 Hello everyone and welcome back to our 9.30am to 10am session of the 2017 Open Simulator Community Conference. As a reminder to our in-world and our web audience, you can view the full conference schedule at conference.opensimulator.org. You can tweet your questions or comments to at OpenSimCC. You can also use the hashtag, hashtag OSCC17. Our next session I'm really excited to introduce is 40 virtual cities online. And our speaker today is Krister Lindstrom. Krister is the CEO of 4Dialog and has since 2008 headed the development of the virtual city concept. In 2017 he initiated the UIDC project which stands for Urban International Design Contest. Today sponsored by several well-known organizations that he's going to talk about and government agencies. So I want to pass the mic over to Krister. Krister, thank you for joining us. Hi Michelle, thank you and I hope everybody hears me okay? Yes. Okay, good. So I'll just go ahead. Okay, hello everyone and thank you for the introduction. So I'm going to talk about, we have currently about 40 virtual cities available online, about 20 of them are available right now. Some are archived and our intention is going for way more, at least 4,000 into year 2022. So why are we doing this? What is our mission? So it's very basic. We want to provide easy to use technology to plan for sustainable urban areas. That is the main objective and mission for what we are doing. And the focus is to develop and market technology for urban planning focused on smart cities and public transportation. And this has had quite interesting consequences. When we did this in the beginning, very few people had any idea what we were talking about. It was quite interesting to see. And eventually, using 3D models for urban planning has of course skyrocketed, but there's still some confusion about what is 4D models. And not until this year, more and more people and customers we're talking to are slowly catching up to what this is all about. And I would like to use this opportunity to applaud the OpenScene community for the work they have done, or you guys have done for many years. So what we do have never been possible to work. So it's been very important for us. Okay, so in order to achieve 4,000 cities or whatever number we're striving for, you need some kind of strategy. And the first leg, we have three legs in our strategy. And the first leg was of course doing city models and using the team we had for several years. We call the 4D team. So from 2018, we are now using these three different parts of our organization. And the 4D team, what they do, they do direct marketing and sales of 4D city models. And the customers are usually cities, it can be an airport, real estate developers, transportation authorities and planners and of course related developers. We have a website on the development, it's not ready yet, but that gives you some kind of understanding where we're going with this 2018. That website will not be launched until 1st of January, but I think it's okay to give you a sneak preview of where we're going. The link is citymodelsonline.myfreecites.net. And of course you're going to get some ads and things there, but just because we're using this site to play around with the coming website. Okay, so that is the basic strategy for do the 4D models and we have quite a few of them. Right now in Europe, I'm not going to list all of these. Most of them are existing, some are archived and some are still under planning, but most of them exist today. So we have models in Belgium, for example at Antwerp, several different models in Sweden. The most extensive are, for example, in Sodutelya, Sundbyberg and Gävle. In the US, we have a couple of models. Some of the most developed ones are around Mountain View, for example, and Aptos in California, we work through that right now. We have a model in Perth, Australia, that was a part of UIDC. We've done Cape Town, South Africa, and we have quite an extensive model of the airport of Stockholm in Sweden. Of course, we just started doing logistics and it's actually not directly the harbor, it's actually the logistics area to the harbor. And we have a couple of campuses and right now we're negotiating with a few industries, that's just one of them. So it's not only about having CD models, it's also about using this technology with immersive software and transportation and movements. And of course, simulations for different kinds of logistics places, such as industries and airports. So that was the first leg. Now, we have started to develop what Meg was just talking about, the university involvement or the UIDC. We had a pilot this year, so we had six universities and city teams doing real studies. The idea was for them to show how a future city would look like. And there was a couple of specific rules. One of the rules, it had to be some kind of innovative transportation systems as autonomous public transportation like pod cars, PRT, APM, or a lot of these buswars flying around these autonomous vehicles. The only thing they could not do was autonomous cars. We think that is something we're trying to avoid. We don't think it's possible to have an autonomous car and a sustainable city. It doesn't compute to us. So we focused on doing most of all public transportation systems. This year we had six participants, three from the US. It was Jacksonville, Washington DC, and Las Vegas. It was one from Australia, Perth. And it's actually a vendor, a developer technology in Australia together with the university. And in Sweden we had two teams, one for the city of Sunderberg. That's a very close city to Stockholm. And the city where I live myself in the north of Stockholm is about 150 miles away. So the idea is to expand this quite a lot next year. So we're looking for 24 teams. And it's been very easy to roll teams so far, actually. We might end up in a situation where we can accommodate all who want to participate, who will see what happens. The idea is to have 24 teams to do different kind of models together with developers and cities, et cetera, and present them at the conference in October 2018. I'll say more about that. If there's two links there, one is the Facebook link for the ULDC contest. And I'm also putting, I'm sorry, it's a bit complicated, but it's a link there also for the winning proposal. I'm going to show you now just how they look like just briefly. The winning proposal is the big one on top. I'm going to hold a little here. It seems to be some kind of technical malfunction going on right now. Do I need to be concerned about that, or can I just continue? Just continue. You're good. OK, thank you. So the top image there, that is the Sundeberg, the winning proposal. The two students spent all together about 250 hours. And they did, I think it's a two-region model. That was very nice, I have to say that. All these models are available in a couple of the links. I think some of them are provided, and some I can provide after this presentation. Lower left is Perth, Australia. And then, no, sorry, Jacksonville. And then we have the second from the left is Washington DC. The third is Perth, Australia. And the fourth is Jävle down there. I did not include Las Vegas because the students kind of misunderstood the task. And it's not worth looking at, actually. OK, so how do we do this? How do we put everything together? Because we're having a lot of teams doing different kind of models all around the world with the 4D team that is doing professional models on behalf of customers or ask for them. And then we have the second team who do everything with students. So what we do, we bring it all together at the conference that has been ongoing since 2008. It's called the Polka City Conference. And we have approximately sometimes around 800 people and sometimes up to 250. So I would say average 150 participants. And it's a transportation professionals specifically specialized in urban transportation systems that is autonomous and of course, solar or renewable energy driven and used together with city planners. Basically minibuses and vehicles in the air or on the ground. So what we do here, we use these teams to present their IDs. And also we use all the cities because there's a lot of cities coming to these conferences. So this tool, this open sim development tool, we use it to educate people. So it's basically an educational and marketing tool for how you can make the city more sustainable using new modes of transportation. But also other things, not only about transportation. It's also about how you can change urban landscape using better housing, better development and basically retake the urban landscape away from the cars. And it's quite an interesting conference. So a couple of examples. We were right now this year in Las Vegas. Let's see here. So we were in Las Vegas. It's called Podcasit and Advanced Transit. And there you see this self-driving little minibus. Unfortunately, the first thing happened after just 30 minutes that launched that after years of preparations, it actually crashed. It didn't crash itself. It was a semi-trailer that actually crashed into it. It was standing still. But that was not too nice. Fortunately, I would say fortunately, the good part of that was it got a lot of publication, a lot of publicity because of it. So how do we do now? How do we expand this? What can we do to get more cities going from 4,000 to 4,000? Is that possible? Well, yes, we think so. Right now, we have about 40 cities. We're using approximately six people on staff and a couple of university teams. Five of them did the modeling. Should be six there, actually six university teams. And next year, we expect using the UIDC and the expansion of the 4D modeling. Approximately, we will have an inventory of about 110 cities. So that's basically 70 more. We need to expand our staff and have more university teams, of course. And when we do our studies and the expansion rate, we expect to have 2,019 approximately 400 cities in our inventory. And with the linear expansion, slightly logarithmic, we're expected to have 14 staff and 40 university projects. So following this analysis, we expect to have approximately actually 4,000 at the end of 2022. It's a lot of work. We're going to need a lot of resources. And we're going to need a lot of support also from the OpenSim community to do this. We are considering either additional ways of doing cities, crowdsourcing, maybe getting involved with the OpenStreetMap community, and many other ways to get this expanded. The number of universities we have contact with right now are about eight. And we expect to expand that quite to quite a much larger number in a couple of years. There are also exchange programs. So what we do is we have students that are doing this a part of the tuition and they're getting points for it. And we today have one exchange program between the University of Southern Illinois and Jabler University in North of Stockholm. And we also hope to have more collaboration projects together with San Jose State University that are running another program adjacent to this program. I have a lot of technology and other issues to explain if people have questions. So I decided to actually just stop it here and say thank you for now, since I expect there are probably going to be quite a lot of questions because when I do this regularly, I don't know. But usually I get a lot of questions based on this. So thank you. And Krista, thank you. And I'll start with the questions because I find this fascinating. So the goal is you're actually going to work with city developers to help them plan their cities. Yes, that's what we do every day. Yep. And part of that you were saying is the public transportation part of it. It is usually not always. We do have projects that does not involve public transportation, but that is usually the most common way for us to get into a project. With UIDC, it's compulsory. For the 4D project, it's not compulsory. It can be anything. We actually have light rail projects. We have biking projects even in Uppsala. So there are other ways to get into a deal to make a 4D model for a city or any kind of development. But the usual way in is that somebody wants us to do something that is related to urban modern transportation using self-driving minipasses or similar. Oh, yeah. I do have a question from Bethany. She wants to know, did you mention working with San Jose State? Yes. And what's that project? The project is called SMSSV or Spartan Superway. If you Google SMSSV or Spartan Superway, you will find the NIST team doing autonomous transportation. Yeah. And then, Edith was asking, can this be used to synchronize train routes? Yes. That is actually what we're doing right now in Jävla. OK. I see here that somebody on the text that UTIM builds a SIM replica for the city. Yes, it is a replica. And Bethany says, I'm with San Jose State University, that she should look for Mr. Buff Ferman. There you go. Or what's her name? Nixon, Hillary Nixon. So what will the next contest be? It will be in Jävla, Sweden, on October. It's going to be, as I said, we expect about 24 different teams. We're not going to have all the teams come to the conference because it will be too much a logistical problem because we're going to be all over the world. So we're going to have contests, preliminary contests, one in US, one in Asia, one in Europe, et cetera. And we're going to have the best teams from each region or continent to come to Sweden. So the total number is 24, but not all 24 then will come to Sweden. We don't expect them to come. So we actually pay for their trip. So we cannot pay for all, it would be too expensive. Now, Cyber Serenity is asking, how do you get the vehicles to work? Do you have special modules? Yes, we have developed special software for that. One is for in-world with OpenSim. But there was a previous presentation here with Maria. And I mentioned that we actually have developed special software to convert a region or several regions into unity because we have better ways of controlling cars. And we can also communicate better with, for example, sensors. So in the city of Jävla, there are five different sensors measuring air quality, the different kind of gases, et cetera. And in real time, you can actually see in the 4D model what is the quality of air in the city right now, regardless where you are. And that is actually a unity application derived from the model we did in OpenSim. Great. And Art Blue is asking, how much of this is actually an OpenSimulator or is it web-based? So I would say all the production is used, is done more or less in OpenSim. We do use Blender for roads and specific stuff. We do import things through SketchUp and different kind of CAD packages. But we find most of the buildings and different objects made externally to be way too heavy when it comes to vectors. And we need something that is light, because we don't want to make the OpenSim model too heavy. And then when the customer wants really high quality, OpenSim is not good enough. So what we do, that's why we export stuff into external software to polish it up and make it more architecture-like and more glossy, if I may use that word. And someone made a comment in OpenSim Business that makes money. And the appeal here is that you're helping cities save a ton of money by giving them their ideas in this virtual space, right? Yeah, and more and more cities are catching on. So we have quite a market right now. We're still not profitable. We're still using investor money to do what we do, but we do expect actually next year to be profitable and the turnover revenue approximately five to 600,000 next year. I bet you the developers love it once they actually understand what it is you can provide them here. Yeah, it's quite an interesting communication. There are people who do not like what we do. And the reason is that they don't want to change. So we actually encountered people who says, no, we don't think this technology interesting and it's just something that looks good and it doesn't really have any real purpose or use. But that's fewer and fewer saying that the more and more people actually adopting our technology and getting interested, not only interested, but actually using it for their own development. A couple of cities has decided to use this technology only for all communication with their citizens. Oh, wow, okay. And one last question because I'm just curious myself too. Your background, were you a developer to start with or how did this idea come about? Well, I'm a politician and musician. That's what I am. So yeah, but I am a programmer too. I did some programming for a couple of years but I'm not programming anymore. Yeah, I do this because of my background in the interest of sustainable cities in the early 2000. So I've been interested in that and I've also been quite active in politics in Sweden for a long time. Okay, great. All right, well, I want to thank Krista for being here. I want to remind the audience, you can see what's coming up in the conference at conference.opensimulator.org. And following this session, the next session will begin at 10 a.m., the first digital biennial. We also encourage you to visit the OSCC 17 poster expo in OSCC expo three region. We're gonna have breaks and lunch and you'll be able to walk around and check out all of our expo regions. So for now, we will take a break and switch out our speakers and thank you very much for listening.