 Hello everyone and welcome back to the Open Simulator Community Conference 2017. This is our fifth year for the conference and we're celebrating 10 years of Open Simulator. Our 7 to 7.30 a.m. session is entitled OpenSim Technology Opportunities or Obsolete from an Industrial Perspective and our speaker today is Frank Rulof. Frank is a senior systems engineer at Thalys, Netherlands with expertise in training and simulation leading the research and innovation activities related to Open Sim Technology within the Thalys Global Company. Frank, I pass the mic over to you. Thanks for joining us. Okay, thank you Michelle for this invitation and thank you the community for this invitation. What I would like to talk about a little bit is how from an industrial perspective we look at Open Sim and how to use it in our products. So in basics companies use technology for two things. They develop and sell new products or they optimize their operational processes with as mostly as an objective to lower cost so related to the price of the new products that is sold. With that perspective it is looked at how you develop products and what markets and that sort of information. So what is the interest of Thalys in the Open Sim Technology? First of all we see it as a collaboration platform and we as a global company have a lot of multi-sites national and international. So we see this as a collaboration platform in which we decrease cost or lower cost and because we are international there is also a traditional tools and methodology that increase cost if we have design methodologies and we want to share that throughout the world it is getting more cost associated with it. So risk increases because dividing work over multiple sites around the globe will increase the risk. Another part is that we look at this technology for the reason of new training methodologies. In our field and I am working in the naval defense area simulations training is done with very expensive machines and very expensive software packages which take long to develop and we see also that most defense organizations want a reducing cost. They also want to have individual training at any moment in time and mostly our simulations and simulators are located in a fixed location. So that is one of the reasons why we also try to look at new ways to doing that. So what is the opportunity of Open Sim? What does it give us? It is a way to connect people virtually for calibration. What is the cost? What is the thing behind it? It could decrease cost mostly travel and it decreases a risk and does cost as well because if you can go into a virtual world and talk with an engineer that is situated in the US or in Australia then it is much simpler. It reduces risk. If you won't do that you have to phone or you have to travel to it and that won't happen because of the cost itself. So it also decreases risk and thus the outlook of a better product. New training applications, less expensive as would already said and no training, central training facilities also meaning cost for travel, cost to operate it. And there are lots of other areas where we think it could be contributing to cost, central cost, engineering, program management, product line management. So if we look at some examples, this is an example of general collaboration, having meetings with people from various subsidiaries all over the world, coming together to discuss and find solutions or innovative or whatever. We use for that a number of tools that we have developed through time. We have the equivalent of what you see here as a presentation screen but then we load our documents and presentations and drawings into a website which then automatically will convert it and put it in world on the screens if we want to. We use voiceover piece server based on murmur. We also use VFox for a while but if we want to sell it to customers in our product line they will not accept their audio going over a server from VFox in the United States. So we have our own solution for that. So this is another thing that we use. We use whiteboard so that we can collaborate between the number of people, a real whiteboard with stickers with drawings you can make on it. We have of course web access but we also have screen sharing so that people can share their screens between the visitors. The other thing that we do is in the line of the training we also try to get the models of our systems into the virtual world so that we can design training around it for maintenance and so on. This is an area that is still one that needs to be developed because the process going from the CADCAM models into a model that is suitable to be in world is not an easy one and we need to find out how we can make that as efficient as possible. Here you see some other examples, this is a virtual training center that we created and we do experiments with so that we can try to find out what is good to do training for our customers and how they can fit and how we can optimize this experience for them in order to give small training to them through virtual worlds and not needed to travel to our facility to have the training. This is another example that we do. We made a command control center to see if we could in the future create training for command control using this kind of virtual training centers. What are the current activities that we are doing? We've been working at the moment, my team is working on the LSL editor. I think you probably all know it, it's the one that I think is commonly used. We will extend it, we will bring in all the open SIM primitives into the viewer and we will also include new functionality in order to have a sort of include facility so that you can include parts of scripts from other files into your work. The work on this is nearly done and that will be released to open source I think in January or so. We are in the final stages of testing and reviewing the documentation, the manuals that are with there and then it will be released in open source. The other thing is that we want to create a better remote desktop and another very important thing and I talk about that a lot of times in other places during the conference is that we are working on a simplified viewer because that is exactly what is needed by the users and what are big comments we have from our users. So now let's talk a little bit about user experience. What we see, I've been busy with this for about six years and all the experiments that we see are some psychological thresholds and then you must see that there is the population is the people that have never experienced working with an open SIM type of virtual world and then you see that each plays a role because elderly people see this not as serious they first start seeing this as a game and while this cannot be serious should we do something with that is then the question and we also see that if you give presentations about it they say yes nice and then they leave it if you give a demonstration they say oh it's nice and it's nicer but they're really going to work on it people when they are to really use it and when they really use it they mostly say hey this is very interesting I can I seen advantage in using it so there is a sort of psychological threshold that holds people back to use it. The other thing that is the other thing that is from a user experience point of view comments we had is okay this is it's a lot of problems to there's a lot of problem to install it to get it running the audio is always a problem to get it right the first time and when we want to integrate it into our larger network of systems security plays an important role and the security for instance is something that already holds distributing the open sim over the talus corporate network for three years because of that so another set of user experience most people who work for the first time with with open sim find the viewer too complicated some other remarks they don't see use in flying or walking why do we need an avatar well this is a little bit of a silly remark of course because if you don't have an avatar you don't see the other the other person you're talking with but okay missing integration with office shoots or other outside tools the graphical look and feel and they get spoiled by the nice games and they get spoiled by the holo lenses and the and say well this is that it's not so it's not so nice the fact that we cannot reach tablets and also the use of 3d headset we did experiments with 3d headset and that didn't work really well because okay we have the nice work of somebody who tried to modify the viewer for the oculus rift but in fact the frame rate does not really allow to work it correctly you need to buy you need to create a whole new viewer to do that right i think the other point is that the other point is that the the presentation screens and the text on it was not very well readable with an oculus rift at that time so we didn't we didn't continue that way because well that was one of our basic things now if we look to user experience in the other sense is that there is a lot of competition using headsets using artificial intelligence using high density graphics which move people away from the real benefits of this technology which is you can access it anytime any place where you are you can cooperate over the over the whole world in an easy way you only need your laptop you don't need rooms with sensors when you know need special expensive headsets and so on but yes the other thing looks a little bit nicer and it looks better the focus on augmented reality this is one of the things that draws the attention away from what we have as well so to make to make it so that the point here is how can we bring open sim to a point and the viewers together because it's a package of course to a point that they are in line with the other technologies like ar like vr with with headsets one one of the things that that opensource itself of open sim itself could look at is security aspects because we are not a military organization but our security regulations are that heavy that we cannot deploy open sim on our corporate network system at the moment and that is also something that is heard by a lot of other companies that are not defense companies but still have a very tight security and open sim needs more or less to get closer to be able to use it make installation simpler we thought of web based viewers we also thought of server rendering so that the the rendering of the of happens in the server and not on the local pc or the local laptop it also helps to bring it to the tablet if you want to do it a simplified feel for users we have been working now on it we we try to to convert a singularity viewer to a simple viewer and do experiments with that enhance interoperability so make the appies to access parts on access parts of open sim so that it can cooperate with other packages documented make it more open so that people can try to integrate things and make a larger applications of it the other thing I would would be good is to have a clear roadmap and an organization that supports and allows others to participate we have the email other organizations that maybe can play a role in building a roadmap and finding other organizations that would help in development and do things to bring open sim and the viewers further on and and one thing is important try to implement industrial standards as much as possible because then the interoperability between other packages would would help so this comes to my this comes to the end of my presentation and again I think that that open sim has much more potential than it gets at the moment but from an industrial an industrial point of view it must be attractive to get profit to optimize organize optimize processes and to make new products thank you very much and thank you thank for a fantastic presentation we do have time for a few questions if anyone has a question I see Steve would like to know if your slides are going to be available later and I can tell you that we will put slides up on the conference website so that people can get a hold of them yeah for I see a question about the audio as maybe as some of you know vcom a company in the in Switzerland was the one that once tried to produce a murmur based voice of IP for second live we asked them to create a murmur based version for us and we work together with them and they will bring that version to open source as well that will also happen in that's one was one of our our conditions to let them work on it and it will be it will go to open source in january as well oh great fantastic um lear is asking to define remote desktop well remote desktop is that somebody's desktop somewhere in the world can be shown in world for all participants okay and then um let's see neo bird says could you say more about the security requirements e.g. VPNs authentications etc please uh yes we did um we did a test with VPNs uh say in the current setup the viewer and and server and that works fine with with open sim and but um our company has a lot of our corporate has a lot of additional policies and security policies to which an application must comply like open source they want to be sure that there are no no back doors in it and so on and so on so it has to go through a whole lot of tests and validations before they allow it to get it on the internet so it's it's the fact that we use udp for instance tcp is okay but udp is is could be a problem from the perspective of the security people okay um i see how simple is a simple viewer right well um yeah okay well a simple viewer that means the people that that give this sort of commands are people that come for the using this for the first time and for the first time it means uh they get a little bit of training but then they go to the viewer and see all these buttons and all the things so a simple in my case is the navigation and a few very simple things that they can do fantastic and frank will you be here a little bit longer afterwards if people have further questions yes i will be uh the whole conference i will be here okay so you can look for frank uh do you have a booth over there yes i don't know exactly the name i think 13 or so okay so you can find frank in his booth i want to thank you uh frank for joining us today and sharing all your available knowledge with us thank you very much and we also want to thank today our oscc 17 sponsors uc urvine institute for virtual environments and computer games who support this grid rock cliff university consortium yippee-ki-yay blues galactic systems ink grid phone loud llc pure power streams for our audio stream and virtual out warding for its ongoing support of many of abacons programs and events i also want to thank our many crowd founders and volunteers for making this event possible so all the people that you see with the staff shirts they're volunteering their time so make sure to thank them along the way another reminder uh the conference schedule could be found at conference dot open simulator dot org and following the session our next session from 730 it starts at 730 am it's called oar converter using open simulator and unity as a shared development environment for social virtual reality environments also we encourage you to visit all of our expo regions uh the oscc 17 poster expo is on expo three region company and information on our presenters and explore the hyper grid to our resources which are located on expo two thanks again for everybody coming and we'll be back in a little bit