 Welcome to the 2.30 p.m. to 3 p.m. session of the 2017 Open Simulator Community Conference. As a reminder to our in-world audience and you can view the full conference schedule at opensimulator.org and tweet your questions or comments to opensim.cc with the hashtag PoundOSCC17. For this session we're happy to introduce a terrific session called fueling innovation virtual worlds in research. Our speaker today is Lisa Laxton. Lisa is the R&D visionary and CEO of the Open Simulator Community-focused organization Infinite Metaverse Alliance, IMA. She is also president of Laxton Consulting, LLC with experience providing various virtual world technology solutions for education, research, business, and defense clients. You may have also seen her around the hypergrid building content engaged in testing but she's available via meetings to anyone in the Open Simulator Community. She's interested in collaborating to advance virtual worlds technology and improve accessibility. Welcome everyone. Let's begin the session. Lisa. Good afternoon. Thank you very much Barbara. I'm really excited to share our research and I know it's going to be a lot to get in so I'm going to go through it as quickly as I can so we'll try to have some time for answers. Now positive technology is a nascent research area that focuses on technology used to promote and support well-being. One of the main technologies identified for use is virtual worlds. Today I will highlight a case study using Open Simulator to support meditation which is a well-being activity. At the conclusion I'll share some thoughts about fueling innovation using virtual worlds in research. Sanctuary is a meditative virtual world that was developed as part of a doctoral research project to investigate the nature of engagement and the human experience. High-level requirements included a realistic natural environment, meditation support, and engaging but non-distracting design, development of new content, adjustment of the viewer user interface, and accessibility. I will present an overview of design considerations and solutions that were employed. Guidance will also be shared on how best to approach a research project using virtual worlds. While challenges were encountered, this project produced positive results. A blended evaluation approach included both quantitative and qualitative measures. Experience meditators with no virtual world experience and initial skepticism rated the experience as engaging and successful. The positive technology framework you see on this slide combines technology with three well-being constructs to create three levels of the framework, subjective, psychological, and social. Virtual worlds may be applied at all three levels because a primary principle in the framework is the concept of presence, real or virtual. A high sense of presence creates a more satisfying experience which positively contributes to change and transformation. Being present in the moment is also a fundamental concept in meditation. As such, Sanctuarium is a positive technology application at the eutomonic level. It combines virtual worlds and meditation aimed at self-actualization. The goal of this research was to gain a richer understanding of user engagement and the human experience of technology-supported meditation in a virtual world as an essential component of how best to leverage technology to encourage and support well-being activities. The study included three main research questions. Purpostal sampling was used to recruit adult participants with a strong interest in meditation to offer informed perspectives as the target phenomenon. Each participant virtually performed walking and seated meditation using a touchscreen tablet computer. The researcher viewed the participant's screen in another room on a laptop computer. This multi-dimensional approach allowed for triangulation of results and yielded a rich and comprehensive view of the Sanctuarium meditation experience. The summary results include engagement ratings and measures of meditation effectiveness, combined with analysis of interviews to answer the three research questions. Findings emerged from the overall final analysis. Sanctuarium was perceived as restorative and viewed as a unique approach to guided meditation. Participants also highlighted Sanctuarium as a tool to help those new to meditation. We don't have enough time today to go into details, but a full description of results, discussion, and findings are publicly available in Dr. Laura Downey's dissertation, linked at our presenters' booth. To support the research, Sanctuarium was designed as a tropical island scape with a bamboo forest, a natural restorative environment with water. It also included multiple meditation elements, such as a labyrinth to support walking meditation and a central point to support seated meditation. Limited messages appear at the beginning of Sanctuarium before and after seated meditation at the center of the labyrinth. Since meditation is a very concentration-based activity, the only interaction the participant had with Sanctuarium was an occasional screen touch to indicate a message had been read, and the participant was ready to continue. The choice to use a seven-circuit labyrinth in Sanctuarium was driven by its long-standing use over centuries, the ability to reproduce the design in a virtual world, and the positive effects of labyrinths. Each circuit may be associated with a specific chakra. The circuit displays subtle indicators of the chakra associations via colored flowers floating in a bowl at the beginning of each circuit. A soft tone associated with the chakras also sounds when the participant enters the circuit while butterflies provide the visual cue. Finally, because avatars play an important role in interacting with the virtual world, the avatar in Sanctuarium was designed to offer a general representation. Designing a highly customized and individualized avatar was beyond the scope of this research. However, to address diversity, gender, skin color, and hair color in 48 avatar variations were created. In order to experience the restorative effects of nature in a virtual world, it's critical that the elements are recognized and perceived as realistically as possible. Multiple design and review sessions were conducted to achieve the high fidelity results. New content to support the island scape with a labyrinth cut through a bamboo forest took time to create. Higher quality textures and sounds require greater bandwidth. More complex objects require powerful graphics. Physics computations in an interactive virtual world require greater CPU resources than a static visualization in a browser. A clear understanding of these considerations is necessary for researchers when considering design rationale, virtual world elements, levels, objectives, and a framework. The overall design objective was to provide a restorative natural environment that supported and or enhanced the meditation experience. Accessibility was also a consideration not often included in general research. Accessibility by design with subtle immersion required oral cues for every visual event and visual cues for every oral event. Butterflies were emitted from singing bowl sound events. Bird sounds provided oral cues when birds were seen. Wave animations were synchronized with wave sound events. It also meant programming a virtual world more for designer control rather than user control to support immersion. All of the design requirements had to be translated and implemented. To help other virtual world engineer research teams prepare for a similar undertaking, I published some guidance with four major topic areas, research goal and requirements, fidelity and realism, content and hardware and software for the participants. Each of these focus areas begins with the questions researchers using virtual worlds need to ask at the outset. Associated rationale and further guidance are provided for each major area. The ongoing collaboration between the researcher and the virtual world engineer contributed to the success of the project. Supporting virtual worlds in research can be more complex than supporting a service contract or hosting virtual worlds project. Every research project is unique, which leads to unique requirements and challenges. Early engagement between the virtual world design team and the research team is critical to large project success. We strongly recommend establishing a partnership beginning at research conception. Planning should be collaborative and design should be as agile as possible. Without a well defined design concept, the likelihood of unforeseen cost issues and delays is high. In fact, changes in the design process can cause persistent restarts and news software development needs can impact success. Even with successful research projects involving virtual world, technical challenges remain with the current state of virtual world technology that impede adoption by education. To support future research and to innovate virtual world technologies, issues need to be studied. New approaches need to be envisioned and championed. And the next generation of virtual world technologies need to be educated and empowered through research efforts to develop the next next generation of virtual world technology. This needs to be integrated with virtual augmented and mixed reality components. Parallel efforts need to merge for mutual success. This approach can create an evolving resource that can support future research globally with an embedded workforce that fund this new generation of virtual world technologies. While the revival in popularity of virtual reality augmented reality and mixed reality markets has them growing again, technical challenges in virtual world remain due to obsolete technology approaches that may not be able to continue evolving. Technology advancements related to the use of virtual world leave the community poised for another paradigm shift. The free and open source software or a fast community is driving innovation amid the rise and fall of commercial applications, not supported by research interest. However, interest from industry and the public sector has begun driving new standards initiatives aimed at decreasing the time to market and improving interoperability. There are many opportunities to standardize that will drive greater adoption in the use of virtual technologies across the board. Human centric virtual technology research is on the rise in the treatment of PTSD, dementia and various cognitive disabilities. Predictive modeling, historic preservation, education in all disciplines, STEM initiatives, experiential training opportunities, cultural awareness programs, first responder training, disaster preparedness and military research all benefit from the use of human centric virtual worlds. The use of virtual worlds for modeling simulation and analysis is also increasing in industry supporting municipal, state and federal clients as we learn to embrace technology to decrease costs, improve productivity and eliminate safety risk where identified with these emerging needs comes the necessity of a competent and skilled workforce involved in not only supporting these efforts but in thinking out of the box with a new approach to virtual technology software development. The majority of the current virtual world technology engineers, developers, programmers and content creators are aging and the American University system for the most part has not prepared the next generation to carry on the work. Very few universities offer classes to develop the unique skills needed to support the development of the next next generation of virtual worlds. There are a few but the focus of that education is based on soon to be obsolete methods for modeling simulation and analysis. Perhaps the lack of associated well funded research programs in America between academia industry and government is the reason. It is evident from multiple technology solutions that unfunded development can lead to stagnation and abandonment. Lack of research and development with new innovations intersecting science and technology can lead to lack of funding. So we are once again at a paradigm shift in virtual technologies. The goals of 100 concurrent users in a virtual region or even 1000 users across distributed regions are now obsolete and short-sighted in today's fast paced technology era. 10 years ago these were laudable goals and we reached them with the help of military research and open source community efforts. Bravo to all of you. Now we have to start thinking in terms of millions of concurrent users not thousands. We have to design for even greater numbers for the next next generation of virtual world technology I like to call the infinite metaverse where technology is platform independent and standards and specifications for intergrid interoperability or IGI exist for developers, engineers and programmers. A new approach creates a living resource for researchers to use and for industry to nurture. I propose we move forward with the support of new research that can fund application development and opportunities for employment in virtual world, integration of virtual augmented mixed and fused realities with virtual world, and development of new and updating of old standards and specifications to support virtual technology evolution. The support of FOS initiatives by industry government and academia is necessary to push the boundaries of the imagination and creativity that fuels the coming paradigm shift but it can't be sustained by traditional research alone. Markets need to be created or adapted. Best practices and use cases need to be examined. Future generations need to be prepared with knowledge and empowerment along a path to the future by the champions of virtual world technology as it exists today. You are all champions of virtual world technologies. Thank you for all you do or you may even be future technologists. This new ecosystem model for the next next generation of virtual world will change the way we work, communicate, and experience life with job creation, lower operating costs, and economic stimulus through design thinking combined with system thinking. This is the research and development mission of Infinite Metaverse Alliance aligned with community needs. Every advancement and open source virtual technologies made in support of funded research benefits the entire community. I hope you all will join us. Thank you for listening today. It's been a pleasure to share what we learned and I'm happy to answer any questions we have time for. Woo! Thank you Lisa. You really packed a lot into that presentation. Yes I did. It was a little challenging for your slides to come through. I hope everyone was able to see those slides with the data on it. Can you, you also recently had an article published, did you want to share a little bit about that article? Sure. For those who are interested in this and other innovative research and a global look at the future of virtual world technologies, you stopped by our presenters booth to get a link to the book where this topic is covered in more detail. Over to the right of Barbara on the stage, if you're looking from the audience you'll see a pushpin that you click that to get a little landmark to our booth to take you straight there. Well fantastic. Thank you Lisa for a terrific presentation. I think we have just a little bit of time for a couple of questions. Looking back in the chat I did not receive any items of any questions. Yeah the chat was scrolling pretty fast because I was transcribing for those who have hearing impaired. I always keep accessibility in mind. And I know you used multiple approaches today to be able to deliver this presentation live so thank you for doing that. Eudomonia is not something that people think about all the time and that's one of the really interesting findings from your study was that using virtual worlds gets on that level. And the qualitative methods you know to have both methods is really interesting. I did get one question regarding the sanatorium. The sanctuary. Sanctuary. I beg your pardon. Is that available as an OAR or can people visit it? There is an OAR but I will be bringing that up live. We're working on a mobile application that would give people the opportunity to experience this without having to log in to open sim. Okay terrific. Is there any future research planned for that activity? One of the things that Dr. Downey and I did discuss was some follow-on research so we'll be looking for funding for that. And you covered quite a few topics related to the different types of funding and I know that you have experience working in government and also for the military previously. I think with the Navy. Do you have a particular goal in mind in terms of an organization to approach? Yeah I think that you know one of the vehicles for getting research funding that a lot of people aren't really aware of is the Small Business Innovation Research or otherwise called CBER or SBIR. This is the primary reason why IMA was formed as a for-profit organization to give us access to those funds. Then you know we're certainly not prohibited from going after the traditional grants partnering with universities under NSF, the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, Homeland Security, etc. Anything where a human-centric virtual world makes sense is certainly where we can put in some proposals. Terrific. Well thank you again Lisa and I want to remind our audience that you can see what's coming up on the schedule and do do refresh your browser for the schedule. There's been some changes you may not have been able to follow and go back and reference it later after the conference as well. The next session begins at 3 p.m. in here and it's titled Why I Don't Need a Physics Engine. So we encourage you to visit the poster expo in expo 3 to see Lisa's booth. There you've got the landmark and also explore the hypergrid tour resources as well. So again I want to thank you and we will see you at the next session. Thank you all and thank you for the compliment and thank you for listening. You know sorry that I had to really run through a lot of information but I didn't really know how to get it to you any other way.