 Welcome back from the latest break and it's welcome back to me who was here a barely an hour ago but that's immaterial because we're here for a different reason now. If there's one thing about OpenSyn that I personally am convinced is his killer app, there are great redeeming features to it, NPCs and all sorts of things that certain platforms don't have but if there's one killer app around here it's something called the hypergrid. It wasn't at the end of the beginning but for most of the history of Second Life now we have had the hypergrid and it enables us to jump from one open simulator to another, jump to servers scattered all over the planet, some of them in the clouds, some of them in server farms and some of them on people's home desktops and the whole world is connected in much the same way as you just jump between webpages. Obviously you've got to be in a viewer to start hypergridding but the hypergrid is just something that none of the competing platforms, you know the more modern slick platforms even have. It is unique to OpenSyn, it's not something you know that even Lindenavs have, they've got massive land and teleports but you can't literally jump from a server in one country to another, jump between places in different cultures, you can't jump into your friend's computer if you want to, if they're running a you know a local OpenSyn installation. So the hypergrid I think really is the killer app because there is nothing like it and everybody talks about VR and advanced graphics and everything else but how many of them have collaboration, how many of them allow you to jump wherever you want to go, you jump in your desktop house around the world in 3D. So it's a perfect system and there's a lot going for it in very general ways but we thought we did this panel this year really to you know get across to many of you who I know come to conferences like this and things you know just how powerful and fundamental to OpenSyn the hypergrid is, the thing that makes OpenSyn so unique and defies its critics shall I say. Now to actually talk about this, we've got we've got the whole kind of historical range here. Firstly joining me again, she was on the viewer panel a little bit earlier, Krista Lopez who of course created to all the sense and purposes the hypergrid. Welcome Krista. Thank you. And over in the middle, on my other side so to speak, we have, he used to be Pathfinder Linden, these days he's just John Lester or Pathfinder Lester and as well as being finastically, sorry finastically that's the wrong word isn't it, interested in education. John has been a promoter of the hypergrid from the start and indeed he used to run in earlier years, something called the hypergrid adventurous club where we all sort of got together and sort of you know met up and then seemingly randomly just jumped somewhere to find out what was going on. So welcome John. Great to be here and I don't mind being called fanatic, it's okay. Yeah, we're all fanatical when it comes to, we're evangelists aren't we, I don't like that word either, but you know, enthusiast, yes, yes, that's the polite word. Right. And oddly enough, in recent times of course, the mantle of the hypergrid adventurous club has almost fallen on the regular Wednesday club outings of the hypergrid safari. This is slightly more structured in the sense that you know, there's two or three destinations every week, they're booked in advance. So we kind of know where we're going, or at least the person sitting next to me does. So the convener of is for the best of word of hypergrid safari and also my co-convener on the HIE conference, which is an international hypergrid conference next week. Please welcome Cesar Amber. Welcome Cesar. Thanks for having me, Mel. And finally, to hopefully give us an impression of just what kind of a vast thing the hypergrid is and its potential. We're also joined by somebody who runs a region on the hypergrid called Eld or Sanctuary, basically a Sanctuary grid. And if you've never been to it, you have to see it to believe it. I mean, it is basically islands after islands filled with these wonderful things we call blam gates, they're just gates to destinations. It's a bit like an airport for the hypergrid, except there's more destinations within an average airport, you know, it's all more planes, should I say. And it's a wonderful place to go. I often use it for, you know, if I can't get on a direct teleport somewhere, I'll go to Sanctuary, find the gate and then head on through. And that will work if some other connection has failed. So it's really a kind of hub for the whole hypergrid. And, you know, I mean, well, I don't know how it's all created. There's a lot of work going into searching for the links for these jumps and everything else like that. So we'll talk about it in due course. So the owner of Eld and doing all that work is Sean Emerald. Welcome, Sean. Thank you, Mal. It's good to be here. And you have to claim John for the blam gates. I got the idea from him. That's, that's, that is true. That's, that's, that's your hypergrid legacy, John, the blam gate. Who are those sorts of a word like the blam gate, but never mind. I don't know if they do they're great. It's a great, it's a great word. And I remember the way John described it. He said you walk up to it and you step through and blam. You're in another grid. I also don't even remember if I came up with that word or if I heard someone else use it. So I'm not going to take credit for it because I can't remember. It's, it's a deal. I believe, I believe it was, I believe it was the Batman on the 60s television show. Sorry. Well, then we should be lucky that they aren't Biff and pow gates. Yeah, exactly. Blam proof cabal. Anyway, anyway, who cares? They work. That's the main thing. Okay. Now, so as you can probably gather, we've got, you know, we've got the whole history of the hypergrid here. So I thought the best thing for us to do on this panel is really refresh our history of everything moving from the point where it was actually conceived. And of course, this is going to come to crystal. I remember attending an event. I forget where whilst I filmed it, but I don't have the film anymore. But it was in second life. And Krista was demonstrating conceptually what the hypergrid was going to be. And she restored these sort of platforms and the different angles, you know, this is that when it was a lower level, the middle level and upper level, and they spread it, you know, it was a flat earth, but multiple layers. I'll try to find that picture. I think I still have that picture somewhere. I bet you do. I mean, you know, it was a great way of, in fact, it was quite unusual at the time. It's even in second life, you know, that that way of using the primes and the flat primes to show the prototype and everything else. Sorry. Too much talking today, obviously. I'd like to ask you, Krista, really to give us a little bit of a taste of the history. I mean, what inspired you to work on the code that basically created the hypergrid and, you know, how it came about, developed and how successful you think it's been? The whole thing started back in, I don't remember 2008 or something when Lindenlab was working on some form of decentralization. They were working on, there was the architecture working group, and there was some interoperability or interoperability work going on. There was some early work done to allow teleports between the very early stages of OpenSim and second life. And that was quite exciting in a way, but it seemed that that effort inside Lindenlab was sort of sidetracked for, I don't know what, some business concerns. And it seemed that if that was going to happen, it had to happen within OpenSim. And it had to happen, you know, to allow different OpenSim worlds to connect to each other and interoperate with each other. So that's where I kind of came in and took the overall idea of having a decentralized federated architecture for federated worlds and try to actually make it happen in OpenSim. So that's sort of where it started. So the first version of the Hypergrid, I think I had it in 2000 at the end of 2008, I think, it's been a long time. Oh my God, that's crazy. It's almost 10 years of Hypergrid. 12 of OpenSim 10 years of Hypergrid nearly like yesterday. But anyway, so it went through several versions. The first version was really a study to see if it was even possible to do it without changing the viewer. And I was able to kind of work around the edges of the viewer. And then the second version was a little better, a little bit more secure. And the third version, which is the one that we are now, is I think it's pretty stable and it's relatively, the architecture is relatively secure. And so yeah, that's what people have been using. And I'm glad that I'm glad that that's sort of what's really enabling people to kind of get into OpenSim independently and being able to kind of stay together. Well, there's two things that I think, you know, we taught her about your own little view, of course, which is customizable for people running things. But two things that really, you know, empowered the hypergrid itself, since this inception is firstly, you know, the fact we can now people can now actually literally run their own grid on their desktops as they've got a decent enough computer and the hypergrid enable it. So instead of going to a world or with somewhere signing up as a resident or anything, these days, you can literally load your own desktop. And then it's like clicking on the web page, you just jump to the destination you want to go to your inventory comes back to you, you don't have to worry about being a member of a grid that goes out of the business. But also, although we have the teleport the hyperjump thing in the hypergrid, of course, it also really empowers communications tool that there are varying degrees of success here. But in theory, you have groups that can talk to each other over the hypergrid, you can certainly message your friends on other grids, or we're all within our, our consolidated viewer, as it were. So it represents travel, and it represents communication, if you see what I mean. Right. Well, what was that your intention? As it were, obviously the travel? Yes. Yeah. Yeah, that was that was the intention. I mean, it's a once you kind of have the basics of identity and of kind of securing identity. And once you have the basics of of kind of accessing people's inventories, then doing any other service, any other feature in sort of this kind of virtual world to virtual woman, like instant messaging or friends or things like that, that's relatively straightforward. But you know, that all that can, and it builds on top of the more foundational of preserving and securing identity and the access to people's inventory. Sure. Now, the other before I move on, the other question I'd really like to ask you is how integral, I think it's really integral, but how integral do you think the suitcase concept in infantry is to the hypergrid? Because I know some grids by passage to put it politely. So I don't know. It's not integral. It's a there are many points in the spectrum of allowing people to access their home inventory or not. So there's a whole lot of points in the spectrum between not allowing people to access the inventory when they're traveling to exposing their inventory to everybody. So there's many. And in fact, in evolution of the hypergrid, I had that was one of the things that varied over time is the where where the different kinds of implementations of the hypergrid inventory access. But but so it can be made in many different ways. And in fact, the good thing about OpenSim is that we can, we can provide different implementations of these services in a relatively straightforward manner without having to change the core of OpenSim. So right now, the latest implementation of the hypergrid inventory service that is in distributed with the core OpenSim distribution is one where there's concept of a suitcase, which is the only folder that people can access when they are traveling outside of their world. Yeah, what that means is that that particular folder and everything that's inside is relatively unprotected means that when they're visiting another world that that world can do stuff to that particular folder that is out of control of the person. So the you know, if you go visit a malicious world, that that world can, you know, copy what you have in that folder, they can add things to that folder, they can do all sorts of things. And that and that's why I wanted really to restrict what the parts of the inventory that that is, you know, random virtual worlds can access. So so that that's that comes from but if people if people are using the hypergrid within a collection of virtual worlds, for which they have pretty, you know, good trust among each other by other means because they know each other, whatever, then those safeguards are not necessary. But you know, it really depends on what kinds of trust people have. It's not very integral. It's it's as I said, there's there's many points in the spectrum that can that can happen. And the one that is distributed right now is just one. When I'm talking to people, I tend to try and talk in a layman's language rather than avoid the technology. But I, I liken the suitcase to the suitcase you put on the plane when, you know, if you want to stuff in your regular inventory, it's coming by a shipping container and will take a while, you know, and I recommend people, you know, if they're wearing a costume or something that and they're hypergridding, they put it, they put the costume in their suitcase so that it goes with them. Is there in any sense in the architecture is there any real sense that the contents of the suitcase travel quicker with you than something you because there are grids where you can get your own inventory. You just got a way to wild for it to load. I don't know where it's the fault of the grid. But is it it's the idea that the suitcase, you know, the stuff in the suitcase has accelerated delivery while you're traveling? Um, not really. I mean, it's in the end, it's the same kind of traffic that happens that the virtual world that you are visiting has to talk to the home inventory service. It's just a it's just a matter of which parts of the inventory service it can access and which parts it can't. But with respect to speed, it's not I don't think it makes a difference. Fair enough, fair enough. Well, I like I like that metaphor anyway, you know, I think of it traveling on the plane and, you know, if I'm traveling, I must fill my suitcase and unpack it when he got when I get back if there's full of houses or something because they don't fly very well. Right. Okay, let me move on to the next step of the history, so to speak. And I'm going to move over the pathfinder, John Lester here. As I said, the first Sunday was in first experience with the hyper grid. But John's hyper grid adventurers club was probably the first kind of formalization of the fact hey, let's all get together and form a community that jumps all over the place kind of thing. And well, what inspired that John? I mean, obviously, you're big advocates of the hyper grid. But how did the adventurers club come around? Um, well, let me see it started very early on. When I was exploring OpenSim, I had just started and had a region on Joe Katie a grid, which was a an OpenSim grid. And then I was experimenting with running my own grid using the Sim on a stick. And really, it was it was, it was a time band, its math. That's right. I was, I was, I was thinking, you know, when I, I remembered when linen lab was messing around with trying to figure out how to jump between Second Life and OpenSim grids and those early attempts. And I always felt really bummed out that that was something that was just dropped, you know, as not a priority for further development. And because I always said that that was really the future was this interconnectedness because that's really the future of I think user generated content is where you have this distributed environment, right? You know, it's not all everybody's stuff is living on one person's asset server. And there's no there's decentralization going on. So so as soon as I, you know, as soon as I, I learned how the hyper grid jumping worked, I realized it was pretty arcane. And like James, that loud said in the audience, time band, time band, this is one of my favorite movies. And I always thought it was so cool of how they would just, you know, jump through these cracks in space time, did, you know, from one place to another. And also the fact that it was, it didn't always work well, you know, it's like, we fell onto the Titanic or oh, we had a long time on place. Yeah, one time wrong place. And it's not convenient. And it doesn't, it's often chaotic. And, and that just sort of hit me. I was like, well, that'd be cool. You could do the same thing with the hyper grid. You could just have a bunch of people. And, and back then, remember, in the early days, you really did need basically like a map of some sort to get to find your way around, because you couldn't just jump directly from one place to another, you had to find waypoints. That was the big thing. Yes. That was wonderful. Because, you know, I don't know how many years it was, where you came from lower to middle to top and yeah, jumps and everything. Yeah, about so many years, somebody came up with one line of code that fixed it. Yeah, yeah. And, and you know, the, um, the one thing that I've always that I always loved, and I continue to love about OpenSim is just this pioneering sense of things and pioneering, pioneering, not just in the sense that you were really doing stuff that's kind of out there that'll make most people kind of go, huh, I don't understand. But at the same time, also, it doesn't always work as intended. You know, it's like, oops, you know, oh, you drove off a cliff. Oops, this didn't work as intended. And for some reason, I don't know, I think psychologically, it's one thing, if you're like trying to do something with word processing, or some other, you know, desktop app, and it just kind of fails in random weird ways. That's just frustrating period. It's not fun at all. But there's something, there's some kind of fun. When things go south, when things go bad, when you're with a group of people in a three dimensional world trying to get from one place to another, because hilarious things happen, like, you know, like, oh, my hair fell off, or oh, my shoe is up my butt. Or I'm naked. Or, you know, so it's just weird things. It's the birth fangs of any virtual world, I think there's even a second life had them for a long while. Yeah. So it's like where everyone was all in it together, you know, and that was, and the early days were just really difficult. I mean, I can't stress enough how painful it was to be like, how do I get from here to there? We need to find waypoints. And how do you find those grids? And there was nothing like, oh, it's, you know, there's nothing like open sim world, you know, or anything cataloging all of these grids very well. And, and it was just trial and error. And so, you know, just, I, I still have it on Path of Landy, I have like a map, the time bandits map is over my fireplace, because that was really the initial spring for all of it. I like the home. And, and, and really it was just I met such amazing people over time. And, and, yeah, I mean, and I think, you know, where, I know Thursday's going to talk a lot about hyper good safari, because I think that's, that's not a, it's not so much a, like you said, a mantle being handed down because I don't want to take any kind of credit like that at all for the hyper good safari. It's really a transformational evolution of something even bigger and better than I ever, ever imagined with the hyper good adventurous club. So it's, it's, I'm just, I'm just really excited to see it continuing and, and growing and there's even a hyper grid safari, I mean, a hyper grid safari embassy in second life. Yes, actually there's two, but one of them is not official. What is that? I think I think you raised a good point there, because obviously one is still in touch with certain people on the Linden platform and who really sort of show no interest. Some of the tribes will come over to open sim and move here, but, you know, because there was nobody there. And I say, you might be mistaken there. It's just, you know, there's no map that you can easily bring up, you know, like you can, you know, you can see his where nearby because he's scattered on grids all over the planet. And somewhere, somewhere something's happening. But I do feel, I mean, I bet users would agree with me in a second, you know, there is that pioneer spirit here, even still. And I, I don't find that in second life anymore at all. I mean, it doesn't mean, you know, people are there for the fund, they can own big houses, you know. Well, you know, it's, I agree. And I think, and I think the key thing is that to have that pioneering spirit, your destiny really has to be in your own hands. Oh yeah. And that is, you know, that's not at all what second life is about for whatever it is, what it is, but it's a centralized corporate owned world that has a lot of user generated content that's really fantastic. But you, you know, beyond the interesting things that you create in the IP rights that you have to what you create, your destiny really isn't in your hands to the, to the fraction of how much it is in, in open somewhere, you know, I can run my own grid, I can have my own, my own, you know, my assets are my own, you know, I can back up things with Ores, I can create content and, and, you know, sell it on things like Kitely Marketplace or distributed for free with, with no restrictions across millions of. That's a brilliant example of the hyper grid at work. I mean, although it's a commercial enterprise, the, the Kitely Marketplace, you know, will, you know, is there and it can deliver not to just the grid you're on or you have to be on Kitely, it can deliver anyway. And I might be restricted to, you know, not being able to put it in your suitcase and export it anywhere, but nevertheless, the hyper grid allows, you know, it's like Amazon these days, isn't it? You know, you order it somewhere at the one part of the planet and it comes to your door. You know, it's, you know, it doesn't matter what sort of, when you're on your own grid or you're part of residence in somebody else's, it just goes delivered. So, you know, okay. Well, you mentioned first, of course, not carrying the mantle, you know, something that's changed since then. I'm going to leave first to talk about it. Indeed, she's going to be giving a talk tomorrow before we do a hyper grid safari that has been specially constructed for the conference here. But next weekend, we're having an experiment which is the first hyper grid international expo. And unlike a conference like this, it's going to be four half days, right? But the difference is that each of those half days is going to be in a foreign language because of, you know, somebody who speaks only French, for example, or can really only articulate what they're doing in French, it's probably a better way of saying it. Obviously it doesn't really seem much point to come into a convention like this. You know, it's a primarily an English language audience and Cesar and I and Safari, we're looking at all these wonderful things happening out there and, you know, thinking, you know, well, there's a space for this. So, first of all, tell us about the birth of Safari first and then maybe move on to Ajay. Yes. And well, first of all, I'd like to pay, give credit to Krista. Krista, you're a wonderful person because while it's true, the hyper grid doesn't work. You're a genius because it mostly works. And we, for 167 weeks, the Safari has been going out and crashing other people's regions. And it's all thanks to you. Thank you. That's great. Really. And the funny thing is, there were weeks when it's a little bit more difficult and that sometimes depends upon just the internet. Sometimes it depends upon the grid where we're going to. It can depend upon so many different things, but there never has been a time, Krista, when I thought we should just give this up. This isn't working. It doesn't work. It works. It works. It's robust. Sometimes it crashes a little bit, but it does work. And we've got you to thank for that. You've been wonderful to us. Thanks. Well, it's good to know. And thanks to the fact that it is fairly reliable, that the fact that we can plan ahead and we can organize trips and we can bring 20, sometimes even 30 people to another grid of all different sizes. Some of them are mini grids. Some of them are very large grids. We've been to every imaginable configuration so far. And that's really, it's fun as Mao will say. It's really the glue that brings it all together because no virtual world platform will be worth anything without the people who are on the platform. That's what makes it live, the people. The people who are either the ones who are creating or the ones who are consuming. The musicians we have, the scriptors. It all comes together to form a community. That's really nice to know. I really admire the thing that you do with the Apogrid Safari. You've been to my little virtual lab a couple of times. I really enjoyed your visits. And I really admire that you are doing this every week and that you do it consistently. It's really very rewarding for me to know that you do that. I'm glad. Yes. And so how did the Safari start? It began, as you said, we'll be talking about it tomorrow. But it did begin very much inspired by what Pathfinder has done. And I've never really grasped what was going on. I used very much a passenger on Pathfinder's trips. And it was just fascinating to see how many different people are doing things in not secret places, but it's just so vast and unmappable. And I think it's very appealing to anybody who enjoys travel and that unknowableness of openness, that sense of expansion that you have when you just hypergrade to different places. And the fun of going to random places is just exquisite. But it's also a great place for me to be able to bring our group to meet the people who made the regions, the people who have something to tell us about the regions. Because when you hear the backstory to a region or a grid, that really brings it to life and enriches the whole journey for us. And I think also for the grid owners, too, because it's a chance for them to tell their story, which is a very human thing. Very true. A little bit of, I know we're going to talk about it more, but a little bit about next week's shindig. So next week, we're very, very generously Liku Rao of Craft Grid has allowed us a bit of space on his grid to have this hypergrid international expo. And so that will be beginning next Saturday. So I think it's in the morning, second lifetime. So you can see all the information on our website. What you'll put in here? I would add that if you're around tomorrow, at around lunchtime, we are doing a special contrived hypergrid safari. You'll begin at five destinations. So you can choose which order you go to and discover hidden letters. But amongst the places you'll visit is the actual bill for next week's conference and indeed Sean's bill. But we'll come to that in a minute. OK, in fact, let's move on to Sean at this point because you're going to be hearing a lot more from us during the conference anyway. Sean, how does it feel to be managing this huge? I can't think of a name for it, you know. It's like a sort of airport for the hypergrid, isn't it? But it's a visualization of that famous time bandit's map. I kind of think of it more as the Grand Central Station. Yeah, in New York you walk in there and there's all these gates that you go through that take you to all these other places. So that's what I've always thought of it as is Grand Central Station. Now, to be fair, mine is only one of several very popular hypergrid hubs, although I think I may have had the biggest one for a long time. But like anything else, competition grows. I think, guys, they're one of the main things. One is very conscious of when I come to Sanctuary. And probably the only similar thing was Maria's and now third's Hyperica is that it's dedicated to being just what it is. You know, there are plenty of grids who've got vast hyperports or whatever they want to call them. But, you know, you've got to be on that grid and look for it and stuff like that. Whereas, Eld Sanctuary, I never know which one to call it. It's just there, you know, you're in, you've got all these gates to choose. So I'm sure you've got to explore the gates a bit unless you've been there before and know where a gate is. But it's dedicated to that sole function. And I guess Maria's Hyperica was a bit the same. But I mean, I think that's what makes you stand apart. I think the others would agree. Well, the grid is Sanctuary. The region is actually Eld II. My original landing region was called Eld. And that was in the pre-Var region days. And once we could have VAR regions and once enough people had upgraded their grids that they could teleport directly to VAR regions, I eventually got rid of the original Eld region and remade it as Eld II, which is a 3x3 VAR. And that is a lot of hypergates, blam gates, I should say. Yes, it generally runs anywhere from about 90 to 120 gates. Whoa. Wow. It could be a lot more if I took the time to go off and find lots more addresses. But I also have a life, too. Well, actually, I must tell people on there, getting a hold of you is kind of nightmare because you're so busy, but yet at the same time, I don't know how you do it, but how much work is involved in getting all those blam gates set up? I mean, the process of setting it up is one thing, but finding the locations and checking them out and stuff. A lot of the ways that I find them is I go through my logs and I see where visitors come from. And I go, oh, I haven't heard of that place before. And I go and I try and go there. If I can go there, I make a gate to there. Yeah. Well, it's a lot of things. A lot of gates. Well, it just seems a phenomenal amount of work for somebody who's actually so busy on other things as well. I've automated them to a great degree. As was mentioned earlier, I got the blam gate idea from Pathfinder, John here. People may remember that there was a time when they were incompatible hyper-good versions and we couldn't go between many. And I was running one version and John's on Jocadia was running a different version, so I couldn't actually go there. So I had to create a Jocadia avatar to be able to visit John's region. And I saw that he had this blam gate there that was freely available and freely copyable, but there was no way to get it back to my grid. So I had a viewer up in two different windows and I disassembled his in one window. And in the other window, I recreated it in my grid exactly the same way. And that's how I brought it over, the very first blam gate. Oh, that's nice. And I did this because people may not remember when Christophe first created it, we didn't have hyper-grid usable landmarks. So the only way that you keep track of where you wanted to go is you had to have it written down on paper or in an iPad in your computer, you had to keep track of all these addresses. And I got tired of doing that. You had to have that little crumpled, time banded map, you know, scribbles in the margins, you know. And I got tired of that. So I started setting up a few of these gates and just configuring them to go to each of these places that I found so that I could easily just walk up to them and glance around and go, oh, that's where I want to go and just walk through it and I'd be there. And then I started to get some visitors and they saw it and they talked about it and I got more visitors and I got more visitors. And then I thought, maybe I should get more places for them to go to. And that's how it started to grow. It started as just something for me because we didn't have landmarks and now it's just a place for everyone. And oh, to your remark about, sometimes you have to, usually you don't have to look for a gate because you've been there before, Mel. Once in a while, I deliberately shuffle them. Yes, I like people to have to go around and explore the region so that they discover the new gates that I put out. Yeah, well, that's fun too. Although, yes, I admit it's, you know, people like me, some of us get a bit annoyed but I go, oh, I didn't come here for a hunt, so I came here to get a drum. Well, not only that, but also when you teleport up from the landing point up to where the gates are, you always land at a random location. So, yeah, I make it so that you get to discover whatever's new wherever it is you land. Yeah, no, that's definitely a good idea because, you know, the adventure continues and having the latest places up front, you know, it's great. I also, I took Pathfinders from my gates and I've improved them over time and I've made copies of them freely available as he did. And now when you go around the hypergrid, kind of see the gates all over the place and that kind of makes me feel good and it should make Jones feel good. Yeah. And I mentioned automating it because you said, how do I do it all? Well, it used to be, I had to check it every day to see if a gate was up or a gate was down because grids go up and grids go down all the time and sometimes they go away. Well, Krista at one point came up with a little teleport move and it had a very nice feature that I liked. So I asked her if I could use it and she graciously said yes. And so now my gates on their own check to see if it's up or down and disable themselves if it's down so that people can easily tell whether there's a chance they might actually get where they wanna go. That really does help. Yeah, click it to see if it's online, you know. Okay, now, I'm not Maria but I'm just sort of vaguely curious stats basically. Do you have any sense of traffic in terms of the sort of places when you people jump to anything like that? Do you monitor that traffic and have any- No, but I have all my logs all the way back to 2011. So if I wanted to, I could do a little log diving and come up with that but I'm a system administrator by trade but not a big data person. Yeah. But so the most I can really tell you is that I've had about 30,000 visitors since 2009. And these days I generally get anywhere from 150 to 250 people through the region every month. Well, good track record for sure. Yeah, and it's always busy and it's a lot of fun to keep running. Now, I noticed earlier on, somebody mentioned the chat. I mean, obviously we put a panel like this together. We can't include everybody who's doing things for the hyper grid but there are a lot of other ways you can travel. For example, for Fredericks, for example, who's taking over Hi-Berica, you can look up websites and grids and, sorry, you can go to the website, look up a grid and click a button. It gives you all the information that these days all you need to do is just copy and paste it into your map and you're away. There is Opens in World where you can, if you want to be listed, you can get a beacon and you can rest it in one per region. So, obviously a big grid can have loads of them. People just jump over there from that. So we aren't the, sorry, you aren't the only place for doing that, but it's a very good example of, I think, the way that Hi-Berica is going, that all these different services are coming online and I know, for example, that a chat called Mike Lorry, who I think is presenting later, he's working on something called a grid phone. And again, I think this project may actually expand from Opensim into Second Life and other platforms, but again, these wonderful protocols, as it were, that I guess Christus put there, means that all these tools can be developed either on the web backend or in World, that just enhance that connectivity. Okay, well, as I say, I believe that we're approaching wrap-up. So I believe that personally, that these days, I just say, well, what is it about Opensim that nothing that is special? And I say the Hi-Bergrid, that's it. Sure, you can collaborate and we have kind of tools that some of the modern programs platforms don't provide or are very different and there are a whole lot of unique things about Opensim, but at the end of the day, we have an app within an app, as it were. The Hi-Bergrid is something that no other platform has anything similar to this distributed service and being able to jump around. And I think that's what makes it our killer app. Right, actually, I've been told we've still got five minutes for real this time. I wanted to add something if I could. Yeah, please do. Yeah, we got five minutes. Because some of the others have talked about what they think is special about the Hi-Bergrid. And I mean, Opensim is really nice for all the reasons the Pathfinder was saying that you have your own inventory. So you have control over your own IP, your own creations and so on. Nobody in Lyndon Lab can take that away from you. And that's wonderful. So we can all do that, but we're all alone, especially if you're doing it out of your home or something, you're alone. There's nobody to connect to, there's no sense of community or anything. And for somebody like me who works from home and obviously lives here and I never get out much, having the Hi-Bergrid is really nice because it makes it seem like it's really all just one big grid and we're just running our little pieces of it. And you can hop over to that place next door and visit your friend. Like my good friend, Layton Majora, I'm out there in the audience. It's really nice. You can go to other places, you can socialize with people, you can go to other grids, like going to Bill Blight's there and learn things from him about how to run your own grid better. And there's just, it really brings a sense of community and feeling and belonging where you don't feel like you're just off in a universe all of your own with no one to talk to. Absolutely, I mean, yeah. You know, that's the answer to people who, you know, say there's nobody there. Well, of course there's nobody there. And it's to go and find them, you know, and all these tools and all that. Okay, we do have a couple of minutes left. So I'm going to go around everybody. I mean, is the HyperGrid our killer app? Or I think you're all going to agree, but just some closing thoughts what the HyperGrid means to you. And I'm going to start again. Sosa, Sosa, why not? I think it's the community is the killer app of Opensim. The HyperGrid makes that possible, but it's the community. It's the fact that we can get along. Everybody, I think Sean said it very well. You can go and visit your friends and then you can go home. So if you want to avoid drama, you can. Quite easily, you just go home or you just go to different grids. So it's the community of Opensim that's the killer app and the HyperGrid that makes it possible. Even back in the day, I can't agree more. Back in the days of Second Life, you know, conversely, I didn't want to, oh, socialized, I liked it, but quite often, the thing I loved most was going to a nice landscape that was absolutely empty of people. Where I was on my own, there was no lag and I could explore and admire it, you know? So it's not all about going to a party, interesting up and strapping on an animation for a movie. Krista, you made it. So I don't think that the HyperGrid is the killer app. I think it's an interesting, yeah, I think it enables communication and community, just like Thierce was saying. And it's a feature that not many platforms, not many systems provide. It's usually not a very good business model to have decentralized things when people think about making money out of computing stuff they usually tend to think about centralizing, controlling things, not controlling, right? So it's definitely a feature that exists in OpenSeam that doesn't exist in any other virtual world platform that I'm aware of. And that's a good thing that it enables people to run their own thing, but feeling that they're part of a bigger community. And I have a feeling that being part of this community for the past 10 years or so, I saw a lot of different stages, a lot of different waves coming and going. So second life was definitely so important and so dominant in the beginning and people were kind of mimicking, reproducing the model of second life with OpenSeam. So there's lots of private grids, private garden grids, and we saw many of them kind of sort of fizzled and some of them were very popular for a while, then they just got less popular, some of them are still around, but there's no question that something that kind of persisted through this time was the hypergrid, right? It kind of started slowly at the time when it started that the private gardens were perhaps more popular because they were more similar to second life and the hypergrid was not so popular, but slowly but surely that was sort of the bind that kind of kept everybody sort of together, I think here in the OpenSeam community. And I think that's definitely something valuable, I think. So I hope that any other virtual world platform that comes along considers adding a federation architecture because I think that is very important. Yeah, I mean, one of the reasons I think to say the killer out too is you feel somewhere down the road we might be threatened by something like Facebook Spaces, which will be so gigantic that it comes across as federated, but then of course it's actually all one big wall garden that people will fall into and hopefully we're a big alternative to that, bring the frontier spirit back and avoid the corporate gardens. But yeah, as they say, grids may come and grids may go, some of them may even go yo-yo, but the hypergrid goes on forever. That's a paraphrase in something or other. Right, Pathfinder, any little rap from you? Well, I mean, everyone has already said it a lot better than I could. I think of what this is, what's the secret sauce here. And again, it's about the people and in this case, the people plus the places and not just the people creating the content, but the people like Thurza for creating the events and the people like Sean who are creating the waypoints, right, you know, around. And so it's that, I mean, and then people like Krista creating the core tech. So I mean, I think you've got the core lineup here and even in the people like you, Mal, who create the entertainment, the shows that you put on and the Metaverse World stuff too. So I think what you've got, you know, the people you've got sitting here have all are all facets. All previous guests on the show, probably, yes. Yeah, yeah, but everyone's very different facets. Okay, I'm gonna have to be a bit rude because I'm about two minutes over time. So I'll just say to Thurza, I've got two words. Thank you very much, bye-bye. Okay, yeah. The only thing I want to say is it's all Krista's fault and thank you. Yeah, yeah. So that's a very good way of putting it, I think. When I'm Krista. Okay, but who's fault? You're not Canadian by any chance because then it would be better. Okay, okay. I have to wrap this, you know, 50 minutes just goes all too fast. You just need to come on my show where we're gone for three hours if we have to. Right, okay, keep an eye on the festival program, of course, somebody will come on and tell you about that, I guess. Thurza will be giving a talk tomorrow in the early part of the day and we have a couple of hours of Hypergrid safari around lunch, all of which extends this. Plus, you can find out all about the Hypergrid on various ESPO regions. So, thank everybody for being on the panel. Thank you, Krista. Thank you. Thank you, Thurza. Thank you so much. Thank you, John, Pathfinder. Thank you. And thank you, Sean. Thank you. And that's it for this year, folks. Enjoy the conference. Bye for now.