposed to the meat verse shall we call it. But I think it's always going to end up having to be small components. And I think like the web over the course of 20 years or more, certain things are consistent every way you go. Whereas in the early days of HTML, you pressed on a link and you didn't know whether you kind of end up or what you were going to get. Because people are still learning how to present themselves using HTML and whether it be VRML worlds or just text and graphics. So yeah, I mean, I think that's kind of the way things will ultimately go. But I don't know how much you know about OpenSim here. I mean, I think you do because you mentioned, you didn't mention it by name, but you referenced the hypergrid, which of course is the system that Christa Loeb's is in the audience here, I think designed. And it allows you to teleport not to a location on a grid. Well, you can do that too, of course, but to teleport to a completely separate grid as long as it's running OpenSim code. And the other thing that Fred Buckhausen was talking about too, which I've been using for a long while that it's not online at the moment is I can have an open installation on an old desktop. And that can be my home. So when I want to go to an event, I can simply hypergrid out from my desktop to the event and then hypergrid somewhere else and then hypergrid back. And the beauty of that is that all my avatar likeness, all my clothes, all my assets completely reside on my own computer. They're not going to go anywhere. I can call them up while I'm out on the OpenSim hypergrid to use. But I've always thought that this as well as OpenSim itself is an ideal template for a kind of future for metaverse. There's many things we've got the second life doesn't have like NFTs and stuff, but the idea that it can be a base from which you can actually move out. And obviously, if in the future we're going to access things on mobile phones, the fact that my my server is on a desktop machine isn't very helpful. But to get to my desktop machine, I actually log into the hypergrid and I loop back into my own world if you see what I mean. But all the content and assets are actually on my own machine. Now, I think, Fran, you can probably remind me of this. I think the landing point at the original hyperdality used a rather similar system. You had your main address was sort of on your own computer. And if you tried to do certain things, it told you you weren't connected and couldn't. Right. You have a local host, which you still have in Vercadia. So I have a whole build there. And then I also I rent a server from Digital Ocean. And then I have another world built on there. So it's very it's convenient and it's cheap. Your assets are mostly, I store most of my assets up on Amazon S3. But yes, it's the same kind of system. And everybody has their own world. I mean, I love the idea of a connective world. I still go into second life. Get on my horse. Get on my horse and ride around the mainland. I say, you know, and explore. You too. Yeah, I love empty sims and horses. It's a chill out mechanism but nothing else. Yeah. No, I think we will sort of love this stuff. It's just sort of figuring out where exactly it's going. I mentioned we had the open metaverse initiative on here yesterday. We had Evo on. Evo. Yeah, I know. And I know it's only been doing stuff on that front. That tends to be, you know, sort of I think there's game places because it's got a lot of different strands, different working groups and stuff. It doesn't feel like one big organization trying to do everything and build the future. It really feels like a disparate sort of collective of people who really just want to build something that's open and will work. Now, the only thing I will give personally a Zuckerberg credit for is the fact what he's done, although I disagree with this and his interpretation of it, he's brought this to the forefront of people's awareness. Even people who've never heard of Second Life or Virtual Worlds before over the last 20 years. I've suddenly heard about oh, there's this Facebook thing called Metaverse or something. And, you know, he's used his power as it were to bring into focus. And I think it's a sort of crucial time in one sense because if an open source project can create a sort of skeleton of something that could maybe be taken up by a lot of people wanting a presence in the Virtual Worlds space, so to speak, then it could temper somebody like Facebook who I know you're saying they want to explore open systems and stuff, but they mean open systems and if it's something independent and it works, they'll buy it. So they'll just suck it up. I'd like to see something on a level playing field with Facebook or Meta for one also, what's its name, Epic Games and things like that. Yeah, we might end up, you know, with not Monopoly, but like a conglomerate who are literally running things and battling it out like the way in the general tech world, you've got Apple, you've got Google, you haven't got Facebook. Again, you've got Microsoft and Amazon, of course, but, you know, after the first six or seven names, you run out of names, you realise that everything else is on a level beneath, you know, and I think it's important for the future of a, again, Metaverse to actually have at least one sort of structure that is an alternative to that. Do you think, I'll go for both of you here, do you think something like that is attainable? Obviously it relies on cooperation and stuff like that, but do you think it's attainable? Yeah, I can speak. All right, well, you know, I think what Dussain said before when he was talking about the major points is really relevant here. I think that the eventual evolution of the Metaverse is going to be from headsets to spectacles to it being really more AR than VR. People want to get up and move around and be mobile once this freaking pandemic is over. And I think that, you know, he mentioned the dreaded AI, but I think, you know, from AI, the next leap is machine learning, which is we turn everything over to the machines and they're doing, you know, and we just sit here and get fed stuff and buy stuff. But the real, you know, the real endpoint of that, as far as I can see, there could be an endpoint after that, is what they call BCI, which is a brain-computer interface. So instead of wearing spectacles or a headset or anything, you just have a node implanted in your brain and then all of the stuff is there. And, you know, I'm glad that I'm old enough that this horrifying endpoint will be after I'm all gone. But, you know, I mean, but you know, but somebody who is five years old now, that's going to be their future, you know, and Ducand mentioned the kids, you know, it's Roblox is, you know, they consider that a metaverse to kids that are in there. They're building everything. My view of metaverse, just to end with this, is metaverse to me is analogous to universe and all of the component pieces of it are worlds or, you know, sub worlds or whatever, make up the metaverse. The metaverse is one thing. And, you know, and that's, and I'm done. Thank you. I'm reminded of Wilburn's model where he literally has them first and then he's got meta galaxies and meta worlds and the possibilities, that's a data. You know, there's Tony Parisi and the seven laws of the metaverse. There's one metaverse. It's the all-encompassing. Yeah, I would suddenly agree with us. That's why I'm trying to avoid mentioning it these days because it's been misinterpreted so much. I do sound thoughts on that. Or have we asked you? We almost have to get back to a couple definitional pieces here. I'll say that my definition currently is I used to think that the goal of the metaverse was one giant virtual world that you entered, like you entered second life and it had continents and it had the team grid and it had Zindra and whatever, right? And that was certainly the model of Ready Player One and Snow Crash. I've come to change my opinion and to call the metaverse something that's emergent. And the reason I say emergent is that I believe that technology is trending towards being spatial. Yeah. Everything from self-driving cars to the ability to use your phone to scan your shoes to three-dimensional product sites by brands to three-dimensional NFTs, whatever. All of these things are spatial. Computers have gained the ability to see the world around them and to present 3D graphics in ways, if you guys saw the Matrix mini game that Epic launched to show off the Unreal 5 engine. Oh, it looks good. This is hyper realistic. You look like you're in a city. It has 35,000 citizens walking around that you can interact with. It has thousands of cars and it looks hyper realistic. So computers have gained this ability to be spatial and to represent reality in increasingly realistic ways. That means that spatial content is emerging in all kinds of places. The metaverse is what happens when you connect all of those little islands. And I think those connections will happen because of resistance and friction points. I want to bring my avatar from one place to another that's really hard to do. And so somebody invents a standard, a proper standard, a proper protocol for what avatar transfer means. So I don't think there's nobody out there building a single metaverse. The metaverse will emerge wherever. I like to say do you want to log into the metaverse? Just stand where you are. The metaverse will come and get you. Yeah, the metaverse will come and get you. They want to sell you stuff. Yeah, of course. Like you'll be in Instagram. I'll tell you, this is my vision of one way that Facebook now meta conquers the metaverse. You're in Instagram. A shoe ad comes up. You can rotate the shoe around. It's like really cool. And there's a little click. There's a little button that says enter store. I clicked that button and suddenly I'm in a little three-dimensional store. And I'm in the metaverse and I never even knew that I entered it. And I think that's how we will see this interconnectivity play out. Well, that is one of my thoughts. I agree on that. It's basically all these interesting parts that actually can plug into a spatial computing world. Coming together slowly and organically, we'll find out which work best and which don't. I mean, personally, I can't stand the idea of being in a helmet for more than about two minutes, to be honest. And I call them helmets, not headsets, because to me they are. I look forward to glasses and smart glasses and things because I have to wear glasses and readings. So I'm a bit used to that. But like I say, it'd be nice to have an implant where I can just, you know, it used my like I use my leap motion to gesture. And on the web, I can just use that for flipping pages. Like in a flip book. You know, so the tactile thing is there. But I think in the, you know, I need to be able to go to like a world here, like open sand and on the flat screen. But then when something interesting requires this, I need to be able to like pick up glasses or a headset and toggle it long as I need to do a certain thing and then put it down again and resolve back to the flat screen. Those two need to be sort of interchangeable. Given that the flat screen will be a 3D spatial environment, you know, it's still a flat screen that you're viewing it through. And the same with, I think there's something in fiction I saw the other day where a smartphone was literally reading infrared. And, you know, the character was pointing a camera at, actually, I think it was a virus or something actually. And Gamble was able to detect it through different frequencies. So you might go in, as you say, with Instagram or something. You might go in to a site somewhere on a mobile phone and access some object or whatever. You might be able to virus or be given this. And then the idea is that at a later point you wouldn't need to go on your phone to get that object. You drag it into your world. Your spatial world or something. So, you know, yeah, all the little bits coming together. Fran on this one. Well, you know, Ducan, every time I hear Ducan, I want to talk about the stuff he's talking about. I spent a little bit of a while learning Unreal Engine 5 because I know that 4 is what they're using now, but I said why bother with that? The future is 5. And I don't know if people realize that. They have two tools within UE5, Nanites and Lumen. Nanites allows you to have literally a million polygons without lag. Think about that. Could you build something here with a million polygons without lag? No, and they can do that. So the realism is frightening. And then Lumen is live lighting that does not have to be rebaked every time that you use it. But I don't think, you know, I'm with Philip on this one now. I don't think the future of the metaverse is going to be virtual worlds. I don't think it's going to be snow crash. I don't think it's going to take place, as Ducan said, all around us and we can walk into it and out of it whenever we want. You know, I played around a little bit with Spark, which is the AR for Instagram. And, you know, and it's fun. You know, gee, I made hearts come out of my telephone. So, you know, but here's my final points on this is that those of us here are, you know, let's be honest, we're an older demographic. We have no freaking idea what this is going to be because we're at the end of it. And the kids that are growing up now are going to be the harbingers of this. And it's going to be what they want, not necessarily what you or what Mal or Ducan or I want. That's right. I just want to say the most. So, I'm here, I came for Art Basil, which is the big art event in Miami each year. And it has been invaded by crypto people. So, there were all kinds of NFT yacht parties and port apes walking around or whatever. So, that was whatever. But to me, the most amazing moment was walking past a school where there was a little lineup of kids to get into the school. I would say maybe grade four. And three of them had Roblox backpacks. That to me said everything. That's the future right there. Okay. Well, it looks like we've got about six minutes to go now. So, hopefully my friend Leah is in this call somewhere. Are you there, Leah? Well, yes, I am. But I haven't seen any questions coming in yet. There's been a lot of wonderful chatter, though. Yeah, I know that's what I love about these worlds, the backchats, the chat. Yeah. So, there's no direct questions coming in. Just, it's just reciprocal talk as it were. Okay. Backchats rules, yes, indeed. Okay. Well, five minutes we got left, I guess. There's got to be a thousand things we haven't even started covering yet. Well, I didn't talk about Horizon Worlds. Is anybody interested in hearing? Because I've been in the closed beta for that. Now it's open. Well, yeah, give us a little bit, not two minutes maybe. Okay. Well, my first comment. There are some positive things about it, but I'll give you the negative stuff, because I'm sure you want that. I want legs. I want legs. Oh, yeah, the legs as well. Yeah. All I am is an upper tour. So, I asked the devs about that because they do have meetings where you can ask questions. And they said that it really has to do with the complexity of movement, and what they call the IK inverse kinematics, if you know about that. So, Horizon Worlds is very primitive. Those of you who remember the early days of Second Life will say, yay, prims, because that's really how you build things there. One of the cool things though is when you build, you can make your avatar gigantic and look down on the scene that you're building. So, it's almost like you're making a dollhouse and you can move things around. Yeah, it's really kind of cool. And you can do that collaboratively. So, those are two really good points. The scripting also, I am someone who, I mean, I can do a little LSL, but as Marcus and other people in the audience still probably know I'm a horrible, I can't code, and I can code in Horizon Worlds. It's visual scripting and you just move things around from a menu and you can make things happen, which I've never been able to do. That's a joy for me. But it's a closed, you know, as Duesense said, it's a walled garden. For all of Mark Zuckerberg's talk about wanting to build an open metaverse, this is closed. And, you know, and I think it's probably only a matter of time before the ads start popping up in people's faces. Oh yeah, I expect you won't be able to move for Black-Haired Ads, but that was Second Life in the early days too, I think, wasn't it? Ad Farms, I appreciate what you said about the, in Open Sim here, and in Second Life for that matter, I always build and stuff like that as far as I'm able in camera. So I sort of take my camera up into the sky and pretend to be God and then terraform everything and then come down to an investigation where I've terraformed and think, oh, I made a cave there by accident, you know. So that viewpoint you're talking about actually is always, I'm found rather kind of nifty. While we've got two minutes probably now, I'd like to take a quick... Now we have a question, if you want. Oh, yeah, okay, yes. The question that came in was from James at Loud, and it was for Doosan. It said, would he make his point about non-fungible tokens and prims? Yeah, I think, so there's so many misconceptions about NFTs. One of them is that it is just a contract that points to a separate digital asset. So that's where you have to hear about art being sold for crazy sums. But NFTs are actually programmable digital content with many of the same features of the prim. Rosdale's prim allowed you to identify who is the creator and who is the current owner. It allowed you to attach licensing in the form of copy-mode transfer. It allowed you to have a value so that you could sell that prim. And they were composable. One prim could be combined with another. And that's actually what the affordance of NFTs allows. But on a much broader scale, because it's not just a box, it's all digital content. So I think we're at the very, very early days of composable, highly utility NFTs. And I think over the next 12 months, we're going to see some really amazing innovations based on NFTs. Okay. And of course, it's not limited to any one world. So it's all part of the metaverse. Okay. We are actually out of time. So I'm going to hand to you again. I'd just like to point out I'm going to get each of you to give your Twitter handle before we sign off. Maybe just put it in in world chat. But there's a lot of conversation going on at the moment. As we said, in things like Clubhouse, a bit of Twitter spaces, meetings in Sansar, meetings in Altspace VR. We didn't even mention that one, the Microsoft product. They're pretty good. Yeah. So the Avatar is good programming. Yeah. And as Eva mentioned, we have the only channels on Discord and things. So I would urge you to engage in the conversation, basically. That's it. So thank you, Doug. Oh, Duzani. Amazing to be here. Sorry for my connectivity issues. It's rising the old lag days. So I was having a lag. Yes. Okay. Remember those, don't we? And thanks, Dr. Fran, as well. Thank you for asking me. And thank you all in the audience. It was a pleasure. Yeah. And I was about to say thank you audience as well. And maybe we'll be seeing you soon somewhere in the greater Mverse. Thank you. Bye.