 Hello, everyone, and welcome to the 1.30 to 2 o'clock session of the 2023 Open Simulator Community Conference. In this session, we are pleased to introduce the presentation, the Open Metaverse Research Group. Our speaker is Michael Laurie. Mike is currently a director of the International Space Flight Museum with facilities in Second Life and Kytley, and he is founder of Galactic Systems and the Galactic Virtual World Grid. He co-founded the OMRG earlier this year. Please check out the website at conference.opensimulator.org for speaker bios, details of a session, and the full schedule of events. This session is being live streamed and recorded, so if you have questions or comments during the session, you may send tweets to atopensimcc with the hashtag pound OSCC23. Welcome everyone. Let's begin the session. Over to you, Mike. Hi, everybody. Sorry, we had some malfunctions on some slides here, so I'm going to be in the middle there. So yeah, as said, a group of us from the Space Flight Museum and a few other organizations got together a little over a year ago to start the Open Metaverse Research Group, because we were kind of getting frustrated with, there was a lot of, I don't know, kind of fractionating, I guess you can call it, in both this community as well as in other Metaverse communities, and things seemed to be just splitting off in many directions and not really working on what we felt were some of the core problems in really making the Metaverse happen and be popular. And so, because really with the COVID lockdown, it really should have taken off a lot better in our opinion than it did. And so we started thinking brainstorming on ideas, so we're meeting every Friday at 1 p.m. in a region in Kitely, and I'll put up a link to where to go if you want to participate as well as to our Discord. And so there's some core areas that are important to us that we found. Number one is, as we were talking about in the previous session, about using blockchain. There's a huge problem with portability of assets across the hypergrid, not just in OpenSim across the hypergrid, but between different platforms as well as persistence of identity. If you belong to one grid and that grid poofs, you lose your avatar name and everything in your inventory, and you've got to go someplace else and rebuild from scratch. And people wind up having to create avatars on a number of grids just because of the difficulty of transporting assets from one place to another, as well as getting around the hypergrid occasionally. And so the obvious solution from my experience is that what we need is an asset system that is common to all grids on the hypergrid, so that you have whatever avatar name you have as your identity, and it's independent of any grid, and your inventory is independent of any grid. And so really the only way to do that in a secure manner that actually protects IP rights of creators while allowing that kind of portability is clearly a blockchain-based asset system. And so the way that works is that you have a, and I'm trying to show the graphic for that, and it's not letting me show that, unfortunately, I had a great graphic show it, but basically the idea is that the assets, whether they're images or objects or sounds or whatever, can be items that the creator basically locks up somewhere in the cloud, typically on the IPFS, and you can create a smart contract on a blockchain that basically if someone signs that smart contract, they have access to that asset that's out on the cloud, and they can then resit wherever the contract permits it. And so one good prototype example of that type of virtual world is Decentraland, which I talked about a few years ago here, but it has its own problems because of some of the ideas that the founders of Decentraland had in creating that platform, but the core idea of having a blockchain-based asset system is really good. One problem that was an issue was dealing with really actually protecting creator rights because of course, I create a cube, I put it on the blockchain, and then somebody else tries to come along and say, hey, I created this cube before you did, and even if you did, I got it in the blockchain first, so I haven't protected it. So there needs to be some sort of a dispute resolution system, and those are entirely possible. So the two ideas we have for creating that sort of an IP protection system is that when you want to upload something with it to a smart contract on the blockchain that there are heuristics using an idea called perceptual hashes, no, there's blockchain size is not a problem. There is absolutely no problem with blockchain size. That's a fallacy that's promoted in the media, sorry. And so the perceptual hashes are different from crypto hashes. So a crypto hashes that you used to see when you're doing downloads, like if one bit of an entire file is different, the whole hash is a totally different number, right? But a perceptual hash is different from that because it is only different in the hash number based on the percent commonality of that object with something else, okay? So you can generate a perceptual hash for one object, and then you can generate a perceptual hash for another similar object, and the difference between the two hashes will tell you how much commonality there is between those two objects. And so that's a very good tool that can be used to determine how common one upload is with another, and thus spot someone trying to upload something that may have been ripped off, or maybe they just didn't upload it to this platform before a ripper got it before them. And so the assets are stored, as I said earlier, on the IPFS, the Interplanetary File System is a cloud service that's available worldwide, so you can put your assets and there can be cryptographically secured with a public key system, and so the smart contract then is connected to that secured asset that's on IPFS. So you don't have to worry about having a huge asset server on your grid if you have a blockchain-based access system. So once you have the perceptual hashes being used to check uploads, let's say someone, a ripper uploads my thing that he got from a platform I was using it on, and they get it into this blockchain before I do, well all you have to do is if you are trying to upload it now and it says, hey, this is already registered, you then can start a dispute resolution system, and there are blockchain-based dispute resolution systems already in practice that can be adopted for this sort of thing. And it's a very simple fact-finding system that has been proven in a couple different applications already, so this is not a new technology. So benefits of this sort of thing are not just protecting the IP rights of creators, but also the persistence of the avatar identity and inventory across grids, at the same time because the grid owners would not be having to manage a ballooning asset server of their own grid, they would then turn and using the blockchain asset server, they would operate nodes that would process all the transactions of the blockchain and earn money from those transaction fees and turn an asset system from a cost center on their grid operation to a profit center for their grid operation, and that makes operating an open SIM grid a lot more economically feasible for people. And with new blockchain technologies, you know, most people when you think of blockchain you are thinking of stuff like Bitcoin or Ethereum where the transaction fees are rather high to do a single transaction, and for virtual worlds we need really microtransactions and micro fees, and that's entirely possible with newer blockchain technologies like Hedera hashgraph like Avax and other platforms that can handle, they have very fast throughput with very low transaction fees, less than a penny, and at the same time they have very high transaction speeds, which means instead of the three transactions per second of Bitcoin and the seven transactions per second of Ethereum when it was on proof of work, now it's on proof of stake and it can do tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of transactions per second as Hedera and Avax and some of the other technologies can easily do tens to hundreds of thousands of transactions per second. Now the reason this transaction per second rate is important, if you have kept up with hyper grid business several years ago, Elon Tochner of Kitely had an argument against using blockchain where he argued that the second life economy size for if you're having that kind of an economy for a virtual world you would need a transaction rate of 6,000 transactions per second, and at the time there were any blockchain technologies that were in action back in 2017, 2018 that could do that, but now there are, so that's not really a counter argument against that proposal. Tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of transactions per second, right, and so with that sort of thing, we've got a viable alternative to the very fractured asset system that makes it so hard really to make the hyper grid work effectively for people in OpenSim, and this can be applied not just to OpenSim but to other platforms, and so there's one project that's been in operation for about a year that's a startup started by Neil Stevenson, who authored Snow Crash, which was the novel that Patrick, that Philip Rosdale said was the inspiration for second life, and his blockchain project is specifically targeted for providing a blockchain backbone for virtual reality and virtual world projects, and that's called Laminal One, and the one is a digit, so you can Google that and check them out, they have a Discord and so forth, and so we're keeping track of, yes, thank you, and so we're keeping track of that project and I encourage people to look at that because they seem to have a pretty good idea of what's going on, so that's one of the things that we've been talking about for the past year. In addition to that, we've been talking with Ada Radius, who's here, is another one of our members, and she's been working with Kayak or Magic and Owl Eyes on creating a new avatar system for the viewer that is number one, allows you to have a much more improved system avatar, but also lets people create their own custom avatars with a blender add-on that Owl Eyes created, and then install that customized avatar into the system avatar folder on Firestorm, and at present what that does is it changes all the avatars in your viewer but not of anybody else, and so this would be something where a grid that wants to have a custom avatar, let's say they want everybody to look like elves, or you want to look like dwarves, or like centaurs, or mermaids, they make a custom avatar for that type of appearance, and that would be the system avatar, and so they would basically distribute that, a version of Firestorm with that system avatar installed in the distribution, or at least an add-on that would install it in there for them, so each grid that wants to have custom system avatars can do that. In the future, we'll have a much larger variety of possible system avatars that people will be able to use, and they'll all be much better, higher quality than the current system, so that's something that Ada is doing, she hasn't talked already about it, she'll be talking about it later, and then other things we're talking about is creating new asset classes, for instance with physics-based rendering, we want to add to this, okay, here we go. As many of you are aware of, Lyndon Lab is working on adding some additional texture slots in the edit dialog, so that we can go beyond just the diffuse, and normal, and specular, but have other features, because with physics-based rendering is basically using a number of different textures that each one is dealing with a single type of optical property, like the specularity, the normals, the metallicity, the roughness, et cetera, et cetera, and so in CGI for movies or doing current cutting-edge gaming, the newer file formats like GLTF are allowing for a lot more different slots for those different optical properties, and that's what we call physics-based rendering, because each texture that you apply for a single slot deals with a different type of physics optics, and so that's what we call a PBR, and so the idea of having additional asset types, having a PBR material as a full asset type, so you could create a PBR material in the world as an asset and plug in all the textures for that PBR material, so then that entire material could be distributed with all its textures as an individual asset, and there's ideas for other assets that are similar to that that we've been working on. I encourage people to go to our Wiki on our website to read that out, to check that out, so it provides a real good value add as a new type of asset class, and here's another important thing that we're suggesting is that people should look seriously at reducing the maximum size of textures in order to maintain grid performance, is that if you have a standard for your grid of a maximum texture size of 2048 by 2048, and you add more textures of that size for PBR, that means that you have to, for right now we have three possible textures for an object, a single mesh, to cover just the normal diffuse and specular, but if we add more then that's more textures that may be that 2048 by 2048, but we can maintain grid performance by reducing the maximum image size, and because as you can see here with this slide here, is if you drop it to let's say 1024 by 1024, then the same amount of memory and bandwidth that it requires to send one 2048 by 2048, you can send four different PBR textures in the same amount of time and same amount of memory, and so if you have two of those and you can go to eight, and so with the current three slots of diffuse normal and specular, if you reduce the max size from 2048 down to 1024, you can allow for the same grid performance to have 12 different PBR slots for each material, and that with that number of PBR slots, you can have real photorealism consistent with the best cutting edge video games using, for instance, like Unreal Engine and things like that, because that's how they achieve a lot of their excellent optics. Beyond that, we've been looking at new viewer technologies. One of our participants is Animats. He's the creator of the Sharp View viewer. He's been creating his Sharp View viewer to produce much higher quality rendering with the same existing textures as versus the regular Firestorm and the vanilla Second Life viewers, and another one is, of course, you've probably heard of the Crystal Frost viewer, which is a Unity-based Second Life and OpenSim viewer that allows for using these platforms with a mobile device, and that's a big advance as well. So we're looking forward to seeing viewers that can add more new features beyond just these graphics and the newer programming technologies. So that's all I've got for today. Here's info about where we are and how you can participate. We meet every Friday at 1 p.m. We want to invite everyone to participate. You can come to the Cats Autumn Castle region on Fridays at 1 p.m. You can go to our website. It's a wiki. We just had to upgrade it because there was a security weakness in the previous version. So if you want to participate in the wiki, you can join our Discord and we'll get you a editing account on the wiki. We enjoy having you collaborate with us on creating these standards and proposals for improving not just OpenSim as an open metaverse, but to create these as standards for other metaverse platforms that seek to also have an open architecture. Do I have any other questions? I'm not sure, Lear, if you're there, but we need to wrap. Sounds good. And my apologies. I was feeling a comment from someone. So far, you handled all the questions beautifully, Mike, and we thank you for that presentation. Great. Thanks for having me. As a reminder to our audience, you will want to check out the conference.opensimilar.org to see what is coming up on the conference schedule. You won't want to miss our next session, which begins at 2 p.m. in this keynote region, and it's entitled Max, the new free mesh bodies for OpenSim avatars. Also, we encourage you to visit the OSCC 23 poster expos and the sponsor and crowd funder booths. Thank you.