 Hello, everyone, and welcome back to our third session, our 8.39 AM session of the 2017 Open Simulator Community Conference. As a reminder to our in-world and web audience, you can view the full conference schedule at conference.opensimulator.org. And you can tweet your questions or comments to atopensimcc with the hashtag of hashtag oscc17. So this session is entitled Open Simulator Statistics, and we'll give people an idea about how Open Simulator is used. Our speaker today is Maria Karolov, and she is an editor and publisher of HyperGrid Business. She has been a war correspondent, she has run a news bureau in Shanghai, and covered business and technology for national magazines for more than 15 years. But the emerging metaverse is the most exciting thing she's ever covered, she says. So welcome Maria and to everybody here, and I'm going to turn the mic over to you, Maria. Well thank you very much for that kind introduction. I hope everyone can hear me okay. Okay, I'm going to assume that's a yes. So I do a couple of surveys every year about for Open Sim users and Open Sim hosting providers and the grids they use. And I'm going to be presenting those statistics today. And the numbers are for HyperGrid Business, which is at hypergridbusiness.com, which is the publication I have been editing since 2008, I believe. I mean this is like nine years now, and this has been an enormous length of time. And every month we do a roundup of data, and then every year we do some surveys, and I've got something like 3,000 articles that have been published on here from over 100 different contributors. So this has been a lot of work, and it's been a lot of fun over these past few years. This has been, I mean I love the fact that there's an open source immersive environment available, and that anybody can start up and run their own virtual world. So that's who I am, and my email address is up there, and it's also going to be on the last slide as well. If anybody wants to contact me with questions or story ideas, or if you want to write for us or contribute press releases, we run free ads for all Open Sim grids and projects and merchants, and anybody else who wants one, so contact me for any of that. So the big thing for me this year, and also the last couple of years, is that the hyper grid has won. The interconnected metaverse on the Open Sim platform has really dominated the public grids. Back at the beginning there was a bit of a split. There were some private closed grids where you had to create a new avatar on just that grid, and if you wanted to go to a different grid, you had to log out and go to the other grid, create a new avatar, log in, and there was a pretty cumbersome process. Today, for the most part, the land is heavily dominated by the hyper grid. Almost all the regions in Open Sim public grids are hyper grid enabled, and almost all the active users are hyper grid, and the hyper grid enabled grids as well. Now to some degree, those numbers are a little skewed because InWorld stopped recording their stats this year, and they had about 5,000 users last week checked, so if their numbers were added in, the red line of the closed grids would be a little bit higher for active users, not much higher for land because they're not a big grid land area-wise, but you wouldn't really see a substantial difference even when those users are counted in. It's really dramatic. Grids have been switching over from the closed system to the open hyper grid enabled system for the past few years. A lot of it is due to the fact that people have figured out how to sell content in Open Sim, and grid owners have started cracking down on content. It used to be that it was a default, it was assumed that everywhere you go you would get freebie shops full of stuff of questionable provenance. Today when that happens, it's a scandal, so that's a big difference from, well yeah, what can you do, there isn't really any legitimate content, all you have is the stolen stuff, to the point today which is we have so much legitimate content, it's widely available, there's so many creators, there's no reason to have stolen stuff, and the people who do have stolen stuff, we're going to shut those stores down, we're going to shut those regions down, and that's been a significant amount of progress that I have really, really appreciate seeing because I'm kind of in the favor of business and legality and making it a comfortable environment for merchants and creators and so on. So for the land area, it has been growing steadily, there's been occasional drops as you can see up there when a grid has shut down or a grid has launched a wide open area, so open areas are something that's unique to OpenSim, in second life every region is going to cost you 300 bucks, you're not going to have a lot of free open areas just for sailing or flying around in or space battles or desert treks, you can't afford that kind of open space, in OpenSim you can, you can have a lot of space just for general stuff and general travel, exploring battles, and you don't have to pay a lot for it, and in fact with variable regions you can pay less and less every day, so that's a, for me that's a benefit of OpenSim, now that does translates into lower average usage rates per region, but that's not really a meaningful comparison because you know if you were to randomly land some place on earth it would probably be empty too, you want to go where people are doing stuff and the fact that those people aren't evenly distributed isn't so much of an issue as is the fact that when people do get together somewhere you can find them and we now have lots of ways for people to find things, we have OpenSim worlds, we've got several different Google Plus groups and Facebook groups where the events are posted and promoted, we do regular monthly roundup of events, hyper good business, plus there's the Hyperica Directory which I sold this early this year to Fred Beckonson and he's been doing a great job with that and his new Outworlds OpenSim installer for people to set up their own easy grids, so the discovery has become a lot easier for OpenSim so you can find those events that are going on, you're not randomly teleporting from MC region to MC region, so that's, that that is a very nice feature that we have in OpenSim, we do not yet currently have a search that works like a Google of OpenSim and that would be kind of nice to see, so maybe somebody's going to be working on it. So I mentioned a little earlier today about, a little few minutes ago, about the content situation in OpenSim and the biggest, the biggest progress that we've made over the past couple years has been the Kitely Market and there's going to be more talk about it on the commerce panel but basically we're talking about 20,000 different items available that can be delivered to over 228 different grids. Any grid can accept Kitely Market content deliveries whether it's an open grid or a closed grid or some other different kind of grid there's a setting you can enable and all of your users can now shop on the Kitely Market which is a website and have the deliveries delivered straight to their avatars and you know they just shop, you know, it's a little immoral message and they accept the content and they have it in their inventory. Excellent system, works really, really well and as you can see from the blue lines of this chart pretty much all the growth on the Kitely Market over the past few years has been on the exportable content, content that can go out to those 228 different grids as opposed to content that is limited to just the Kitely grid and is not exportable. Merchants are getting used to the idea that people who are going to steal content aren't their customers anyway and that the people who want to buy content want to have an easy convenient way to buy it so that selling on a hyper grid is basically all upside and not that much downside. So we're seeing that expand continuously, it's been growing steadily over the past few years and I assume it's going to continue to do so and the other thing that's helped with the cross grid commerce is the globe it payment system and this is a common currency that you can use on many different grids and that has been growing this year as well. So that is a nice little thing and we also ask people about do they travel to other grids and in our most recent survey which we did in October the average person has been to five different grids. Now they probably don't remember all the grids they've been on and they might not even notice that they're on a different grid because you can go through a teleport gate and end up on a different grid and you might not even know that you traveled from your home grid somewhere else as opposed to being in a different region on the same grid so those numbers are probably under counts. So yeah, open some people are traveling around and that's been continuing to go up. So we also ask people about what grids they visited the most and always grid remains kind of the crossing meeting place, the crossroads of the metaverse. More than 70% of people have been to OS grid and OS grid is the biggest grid by land area. It's usually the biggest by users. It's got a system where anybody can connect the regions that they run on their home computers. So it's a lot of people are connecting home-based regions to it. There are outside vendors that will run regions for you and connect them to OS grid and OS grid is the primary platform for testing new features at scale. If it works on OS grid, it's going to work anywhere. So they're non-profit, they're registered non-profit, you can donate money to them and I recommend that people do that. If you want to support the growth of open sim, it's right now the best place to donate if you want to support this and it's tax deductible. So go to their website osgrid.org and click on the donate button, especially donate a regular monthly schedule so they know they have money coming in to pay for servers and hosting and you know all the other stuff that they have to pay for. So a great great grid, I strongly recommend that you take a look at them. We also ask people how much they like their grids and despite all the complaints you might hear, people pretty much love their open sim grids. They're on only two percent of our readers say they wouldn't recommend their grid to others. So yes, those are the two percent that you hear, you know, speaking up but they're a very very tiny minority. People really do enjoy being here but they would like to see some more features added to open sim. So there was a developer panel earlier today and the number one thing that came out of the developer panel was that we need a new viewer for open sim that's specific for open sim that's not tied to Second Life so we can start having some you know better features, better graphics. That's also the top concern for our readers. The people who took the hosting survey last week said that this is the most important thing they want is the web-based viewer. And then an online marketplace and content was in second place. This may be because people aren't aware of the Kytley market or they think that you know Kytley market still doesn't have enough stuff on it. So now the the thing that I'm most concerned about and I don't have a slide up for it is the position of open sim with regard to the virtual reality community. Virtual reality has been taking off. Millions of PlayStation 2 headsets are being sold. Over 100 million of the mobile-based headsets have been sold. The YouTube 360 degree apps are like very widely watched by millions of people. Lots of investment going on in this category, a lot of hype around it. And right now it seems to be completely bypassing open sim because we're not architected to work well in virtual reality. There's a viewer, the control old studio viewer that kind of helps open sim be used in the Oculus Rift and other VR viewers but it's not really optimized for VR. If you're experiencing open sim on a desktop and you have some lag, it's annoying. You know you might grumble a little bit. If you're wearing a headset and you experience lag you're going to start getting nauseous. You might throw up. It is a very, very significant issue for virtual reality that you have very stable frame rates and that the vision, that the video quality is very, very consistent and reliable. And open sim is not architected around that. Open sim viewers aren't architected around that. It would require a significant amount of work to redesign it to do that. Second life gave up on doing it. Lyndon Lab abandoned their virtual reality viewer for second life and switched to focusing on Sansar instead which is built from scratch. So that's a big question that open sim is going to have. Are we going to remain a niche product for people who want to have desktop-based virtual worlds? Is it going to expand to having a web-based viewer to kind of expand the audience a little bit more? Or is it going to expand even further to include virtual reality support? And all the projects that I've heard of that have been ongoing have kind of faded away. The U.S. Army had a big one, but Maxwell Adams, the guy who is heading it, has moved on to something else and I haven't heard anything out of them since. So I'm very, very concerned about which way this is going. And I hope that next year we're going to see some changes in this and see some progress. So I've posted a link to these slides below and it's also up here, oscc17-hyperglid at bit.com and there's my contact information again. Sorry, yes, I misspoke Douglas Maxwell instead of Maxwell Adams. Thank you, Son, for pointing that out. So we have a few minutes for questions before they go on to the next session which and there's going to be a viewer-developed session in the three hours from now too that I suggest that people attend because that's going to be very vital for the future development of OpenSim. Meg, are there any questions? All right, I'm going to, I'm taking a look at the in-world comments. Hi, Maria. We don't have any questions yet, but I did want to ask you from covering all these grids, what is your insight into if the viewer did get updated? How many things is that going to affect? Well, first of all, if there's a web-based viewer that you can embed on a website or share on Facebook, that has guest avatars, so you can just click and enter into it without having to download a viewer, install it, configure it, hook it up, get the grid URI set up. I don't really know if people realize this because we've been in OpenSim for a while, but getting into OpenSim for the first time is actually really, really difficult and we do this every day so we don't notice it, but you can't just click on the link and there you are like you can with everything else. You have to figure out which viewer you're going to use, you're going to have to figure out which grid you want to log into and then you have to log go to the grid's website, create an account and create an avatar. If we can make this process one click and you're in, that is going to expand the marketing, the social networking available for grid owners immensely. I mean we're talking a big dramatic dramatic change and I think this is why so many grid owners in my survey last this past week said that having a web viewer was their number one priority. Right, okay, so Krister Lindstrom, he says we've developed software to do a conversion from the region to Unity, so can we get the VR to AR? Okay, so you can convert OpenSim regions to full mesh and there's companies out there that will do it for you and there's software that'll do it for you and then you can set it up as a Unity project and or WebVR project or WebGL project or and there's other platforms, Science Spaces has a Web based VR platform but this is all exporting out of OpenSim and importing into another platform that has a web viewer or that has virtual reality. So you'd have to actually leave OpenSim, export the content out of it, go somewhere else, load up the content, content that was created with the idea of using it in OpenSim, not using it in this other platform and then people can walk around it with you know a VR viewer. So that's that's taking people outside of OpenSim. That's basically using OpenSim as a development platform and there's other better development tools out there for VR content. So I haven't really seen a lot of uptake on that. Definitely if a company or a school wants to move their entire campus over to Unity they can do this but for like a small you know event organizer or something this is what one knows it's a pretty much a one-way trip. You're saying okay I'm going to leave OpenSim and I'm going to go over to AltSpace VR or I'm going to go over to Science Space or I'm going to go over to Sansar or some other platform that does a web viewer that does virtual reality and I'm going to be over there now. That's that's a migration. That's you're an immigrant immigrant out of OpenSim. Gotcha. DJ Phil is asking did Mo's abandon the web-based viewer project? I have not been able to get anything out of it. I've emailed them, I've emailed the new people who have taken over. I haven't been able to get a yes or no on this. If anybody has heard of anything please let me know. The open source code is still out there. It's called Halcyon. Anybody can use it if they want to and contribute to it and it's available on Github. Somebody just posted a link in World. It's designed right now for closed government and corporate and school grids where you don't need people to teleport it out. You don't need people to maybe get content from the quietly market. It's a very small controlled very secure space and which is useful for many projects. Like I said for an elementary school for example or a government agency that's what they might need and they might have to have. So there's definitely a benefit for it. Not so much of a benefit for a public-facing social OpenSim grid with hyper grid and with lots of content and social events and things like that. And I have just two questions from OpenSim. We've got to be really quick about this because we're high over. From the YouTube channel Gwinnett, Ryder, Sinclair. How will OpenSim compete with Amazon Samarian? Do you have any ideas on that one? Yeah we can't compete with anything Amazon. We have such a small audience a user base compared to anything else. We have such a small install base. I mean it's growing. The signs are positive but it's growing in a linear pace which is good but it's not growing at an exponential pace which is what you would need for mass adoption. So people like it and they bring other people in at kind of a steady growth rate and if everything else was standing still that's fine but everything else is understanding still. We don't have Amazon's resources on anything. We don't have Google's resources or Apple's resources or Facebook's resources and we probably never will. I mean I was hoping maybe Google would look at OpenSim and because they like they adopted the Linux code base for Android maybe they would do something like that but they're building from scratch. They're building hard board and the daydream platform and they're mostly going with Unity and Unreal and those kind of engines so there doesn't seem to be a lot of hope there. One last question but we got to be even quicker. This is from YouTube. Sally Devassani, she wanted to just know your opinion on Android Viewer Lumina. It's not really an immersive viewer. It's not something you would put on a headset and you're inside the world. It's something to check in on like if you're a merchant or you're selling things or you need to provide customer service or interact with people. So I've used the mobile viewers for OpenSim. I've even used the VR viewer for OpenSim on a mobile phone and got it got it to work. But the slowness, the lack of immersion makes it useful for certain specialized applications but not a good fit for mass adoption. Gotcha. Alright, so Maria, thank you so much for your presentation. The one thing I heard loud and clear was I'm going to go shopping on Kitely and try to buy myself some hair this afternoon. Are you saying my hair is on a date? No, I'm going to buy myself, I'm saying. I'm looking forward to it. Alright, as a reminder to the audience, you can see what's coming up on our schedule at conference.opensimulator.org and following this session we have a session called 40 Virtual Cities Online and that will start at 9.30 so stay tuned.