 Good morning everyone and welcome to the second day of the first annual open simulator community convention I hope everyone is doing well this morning and has found their way to the keynote regions and is having a seat Just to start things off this morning We want to do a few quick housekeeping notes for those of you who are arriving at the conference venue for the first time today First we want to send a warm welcome to all of our attendees and a huge Thank you to everyone who sponsored the conference speaking at the conference and all of our tirely tirelessly hard-working volunteer team I hope you guys enjoy the venue and all of the things That are here for you to do and see on the conference grid a couple of quick reminders If you profile your avatar if you are in world You will notice that you are in one of four zone groups and that will correspond to your landing region and your keynote region So if you're in zone group two, you should teleport to landing zone two and keynote zone two We do that to prevent any single region from getting completely overwhelmed So we're trying to sort of prevent cascading failure if you will which cross your fingers and knock on wood will not happen today So in the event of technical difficulties if something were to happen in the region that you're in We just ask that you wait for a few moments Keep an eye on the Twitter stream using the hashtag OSTC 13 and then try to log in again and we'll try to get things back into motion and Stick to the schedule as much as possible Another reminder for those attending presentations when you arrive on the keynote regions or any of the breakout zones We ask that you do please sit as soon as you arrive in all of our testing We've discovered that the grid performs much better The simulator performs much better if we have sitting avatars so that will really help us have a very successful conference today If you haven't checked the schedule go to conference open simulator org The schedule is completely online all of the sessions and descriptions and speakers should be there We have a couple of really exciting lunchtime Social events for the meal break. It might be dinner for some of you in our European audience So check out those events and we'll have breakout sessions following this keynote. I think that's it for the housekeeping We hope you have a wonderful time at the conference and I'm going to turn things over to Justin to introduce this morning's panel Okay, thank you Chris Hello, everyone. Hello again to the second day as as Chris says of the conference. Thanks a lot everybody for coming So one of the interesting things about open sim is that it can be used In a many different contexts whether it's social grids or or kind of private content design But it's also very interesting Area of innovative applications using open sim using the kind of 3d environment to do things Which weren't really possible or would be rather expensive and difficult to do with proprietary game systems or other kinds of engines so here today we have Three speakers who have very kindly agreed to come and give a presentation and answer Questions about that particular topic. So if I go on my so immediately on my lefty Here is well for me facing you but left most on the stage from your perspective is a crystal in strong Who who crystals worked with and I think even never done has worked with closely And he's a co-founder of the international Institute of Sustainable Transportation And he leads a global effort to research and develop an automated transport system using solar and other kinds of Renewable energy, but he's also here. I think to talk about a company. He co-founded called in-searcher or I hope I'm saying that right Krista Which is basically using open sim to create collaborative visual visualisation environments from 2d data for urban planning and real estate development purposes So next to crystal on the stage is a Klaus Klaus is I've known for a long time. I work with Klaus for quite a while He's a he's an entrepreneur and a leader in developing strategic innovation for market success And he's got over 25 years of building businesses and consulting to premier clients worldwide What he's going to talk about here today is is a company called Of which he is in charge called 3d avatar school, which was using which is using open sim to to basically Be able to engage children in education environments in Different ways of teaching innovative ways of teaching in more kind of a game kind of way and be able to do very interesting Things of the platform there, which he would talk about and finally on the stage is Douglas Maxwell who many of you may know Douglas conducts research into the use of virtual environments for strategic applications as a science and technology manager for the US Army Research Lab In Orlando, Florida So he's also the founder of the military use of the virtual world's working group and the virtual world tech advisor to the office the depth the officer deputy under Secretary of Defense Sorry, I'm Gabbling my words slightly Deputy under Secretary of Defense readiness. I'm not used to used to these US kind of titles But I think what he's gonna hear to talk about mainly is is that that is a Is a kind of grid he founded as the director called the Moses Which is the military open source enterprise strategy? Which is exploring how to use kind of flexible environments like open sim to To do various different kinds of training which aren't possible in kind of more traditional gaming environments I hope I've got that right Doug, but you can correct me if I haven't in the presentation So first up to speak is is going to be dug in fact So Doug if you care to take the podium Happy turned over Thank You Justin. I'm that Actually was probably one of the best introductions. I've ever had I appreciate it Thank you very much for having me and this this conference is a testament to the the coming maturity of the open simulator Platform and I'm I'm very pleased to to see how well this is has come off Just to give you an example the the federal consortium for virtual worlds in November of 2007 Only had a couple of dozen attendees and so for the open simulator community conference to be able to have a virtual Version of a conference which is something that that we have dreamed about in doing for years Is is just fantastic in and I think it's a testament to all the hard work and maturity of this Like I said, thank you again for for having me in your Interest in in our work My name is Douglas Maxwell. Please just call me Doug and I work for the army research lab The human research and engineering directorate Justin is right. We have impossibly long Titles and names. So please Doug is fine What I want to talk to you today though is about the genesis of Moses where Moses came from where we are today And where we're going Specifically my My mandates my guidance comes from the training and doctrine command which is an area of the army that is responsible for soldier training and I will read an excerpt from the the learning concept that they put out around 2010 Which is the army must have an adaptive development and delivery system One that extends knowledge to soldiers at the operational edge And is capable of updating learning content rapidly and is responsive What does that remind you of? for back in 2010 the army had Already been using virtual environments for various training purposes for about 15 years So why would they put out a statement like that in their future vision? I was curious. I I was actually a bit confounded by that So I did a big a bit of digging and it turns out that their their current Virtual environments were all based on first-person shooters And as you well know the the first-person shooters come with certain limitations One of those limitations is they're expensive to populate and maintain the the art pipeline starts way back at the Maya max stage and photos in Photoshop Which is not in not unreasonable But then you have to go through a world-building stage you have to prepare a level and then you put that level into the simulation engine or the game engine and then you end up with a a static level and One of the things that we find remarkable about virtual worlds is their wonderful flexibility every object In here isn't is an agent Other than the expense you you can spend literally millions of dollars on Levels in these triple-a title games They also have certain technical limitations For one thing you can only put a finite number of users in each level Usually those levels are capped for performance reasons or to to maintain a certain level of performance and frame rate The complexity of the scenes in the areas of operation We would like to see very large areas represented in usually In the first-person shooters are limited to a few square kilometers so Lastly and probably the most important there's information assurance restrictions there They weren't deemed safe enough to deploy on a large large scale, but usually they were just put in a in a classroom So this all points to a solution to the the trade ox call In the realm of virtual worlds So we would like to properly represent our environments. I would like to accurately represent our environments Which means that we need advanced Terrain import tools we need to be able to represent cultures correctly culture meeting not just peoples but also Landmarks and buildings etc. You know the entire environment has to be done. Well So if you look at the the picture at the bottom Left, you know, we've been looking at some of the triple-a titles such as the cry engine and in unreal and I get asked questions frequently. What about the graphics quality? Well, if you look at the picture on the right, the graphics quality is what we would deem good enough What we're hearing from the army research Institute, which is the the cognitive psychology arm of the army research area Is that you don't necessarily need photorealistic? Representations of your environment you need graphics that are good enough to capture captivate and create immersion But the extra expense that you go beyond that good enough to the photorealistic May be too expensive to to reasonably expect so we took a look at second life back in 2008 and it it gave us a glimpse of What the future could look like in Alternate virtual environments Flexibility obviously was the biggest thing that attracted us But we also recognized that we couldn't operate on the open Internet the Military has not only content, but the usage of the content can make the Activity sensitive so we worked with Linden lab to to produce the the enterprise unit and There are a lot of industrial users as well, but we worked with them to make it more secure When they abruptly cancelled the enterprise product, we were kind of left in a lurch the federal government contracting processes a Byzantine very complicated and in time consuming activity so we Couldn't just cancel all of our our activities And and stop on a dime So we needed to look for a way to to get off of the enterprise and the open simulator Looked very attractive to us. And so that's when I created the Moses You'll notice that the last s and Moses is for strategy. We are not a solution provider We're not a service. We are an exploratory activity and so We provide the information and data that we learned back to the community and back to our our collaborators so in our year one goals We're quite literally to Replicate the second-life enterprise We needed a persistent virtual world persistent being key We needed back up in redundancy that is something we didn't have in the open second-life public grid And it's something that we had to a small extent to in the enterprise It needed to be completely self-contained and disconnected from the internet. So we needed voice over IP We needed all the grid services everything That could happen on our Open grid One moment my fewer just crashed So in the year one we had to replicate the second-life enterprise We also wanted to reach out to other Other people who are using the open simulators specifically the other people who are in industry and in the Military domains. We wanted to know what they were learning. We didn't want to go this alone We recognized early on that this had to be a community effort. So I invited our academics I invited our other military even some of our civilian Collaborators to come in as well. And so inside the Moses grid you'll find that there's a very diverse community of users We hop back on the podium So what does year two have in in store for us in year two? We want a practical vision Quite literally we want to know what is this technology actually used for? The technology Has not been validated ironically unlike the Air Force's flight simulators the Infantry soldiers don't have an accredited unit of training that they can go through inside the virtual environment Here we go Can everyone hear me okay? Okay, great. Sorry about that So in the practical vision we want to Foster and develop high-value soldier skills We want to expand upon the the current small unit trainers and go with multiple unit training We want to know if There is actually a value in this type of training In this extra flexible training for example, we want to know if allowing the soldiers to train from a home station With mission editing capabilities can they be accredited and given credit in their jackets for training rather than just taking a paper test for example So we have set up a number of tests that we are planning to undertake over the next year to actually begin providing for Proof of this So one of the things that we want to know is If you provide a large number of agents in the system Can you increase the kinds of training that you do inside the virtual environments? So for example, if you're in a first-person shooter that can only accommodate 30 to 40 users that gives you Enough training for say a platoon, but there's no overhead left over for enemy or White forces for your regular regular villagers. So they're largely training in a vacuum if we were to provide a Environment that allowed for hundreds of users Whether they be human or or bot Does that increase the realism of the Training environment in such a way that it provides something meaningful for them to exercise say for example their cultural knowledge In this particular picture, this is a screen grab from one of the previous DSG experience experiments that we did with Intel this summer The Experiments were designed to test the DSG technology But rather than Having a whole bunch of people try to log in and stand around With nothing really to do. We set up a role-play scenario for them The idea was to give them something meaningful to do During the two-hour time period that we performed our sampling of the servers It turns out that this almost took a life of its own and we had a lot of people who really got into it As you can see in the screenshot. We had very good participation flexibility one thing that This type of technology has that the first-person shooters don't have is that you can make Changes to the technology excuse me to the to the arena the sim While it's running you don't have to go back to a world builder. You don't have to Rebake lighting. You don't have to basically start from scratch if you want to make changes that gives us a number of Advantages one is cost you can cheaply and inexpensively Increase or decrease the level of difficulty of the training And you can do it very quickly. So you also save time We would like to create Tailored mission editors that allow for modifications to the scenario if we have a Trainer that is observing a unit that is doing a bit too. Well, we would like for them to be able to increase the difficulty While the unit is in the the unit of instruction and they may not even know that the adjustment is going on Conversely, if we have someone who is struggling we might want to dial it back a bit and let them catch up we want to make sure that they are learning what they need to know when they need to know and Again, we recognize there's no one size fits all the performance comparison test is one that we're very excited about This one Is a bit unconventional So I'll set this up we We do a common task called room clearing and that is where a squad of four soldiers is tasked to search and clear areas such as apartments or whatnot So whenever they're trained to do this They go through what's called a mouth facility a military operations in urban terrain It's usually a mock-up of a village or a city and that's where they they practice the the room clearing activity During the crawl phase of the activity. It's called a dry fire They are Not given any blank or live rounds, but they they do still have their weapons and they go through the the Choreograph they they go through the tactics and strategy of how to do a proper room clearing Depending on the kind of room that they that they encounter During the walk phase of this activity. They're given blanks and the validation authority there their company commander Assesses them while they're going through this. They do have blanks. They are firing But they are forced to go through this over and over and repeat it until the Validation authority says that they've done it correctly and they're allowed to proceed to the the live fire exercise And that's when they are using real bullets in they are shooting at targets inside the rooms so during this year's activities, we're going to replace the crawl phase the the dry fire phase with our Controlling with our control group and They Will be using the Moses to go through their tactics and strategy to practice Their entry into the rooms and their cover and clearance before they're allowed to go out into the field with the blanks What we want to do is to have a Objective and measurable Way to figure out if there is an equal or better Training effective out effectiveness outcome using the virtual rather than taking up the resources of the live training environment so an obvious measure is if they Take just as many times to redo the walk as they do with the people who are in the crawl Then we can say that they they equaled the effectiveness if they take more times If they have to redo the walk more times than the other group then they didn't get as as much out of it And then again, we feel comfortable with allowing them to do the crawl phase inside the virtual environment Before going out to the the live because they do have that blank fire phase in between So lastly I want to talk about metrics and milestones Right now we're at about the 40 to 60 user That is usable. We want to get to 300 using the DSG Eventually we want to go to an unlimited amount of users, which would mean that it would be hardware bound in not software bound The virtual operational area we can do about six square kilometers and Moses right now again We want to get to unlimited based on the available hardware resources not due to any software limitations We want to increase the the complexity of the agents in the Sims specifically we want to jump on the physics and get physics in shape for example our vehicles kind of look like land speeders from Star Wars We want to get articulated joints and ground clamping between the the tires in the ground Mission editors we want to get This user interface Changed in such a way that the training community can easily use it and modify the the scene Based on their needs and do it while it's running. I think I'll end it there I'm being handed the shippers hook. Does anyone have any any questions? I Certainly have a few questions, but I think we'll we'll probably take him through it Well, and this is anything really specific now for Doug Okay, I think we'll we'll we'll go through we'll we'll open up for questions at the end and If anybody has anything, please bring it up then. Okay. Thanks a lot Doug okay So we're gonna have a slight change to the order now. I'm sorry Klaus. I I probably just about to spring this on you But Christa, I'm sorry, Krista Lopez just had a quick problem. She's helping with the slides for Crystal in Strom's presentation. So I wonder if you could actually go next would that be okay? Yes, absolutely. If I can get my avatar with the short trousers here. Oh I just sat down there. So I really did you oh, so yeah, Krista Krista Lopez just told me she So I'll go back Next yeah, so if you could if you could just Yeah, I can I can see I can see you fine at least class See you did go. Is it a hot day in Hong Kong today? Then I see you did go for the short Yes, indeed indeed. It's always a hot day in Hong Kong's it's hot and humid. Can you see the slides? And not yet Okay, give it a second here Let me just do this again. Yeah, it was actually it's here, right? It's always hot and it's always humid And one gets very used to that after a while to the beginning Yes, we're just still sorting out the slides Folks tell me if you have any issues Klaus Well, the only thing is Fine earlier the typical demo effect Carefully, yeah, I still see the the Moses slides, but oh did so So let's click into the leap button have any effect Klaus if you could try clicking the home button at the top of that panel There's a little red home icon Yeah, yeah, I might reload them go to the beginning. Yeah, I say yes Yeah, and there's the confirmation box of course a yes no for that Yes, but it still seems to Right It still seems to have 87 slides and I only have 29 Extra slide, let me see if I can maybe I can delete let me just delete the previous presentation Maybe that does the trick my presentation is sort of separate because it's the first one after the what's the second one? So that is Okay, that seems to have cleared it so if you try dragging again, hopefully that will be a yes success I think Slide one of 29 this looks good. Yes. I think I'm sort of confident that looks good to me Does it okay, then it's better And what you guys have but I can see okay anyway, so you see the the title slide Then finally enough. I I don't yeah, but other people can see it, right? neither do I actually Still see you anyways as be patient with us you guys won't be a minute as they say in the UK Yeah, yeah, I still do this see the Moses one. They were so impactful. It's hard to get rid of them It's actually really interesting duck because I have Yeah, maybe we need to actually reset the The script we do see We do seem to have a little bit of a technical difficulty if you could bear with us a second Okay, yeah, if you guys shall I let you guys do something with this? Yeah, give me just one second here, and we'll try doing this the Okay, we'll get this reset for you. Just one second and thanks everyone who's watching for your patience It wouldn't be a conference without a technical problem, right? Okay, I'm looking give us just one second here Mm-hmm. Okay. It's looking like we may need to actually restart the region that we are in So when that happens everyone who's in keynote one right now probably is going to either need to teleport away or You might get booted and have to re log and that will be the same for our presenters So we'll try to bring the region up Ah These are the kinds of things that we we always hope won't happen But we always have fallback plans in the event that they do If I if I just start maybe talk about maybe ask you a few questions Doug Quickly so I think one of the So I can't remember exactly who asked this but I think one person was asking What is the how realistic is it for the soldiers? And I guess my my corollary question would be how much does that matter? Well, we we can only measure the the realism for the soldiers by by watching Their reactions while they're inside the the system for example, if we give them something to do and They they go and perform their Their objective and they jump right back out We we watch to see if they continue looking for things to do in the system or if they continue operating in the system I've seen some experiments where they do their their their assigned task And then they immediately Put their hands down or jump into their cell phones What that tells us is that they were simply doing as they were told and they weren't Very engaged. I've seen other experiments where They start getting self-motivated and they look for other things to do or they begin exploring and they begin the forming Self-cohesive teams they they start looking for things to do The level of the graphics Seems to have less to do with their engagement right now the the second live slash open simulator graphics are kind of an example of the The lower end of graphics fidelity what seems to get them is the the kinds of Tasks if you give them an environment saying a first-person shooter where they can't really Interoperate with with anything except for what the designers set out to do like a door or a very limited set of Of activities they get bored fairly quickly In these non-determinant Environments where they literally can touch and Discover They can interact with anything in the environment. That's when we seem to capture them and to keep their attention Okay, I'm being told that people can for anybody listening to the stream who was there People can really log to key note one now Of course, that might be a bit delayed He kind of logs back in at once, but it is it is back now. So if people could head back there, that would be great I'm just going to yeah, okay Yes, there's so many other questions. I had I will I had personally I think um I think you covered a lot of interesting grounds especially to do with the fact that it's different from Kind of traditional first-person shooters, which which it sounds like many of these systems have been traditionally based on Because I get I think one interesting thing you're doing with Moses is adopting kind of almost a as you say There you had a rather than have people stand around doing nothing during the the load tests that you were conducting you actually had a kind of Kind of a kind of scenario a well-placed scenario for anybody to come in and actually participate and I find this very interesting because You know, you're kind of opening I know there is a certainly a selection of the p I mean, you know, there's a selection people because of the people who are interested in in what you're doing But it's still people very much you who aren't, you know Who are not soldiers in real life or anything like that and maybe don't know pretty much the first thing about being a soldier, but I Mean did some kind of are some kind of interesting results coming out of that is that is actually quite an interesting thing to be for you to be doing Yes, it is in fact the the kind of activities that we had the soldiers for doing and I'm talking about the soldier roles They were actually civilian volunteers Was called a key leader engagement and that's a common activity in in theater Just trying to figure out who is really in charge of an area And it may not be the guy who's oldest or has the longest greatest beard Is is actually in charge but trying to figure out who is in charge in an area is is critical to to their mission and so we tried to give the The soldier roles the skills and the abilities for Them to go in and to query the other civilian Volunteers to try to figure out who was actually in charge We told the civilians we gave them all the information they needed to behave in a culturally correct way We gave them some pre-training overall it was it was a very satisfying experience and it gave The volunteers something meaningful to do and in fact they stuck around for hours after the Event was over in some cases and they really took their role seriously And we plan to have more events like those as we increase the scale Of our activities in the in the future. So anyone who's interested in taking place in the next round of DSG testing Watch out for the announcements in the social media Okay, great. So we're slowly re-establishing Keynote one now. I've been able for instance myself to get back in world It's gonna take a short period I think because it's probably a fair bit of traffic happening on the sim Right, so I think you're already whoa You're already sitting at the podium on you were Klaus Yes, and I tried to load it. I still see the old slides, but somebody said they can see my slides So that's it's good. Okay. I'm just gonna wait. I think we just wait a minute or two for the yeah I see your first slide for instance I don't Can you? Klaus, can you try advancing to the next slide just so we can make sure that that's all going to okay? Just click that Do you see the next slide? I do see the next slide Okay, for some reason I don't but never mind. I know what they are. Okay Okay, so we're back up to and recorded 80 avatars again, so I Imagine that means probably most people have got back in But I'm sure people can come along as as they are so so close. Are you ready? Yes, I am Great, let's get started then And by the way, if people have questions or comments to do feel free to To place that right into into the chat here So basically I'm going my name is Klaus nem so I'm here in Hong Kong and I'm going to talk to you about a project and the company we did for the last three years and We actually work very closely with this Justin here So there will be technical detail that I would be very happy just if you jump in and add and so forth because you're actually closer To some of the technical details and I'm Basically, let's see. Can you see the slide the next slide with my background? Basically my background is sort of consulting with boost Ellen and Hamilton For example when it was still one company and the military arm wasn't acquired yet by Kali And then I started where did one startup called Shazam, which is a music recognition company and then sort of the relevant bits and pieces came in 2006 2007 when I was working with a UK or both global Consulting company called PA consulting and we actually did a virtual office of course in second life at the time So I was sort of very involved with experimenting like I think like many of you with the Sort of the second life the virtual world the interactive, you know components What can you do with that and at the time? I think you know in hindsight? This was mostly experimentation sometimes for clients For example in the healthcare sector we built healthcare seminars for sigma and others and did various things and then when I came to Hong Kong We did team building exercises for clients like FedEx and Then we set up 3d avatar school about in 2010 and 3d avatar school is about Teaching children 10 to 15 year old children originally Chinese and then English in China and I'm going to talk a little bit about what that project is about because it's In some ways, of course, there's similar things to what duck talked about but certain things are you know different and very unique probably And we obviously used open sim and the viewer and so forth and two months ago We got acquired by our Chinese investor and they're going to take the business more into mainland China We won a bunch of awards for this along the way But let me talk about what's more interesting that now I can see my own slides that helps too about the The business and the product so the the background was really the traditional English education particularly put yourself into the shoes of Kids 10 year old kids in one of the provinces 30 a city some in rural China Government is telling you you should be learning English your parents in fact your grandparents with a child One child policy are all telling you should be learning English Of course, you don't care because nobody speaks English there so big problem is the is the motivation and the Sort of the motivation and another one is that those classes are very big and often have teachers that are not native speakers so those are some of the problems that people were facing and What we basically built against that if you see the slide now that talks about the Combined we combined the the classroom based learning with a lot of online game mechanics So what we did not do is we did not have a virtual classroom where people sitting in virtual chairs and where we're doing this now but rather free-flowing games and they're designed like a Storylines was almost like a TV episode here's you know in a spaceship with by the way with only six students So that's one thing that was very different from our requirements here. We did not have very large Concurrency we had small class sizes six students and one of the avatars the seventh avatar would be a live teacher and we created really We created games about six months worth of games at the end and A lot of game mechanics were involved as well Of course also a lot of reports and metrics and analytics and so forth and you know a little bit of classroom You see sort of one of the white boards in there, but that totally changed the game because The kids didn't think they they were you know learning English they thought they're playing multi-user games like a World of Warcraft kind of thing and that was pretty Provided the other motivation that was the very strong factor Let me see which slides are we seeing now Okay, this one should be talking about About the the leveling up so basically we had mechanics typical game mechanics that students when they come in They have a certain level they start sort of as a space cadet and then they move up In the storyline where they basically on the spaceship the spaceship crashes They have to rebuild the spaceship and go through a whole series of English advances Hence the product name English adventure land where they have to speak English along the way and During this they get up on titles so they become get more and more coins and they level up Basically the leaderboards and all sorts of other game mechanics that were involved so it's again It's very different from a virtual classroom kind of setting for the kids. It's really much more like a like a game So with things for example like team-based learning were The students sometimes they work by themselves sometimes they have to work together to solve certain English problems And they were all designed from pedagogic perspective. How do you teach English as a second language? So we had pedagogic didactic experts We had game designers and that's sort of the secret sauce really was to combine the pure game design and the And the pedagogic Yeah, and I come to the young so the viewer indeed or let me just bring this up now So one of the things in fact you see it at this slide here. It's a good question Did we adapt the viewer for that indeed? We did because the viewer like most of us what we're here using now here with lots and lots of menu Is that we're originally designed for content creators? That's not what we wanted that was totally You know distracting so we basically put a lot of work into the viewer and it's all open source To basically there was the warn buttons We took all of the buttons and all of the menus and all that crap out that you know the the user of this kind of Environment doesn't need because the kids are not supposed to create content They're supposed to learn English in this environment So what you see actually on this screen is we used heads up displays hats and you know Very limited number of interaction that we carefully designed and we took everything else out So basically it was one of the huge technical challenge to take Everything out that the kids would not use when they were using this environment And that's something that I think is you know was always one of the major obstacles in my experience for any kind of Corporate use as well because this viewer was constructed for many different things not just for you know use Usage of a well-designed Instructured environment So that's a good good question and other things we used here on the gamification side You know it's a virtual item so combination to keep things interesting for the kids Because again there you know unruly 10 to 12 year old So you know we needed to keep things interesting So they are walking sometimes in one room sometimes they go out into the garden and they have to find flowers and you know do certain tasks and Missions yes, the question is is this viewer open source absolutely it is and I think Justin will be able to point more to where this thing can be found But we basically use the back-end open simulator and the viewer the open the open source components Other things that we did here For example most of the lessons and the design was with a live teacher. So that was the facilitator the coach Six students per one teacher But in some cases we use bots and you know non-player characters because it also keeps things interesting and fluid So that they you know because this is the lesson was about one hour long that we didn't lose the attention of the kids Other things we did well there We got a tremendous amount of very good press here in Hong Kong and in China About this kind of thing and to some extent I think this is because the gamification of the education hasn't reached the level of public awareness that you find in the US or In the UK in the West basically So this was something still new which was very positive for us and you know the bottom line is the kids We love this kind of thing They you know one one quote was that the teachers found that the kids wanted to learn more English in the traditional Classes that they also have of course this was an augmentation of their learning Not because all of a sudden they realized that English is the way for social upward mobility, but that they were They were basically interested in playing our game better. So that's sort of inherent Implicit motivation was very strong factor. So we got a lot of good press which helps now. Let me talk about some of the technical Some of the technical challenges that we encountered in just a few free to jump in here because for example the The Amazon thing I think I didn't talk much about here now some of the Technical challenges were around that we had to deploy the servers, you know duck talked about we couldn't use second life, of course Not just because of the control aspects, but also because it was You know, we needed to deploy to deploy this within mainland China partly because of the great firewall of China the censorship thing that It's latency that would be unacceptable in an operational environment for particularly for the boys. So we basically had to do Various technical things we could deploy basically sort of created our own second life enterprise If you will that we could put Originally on Amazon and then into China China data centers as well as in Hong Kong We talked a little bit. We'd you know We vastly simplified that the viewer the client software that was really necessary and made a huge difference in terms of nothing This could be a applicable for corporate settings as well We needed to do a lot of stuff. In fact, you know, we just had a you know, various crashes and things here We never had that in You know at the end in the production environment in China So it really became a very stable environment, which was very positive and again necessary because you know This was a paid production environment Where we couldn't afford any downtime. We had up to 180 Students taking classes in parallel, but again those were sort of 30 different environments with 30 life teachers And we had about thousand kids life. So this the stability of the environment And I think various things around the testing and building test harnesses and so forth Another thing that we we found was a problem is, you know, the gray avatars the white clouds You know kids and teachers don't understand it are not very forgiving So we were working on some caching systems, but They were not quite Completed and in production that would have made that much much faster because in essence Different from slightly different from what duck was talking about We did not plan to have any changes in the life environment, but rather You know something that was designed once and then would just be used by people So we wanted to get rid of the basically to preload pre-cache all the environment physics duck mentioned that Obviously game designers always want to use physics and really exploit the the capabilities We had limitations there, but we managed to work to work around this by very sort of scripting tricks and so forth So at the end it was sufficient what we had it would have been nicer to have a better physics engine But it was not a showstopper for what we did and you know the game designers worked around that Already mentioned we had a high concurrency of classes and that was sort of really was built to be scalable to eventually serve all of china But in each sim if you will We did not have a very high concurrency and that was mostly for pedagogic purposes because it was a very high extent of Interactivity and participation as opposed to you know, large number of people interacting Another interesting thing that was very necessary for us and might also came handy come handy in Incorporate environments. We had to go down to very low pc specs sort of after five year old pirated windows xp machines Those were some of the technical challenges Let's talk about you can probably at the end just you can add some of the The technical views from your perspective. We did have sometimes issues around the script complexity to solve a sort of inherent Sort of potential conflict between what the script does and the back end Developers wanted to do in terms of stability. So that we needed to negotiate some trade-offs there On the educational side We basically had kids that had a very low level of english proficiency and that were not very motivated. So very different from You know most situations I think because we started in one of the the third tier our provinces in china Where as I said people are not inherently motivated to learn english So that was one of the challenges We had bilingual teachers partly because of that and partly because of the firewall So we needed to bring in teachers mostly from within china We had some teachers from the filipins those teachers obviously had never worked in this kind of thing So and before economic reasons to run this profitable as a business We needed to minimize the training and we managed, you know after some time to do this really well And the the teachers loved it as well, although it was totally new for them We actually had some theater trainers to give them some voice training and Yeah, so because nobody had really done this before on the the the last slide here on the business challenge is Basically this was a offering where we had Let me see. Okay. Well the last thing here was we had to combine on the educational side Sorry, we had to combine a very strict and serious pedagogic teaching environment with the kids basically just having fun and we needed to Ensure ongoing quality assurance and training which this environment actually had huge advantages We could have the filipino teachers teach the chinese teachers and people jump into lessons to observe and To quality improvement and that was hugely helpful On the business challenge side slide and this is my last slide here One of the challenges was that we had different different audiences because we basically had the kids We needed to sell to the kids On a Proposition that was you know, you guys have fun and you play a game We needed to be careful that this is not the message you wanted to give to the teachers and parents In particular because they were sort of skeptical of the game So we needed to tell to them this is serious learning your kids are improving the english particular conversation They're going to have better test results. It's going to be good for the kids The teachers got this earlier the parents also but basically having different messages to different audiences And then finally we had a globally distributed team So just in most part of the team we had people in the uk people in the us and australia and georgia former soviet union Literally a very you know a globally distributed team because we couldn't find the technology skills in particular in hong kong And then the final thing for those of you who have worked with mainland chinese partner. It's an interesting Experience if you don't speak the same language as a chinese guy who doesn't speak a word of english the business partner And you know my mandarin is non-existent And you know that was certainly one of the the larger challenges as well, but that's independent of the open sim environment um, yeah those i think were some of the Experiences we had So that's that's all for my side if you guys have questions feel free Okay, uh, thanks a lot class. Um, unfortunately, we're running really tight on time now with the interruption Um, so maybe actually I just I just because I know nick is asking a few questions here And of course, I know a few people have said about the viewer. It's certainly available open source. Um, I think it's one of these I didn't have much involvement with the viewer side as one might expect It's one of these things where it is is like viewers in general it can be quite difficult to build But there's definitely the link and I don't have it right with me right now But I will dig it out and I think nick was just asking a few questions quickly. Um Um whether whether how how the results of um when the kids were doing assignments how the results were registered the word of results Registered in in a system somewhere Yes, a good point. Um, we had sort of a simple, um Test systems after each lesson to see how much they had retained And that was there was certainly important and we were planning to do much more in that respect So eventually we would use the environment to uh, basically sort of do ongoing Results and in testing but there was some, you know, initial version of that in place Okay, thanks a lot class Okay, and uh, and for our final speaker here is uh, krista who of course now after a few Interesting events. I don't choose quite a long time ago, but he's uh, I think you're going to talk about, um In in citrus that how you pronounce it krista Uh, we say in citra in citra, right great Okay. Yes, so please when you're ready take it away Okay, thank you very much and thank you for having me at this conference. I enjoyed very much Um, so I'm going to do a brief presentation about the citra and how to use open sim for for creating sustainable cities for the future And before going into the actual presentation, I just want to tell you why we're doing this Um, and and I'm very much involved in politics, uh, mainly in sweden, but also to some extent in california us where i'm right now Um, a major challenge for the world is is the urbanization and the consequences of urbanization Um, one one major, uh issue of most cities have is they're growing And the countryside's are are vastly, um, um Diminishing in in in importance for for the future That also means that a lot of people need transportation They need the energy and they they need different kinds of Services to be able to manage and how to live in the future And the way we move around today using fossil based The transportation systems mainly cars buses et cetera is in the long run totally unsustainable so so, um What what I saw um in 2006 2007 was that the tools available to do Early stages Planning and and not only planning just set out ideas to how to produce New more interesting and more sustainable cities Those tools didn't really exist There were a couple of interesting, uh software packages, but those were client based not web based And and there were some of them are extremely expensive or or just toys. So That's how we moved into the the interesting world of open sim and I was introduced to this by by crystal office Okay, so let's go forward So, um, so this presentation is on how open sim in the city of technology can be utilized to facilitate communication of sustainable urban plans So what this is we're using the the the open simulator platform and some of the software added on top of it In order for the communication. So for us, uh, this is a democracy Is a communication tool on how to share a vision with many people involved in change processes because the change is is real and it's it's very Important to have people on board and understanding what it is you want to change So just a little history here The first model was developed in in 2009 what we did The first commercial model, I should say Visualizing and simulating a train arriving from Stockholm to Uppsala travel center Where they had a new kind of automated transport transportation network also called a podcast system Installed, um, the podcast system wasn't there, but they wanted to see how it could look like if they had it installed Uh, and the project moved ahead So what happened was that we slowly also looked into other issues for example parking issues and nearby Between the football arena and and quite a big university hospital That started in 2011 and summer of 2011 We started to do complete four square kilometer model of an entire automated transit network That was quite a challenge. It was interesting We're kind of pushing the boundaries of what opens in could do at that stage And uh, but it worked and it was quite successful The main stakeholders was the city of Uppsala. It was the county of Uppsala It was the hospital and and a couple of real estate Owners along this route where this automated system was supposed to go in So, um, how did this look in the beginning? Well, you have a photo to the left how it looks in real life that's Uppsala train station with a sculpture outside and On the right side, you see how it became inside the model We mainly focused in the beginning on the train station setting And and eventually of course grew it far the farther away to to to go all the way from From the train and a train station all the way to to the university where it's actually a couple kilometers farther away Um, a couple of pictures from that modeling, um, you have on the upper left corner You have another view of the Of the train station and the proposed Line of a prtu podcast system And the upper right you see some bikes, et cetera at that stage we did not have bike simulation We have that today lower left corner was when we did some experiments having high speed rail coming in And lower right corner you see, um, the first simulation we did of of an automated transit network system Uh, based on on a technology from the korean company called vectors um eventually This technology was more and more Adopted by the city of Uppsala and we became in in may 2013 the main event at a science and and development fair for the city of Uppsala And they decided to to promote this technology and they were looking for a new area And in the little Upper left corner, you see a little green area. It's not exactly the one we use. It's very close So they had a development area. They wanted to put in about 15 000 apartments total And and uh, this is a development that's going to go on for 12 13 years and this is divided into four phases And they asked us to to visualize the first phase And in that first phase there were eight different builders and these builders had already most of them architecture drawings or just sketches on how they would like to To put in their buildings So what we did was, uh, um, a completely new model that was based entirely on How the visual impact would be in in in that area in that green space um Also, um now one of the new prerequisites was that they wanted us to put in biking here also Um, so we were actually able to do a nice little biking feature into this Um, I I will just show you one model more. This is what we also have recently developed And that is the city of sunbae bragging sweden who wanted to Change and street into a pedestrian area. And this is the sunbae my model 2013 Uh, and that will be a pure democracy project They will have a blog where you can actually go in and put in comments and those comments will be shown inside the model on different screens Okay, I would like to show a video now of of, um, how our technology works. I'll go back to the osb model you saw before Um, I'm actually going to go back one slide here. So it's actually going to be This one, okay for some reason that doesn't show there it comes So krista, I think you could please play that video and the link I sent to you. I appreciate it While we're waiting for it. I assume I will see it as soon as it gets live here so second So this video is a screen capture of the um Of the upsala osb we call it the osb model that stands for their regional area where this Development is actually going to to be running um It has buses cars and a couple of views from different angles east west north south Krishna's messaging right now. Okay. I won't see it, but I'll be here. It says, okay Okay Yeah, okay Okay, I hear it. Yeah So I'll just let it play for itself um I hope everyone sees it By the way, a lot of this was done, uh, with, um, uh, nebaron We've done an excellent job in in this project. We really appreciate it Oh, yes, thank you krista. I see that you sent out a link for everyone so they can check later So for those of you who can't see it, we'll make sure that you either look in the chat window You will see the link for it or uh, just Copy it for later so you can actually see if there are more there are more videos available than this one Okay, I hear from the sound. It's probably be pretty at the end now Okay krista you can stop it Okay, so I'll just continue then so, um That this gives you I think a pretty good, um picture About what we're doing And I think uh, it's easier to understand when you see it like this and this is actually shows the the power of this I must say I've been involved in many projects in my life To do these things have is extremely rewarding and people are really appreciating it and understanding and feel empowered that they can Actually change the surrounding and have an impact on the future not only their own but the children and friends, etc It also highlights, um the issues that might arise and And it makes people regardless of from what position you are if you're a business owner If you're somebody living in an area if you're involved in transportation planning, it doesn't really matter Um, whatever where you come from you see the same thing and when people can start communicating in a much more efficient way Than they've been before So for information, we just got a new contract. We're going to model the entire Airport of Stockholm the island airport and show how that area can work Together with the adjacent city and the transportation issues they're having between the airport And the the adjacent city And hopefully we can show something of that next year Okay, so, um So we just went through the live demonstration. So a couple of other issues here I'm waiting for the slide to load here So what is it what we do? Well, it's about a vision that's green development in urban areas is everyone's business And as money as possible should have access to the change process. So it's a democracy too So we focus on using students in real estate and city stakeholders to make a very cost-effective basic model for all The initial process is closed. The ready approved model is published on the internet And the reason we have a close development in the beginning is that you don't really know What all the stakeholders wants and don't want so I'm very careful We are very careful to publish anything until we get everybody's consent actually to publish and that that's very important So this technology is disseminated and propagated through science center university and geo stakeholders in the cities And and we very much encourage anyone who wants to use the technology in their city and want to be involved in planning to use this And it's free The only cost is for hosting the model and some development of course or making the base models So the business model, uh, it is approximately per square kilometer The cost is that is our cost between five to ten thousand euros Um, but that's extremely low cost and and we're happy to be able to keep it at that Um, I just give you a vision of a project. We're working on here in california I don't know how many of you are aware of it, but california is now planning to have the first ever high-speed rail project And in that high-speed rail project We're looking at opportunity To see if we can do a complete Development through cities and how they can intensify making stations for these how they can make Development adjacent to the stations and of course transportation feeding So they don't need to have huge parking centers around each station all the way to san diego Los Angeles san jose San Francisco and up to Sacramento and right now we are in negotiations with the city of san jose Um next slide Um So what is uh, what is our business model? Well the the pure Revenue mainly is coming eventually as we build the models for server hosting and and support of those models and having people Subscribe to the models and when I say subscribe, that's not for the main users of that Those are that's for those who wants to do changes in the model. The general public has no cost accessing it Um and the benefits are there's the same cost as hosting your own servers Software hosting access backup updates included in in the cost You can access any time for anywhere by anyone in read-only mode. Um, so that's a free part Um, etc. So you have a very flexible simulation mass transit traffic and pedestrians in real time And we have another piece of software You don't see here that I've been involved in developing for a huge construction company called skanska To take care of the actual building process and all the documents involved in there because it can be several thousand documents actually make such a model And this allows they call us to collaborate through the web to share visions and proposals where you're receiving valuable input in a timely manner And it's access to the citra train consultancy models for a while. So that's something we're building right now Um, so how does this work? What is it that we do and it's quite a long process to do this Uh, first you have to select a sector somewhere by any satellite photograph with a certain amount of revolution Just, you know, I see questions coming on this chat window. So I I will hold off those until after Hi, christie. Yeah, and for Unfortunately, uh, and this is very unfortunate because of some of the other interruptions with pretty much Run out of time now for people to get to the other sessions. This is the last slide. Okay, great. If you yeah, so so So the the benefits are are And how this works we select the set i'm just going to do this faster We select the sector we get the terrain data aerial photos with hatch buildings to to this photo And through some tools create transportation bots, etc and and some light sound Etc and and shadows and then very end We just run the model So, um, I will skip this. Um, next slide Uh, it's based in deliveries for profit and the people involved And I think that was it. Thank you Okay, great. Thanks. Thanks very much krista. Uh, round of applause everybody Yeah, I'm sorry. Um, yeah, because of some of the early disruptions we've we've kind of run up against now Our last time when we we actually have to be able to leave some time for people to get to the other breakout sessions But thanks very much and sorry. I don't think we have an opportunity to take in the questions But I'm sure krista. I'm sure you'll be around a little bit after this right if people do want to Do want to talk to you about about this your presentation Okay Sounds like we might have lost him off the call there Right. Well, how's I I'm still here. Sorry about that Okay. Yeah, I'm I'm I'm sorry about that. Yeah, we've we've kind of I think they were just so interesting presentations We just went out to time But yeah, if people want to if people do want to not take anything away from the break out So if people do want to talk to talk to any of our presenters I mean, I can't speak for them, of course, but I'm I'm I'm sure you know People will be happy to Answer any questions about about what they've been doing But no, thank you very much everybody for the presentations presentations today. That was great Right, and I'll just hand hand back to Chris now who uh, you can take us forward into the next sessions Great. Thank you, Justin and definitely thank you to our panel and I do apologize to our panelists and everyone in the audience I'm watching the stream. Unfortunately with these cutting-edge technology sometimes we have issues, so we appreciate your patience Just a reminder for everyone the rest of the schedule today is a pretty full schedule The next session starts in about 10 minutes And we do have a full slate of breakout sessions in all six breakout zones for both the 8 30 am and 9 30 am slots So please do check the schedule at conference dot open simulator dot org I also want to remind everyone we do have a meal break scheduled into the presentation It might be lunch or dinner depending on where you are But during that time We also have two sponsors our silver sponsor avanation will have a meet and greet on expose zone Six and we hope you'll stop by and visit with them And in expose zone three silver sponsor simu dine also We'll be talking about the launch of their new viewer For the microsoft surface and pc and their staff will also be available So that's avanation on the conference grid in expose zone six and simu dine in expose zone three And do remember that the expose zones are public. So anyone with a hyper grid address Can come in and check those out We also did account creation. So anyone who registered for a streaming ticket before 4 am california time this morning Should have an account to come into the grid So we hope to see some of you folks joining us for the rest of the day And then finally our next keynote will stop up start up at 11 30 Following the meal break and we will check in with you guys then Thanks so much everyone. Have a great time. Enjoy the rest of the conference and we'll see you soon