 everyone and welcome to the 10 30 a.m. to 11 o'clock a.m. session of the 2021 Open Simulator Community Conference. In this session we are happy to introduce the presentation called the Barbara Truman Planetarium. Our host is Dr. Cynthia Culloan, aka Lear Lobo, and she is joined by Dr. Andrew Stricker, aka Spinoza Cunel, and Francesca Yonakura, aka Frankie Antonelli. Cynthia is a professor at Parker University in Dallas, Texas, and a VR researcher. She loves Open Simulator and is proud to be a member of the OSCC Organizing Committee. Andrew is an education innovation analyst with Air University's LeMay Center for Doctrine Development and Education. Frankie comes from the higher education where she specializes in instructional systems and emerging technologies and support of learning. Please check out the website found at conference.opensimulator.org for speaker bios, details of sessions, and the full schedule of events. This session is live-streamed and recorded, so if you have questions or comments during the session you may send tweets to at 21. Welcome everyone, let's begin the session. Thank you myself, right? Anyway, I want to thank my co-speakers here, and of course, who you know was a member of teens, and we want to talk about her impact on our lives in a positive way. Looks like my talk has skipped ahead a little bit, but we're going to introduce some of the controls and themes later on in the tour, but first I'm going to introduce the approach that we're taking in this talk, which is essentially to celebrate a life well-lived. Now, Spinoza Quinnell is our mastermind, and he designed 18 grids of content at virtual harmony, and we're going to showcase just a few images from those that relate to Barbara's impact and work with us. I'm going to advance the speak easy and turn the microphone right now over to Spinoza Quinnell, who's going to tell us about these slides. Spinoza, over to you. Okay, thank you so much. As many of you can imagine, Barbara, she was known as Delightful Dew Angle, but she was an inspiration for us over the years, and what we tried to do with this planetarium was honor her work with us in a way, all the imaginative creativity that she brought and her energy, and we did a Parisian theme because Barbara was very excited about the things at the time that she had spent over in Paris, and so over the years she inspired us to build a French village in virtual harmony, and she had her residence in this little Luar Valley village, and so it just seemed the right timing for us to be able to highlight a few of the things that were near and dear to her, and after we're through today, I believe it's right Senate 530, there's going to be a tour of the planetarium region, and Senlai would just love to show you some of the things that Barbara inspired us with. That's correct, Andy. In fact, the tour is going to hit the highlights and show you a little behind the scenes on how the controls were and we also have some freebies hidden into the build. Well, on this next slide, could you go back there? Oh, sure. There's one slide that was skipped. I want to... Oh, yes. I did want to share that we organized our memories around four parts of her inspirational characteristics and the four areas that we like to at least highlight in her honor and memory is, first of all, she really enjoyed having fun, and for her you could do wonderful, serious work with having fun, and so we always organized regular dances that we would bring our family and friends together in virtual harmony and Barbara was very fond of her work over the years with the space program, and so we put a lot of effort into space-oriented themes. And so, matter of fact, the last dance that she participated with us was Dancing Among the Stars, and so we just wanted to emphasize that. And then the next point with the pyramid is leave no one behind, and we have a lot of images as no one should be left behind, and everyone has an important contribution to make in this type of work, in the metaverse, so that was very important to us. And of course, the next area that we want to share is no stranger to any of you, she's always with Scouting New Frontiers, and she was always bringing back to us, you know, there are the possible, and so her scouting is represented by the radio telescope and the obelisk that was located in Paris, and then of course, you know, the JPL model, Daremighty Things, that is at the core of Barbara's spirit. There was nothing that she wouldn't try and aspire to, and matter of fact, we often accomplished things that we thought were just not possible because she was there keeping us encouraged and going forward. Thank you. Thank you, Lear. Thank you there, Spinoza, and so now you're looking at images from our different builds with adventures, with delightful. You see us in the lower left, and we're standing in front of the Enigma console. I don't know if Andy wants to talk about that, but that's part of our artificial intelligence system for giving, for collecting data and getting feedback back to users. Andy? Yeah, just quickly, Barbara loved history and scientific history, and so we would bring in the story of Alan Turing, his work during World War II with the Enigma machine, and breaking the code, and we always mixed up our simulations that we created with the, you know, what was contemporary, with what was historical, and so many of our students over the years really cherished that kind of, you know, narrative as it were, and going through our simulations. Thank you there, Spinoza. So, McMurtle Station was just one of those, remember the Pilgrims project, Andy? And the, the, the fascination she had with the Shackleford expedition. Do you have anything to say about that? Yes, the, so much of the, of relating back to the history and the significance of helping us understand and appreciate what we were doing in the Metaverse was, you know, as many know the story, the Shackleton expedition, and the means of rescuing all of the members of that expedition without any loss of life was truly inspirational. And so we, we teach a lot of theories of leadership because Barbara helped us with our military simulations and trying to show the relevance of the Metaverse for improving people's understanding of how to work well in teams. So a lot of these images you see here have this aerospace aeronautical theme and because we, you know, we work with so many students across the military services. Over to you, Lear. Thank you there, Spinoza. So moving on to the next slide, you'll see here a variety of images from the space program and, and we had gone from a fantasy kind of build to a more realistic one using NASA data. And we had seven different stations or different areas of the game and one of the rewards for, for going through it and participating is of course to discover hidden spaces and you see one of them featured here below through the caverns below the planet. And at the end of the adventure, you know, there's this mysterious Stargate and this object above it, that greenish looking thing and Spinoza, do you have anything to add about that? What is that mysterious thing? I'm glad you brought that out because on our session on Sunday we'll talk about 3D visualization and that is actually a model that JPL and NASA worked on to model the universe. And, and so we, you know, as Lear has pointed out Barbara and I, we all loved and Frankie and Lynn Skylark and Algenon Luar. We all love mixing science fiction with science, you know, because science fiction inspires, the fiction inspires the science. And so many of our students commented over the years that they thought it was really a hoot to to see the blending of science fiction with the science. So Robert, you know, authors like Robert Heinle and others are, is highlighted in our, in our grids. And then, and then up, up our right hand corner you see Delightful in one of our Grand Prix racers. And so we, Barbara loved anything mechanical. So we were always building new things, anything that could move in world. We were creating and, and having a blast, you know, creating all these devices, right? Where you can actually get in and operate. Thank you there, Spinoza. So I'm keeping up with the speakeasy here and, and showing some of the Grand Prix and the Oktoberfest that you saw in the lower right corner. We're moving on to the next slide. We, we were, we're standing in either Pompeii or in Sakurajima. Why are we meeting in these spaces, Spinoza? Again, you know, the, the mixture of the history and the expo, you know, it's inspirational with Barbara to, you know, we came upon this really interesting way of addressing volcanoes. And so we, we loved creating these really interesting places where you could see how people, you know, thrive in very unusual environments. And so if you, if you get a chance to visit virtual harmony, you'll notice that a lot of the places that we have, you know, represent, you know, from around the world, these really exotic places, both in history and in contemporary times. I'd like to put a little shout out to everyone who creates content in these worlds and shares it. You know, from the clothes we wear, to the dance devices, to the animations, to the worlds, to all your solutions, to what Ferd was talking about with DreamGrid. I installed that and, and demoed it to my students who just thought it was absolutely marvelous that we could have our own server software and do it so easily. And, and, and then also through the open simulator, through the ability to install it directly. We just have so many Barbara's life. She was celebrating yours and everything that you do. And so we want you to realize each of you matter, you know, in so many ways. Now I'm driving all these different devices at the same time, but I just want to ask you to ask you to invite you to celebrate with us among the stars. We love showing, Barbara loved the picture of the lady flying as it were through a space that represented her. She said the sense that she has when she's in the metaverse, the exploration and the thrill of making new discoveries. And, and, and we say this among ourselves since her passing, but we feel her spirit with us still today with us. We sort of sense that she's, she's there scouting out ahead of us. And so we, that's one reasons we just want to like to share this party picture of her. That's what we keep in our minds as we think. Now for those of you who didn't know Barbara, she was community manager of the Moses Project before its retirement. She began as a user just like the rest of us. And then of course joined the project with Lisa and Sun Tzu and many of you. There were over 262 people on that project when we began. And I want to thank the organizers. They've given us this amazing opportunity to showcase this planetarium and to remember Barbara in such a unique way. We have a grid set up. So if you look at your world map, you'll notice that I'm going to go take a look just to make sure if you pull back with your cursor, you will notice similar to the the expo regions one through six, right? It's to the right of it right above the music stage. And remember tonight, we're going to go there at 530 and do a short tour. And of course, if it winds up being a little, you know, a little slow, you can certainly explore on your own. This is going to be up all year. So there isn't a rush. And of course, we have all kinds of kiosks and freebies. We have spacesuits. We have flight jackets, you know, with with our patches on it. And we have some of her favorite things for you to enjoy. And we also have a secret little apartment set up. And it has a departure to a 360 degree virtual world kind of excursion so that you can do this blended reality or what a sidearm we call hybrid tech. Yeah, yeah, yeah, we included a 360 tour of the Eiffel Tower. So just for fun. And because, you know, that was a big thrill for Barbara was was going up the Eiffel Tower. And so so we wanted to make sure we represented that. And I do want to say as we wrap up here a little bit, I just want to share how much the open similar community has obviously meant to Barbara and for us, all of you over the years have inspired us. And the community keeps us going. So this year particularly has been very touching for me just to get connected, you know, with doing the the planetarium with Lear and Frankie and Algernon and Skylark, our little group. It's it's like family for us. So thank you so much. Now as we wrap up tomorrow, Andy and I are going to be talking about artificial intelligence. And what we're going to be thinking about is how we apply it as a proof of concept in these game simulations as we sample behavior from users and their interaction with the world, how we learn from them, borrowing on how other systems have learned and made discoveries that were quite surprising using people from diverse backgrounds. Everyone's a participant in this kind of exploration. And so Andy is going to showcase some of his wonderful work. And I'm of course going to collaborate. I have the privilege of collaborating with Andy, who he and I went to high school and college together many years ago. And in 2008, he invited me to join the team. And I just never left. I've had such a marvelous time. We're now at 18 grids, not regions, because we're showcasing all of this from a little farmhouse in in in, you know, in the United States. And and then when we host events for the military education, he moves it all into the cloud into the Amazon cloud. And all of these architectural possibilities are thanks to you and to everyone in our community who's really strengthened us and inspired us to keep up the work. You know, the pandemic was a bit of a, you know, a kick in the pants, wasn't it? And each of us has had to find ways to cope and strengthen and inspire those around us. Anyway, I just wanted to say thank you. And that's why I'm here. And I'm excited and looking for it to the 10th year. Over to you, Andy, for closing words. Well, again, as sin is shared, you know, we've known each other since fifth grade. And Barbara's family grew up near ours, too. And so so, in coincidentally, you know, that's how life is, right? Life is very mysterious, but we all got connected. And we stay connected through our adult life and through this wonderful journey. And so, thank you so much again for the invitation and the opportunity to share and to offer this tribute to Barbara. Okay, I'm sorry to break. And this is a wonderful tribute to delightful to Barbara. Thank you to our panelists for an informative and interesting presentation. As a reminder to our audience, you will want to check out conference dot open simulator.org to see what is coming up on the conference schedule. You won't want to miss our next session, which will begin at 11 o'clock a.m. in this keynote region and is entitled State of the Open Simulator Community. Also, we encourage you to visit the OSCC 21 poster expo in the OSCC Expo 3 region to find accompanying information on presentations and explore the hyper-good resources in OSCC Expo 2 region along with sponsor and crowd funder booths located throughout all of the OSCC Expo regions. Thank you again to our speakers and the audience.