 Welcome back everyone, and thank you to Ari Earle for his absolutely charming musical interlude. I hope everyone had a chance to get up and stretch their legs a little bit while they were listening. It's such a pleasure to have his talent available to us in second life. I just love it. Okay, all right, hang on here. Let me get back up to speed, and welcome back to the Science Circle end of the year panel discussion on the present and future of virtual worlds. We have a new panel with us now this hour. We have here sitting next to me Stephen Van Hook, who is a KIPP, and Stephen has been a television producer, a newspaper features writer, a columnist, a radio newscaster and reporter, a weekly radio talk show host, a television news anchor and NBC affiliate news division manager, and directed a nationwide television and public radio information program in the Ukraine. And Stephen has also designed and taught on-ground and online university classes, including MBA and bachelor's degree courses in the real world. And Stephen is going to present a brief slide show here for us, a PowerPoint talk. So I think we can look forward to that. And then also we have with us to kind of help us kind of finish out our discussion. We have Phil Youngblood, of course, who is familiar to all of the Science Circle members. He's a founding chair of the CIS slash cybersecurity department. He's a Fulbright scholar. He has a PhD in education and also in chemistry. He's, in fact, Phil runs the, well, I should say, and Phil has been on the Science Circle board since 2007. So he's one of our stalwarts. And, you know, I wanted to invite him to speak with us. You know, because he's been, you know, involved with this for so long, I really think that, you know, he'll bring us a very unique perspective on the things we're going to be talking about. Again, I'll just remind you that you should be hearing us on your music stream rather than a regular Second Life voice. And also remember that the Science Circle is a grant funded nonprofit for the development of virtual world platforms for education. And with that brief introduction, Stephen, are you ready to present your materials? I believe I am. If my audio is coming through, okay. Sounds good. Let's do it. Well, thank you so much, Matt, for that nice introduction. And of course, thank you, Chan, for all your work as always pulling this all together. And it's really, it's wonderful to be on such an esteemed panel. There are so many smart insights from the others, including what we've heard so far from George and Bill. And that takes some of the pressure off of me to sound overly informative and smart, especially sitting here next to Science Circle founding member Phil Youngblood. I'm really looking forward to your part, Phil. So I'm just going to quickly jump into my subject today. And it's what's happening in academia and how we might do a reset of our prior experience with virtual worlds and especially from the perspective of university administrators and educators and students from around the world. And of course, tech companies that might help make some great things happen. But here's the big bug in the academic room, of course, it's hard to look too far up ahead when we don't know how far down is going to be yet. So there is a big question mark after just about everything I will be saying today. Yeah, I do like this image. If you look closely, you can see a skull in the middle of the virus. My God, daughter pointed that out to me this morning. I will be sharing some data and resources as we go. And much of all that comes from this assortment of recent articles in the Chronicle of Higher Education inside higher education, the New York Times, the Walt Street Journal and some other credible sources. And I'll also be sharing links to some additional resources in some of the slides. And you can download a PDF of these slides and access the active links. There's a sign there right there on the side of the screen. If you click that, it'll let you download the PDFs of these slides. I will be primarily focusing on US news and issues since that's where I'm at here in Southern California. But it's a pretty good bet that if it's happening here in academia, it is likely happening elsewhere, or at least they're suffering the fallout from it. It is important to define a few terms right here at the top, especially as it relates to online learning and technologies. And these words get confused and conflated with one another. And it especially upsets us who have been working in online education for years and even decades. Online courses, when I'm talking about that, these have been years in the making. They're often fully developed. They have readings and lectures and videos and discussions and immersive activities. And they've been carefully cultivated to serve their students. Remote courses, that's what we're talking about quite a bit in the media today. Those were an emergency response to COVID. Typically, it's a live course, often broadcast for one to three hours on Zoom, often by inexperienced instructors with low tech skills. And of course, this leads to low student satisfaction. And we're seeing it in the course evaluations for these remote courses. And students are even now asking for refunds or they're filing lawsuits to cover some of their tuition because of their sole experience with remote courses rather than going back to campus. And then we have high flex courses. And those are being introduced at one of my universities. It's a classroom broadcast live online for two different audiences, one in the room and the other online. And this is an expensive high tech option. It looks good in theory, but it does require high instructor skill and very little support. And one teacher remarked that he teaches well in the classroom and he teaches well online. But if you put the two of them together simultaneously, we're going to fail at everything. And of course, administrators aren't happy to hear that kind of thinking. I'm also going to be briefly sharing some of my own observations and experience working as an educator and course developer for some 20 years at some large public and smaller private universities. And here's some of the courses and institutions where I've worked. More than half of the courses have either been fully online or a hybrid mix of online and on ground. And because of that, I've worked with a number of platforms and programs, some of the larger ones still around doing well, some of the smaller proprietary platforms are no longer with us. But it gives me a sense of what works, what administrators are looking for and what students like. And those aren't necessarily all the same thing, of course. And for some 15 years, I've also been experimenting with educational bills and Second Life. For a couple of years, a science circle has let me huddle in a corner of this Sim. While I've been setting up some virtual learning demonstrations for my universities, trying to pull them in. You can get a landmark to this, clicking that little eye on the screen here, then it'll give you a landmark. I'm just right over the hill here. I'm not hard to find. And now it's time. Let's go ahead. Let's talk about what's happening in academia over the last year since the COVID crisis began. It's been more of a morphing, really, than a revolution or a redesign. The transformational forces, well, these have already been at play for a long time. The lower state funding universities and colleges are suffering the demographic dip in enrollments and administrators stressing over budget cuts and program reductions and up to 30%. I just saw this figure up to 30% of a university's revenue may come from dorms and dining. And that is a really big loss right now. Also, there is a lot of pressure to go ahead and cut more into tenure and replace those expensive professors with adjuncts. So one dean just got in trouble in Colorado. Maybe you saw that story. He said, this is a great chance to shove out some of those tenured professors. Why waste a good pandemic? He said, and of course, he got a pretty good lashing in the media over that. These are forces that have been simmering and expanding for decades now. And now the blinds on many of our social systems are being lifted and we get a clear shot of just what's behind the curtain. And Zoom, of course, now is the hub of almost all my online classes everywhere. I'm teaching currently for four different universities. All of them are using Zoom. After a couple of terms, I think we're doing better on it. But you know, historically, academia doesn't move very fast. All the instructors in the room, you know what I'm talking about. And when it does move, well, it doesn't always do it right the first time or even the second time. And I can't talk too much about the internal specifics, what's happening at my universities. But I can at least share a few steps that they have released to the media. One of them after COVID closed the UCLA campus last spring term, they put up a virtual campus in Minecraft. And it was interesting to look at. But I don't think they've done much with it. It is interesting to note this was paid for out of the Bruin Gaming Fund, which I think is indicative of something. And National University, also where I teach it, recently implemented an artificial intelligence program that was touched on earlier today. They use the software company Payback. Well, there's an intriguing threatening name. The goal of this stated in the release here is to better engage all the online students, which right now all of them are and engage them in the course discussion and the tasks and to provide students with suggestions on how to do better from an artificial intelligence source. This is supposed to help instructors focus more on some of our other resources, it says. And it may worry some that it's just a short step between augmenting instructors and actually replacing them. That may ultimately be where the artificial intelligence is going to be taking us. And then now we need to consider, well, what did the students want? What are they expecting from us? What do they desire? What do they need? And the best way to get to the heart of this is to better understand them. And in the 20 years that I've been teaching, let's see, I started at UCSB 20 years ago in 2000. It's exactly 20 years now. The largest group of students coming through have been millennials. And as an aging hippie from the 70s, I've always felt a special affinity with the millennials. Maybe we have some in the audience today. Other older siblings, when I taught them, they seemed to more focus on careers and earnings while the millennials seem more focused on issues. And they have this get over it attitude towards racism and sexism and intolerance that I really admire. As hippies, you know, we protested against the war and for civil rights. And the hippies got beaten because we were long haired and perhaps melee and most likely drug users. But the millennials that we've seen protesting over the last several months now, they've just been too cute to beat. They got cute shoes and they got cute backpacks and their moms were right alongside to protect them. And we really need to understand this new generation if we're going to serve them well. And here's just a couple of interesting tidbits. Those in the upper economic tier of millennials are about to inherit some 30 trillion dollars from the retiring and expiring boomers. And that'll be over the next decade, the next 10 years or so. And more and more of these millennial heirs, heirs are saying they don't want that uber wealth. They're going to be giving it away. There's more news reports on this very topic, including giving away what what they inherit is real estate and art and jewels. And no doubt that is harsh news to their elders that have spent lifetimes accumulating this wealth to hear their their offspring just wanting to give it away. And that also that coincides with this great bulk of millennials who are unable to find any jobs or certainly any well paying jobs with any kind of future and many of them have become sullen and depressed and we see high rates of drug abuse and self harm. And now not everyone wants to go to school but for those who do we can certainly make learning more accessible, more inclusive, more fun, more relevant. Something to keep in mind is this is happening across the entire economic spectrum and a futurologist are predicting by the year 2050 that artificial intelligence and robots may well entrench this new breed of people a useless class of people that are not just unemployed but unemployable there's just nothing for them to do. And an interesting point in this article is they suggest virtual reality worlds might provide them with far more excitement and emotional engagement than the real outside world and this might work as a as a replacement for the regular life they may have been hoping for. These virtual worlds they also provide a sense of place and belonging. This is so important to student success and retention so much of our college experience you know that you remember that even if it was decades ago is not just sitting in a classroom well we can do that just about as well as being online. These students are looking to mix and mingle and experience the lifestyle and setting. They want to party and play and the more we can connect with them in a context of place the longer they will stay connected with us. About three years ago we were talking about Rosdale a little bit earlier today about three years ago I participated in a webinar with Phillip Rosdale he was the CEO of High Fidelity at the time and founder of Linden Lab Sansar was on the horizon and they also brought in tech evangelist Robert Scoble and they were previewing some emerging technologies including Sansar and much of it has not seen the full light of day that's for sure but a few things they did get right I asked them about educational uses of the the new 3D immersive technology practical excuses that they could see instructors and universities adopting and they gave an in-depth response you can find a link to the video it's on the screen here there's also a transcript of the session notes there were some really interesting insights shared there everyone you know students are already using augmented reality and virtual reality glasses and participating on these very expensive programs learning how to build a track caterpillar tractors and bowing jet engines and studying principles of gravity between planets and you know what's capable here but the problem with this is the cost of these virtual design platforms these immersive platforms are not cheap the video for Grand Theft Auto 5 alone was $400 million and to have effective virtual world learning expenses is also going to be costly but the cost of simply doing what we're doing right now simply hanging out and giving talks on a stage well these are simple and inexpensive ideas and and Scoble in Rosendale says it's events like this that are ultimately going to carry the day where this physicality of place is just magical they say and so the question is well what do we do best in virtual worlds as educators and this is it right here right now look here's a screenshot of an earlier seminar here in the science circle open-air auditorium it's this wonderful place we have a real sense of being a real sense of place there's context and proportion and exploration and tactile interactivity and even games and we just don't give that in a zoom class where every square and flat face is in your face that's a problem with it it's an exhausting a synthetic abstract I've done hundreds of these and it's a common complaint that these zoom sessions are just exhausting and I think that's part of it is it's just not real and our brains are trying to make sense of it whereas we have a much greater sense I think of place and being in these virtual worlds so what do we need to do to bring educators and academia in here are a few of my suggestions to those designing virtual worlds and technology for educators and first of all it is really time to polish everything up and rather than just seeking quick fixes and substitutes academia is looking very very hard right now at options online learning is not going to go away now that we've seen the need and application of it many students are going to want to hang onto this many of them don't like learning online but more and more are starting to demand it and as academia suffers further and further cuts they are going to be looking hard for cost-effective and student-pleasing options the educational platforms and and programs well they need to better understand the demands of academia there are these old stodgy administrators that just don't understand the tech and just want to go back to the old days but that's just not going to happen and and the some of the other issues they have well there's just there's no money for it there's no budget well there is a budget you just have to prove that it's worth the limited funds available another one of their concerns of course as always is the overhead demands on students to have to learn new skills of a new platform the instructors to learn a new platform and this does have a pretty high learning curve we all know that and then there's also just the title nine horrors over privacy and harassment and griefers in virtual worlds and the lawsuits that might come out of that if the students are mandated or required to participate and there's also just plain performance standards that universities need to cover for accreditation especially some of the higher tier universities they want to protect the reputation now i've been pitching virtual world learning to administrators for the some 15 years i've been in second life right around with most of the old timers here we've seen the ups and downs of it typically what reply i get from administrators well there's just too much development time too much cost too high of a learning curve for teachers and students and just too little practical use so we need to ease up on access we need to make creation easier are invited and secured guests should be able to click directly to a seat with even without a membership with a customized avatar even a full camp function and maybe minimal function of chat and that should be just as easy as the accessibility of skype where a single step gets you to where you need to be we need the creative and simple filters of tick tock for designing we need the functionality of zoom where slides and video and audio files are easily shared with a single click and i think we also need to continue to counter the gaming bias of course second life is not a game in the mind of its users but others don't always see it that way and so what you know learning can be fun and gamified i suggest you check out duo lingo my god daughter suggested this to me just two weeks ago and i studied two years of russian in college i lived in russia and ukraine speaking the language but i've learned more russian and just a couple of weeks playing around with duo lingo than i did in all my years check this out if you haven't had a chance to see it yet really good example of how gamification works we also need to keep in mind unfortunately that new technologies always don't do what we hope they do students were given access to network computers but a duke university found that the test scores in reading and math were failing and students in the one laptop per child program were actually spending more times on games and less time on actual studies and of course we also work have to work harder to bridge this digital divide especially between rich and poor countries mostly split between northern and southern hemispheres and also between rich and poor communities we also need to ensure that this digital divide isn't further compounded by the content divide we need appropriate course materials that connect and resonate across national cultural economic boundaries and that's an issue very dear to me and yes there are funding sources out there to help it this development is very expensive but someone is going to do it and someone's going to do it soon someone's going to do it fast here's some of the government programs that are supporting educational developments and of course there's also foundations and the names that we know gates jobs sailor and the schools are also going to be shifting money from classrooms and facilities to new and better online options you can be sure of that there'll be money for it what we need to bring is a new big picture and not just view from our own individual purchase we need to appreciate the practicalities and realities of administrators now sometimes we teachers some don't always do that well we also need to understand the desires and needs of students they're facing a very different world and future future than we did and we have to nurture the creative abilities and aspirations of educators and we need to embrace the ultimate possibilities and immediate limitations of learning technologies james corbin i saw him the other night on a talk show and he was saying you know we've tried imagining the possibilities and it's working and that is just an inspiring thought and just one more last thought from wane gritsky as we look towards the future let's not get distracted by where the puck is but let's prepare for where it will be and it might just all work out here are some references if this is a topic that that interests you there are some additional references and resources you can check out there's the pdf file if you click that little sign there you get it with hopefully the active links that all work there's a few more that you can pick up on and here's my contact information feel free to drop me a note it has been a pleasure hopefully i've stuck pretty close to the 20-minute allotment and i'm going to turn it back to matt thank you so much everybody whoo thank you so much that was uh fantastic steven uh man you ran through a lot of stuff so quickly you know you mentioned one thing that kind of caught my attention uh with your uh list of sort of applications and tools we could use you mentioned something about sort of limited chat functionality and i just wanted to press you what's what's your concerns about chatting is it just the sense that people will end up sort of eye-emming each other all the time and not paying attention to the classes or something like that well that's part of it too what i'm thinking is bringing people in that have had no experience whatsoever with the platform and making it easy for them and what i mean limited chat is if it's just a matter of i don't know how to do this and i don't know how to do that and can i fly and where can i get some better clothes is that maybe they can be brought in they can have like a general chat among themselves and then during the presentation itself maybe moderated chat or something just to keep just to keep all the chatter down a little bit it's really hard to follow it you know as a presenter it is yeah and um uh just to kind of follow up and some comments i was making nearby chat is that um uh the i think that part of the fatigue that so many people complain about with these zoom classrooms or zoom meetings is isn't in fact part due to the lack of immersiveness i just don't think zoom is immersive so you know that and just staring at your screen um and or looking at the tiles of the different faces uh is you know it's just gets boring and tedious um and uh so forth and there are also some issues with the the interface of zoom i think a lot of times not all of the um the uh the attendance thumbnails display you might have to pay sort of page through uh to see who all is there because it doesn't you know not all of the thumbnails fit on the screen and things like that and um there are a lot of issues like that and i do think that one of the um you know one of the benefits of virtual worlds is the immersiveness you know i can spend all day on second life and not get exhausted but um you know i um you know before the lockdown i used to meet with my buddies like once a month for a happy hour and that was fun and then with the lockdown we tried to continue the happy hours on zoom right and uh so that was pretty fun but you know we would all sort of get sick of it after about you know an hour and a half whereas before you know in real life we could go on all night but um uh but it's just not the same on zoom and um uh but but i can hang out all day on second life and not feel you know quote unquote exhausted by second life and i attribute that to the immersiveness of it so i think that is one of the i would just throw this out there that's one of the the key benefits of a virtual world um uh resource for teaching um is that uh you can it does overcome uh this issue of just being exhausted or bored yeah i think i think you've nailed it right on the head matt and no doubt there's going to be a lot of dissertations coming up over our experiences in the last year and no nothing else it's just as a as an educator and i've spent many years in the classroom what we have in the classroom is a sense of proportion you have the students in front that are engaged in and listening carefully and then the students in the back that have this natural distance to them you don't get that sense in zoom you very much get that sense of proportion and perspective here in second life as a as a presenter as an educator i think that makes all the difference so thank you very much yeah and i do you know i uh uh as we touched on in the first hour the issue of the avatars you know i remember uh back when um oh what's his name i was holding his um his office hours here um and he was mentioning that the lindons were a highly cognizant of the challenge of um uh of of for newbies uh to sort of figure second life out and how to create an avatar like second life is not just a plug and play application uh once you log in and create it you create an account and log in and you have a default avatar um uh that's not good enough for second life you really need to be able to customize your avatar kind of like the way you do in any like in a console game or something like that uh where you can in those you sort of select an avatar from a menu maybe you can select from a limited library of outfits and so forth but so there's a kind of a minimum amount of customization but second life really allows you to create any look or any appearance that you want but it's not easy especially with mesh you know i think mesh is has a very steep learning curve so all of these are this is all like a barrier to the wide adoption of a of a platform like second life just the the the entry level barriers uh complexity uh make it uh make it challenging uh so there apparently there's a lot of hand ringing about this uh at linden labs about how to simplify all that but i'm not sure that i'm not really sure that anyone has an easy answer to it though well money makes everything easier doesn't it maybe as the funding begins to flow as this becomes recognized as the valuable source it will be and we'll see greater investment you know that is an excellent point i mean one reason maybe it's so difficult is because second life is still kind of a niche world and simply you know the demand simply isn't there but if the demand like you know so it's a little bit of a chicken in the egg problem but but perhaps a more widespread adoption of second life or some other comparable platform um would in fact drive and motivate the creation or you know even if it's just a matter of of having a much much bigger library of kind of default avatars that you could adopt even that would probably help a lot i think well i'd love to see i see the platform be second life we've all invested a lot in it but if it is some other platform that steps up and serves the need i think will be equally as happy to see that happen yeah yeah um all right well thank you very much i do want to give i i think now i'd like to move along to phil we have about half an hour left and i think phil may have have some remarks he might want to make but i think for the most part i'm kind of anticipating that for the rest for this next half hour i think we'll probably just have kind of a free form discussion of any of the ideas that kind of pop into our head or concerns or whatever but phil why don't you i'm going to turn it over to you and let you have a chance to you know share your impressions of what we talked about today okay sounds good let me check the voice first does anybody hearing sounds good okay uh yes i do have some things that i'd like to share with you particularly in terms of context we certainly covered a lot today from technology to sociology to art and academia and the audience is still stuck around thank you it's a fascinating topic and a really good one for the end of the year what i'm gonna cover today can be categorized in three areas one is that we actually create the world in which we live we all do that and i would like to share some of the virtual worlds past and present to put things in context and then kind of a follow-up with some of the things that were already said about modern lessons of the virtual world so here goes um so the first thing i would like to suggest is that like michael creighton here is that virtual worlds aren't new in other words we all are viewing this exact same presentation today but we're seeing it through different eyes through our different experiences through different our culture cultural lenses and that's kind of what he meant here is that we do always are living in a virtual environment that is our own world but i'd also like to suggest that virtual worlds have been around since the very beginning in other words how do you express your ideas to another person in pre-electric technologies you had language which was a huge breakthrough and also music we just heard that during the interlude we can all identify with that and art we'll talk about that in the first section of these presentations when we got to electrical technologies what happened was the distance closed in other words it no longer mattered whether you were in uh rusher india or europe or the americas or australia is that essentially uh because of the speed of uh electricity and speed of light uh you could that's you could only transport you could only transport uh a part of you in other words you pick up the telephone or a radio and you've got sound much like we talked about here you've got the the the voice and what it can and music and what it can present of us and then what text can which is and then image and sound when we got to telephone television but that's only been fairly recent um when we got to electronic technologies which is by definition electronic means computer essentially and if you start looking at that and the way the web and virtual environments have evolved you've got the web which is essentially one way and primarily text by the way that's the very first web page back in 1989 uh sir uh tim birders lead and then you've got uh the first interactive one in other words uh with amazon and others where you could buy stuff in other words it became a commercial area and then you have a big jump during mostly the 2000s which is social media and then you've got the virtual worlds the 2d the 3d 2d quasi 3d and then actual the real virtual worlds uh where you have vr and ar let's take a look then at the definitions really quickly because we've been throwing it around and as uh one of the presenters did uh talked about i think steven we need to talk about terms and so virtual then has the power of acting as part of you in other words essence of representation right now you're not seeing me but you're you're hearing me in my voice at least and perhaps my avatar represents me and so avatar has been around for very long time uh essentially an email you've got uh you know a username or something and then you have an icon or a picture as in like facebook and then now you've got actual real 3d models which we have talked about are very significant in other words we care about what we look like here in in um virtual worlds particularly the 3d ones as as the avatar let's take a look at some of the virtual worlds first of all you some of this may be a surprise but um at its heyday anyway there were over 300 million people registered in non gaming non gaming social virtual worlds if you there's a couple links up there i can uh present them a little bit later but you can see up to 150 different virtual worlds and then open sim sites and yes uh side circles on there and here's kind of a classification of the virtual worlds and i'm going to talk a tiny bit about uh there's not a lot of time but i'm going to kind of roll through uh some of those there but you notice those are divided up into basic functions and age if you look at uh what most virtual worlds are targeted to you're talking about preteens in other words when people want to start socializing and learning to fit in you've got those uh and then second life really the one of the somebody asked about the average uh age of second life and actually at one time was 37 it was the uh oldest one and essentially second life is a place for creativity and then you've got some other ones let's take a look some of the forerunners back in the uh main from the early days of mainframes i remember in fact actually uh the first um club penguin absolutely i'm going to be talking about that second so you got uh these mainframe kind of what they call eyeball uh games even as early as the 70s and then habitat really is kind of the the grandparent of them all as far as forerunners of the uh massive uh multi player online role playing games that was invented by uh lucas films back in the 80s some of the early pioneers uh yville now if you've actually been in any of these let me know so for example yville was a quasi learning environment where you could have like we said tiny little cartoon thing and it was created by caltech uh interestingly enough um active worlds that was actually where i first got in around 1998 1999 um active worlds looked a lot like second life and still around uh there's there's uh and the worlds are not confined to like um 250 meters by 250 meters one of them is larger than the uk in actual size then you had a club penguin if uh depending on uh uh kids or how old you are whatever you might know some of these you had club penguins these are the these are by the way the really heavyweight ones hobo hotel is one of the largest ever and it's basically a little cartoony place same thing with club penguin where you could socialize play games customize your room or avatar but in both of these the chat was monitored because you're talking about kids i mean young kids and uh in some cases like in the club penguin from my understanding yeah it was actually club penguin is a pre-cursed animal crossing i would say uh that's a that's a good uh observation let's be here witch um somebody mentioned the imvu one and that we have a lot of um kind of imvu refugees in social life excuse me in second life um there are also ones that are geared toward moneymaker in other words like um there was one called barbie doll uh let's see barbie dolls or barbie world and star dolls and that's it but look at how many that's actually star dolls 400 million teens that are and they talk about uh that seeking fame fashion friends games and activity web based here's some notable others i threw them in one was uh china had one that looked remarkably similar to second life it didn't last for very long partly because and the explanation is is it the chat could not be controlled in other words much like in second life there is no control of the chat which of course uh for all technologies that's a plus or minus in other words you can have graffers or you can have the type of chat that we're we're doing here and then there uh was another one um that reinvented itself like some of them uh have basically an online getaway to hang out with your friends meet new ones and such uh second life we all know there's some actual information about it that was gotten through and it's was celebrating just recently it's uh 18th or 15th and or more um anniversary and one of the things that that all of these have uh are basic yes it actually does although it wasn't this popular until about 2000 into 2006 was when it really started taking off and then 2007 in the summer was real peak and then into 2008 and then it started as like somebody pointed out in the last time we had uh one of these presentations that they go oh there's a slide that Phil shows yes one of these hype things uh were basically in 2008 and they realized uh businesses realized for example that the people in second life are not new people to market to they actually have people already buying stuff but it's a huge it's still a huge thing um and so let's take a look at some of its competitors though in other words we all know from a business standpoint that you can't just stand still or you gotta be overtaken one of them that somebody mentioned the other day was signstays I took a look at that they kind of got together with unity and boy do they look has anyone been there because boy do they look a lot like sign space but they use I mean like second life except that they're both web based and virtual reality one of the things that second life has not done well is obviously go to the web that would be the ultimate in other words a web browser that everybody can use but for various reasons like George mentioned and stuff there's some technical issues or problems with doing that but since second life is so server heavy in other words it's resident on cert without getting into too much of the technical it's resident from the servers instead of on your client and then there's problems with bandwidth and all that now I took a look at another one that somebody mentioned the other day and it was this 3d web worlds now this is this is talked about a walk in vw it is really primitive looking and such like that but it's really easy to get to it and it's really easy to learn and essentially it's they're renting out spaces for business and education if all you're going to do is chat to do something better than zoom then something like this is an option it's not as rich as what we're talking about here interactive or anything else but if that's all you're doing showing stuff and chatting then that's a competitive same thing of course with some of the open source one somebody mentioned in the chat that second life was expensive well it is and some of these other ones are also so anyone who actually can come up with an open source web browser accessible one is going to really clean up in the vw market let's take a look at now instead of going too far off into all the different possible virtual worlds depending on how you describe them let's take a look at some of the ones people may have heard well the warcraft of course is one of the ultimate ones that done fortnite seems to be an interesting one particularly during the pandemic that's become a little popular you've got minecraft of course which is really relatively new but it's also the best selling video game of all time because of its capabilities to be both creative and to socialize and then i'm just going to briefly touch on this some of the early the most popular games in video games in terms of sales you've got some of the really early ones you know that that weren't social but that were games you know pac-man tetris mario brothers then pokemen which is still the largest franchise i mean it's larger than star wars or any of the other franchises as far worldwide elder scrolls which is one of my favorites actually call of duty is still the top first person shooter we minecraft and others okay they're also social simulation games in other words animal crossing interesting thing about animal crossing i know some people in their 70s who use animal crossing and it's not because of the sophistication of animal crossing but because that's where the grandkids are or that's where the people are and so coming back listening to all the speakers and coming back i see the the most important things underlying concepts it's not community is a place of the mind and it's not just a place but you do have to have a sense of place as as steven mentioned but basically they will succeed where they empower others to be creative in other words users to be creative to be able to interact and then to learn and share with each other that's how and then how we're going to what in other words virtual worlds will always be around and that's how we're going to they're going to increase now let's take let me take a look at a couple more and then at some of the lessons learned kind of piggybacking a little bit on what people have said earlier okay mooks anyone ever taken a course from a massive open line course stanford in particular is one of the pioneers in this in fact 2012 was considered the year of the mook con academy i put that down myself because that's one guy's vision it was around for a while and actually it's very interesting particularly for k through 12 and then edx which was developed by mit and harvard wonderful courses for free or you can even get credit on them game engines for you guys that are really enterprising and you want to learn how to do it yourself is there is unreal was one of the first ones and then mostly that was the one that developed a lot of the early first person shooters and then unity unity is pretty much yeah i think edx is great and then unity is about cleaned up now in the market for actually how to create these and then they work what actually happens is you have the game logistics and then you have a graphics rendering software much like we have in here with the mesh and such and then you have audio which if everybody remembers i think it was 2010 which we had audio in second life and then the physics engine in other words the one of the things about the physics engine here again i'm watching my time but one of the things about the physics engine which is havoc here and by the way havoc was used in almost everything you can imagine from the movie the matrix on up and in games and such but essentially we in order to interact we want to interact in the world most people want to interact in a world which is familiar to them in other words earth gravity or gravity going down objects behaving the way we would expect that sort of thing but frankly that can be a limitation i was trying to work with the let's see was it mars society or whatever trying to invent a one of the or trying to create one of these wheels in space and trying to create gravity that goes in different directions in other words as the wheel went around is really a difficult challenge in a place like this where the physics doesn't support it or to create different types of gravies being on the moon and stuff okay so let's take a look then at some of the realities having to do the virtual one is and this may be surprising how many gamers do you think there are there's three billion actually 2.7 billion in 2020 a very high growth rate very big industry but it really is all about feeling like you're present with others and being able to interact being able to create however one of the realities is there is no what i mean by there's no benevolent tech god is there's nobody just going to give you all this stuff for free these are all companies and they have to make a profit and they do it either by advertising or they do it by subscriptions or rentals or ads all of that sort of thing and that basically the look and speed are balanced with creation for a game like this which is not a game this is not a game but for a place like this to be creative you can't set it up on your laptop unless you've got a really good laptop or so in other words the more creativity and freedom of expression all that the more technology you need and if it's based somewhere else on a big computer called a server and you have to then download it to you you're going to need high bandwidth high technology and that's not accessible for everybody so there is a balance here between technology 5g may cure that because it's very high bandwidth but oh by the way with scissor g one thing he's saying that i want to touch on real quick is how many people have actually used physical objects in other words almost everything in here is a static object in other words if you drop it like like the slide viewer right there if that were real logic it would drop to the ground and crash how many people have actually tried physical objects in here i'm very surprised that we haven't used those a lot i'm going to be experimenting a little bit this next year because physical objects are very interesting and they're available in second life and you can there's a lot of flexibility with them and you can see how things actually interact physically okay here was a prediction back in 2008 is it 80 percent of active internet users and fortune 500 companies will have a virtual presence in 2011 why did that not happen that was one of the main themes today yeah bouncy well if you set it up as bouncy if you set it up in other words the physical thing you could set it up as to what this here are some suggestions and i'd love to hear some in chat is how come we're not all using 3d virtual worlds how come all the businesses aren't one is uh negative perceptions one is some people got into the head that for some reason a game is childish uh not true but that's kind of in other words it's if it's not real then it has a real importance or it's a deviant platform now there's i was really surprised that people thought that second life was any different in other words why were they surprised that second life was any different than first life because you have first life real women's here and they will do whatever they want to do in second life and in some cases people will do it more because of the anonymity and the whole bit like that so i was really surprised with the kind of reaction to that or it's difficult we've touched on this learning curves that sort of thing or do i really want to learn this is because it's not going to be around um yeah and i'd love to unfortunately with the time i'd love to like shyly you've got some good stuff in there and we're just gonna i'm gonna pop through a few of these things and then we're going to be slightly slightly close to out of time here but the common of course positive ones are exactly what you guys have been talking about social creative collaborative i didn't make up the slide this a minute ago global communications that's one of my biggies in second life if we were to look at the audience right now we would have a slice of the world and a level playing field people also mentioned that in other words if you can access it does it matter who is sitting up here who's in the audience we all have basically an equal voice in chat an equal voice in in creating in experiencing stuff like that which there are enormous barriers in our first life but in here there are almost no barriers aside from language but even then there's uh and again this is all in your head in other words whether you feel in here and whether you feel that the the avatar sitting next to you is actually another human also dictates whether you're a griefer in other words if this is a game and the person the avatar sitting next to you is not a real human it's easy to be a griefer but if you actually know that that person sitting next to you is a real person somewhere else that's doing the same as you now that's how these worlds will succeed so finally here are a few quotes that basically said we wanted to have this for world forever uh Willem Shakespeare you know brave new world it has such people in whole worlds where our friends are uh Henry David Thoreau exploring strange new worlds where no one's gone before Gene Rosner and so I believe that uh we're going to be spending a lot more time in virtual realities whatever they are whether they're web based whether they're based like here whether they're in other words the past the technological barriers this is going to be this is a brave new world we're really at the very beginning of it uh as was mentioned uh side circle is one of the bleeding edge applications and this is going to be a marvelous place and you guys are all kind of and I'm really glad that uh we're we're all in this together and that we're experiencing and we're we're going to be the ones that are guiding our way into the future and so I'd like to leave on that positive note at a year that's not so positive and I'll turn it over to Werner yes fantastic you know uh this was very exciting presentation feel I gotta say I feel quite exhilarated at sort of feeling like we are all pioneers I mean uh you know I think pretty much everyone here has been in second life a long time and we're all veterans we kind of got in at the beginning more or less and and um uh and the fact that we can have this conversation now in 2020 and really begin to see um uh you know there's I don't know there's sort of a glimmer of hope that you know what we what we want to see happen um from this technology uh you know suddenly seems possible um is very exciting I think and I feel like your sort of historical survey of uh uh all of these platforms that have come before us uh just has just feels very exhilarating it's fantastic any questions from the audience since this is the last presentation any anything about anything we've talked about today I'm just trying to scroll up through the nearby chat here to see if we want to scissor gee mentions yes connection we do feel connected here and I I agree with that let's see um while you're looking for some of them by the way there are some of the technologies like the unreal game engine and some of the ones if anybody remembers back 2008 2007 almost all the businesses were actually in here and what they found was kind of what we found in some cases you know there may be griefers that have to go private even if they were private it wasn't really private IBM used to have a really big uh presence in here and same thing with a lot of other businesses and what they did was they essentially took their own programmers or technology and then are still using this type of technology it's just that uh they've they've made it more proprietary so people um can't get in there because they have to talk real business oh I didn't know that um yes you know my uh my initial curiosity of second life was raised by reading about it in business journals um and uh and most of the big universities in shallow points out yes yeah and it was being touted as a way for outfits like Nike or I guess even IBM and uh other sort of retailers I think maybe I don't want to say walmart but I'm not sure if that's the case but you get the idea that they could have that they could have virtual stores in second life through which you could buy physical objects kind of like amazon except you would walk into a virtual store instead of just scrolling a website I think that was kind of the the idea that people had um but you know but but when I first logged in like in 2008 and I would go visit uh these business shops or business regions they were empty and there wasn't really in fact there wasn't really anything you could buy so it didn't I felt like like even those businesses who wanted to sort of leverage this platform didn't understand how it worked they didn't know how to exploit it now and I really do think that some of the businesses thought that they had a brand new audience you know millions of people and didn't I mean maybe that's simplistic but uh did they really think that the avatars were new customers or actually customers that have already bought stuff so it was simply another way of reaching them like the web and that that's kind of where I think some of it went wrong yeah and I don't know if it was a coincidence but a lot of those for-profit businesses left second life around the same time that the academic and non-profit you know NPR and the other universities all seem to leave second life too now those academic and non-profits left because Linden Labs canceled the discount so it may have been that the that the for-profit businesses that might have just been a coincidence I don't know I see George do you have a comment I see you've got your um mic possibly open plus you have a lot of good background on this stuff I think it was a coincidence but also the shared thing is that the exhausted capabilities of second life at the time right and there are you know all the usual things about griefers and and what have you and the company's inability to improve their products and all that stuff but there just wasn't much else to do and then it was too early right a vast majority of people couldn't take it seriously oh it's just a silly game people look like animals etc and all that now it's different but it will require much more functionality and it also needs to be taken seriously right now all of these virtual environments are dominated by games companies and they have huge resources to develop good graphics and everything but they have zero interest less than zero interest to make them interoperable right so games are not the path towards the metaverse 3d web it will have to be something that grows on top of the existing internet you know next generation web download compatible but also to be open source this is the only reason why web took off because everybody can program it everybody could host a server or a website and so until that happens you know there'll be all kind of niche entertainment in some sense I do think that yeah that's an interesting point George and I do think that gamers who come into second life are a little bit befuddled by it because in fact there is nothing to do in second life there are there are no requests there's no leveling up there's nothing to do and that I think um uh it's uh I think some people are challenged by that it it does it kind of takes a commitment to second life to sort of figure out what you're going to do with it yeah I think that's an important point even back in you know 2008 2010 I would tell people you should have at least two different things you wanted to do in world to to have a sufficient motivation to go through a steep learning curve horrible interface which neither of which has been improved and uh and and you're right but also I think well now I know that all of the major virtual worlds companies including linden labs kiterley and science space they're all desperate to attract business interest to use this as a conferencing space you know shared workspace and so on and they all have same same problems um a friend of mine who is really familiar with the industry and all that saw the web page that linden lab has about hey your second life was your business when conferencing is on and he said look they can have it with with his glossy new mesh avatars it looks like a porn game and businesses are not going to do that same thing is going to apply with education and and so on so that's what I keep saying you really need to have high quality realistic functional avatars um and that has many you know difficulties involved as we discussed yeah it's all very true I completely agree but I've often I've often wondered who does the marketing for the home page for linden lab because it's obviously not oriented toward the age group that uh is second life and it's not only entered toward education it's not oriented toward business it's so I'm wondering if there's a disconnect somewhere there boy if I could jump in a moment on that one uh Phil and it's what I've been hearing uh been been said here where did business go where did academia go why aren't they jumping in why don't they get it and really uh I think it's a matter of perspectives uh do they really understand what the virtual world experience is about I think they do I mean I've I've been working with some pretty high placed people bringing technology into education but I think there's a difference in perspectives the difference in our perspectives those of us that have been here for 15 years we do get it we see it we love the immersive aspects of it the possible of 3d but they're looking at it from a very different perspective when I talk to the administrators and the decision makers I we may see the virtual world is this wonderful place it just happens to serve academics and business whereas they're seeing it more as an academic tool that just happens to be in a virtual world they don't have that same commitment they're they're not looking for a second life they barely have enough time for the first I think what they're really looking for is this immersive explorative experience but they want it to be accessible in easy and one click and that's the disconnect I think it's just a matter of the realities of it and also just the different perspectives on how we're approaching this you know one thing I do when I meet newbies in second life and they don't know what to do like they end up going to clubs they're they're trying to find ways to make money in second life so they can buy stuff and blah blah blah they don't really know what to do with themselves and one of the things I tell them is like think about what you're interested what do you like are you a fan of star wars like are you part of a fandom or are you into art are you into music are you into science because when I tell them what I do in second life I say like on the weekends I do all these science groups and you know we have discussion groups and stuff like that and they said wow I didn't actually I even have this discussion with people have been here for a long time and they say I I had no idea that that sort of stuff was even in second life but I tell them to use the search function just say just search for things you're interested in search star wars or search firefly or or I don't know whatever and just look for communities of interest in second life so you can meet people with similar interests and I think very actually I think very few people end up doing that but that was kind of one of the keys for me to being able to connect in second life with finding communities of interest what let me real quick story is that when I first got in second life and talk about in 2007 time period I started wandering around seeing what all the different areas were and one of the places I found was you know one of these resident areas where you could buy a house and have a garden stuff and I walked up to one of the people in the garden and I started talking with them and what it turned out was that this was the wife of somebody who was over in Iraq and the only time that they could get together to feel like they were together was to basically go into their house there and be like they did and that really struck me powerfully that a place like this could really connect people when they need it and I think that's also taking place a lot in second life and one of the reasons why I think we're going to continue to have places like this even if it may not be here or whatever but really that that connection to other people and I think we just yeah got Bob Dolf here well thank you all um this was fun and I think I also have to go so take care everybody great job bat thanks thanks to everybody