 So this year's Open Sin Community Convention, the year that Time For God 2020, well it hasn't, yes. Okay, this is a sort of panel but it's more of a sort of general conversation about the future. My name as you probably know is Mal Burns, I host Metal World News and the In World Review which we filmed from here. But this year has been a rather strange one as everybody I think knows. Firstly we've had, well possibly as a result, we've had the Covid virus going around, around the whole world that is, which has had a distinctive effect on the number of people and spending time online and the amount of time they spend online. So one of the things I think of interest at the moment is to get an idea of the future in terms of what has happened as a result of the pandemic. The other thing that I think is a major issue at the moment and I know my guest and many other people are aware of this is it's almost as if the, we've suddenly seen the rise of a whole load of newcomers on the scene, probably as a result of the pandemic, some good, some bad but almost newbies in many ways. Obviously there are established platforms like this around but what is curious is for example that a year ago the name Skype was almost ubiquitous. It's now Zoom, what happened? You know it's like the whole world suddenly forgot Skype and moved to Zoom, which of course is online socialization although hardly virtual so to speak. Anyway to discuss all this and more I'm joined basically by Kent By who's the host of a program called Voices of VR. Welcome Kent. Thanks Mal, thanks for having me here. It feels great to be able to get into OpenSim. Yeah I've been sort of covering the voice, the virtual reality feel since like May of 2014 and kind of consider myself like an oral historian trying to track the evolution of the medium. You know obviously virtual worlds have been around for a lot longer than you know 2012 to 2014 when VR started to come up in the scene. So it's interesting to be here just to see the all the different levels of you know the user interface that I'd say is more web based than so VR based. If the same interface was in VR it'd be you know hard to read the text and they'd be very overwhelming to someone who's sort of embodied. So yeah this this combination of embodiment and these different degrees of presence this year in particular I've been paying a lot of attention to the future of virtual gatherings and virtual conferences especially with the dimension of virtuality and what does virtuality really add to that. And I see that there's a bit of a fusion of taking a little bit of the teleconferencing, a little bit of the zoom. There's certain dynamics that you have in this type of virtual environment that is a bit more text-based or you know 2D on the on the web. So yeah just trying to figure out the affordances of each of those and how they all fit together because I think that's if there's any one trend it's a kind of a mashing together of all these different affordances and how do we kind of reach this perfect combination of everything and I think we're we're still pretty far away away from sort of finding that that good sweet spot of trying to draw on the affordances of everything but I think this year has really been a catalyst for people to really start to experiment a lot more with these ways of virtuality gathering. Yes I would tend to agree I mean there's been quite a lot of innovation despite there's a lot of copycat going along. I mean I know for example you held a little session in Phillip Roestell's new audio hi-fidelity where he and I and a whole lot of people were for example and that was an example of somewhere where it wasn't Zoom and it wasn't really a virtual world it was just this flat space. We had our photo icons as it were and as we moved from different points on the map you know the voices of people around us faded out and then faded back in again so there's a kind of audio virtuality for once with another word which was quite fascinating because also in some of the other newer worlds well they've been at it a while the offshoots from hi-fidelity we are very much now becoming concerned with voice I mean and you often can't even text in these worlds they assume you'll have a microphone and they assume you're going to be talking and you know obviously in there thinking oh somebody can't hear me I better type a note and hey where do I type it you know so it seems to me that one of the major obstacles we're coming across particularly from the social worlds point but from everything is that all these new programs all seem to require a new learning curve you know the keystrokes that work in one don't work in another the physics engines to run them are different I mean a lot of it's in unity but then again you've got samsar and other platforms that have their own unique engines and also of course they don't this has been a bugbear for a long while they don't interoperate now do you do I mean obviously you're concerned with the greater VR thing and there are fortunately a lot of platforms around say science space for example where you can view the monitor screen as a traditional monitor and it's still a fully 3d world or you can go in in a headset but you know there are great differences aren't there as you know if you go in in the headset you you don't normally see yourself for one thing and you don't normally know if you're legless to put it politely um you know so you could be in the same place but the way the presence feels is very different now do I have you had I mean I should tell the audience here by the way that Kent here I mean he interviewed he posts on Voices of VR about three or four interviews a week I mean where you get that energy I don't know but in your experience have these issues come up at all well yeah there's a lot of things that that come up as you sort of recounting a lot of these different things there's a number of different qualities of presence that I tend to try to break things down into and we could start with say like this space here where it's where there's a lot of text there's a lot of user interface options you know it's sort of like taking the affordances of like a web app and the kind of affordances of kind of pull down menus and stuff and it feels like I'm in a application that would be like photoshop or something where there's like it's like the swiss army knife of virtual worlds but you know for anybody who is using any piece of software there's you have to learn what all the menu items are and what you can do what you can't do so something that just launched a couple days ago was Greg Voters gel app which is sort of a pared down version of you know the Mozilla hubs so that's an example where he's just trying to just strip out all of the user interface and just say okay if you want to just do collaboration in a 2d world and you're moving around and you're able to talk with other people but essentially exchange like text in different formats then let's just make it as simple as possible how very like clear key strokes that you can do and then sort of really focus on that and so I come from the world of content management systems and so you can look at something like Drupal versus WordPress Drupal is like the swiss army knife that has like this optimized for the highest level of flexibility but whenever you dial down in any specific context it's always going to be like imperfect for that context and there's always going to be like some kluji ways in which that you kind of have to like force the system to kind of just make it work or there is still going to have like this overwhelm of user interface something like WordPress you can start to get a lot more simpler but there's always that tradeoff between the flexibility that you want versus like the elegance of the user experience in order to really you know fit into a very specific context so that's one issue there's the whole other issue here which is the dimensions of presence and I think it's worth maybe just kind of speaking about maybe some of the big experiences that are out there both in virtual worlds so like fortnight or you know you know rec room but these virtual spaces and so I'm just going to run through these four qualities of presence you have active presence mental and social presence emotional presence and embodied presence and so so right now in this space I'd say this more mental and social presence because there's so much word so much text you have to do a lot of reading there's a text chat that's going on at the same time so there's a lot of great accessibility options there and there is a voice chat that people are you know having hearing our voice here and so but there's also all these other dimensions of you know so just typical of the internet or the web your your cell phone you know so all these ways that you sort of use the abstractions of language to be able to connect to other people and there's a lot of different dimensions of user interface and user interaction design that's being ported into virtual reality so let's look at say like the active presence so that's like the ways that you can express your will and agency into any given experience so in this world you can kind of navigate around and you can sort of sit down but you don't have well there's you're not like playing a game you know it's not like rec room where you have this full embodiment and it's a lot about like playing games with each other and that's like really taking off with the youth I'd say like you know folks that were maybe graduating from Minecraft or war blocks and they want to have like an immersive VR experience but they still want to kind of play with their friends then rec room is like a great room a great place to be able to kind of play around in that way and it's really optimized for high agency high interactivity so you're able to kind of engage with everything that's in that world but then you move into something that I'd say more also in that in that sort of I guess high agency would be something like fortnight which is you know it's a game you know but it's also starting to become like this platform to be able to have like music concerts as well so it's sort of like the game world that's there people are kind of there to do the building and the playing of that game but they also have these other dimensions of being able to connect to their friends socially so then you go to something like it might be emotional presence I'd say something like the wave or the wave XR where you're able to go in and just listen to music and really vibe out or this is just also just like immersive stories it's more passive 360 video would be really modulating your sense of emotional presence but anyways that you are able to build and release tension to really get you emotionally engaged into the experience and so the wave XR and just in general the process of gathering for virtual conference like concerts is a good example of like emotional presence now the embodied presence that's where I think VR is really starting to shine in terms of you feel like your your body is there you feel like a sense of environmental presence but you also are hacking your your sensory experiences of your site your your hearing with specialized audio but also like haptics and eventually taste and smell but by by having a immersive virtual reality headset on you it makes you feel like you have this sense of place presence is what Mel Slater calls it but you have this sense of embodiment that you have this avatar representation like we do have here but I don't feel like I'm in my body here in this I'm like looking at this from a third person perspective looking at myself on stage and there's certainly ways to sort of have the first person perspective but to really get that sense of what Mel Slater calls the virtual body ownership illusion of being able to actually move your body around and to seed your limbs represented in real time you really start to take a different level of body ownership and I think that's where a lot of the VR is starting to come in in terms of playing with that virtual body ownership and VR chat is probably the experience that is playing with that level of body than the most it gives you the most latitude to be able to create these really immersive worlds but also these avatar representations that are really really quite exotic in terms of lots of different things that people are doing so that's that's kind of an overview of how I start to think about it through this sense of active presence and mental and social presence and embodied presence and emotional presence and the thing is that all four of these things are happening at the same time but you're kind of modulating things in different ways like this experience is highly centered in it like the center of gravity is in that mental and social presence but you know what so you there's going to be this fusion of everything together I think this particular environment um you know it's been around for over 10 years now and of course you've got lots of grids connected together unlike second life which is just one grid but we think back to the early days of second life where you know for many years it it was a chat room with text it was actually no voice you know you I think the first time you know I was in second life I had to communicate with people via Skype simultaneously because unlike most people who say I don't do voice I was wondering around with a teacher saying I don't do text you know it's almost like a war between doing one or the other but then you consider events like um not just necessarily here even in second life and elsewhere say a concert you know um you when you go to a concert in real life you enjoy the music and actually probably you know to focus on the music to chat to somebody next door to you but in fact through second life and here you have dance parties and events and things and if you're on voice sit be lost over the music so people rely on the fact that they've got the text channels it were to um to have a complimentary channel for communication while they're listening to music and it seems to me and you mentioned these the um indeed let's just call it the COVID world whatever um it seems that big winners um have been and yet you um you mentioned them briefly um uh one of our camera around here actually is in there all week and that is Mozilla's hubs and in fact Blair from there was on this panel literally last year um and you know it astonishes me that if you go in there deeply you can actually have a pretty rich environment it's so you know when I first saw it I thought well it's a quick link to get in but it does come with that quick and easy entry point uh there's another one called frame IO which doesn't seem to be quite so good and there's the the new one you mentioned um how I mean over over and beyond the idea of interoperability which I think is way down the line and I notice you've been having some conversations with other people on Twitter this week about that um beyond that how important do you think it is that we have what you call that quick and easy solution you know people want to go on the Zoom call they now get Zoom for tea but at least they can't complain it wasn't easy to do you know um so in the sky do you think that is going to be an important factor um generally speaking well I'd say that uh there is a couple of things there's the quality of the experience that we talked about the different qualities of presence and then there's a specific context that you're doing something for um so but let me let me sort of unpack something that you we had mentioned high fidelity in Zoom and I want to elaborate on Zoom just for a second here um so Zoom is great to be able to have a sense of emotional presence with people because you you are passively receiving it in a sense you don't have as much agency but you're able to see people and see people's faces I think it's really quite important especially if you're talking about trying to build trust and and build relationships with people and um you do have the highest transmission of you know your emotional affect when it comes when you can actually see someone's face and I think that that's probably the reason why I think uh Zoom well the other thing that Zoom did that I think was different than say Skype is that they made it easy easy just to be able to click a link and be able to get straight in it's harder to do that with say like Skype where you have to like be someone's friend or be invited you know but you have these more ephemeral like okay I'm going to get in there get directly into where I need to go and then they hop out and there's all these different ways to be able to control you know that meeting but um I'm we're just gonna you know uh uh the fifth wall form is having a whole Zoom conference here this weekend as well that I was also kind of hopping over and participating in um but they the breakout rooms uh originally it was hard to be able to uh have agency as an individual to kind of go to different breakout rooms and so when you go to an actual conference you're able to decide where you want to go to um you know if you want to go to this session or that session but there's this whole other layer of like the interstitial hallways where you kind of randomly run into people and that I think that's probably one of the hardest things to recreate in terms of having these virtual gatherings is that it's the water cooler isn't it where is it well yeah it's almost like you have the the session the session sets a context for people to talk about but then you know uh are you still able to kind of like roam around a virtual space and kind of run into people and be able to talk to them you know and whenever you have the ability to teleport into different places then you're kind of eliminating those interstitial spaces to be able to to have those collisions and so there's a application called Verbella that I think actually did a really good job yes I know them yeah um you know they did for Laval Virtual it was the first time I tried it this year where you do actually kind of locomote through the space and you have this opportunity to kind of run into people um and then you know just recently this year was Burning Man in alt space and I'd say you know Burning Man's a type of experience where rather than like focusing on like talks or you know a schedule it's like more of like the on conference where it's more about creating these worlds to be able to explore together um and it becomes more about you exploring those worlds but also kind of just running into people and so let's say like either you have designed a decision to like schedule a gathering that is trying to focus on the content being the talks or you kind of do the bottom up where the content is the relationships and the connections between the people and I think the big open question is like first of all how you do both of those really well but also like how do you set the larger context that allows people an idea of why you're gathering um so what some of the things that I saw at the virtual conference scenes so like the IEEE VR um that was in Mozilla Hubs they had these birds of the feather sessions where it's like okay uh we have a global pandemic and we have all these virtuality researchers that need to learn how to navigate uh how do you do user testing in the middle of a pandemic well this is like a problem that a lot of people had and so you had this shared intentions shared problem of people that had a shared context of this academic conference let's get together and there's an invitation that was sent out let's have a talk about you know how we navigate this all those people come together and it's like that ad hoc uh shared problems shared intentions shared context uh that they're able to have this like group discussion that is really able to like solve uh their uh what their problems are uh and so I found that you know like when you have that those all those combinations of the ability to people to to gather together to to have their agency to kind of find that place to find these other people and to have these emergent conversations the birds of the feather we're still like meet at this place in this time and I'd say the real challenge still not only just in virtual gatherings but uh face-to-face gatherings is how do you connect the people that have those similar problems and similar intentions to be able to find each other to be able to like uh collaborate with each other and I think that's that's the essence of like virtual gathering um is like bringing people together with a shared purpose and how do you connect them and allow them to collaborate with each other um and like the the oh sorry go ahead yeah I think one of the big success stories too here is that virtual world in a way is discord I mean I I originally downloaded discord because I wanted something that wasn't Skype you know to have my friends too and whatever and I realized I could have a server but at the time I didn't really see the implications but now of course you know there's a there's a lot of um it's quite a minefield following all the discord channels but it it it has kind of worked in an odd way which is not so much here because as you can see we've got a chat room at the side of the window while we're talking but um in in many worlds um where there is no chat for example a couple of them being um you know sort of uh derived from philips original hyperdose um they they heavily use discord as a parallel channel so they can do the chatting in text and um that isn't just a matter of texting of course they can paste in links and put little youtube videos you can do all in discord the only thing you can't do is move around and um have that sort of environmental presence is what it used to be called in second life and of course you've redefined that the embodiment you get through a headset of course means that you know that degree of presence makes this platform and second life fairly laughable and unfortunately they can't be converted you know there's no way you can is to do with the physics you can't come in here in a headset unfortunately um but um yeah I mean um moving on to well let me just say just to follow up with that that point about discord because I think that's an important point because um there's existing channels whether that's facebook or twitter or uh discord or slack um these are all like back channels uh or linkedin um but they're they're able to create these elements of a social graph which is like you being connected to people and what I found is that like VR chat has its own ability of having a social graph within it so you friend people and connect to people and when you go into VR chat you can kind of go to what your friends are doing um alt space and burning man um alt space has really turned out to be like the enterprise corporate marketing or corporate um networking type of so like you have a lot more professional gatherings there so um the fifth wall forum chose alt space to do kind of their their after party um and then you start to friend people and then when you start to go into alt space then it sort of becomes your professional network um and there's like you know more of an egalitarian approach with avatars there where everybody kind of has the same choices and options and you have the ability to kind of customize it um but you know you look at something like discord um i i'd really see that as a really powerful way for these communities to start to emerge to say okay let's like start discord but it has some sort of intention and shared purpose uh shared values and it creates that shared context but you also have the ability to have the audio chats um so if you're going into different games but you also have the ability to friend people in discord so you're able to kind of have this persistence of being able to connect to people and have these back channel conversations that you may run into people um and you know for me i use twitter quite a bit to be able to you know connect to different people um and i'd say like both of these um discord and the all these social media platforms of whether it's uh you know facebook or twitter but also like slack um this there's this like big open question that i had which is the the experience of having a serendipitous collision at one of these gatherings like how do you you know uh define that um and when i was at a conference i would be just kind of like roaming around the hallways running into people uh and people knew me from my podcast and you know so and they wanted to be able to share something with me and i was roaming around looking for interviews and so there was like this um conspire uh this shared intention where i was both seeking for people to talk to and people were seeking me to they wanted to share something with me and when so when we collided and would be able to come together then i would be able to like have that interview and then once the virtual conferences started that hallway was like eliminated and all of the because all the conference organizers was like our conference is the talks and so we're going to make it easy for you to just teleport directly to the talks but have no interstitial areas for you to kind of run into people so the places where i was really thriving were disappearing so i've had over the past year to really have to really redefine what i uh classify as this serendipitous collision and i found that it's like you know these interactions and these collisions on discord these collisions within you know twitter you know mal you reached out to me on discord to be like hey do you want to be in this this conference here this weekend i was like yeah sure why not absolutely um so it's like when those different types of collisions happen then i i give that a lot of weight in terms of you know this is what's emerging in the moment and i think that's the thing is like the being able to find many different ways for people to connect to each other and find like what is emerging in the moment this is happening right now uh here's a link you know dive into this other context that may be a little bit more immersive or have other affordances like this you know this this world has specific avatar representations and identities and people are friends with each other they can have these back channel conversations with each other i mean this is like you know you start to have that built into the system but you can also like if that's too overwhelming then have that in the back channel as well so i think that's what i see is like there's even though there's a gap in a lot of these applications where like in alt an alt space you can actually text people and write back and forth but in like vr chat you can't right so it's like you would have to either do a back channel discord chat to somebody or on twitter dm or text them or you know find another way to communicate with people because you can't do it within the application so yeah it's it's trying to figure out like how to keep the user interface elegant and simple but also if that's a high demand like it'd be really helpful for me to in vr chat for example like people can be in a private world and maybe you want to join them but you have no idea what they're doing they can only you know disclose what degree they're open to you joining them if it's green you have no problem but if it's like orange or blue there's like different levels of of a privacy that people have in terms of you know or red do not disturb but you still don't know like what world they're in what context they're in and it's hard to do that within the app itself and so yeah i think this this whole back channel dimension i think is a key part of how things are continuing to evolve here i would tend to agree in fact i was kind of raised a couple of issues and i obviously have a feeling for some of what you think from well twitter mostly to be honest in your case um vr chat for example uh pardon me i'm croaking um uh this week i think it was it's um i think it was vr chat yeah they've they've now launched a professional version where you pay it's not perfect it's a it's a vr chat plus and so it's there um you know if you want to support vr chat then it's a subscription service so it's essentially their business model moving towards a subscription based 999 a month or 99 a month and uh yeah i actually just joined last night and when you join you get like a rather than just 16 avatars you get access to 100 avatars um and then there's uh you get like a uh an icon an avatar that you can put next to your name plate um and you get some badges and you get increased trust levels but more than anything for me it's like this is a way to sort of get beyond the models of surveillance capitalism and you know pay pay for the service that they have you know pay for these servers you know it's been funded by bc mundy why not sort of pay directly for the services that you're getting rather than having a business model where they're trying to like surveil you and get all this private information about that that raises the very issue i was driving towards i mean slap for example was originally they wanted to design a game and they couldn't do it so they thought you know slap as it was but it was a kind of open model and um the other of the news this week is that has now been bought by a sales force of all people who have a reputation for literally destroying everything they buy up um which is kind of sad but um we're also faced and you mentioned the surveillance stuff and everything else we're also faced with and again it i don't think it's any accident that it's we're becoming more aware of very quickly during the covid period is the the unstoppable you know um bulldozer of facebookers i mean i have to mention names here i mean you know firstly they have a social platform so all this behind the scenes batch handling you've already got in a facebook if you see what i mean if you can stand it with some of this gone then you um you have the um extensions they're into that social network in the form of horizons i think is one and spaces is another i don't know when you've actually been into those and and then of course they now have a well they don't have a monopoly but they look like they're trying hard to get the monopoly on headsets so you're you're dealing with the software platform of virtual worlds you're dealing with the social network and you're dealing with the hardware and you've got one monolithic organization which is more than capable of surveillance running them all now i just this just makes me feel uncomfortable i'm i'm all for interoperability between things but monopolization um you know is is a very different thing do you feel there is an inherent threat in the you know this activity because it as i see you know includes they have said it includes the social network and it includes the virtual environments potentially and um you know maybe everything will interoperate but nobody else will be able to get into this if you see what i mean yeah yeah well i have a lot of thoughts about this this is like kind of the existential dilemma of our time where we have these big mega tech corporations that are controlling a lot of things i mean that's the big reason why there's been these antitrust cases that are you know in the united states against folks like amazon and apple and google as well as facebook and so this is like you know decades worth of uh anti-competitive behaviors that are happening within these companies that they have all sorts of ways of either acquiring killing or copying their competition uh which creates this you know economy is a scale where you know as soon as you get these big major tech corporations then they just have the power to basically to either buy up all the competition to be able to just kill them off in different ways or to copy them just clone so the copy clio clone and acquire so that's a whole dynamic that has been happening for a long time that sets the broader context for in order for anybody to create the technology platforms you have to have access to an enormous amount of capital so you have a duopoly of cell phones of providers between like apple and android in terms of the operating systems at least um and then you have uh with vr you have facebook that has been really out there but you know basically in the standalone vr market uh not really any competition uh google has made so many different failures in their own strategy that they basically uh pretty much shuttered so many different aspects of their vr strategy they're focusing more on ar at this point but you have apple who's also been developing a lot of these different things but they've been secretly developing everything and they're just you know they're going to wait until they're ready to start to launch it but they've been completely absent to this larger discussion so you have what is essentially going to be like this battle between apple and facebook to these two close world gardens who uh in each of their own ways apple especially apple being extremely antagonistic to all these open standards whether it's open xr or web xr uh they're just kind of like doing their own thing and like if you want to have any sort of application you have to have like their native solution for whatever that is um you know snubbing turning their nose up against even gltf and creating their own kind of proprietary or going with the pixar uh us zd format so you have this larger context um and i think laurence lessig uh in his approach of what he calls a pathetic dot theory saying that there's these dials that you can turn to be able to control different social socioeconomic dimensions of any issue when it comes to the scale so you have these four major ways to do that you have the law uh and that's literally the dimension of the tech policy and the antitrust and and the regulation to be able to to rein this stuff in that's been kind of absent uh for so so long to kind of accelerate uh the issue that was talking about earlier about the these monopolies that are really having too much power and control over our lives and then you have the market dynamics which is you know the competition amongst these different players uh and if for whatever reason they've have one player that's decided to make the market risks and other people have just decided not to take the chance or like google really stepping back with a lot of their strategy yeah um and then you have the market which or the the culture which is the us people the people who are actually consuming stuff it's all the ways of uh people talking about stuff uh either there boycotting this person or not or educating people about the options and so using all the different uh media and journalism to be able to cover what's happening so you have this sort of choices to what they're going to do or whose companies they're going to support or not and then the last one is the technological architecture and the code so that's where you get into something like this like the the radically decentralized options versus like the the centralized options so you can you can start to fight back by just creating the open web or open alternatives that are not sort of falling into this closed-world garden mindset the challenge is that uh let's just like take as an example high fidelity versus VR chat so high fidelity Philip Rosdale obviously coming from second life he learned that you know in order to really scale these different virtual worlds you you have to have these huge server farms and there was like this fundamental uh economic issue that like if you wanted to have a metaverse that as big as we all want it to be then you know you're you're gonna have to have people run their own servers but the problem was is that the the the quality of the experience of something that's an immersive virtual reality experience has not been proven out to the point where people are willing to go through that much trouble and that there's so many different issues with uh just standing up a server and dealing with security and all the people that are all the viruses in the malware and everything else you know there's a lot of stuff you have to you have to be simply like a system administrator to be able to actually stand all that up and and have that both the technical expertise but also the money and the resources and you have to maintain it so the centralized economies of scale from these major companies have been like they've eliminated all that and they're just really focused on the experience uh but they do all these other sort of you know surveillance capitalism things to really sustain it that have these other you know side effects and so I think the challenge of like something like uh this dialectic is that you look at something like VR chat that has just stood up all this stuff and they paid for all the servers and they're taking care of all that problem um and they have proven that they've been able to really grow those networks of people because the experience has been so compelling but yet uh what about WebXR? Well WebXR is sort of stagnant because you know Apple is refusing to to you know if you want to implement a WebXR experience then you know you may have to deal with it not being able to be available for anybody who has an iPhone iOS or you know using Safari it's like they've just refused to implement those open standards so then you have like Google that's starting to implement all that but yet you know their own strategies you know been really uh fragmented and not really coherent anyway because they've been also taking that sort of decentralized approach generally and they've they've also found that they've had difficulties trying to get really uh things really kick started so I feel like there's a lot of these different dialectics and decisions that you have to make and then unfortunately we live in a world where uh it's just we've had so much power and consolidation for those tech companies just because it's so difficult to kind of do it on your own um but I do think that it's a pendulum that swings back and forth and that we will be starting to hit to this point where we start to do these more decentralized approaches. Yeah I think so long as competition still exists you know and you aren't dealing with actual monopolies I mean there's still the danger of a cartel of course but I mean um you know there's some safety in that so I'm a big fan of Apple but sometimes I get distressed when I think you know well how can I say I'm a fan of Apple loads Facebook so much um you know I think it really is a matter of of you know size when you've got a corporation that's bigger than a greater economy than the GDP of a few countries you really wonder what's going on um and the other thing that actually I'm glad you mentioned it because um what I think I have a region or mega region attached to open sim here uh which is a grid in its own right but you can jump to it and have friends across grids here because um you know so it's something called the hyper grid which um was mentioned earlier it was created by Christopher Lopez who was one of the devs here and um um although it wasn't mentioned in the summary I mean I use a chapter that's got a service called Dreamworld which basically means I'm actually writing the server for the whole virtual world on one of my computers but um it's rooted um through an IP database I guess it is it's another company called Dreamworld so it's much harder for to imagine you know because the obvious threat is you mentioned is security where somebody can just teleport into your world on your own computer they can do or ends of damage you know so um you know you need to have the security in place there but um I remember many years ago I asked somebody from Microsoft long before you know it must have been over a decade ago in second life they were talking now I said well windows ever be a virtual environment you know like rooms uh somebody actually did it about 10 years ago it's a plugin program and it um but you know it took over the interface and you were able to create your own objects like you can hear and you can tag you could link the objects to anything in your system via the pdf or you have a bookcase for the pdfs uh you could have an application launch it basically became a replacement for the windows desktop and um I love that because it it was the first example really uh probably before second life that I saw of of that 3d environment being a utility I don't mean just fun I mean um being able to utilize you know the room the 3d environment or the rooms were your central hub you did everything from there whether it was reading going on the web launching your applications and whatever and um I'm well I'm wondering about the future of that so I know in VR and the particular stuff you cover um you know some of these front ends as it were are quite capable of pulling in um you know stuff from elsewhere certainly on the cloud but the sort of people might ultimately be able to pull in um things from their own computers their own environment into a virtual interface have you have you felt there any indication of that sort of thing coming along as a sort of the leap as it were you mean like pulling in what type of other objects into it like what can you give an example like a photo or video or what do you mean exactly oh yeah well yes a photo or video but in more extensively than that um something that actually works as your starting environment whether you're almost whether you're offline or online everybody's online now but you know the you you log in at the beginning of the day into your virtual room whether it was in a headset or whether it was on a 2d screen but instead of a um a windows desktop or a mat desktop your literal your desktop would have turned into a 3d environment so that a 3d metaphor takes over everything you do in the day or not yeah yeah well i i know we have about uh five minutes to to wrap up here so maybe this might be my my sort of final thought here uh which is yeah which is that um yeah i you know the this transition into from 2d to 3d is something that is a huge paradigm shift and that's something that people in this community have already been working with for you know like you said over 10 years now and you know even longer with second life and so but you know those spatial computing metaphors um to add different levels of our embodiment new interaction design for me the way i think about it is that you're combining all these different design disciplines from game design to user interaction design and web design and you know literature and written text and all those affordances of how you tell stories with words but also like uh cinematic storytelling and industrial design and architecture and dance and embodiment and all these other ways as well so uh all these different design disciplines you're fusing together uh and this is going to be a long process it may be 10 years or so maybe 20 years we've already been under that process for for just doing stuff on the web uh and you know and on the internet as well so i think that as we're starting to like move into this new paradigm of spatial computing then you have to like figure out all the affordances of all these different things and you have like these weird collaborations uh from like architects you know working with theater folks uh or people who are web designers working with people who are uh hollywood storytellers um and interaction designers and game designers uh working with uh you know other dimensions of uh industrial design so you know you have this fusion of all this stuff but both happening with virtuality and augmented reality and just virtual worlds in general and so uh this is going to be a long journey and you know for whatever metaphors we have for pulling in different objects and the operating systems and you know uh and how to sort of pull in the media you know there's there's certainly you know like mozilla hubs it was a great example of being able to kind of dynamically pull that information it's probably like the one application because it's on the web is pulling in most of those affordances of the web the most because you're on your PC or on your computer it's easy to kind of throw in a link but these other systems that may be in VR are harder to do that so I mean that's that's why I you know I think this is sort of like you know for me at least this this paradigm shift into spatial computing is you know for me one of some of the most hardest problems and for me what makes it so interesting is that it's so interdisciplinary brings in all these different disciplines because each of these different disciplines have this unique lens into the answers that they have to provide and so the big challenge is how do you combine all these different expertise and that's that's a lot of what I've been just covering on the Voices of VR podcast and you know just trying to talk to these people and try to you know have a water cooler to be able to see how all these things are going to come together well I think yeah I think we should have people know uh because um Voicesofvr.com is your website and as I mentioned earlier that you you have a remarkable number of podcasts there and yeah yeah there's no one person that seems to cover like you do that I mean sometimes you work you're almost at the fringes of the metaverse virtual world interest you know but you cover so much um you know and I don't know where you get the energy to be honest but you know there's there's almost there seems to me to be almost nothing you haven't touched in those podcasts um you know when it comes to organizations people and things that they're using um you know uh virtuosity or indeed virtual spaces even if it's not in the headset kind of so to speak um but you're right the worst of times in some ways but the most exciting of times in others on it as you say we this whole thing is really just beginning so um okay now you're also on uh twitter.com aren't you twitter.com slash ken bye I guess it is we've given yeah I'll uh yeah I'll drop that into chat I'm also going to drop uh I recently did a talk to architectural students talking about the art of gathering but also looking at my experiential design framework that I talked about briefly here but if you want to like a like a deep dive with slides and everything I have a two hour talk that kind of dives into lots of different dimensions there folks want to have more information to kind of see everything because I think you know there's a lot of stuff that's happening from this community that's going to be pulling in especially when it comes to accessibility and really integrating those aspects of text chat and everything else I mean that there's there's a lot to be learned from what's been happening in open sim as well as second life that is going to be fused so you certainly have a lot of puzzle pieces here that's going to be integrated in so look forward to connecting to more folks here and uh I'll send some links in the chat if people want to get some more information absolutely wonderful well it's been absolutely great having you here I'm so glad you're able to make it and just a mine of information and I'm sure we could go on for hours if we had the time um before I go off air as it were I'll just remind folks that I will be back with an actual panel um uh this time tomorrow the Sunday and we will have representatives from Science Space from um uh Sansar and um two of the offshoots from Philip Rosil's um HyperDursey, Vicadia and Tivoli so we're going to have some four platforms represented as we look at the sort of new platforms and I chose them because they all for a kind of a bit in the spirit of embracing user-generated content and the sort of things we value about open sim here so until then um my thanks to you all and a special thanks to uh uh Ken yes again awesome yeah thanks for having me it's great to be here thanks everybody