 Hello everybody, greetings from Open Simulator Community Conference 2019. I'm told I'm my moderators, so get down the way. Most years we have a panel about viewers here, and of course viewers, in fact there aren't too many changes since last year. Viewers are of course all about communication and that can be communication between different worlds, different platforms. In the case of worlds we have things like the hybrid grid, but there are many other platforms around these days. Now the discussion of, I believe there's a discussion coming up, where pitching the idea of virtual worlds against virtual reality, which could be interesting, they've made a boxing ring for it. I thought this year we would actually step away from Open Sim directly and actually look at the future of social virtual worlds. What we often call the metaverse, though arguably the metaverse, if you listen to people like Will Burns, is a great deal bigger than just a bunch of social worlds. And in the spirit, I should say really of Open Sim, I mean the real place to look is probably open source, though in fact the panel I have here today is a sort of a mixture of open source and proprietary, but we will come to that. Let me introduce the folks I've got with us, just to get that out of the way too. Sitting next to me on this couch is Adam Frisbee. Now Adam Frisbee is the CEO or, well actually it's not CEO is it, that's, oh anyways, it's just science-based. Science-based is an interesting platform. It's also in unity and it has a standalone client, but it is also available on the web, you know, it was this sort of plug-in, it's not quite the same, but you can basically use the same instance on the web. And the other notable thing about Adam himself is that he was the founder of Open Sim or what, the founders of Open Sim himself. So we wouldn't be here today, would we Adam, if it wasn't for you and later on the course Pista, which basically changed the world of everything. So Adam certainly knows what Open Sim is all about as well. Now on my other side, I have two guests on my, hang on, where is my left and right here, I'm looking at it the wrong way around. Yeah, on my far left. We have Blair McKinter. Blair McKinter is from Mozilla Hubs. He works for Mozilla effectively, which you all know of course the Firefox, the web browser, and Mozilla of course have a long history of open source. I think of Mozilla Hubs as a bit like a kind of very modern VRML, in other words it appears in the browser. And actually Avocon, who are of course our hosts for this conference, actually have gone in there and created like a little Avocon site on Mozilla Hubs. And you know, I'd have to have stories, but I think it took them more than about five minutes, very intuitive, very easy to use. So, welcome Blair. Welcome Blair. And also, Ghoster Smith. Now, Ghoster interestingly, I came across him because of his involvement in a talk show called Endgame, of which I personally like, although he's been involved with lots of others too. It's Endgame is actually produced and broadcast from VRChat. And I know that VRChat is probably the biggest in terms of volume of users of all the virtual worlds. I'm not quite sure why, because especially when it first came alive, I thought all that will stay primitive compared to even second life. But in fact, when you get into it, it's quite a lot more complicated because of his broadcasting side of things. Ghoster actually gave me a little tour of the sets, you know, they used to film. And also it showed me how easy it is for you to take any environment you're in and literally create your own proxy of it. So, you know, if I go into a studio, I can actually sort of create a second instance of that same studio empty that then I can use myself, which is, well, I don't know how they handle copyright on builds, but we will come to that. So welcome, Ghoster. Hello. Now, as I said, I'd like you, obviously, the team here is to talk about the future of virtual worlds and you have all very good representatives of that. But obviously, you know, I do expect you're going to comment a little bit about your own platforms, too. It's actually been quite a hit week because there was some major news from another world, high fidelity during the week. And coincidentally, I have a panel this time tomorrow talking about the uses for the open source version of high fidelity, which is by and large unaffected by the plight of high fidelity, the platform as it exists. But not totally, in other words, a lot of work needs to be done to set up independent, you know, networking, maybe a new thing that is resembling the hybrid, even though it won't be a good set. So all these are kind of changes. Now, before we came on air, I happen to mention Discord, which is another one of these things. I'd like to start with Discord. I know you're all on it. Discord is not a world, but it's like Skype, but better, and it's like IRC built into this, and that's better. But it was sort of built for, they describe it as gamers, but I mean, we all know that virtual world users are akin to gamers, even if we're not playing games after time. Discord has an in game overlay system, which means that, for example, I could be here using Firestorm, and I can see people I know on Discord, and they could be not here in OpenSim, they could be in, I don't know, high fidelity, or any other world that has a Discord channel. And through the overlay system, one can communicate with them. So it's like having an IM system that is on screen on top of the world I'm playing, which allows for interoperability in terms of communication. I'd like to start you all off before I talk us into the ground about your thoughts on the importance of communication and any ideas you have and the way your own platform streaks it. I'll start with you, Adam, I think, because in your case, it's probably fairly straightforward. Yeah, I mean, that's an interesting question. I mean, obviously, my background does have some love for open standards and trying to make things compatible with each other. When we built the instant messaging for ScienceBase, we actually looked at what standards there were out there, and we ended up building off the top of something called XMPP, which is a pre-opened protocol for cross-platform or cross-server communications and IAMs. It's certainly possible as a platform developer to open it up to having third-party communications going across worlds, and it'd be lovely if that standard exists. The problem is that there's no commercial incentive to do so because the people who would benefit from it are not the people who have the users. If you've got, for instance, let's say second life, you've got maybe half a million active users there who log in each month, you don't want to open up communication with a smaller competitor because it's not commercially a good idea for you. It makes it easier to, it lowers the barrier to people leaving their social network. So it's a bit of a perverse standard that I mean, when you're working entirely in the open source space, that it doesn't matter so much because there's no sort of, it's not a zero-sum game. But I think that there is ways of working around this one. Discord is actually a great example of using the overlays and things to sort of bypass the limitations that the platform providers put on their users. And I think that, I mean, if you want to talk about encouraging it, that's the way to go because it's something that it doesn't matter what the platform provider says that it's not going to just happen anyway. I think we've all been like that in the past. If we're on a platform that doesn't provide what we want, some of us at least will go and find what we want elsewhere and just run it concurrently or on the second screen or something. Blair, with Mozilla as well, this is obviously fairly acute, isn't it? Hubs very much provides an environment, but it's not exactly loaded with heads-up displays and interfacing tools, is it? So I imagine someone like Discord comes in quite important there. Well, so Hubs has its own in-world chat and so on. I think the big difference with Hubs from some of the other systems is Hubs's design was designed, the team would say privacy first. So you can create rooms, you can create scenes in an editor or anything that let good GLTF. You can create a room from that scene in Hubs, but there's no notion of lobbies or one big virtual world with a communication channel, right? So Hubs, then if you have a room, you can share the link with anyone, anyone can join the room just by going to that link or whatever browser they want. Things like Discord come in when you want to have some additional chat and control. So Hubs integrates with Discord, it'll undoubtedly integrate with other chat systems in the future like Slack or Teams or something, but the goal there is to leverage the power and the infrastructure of Discord to do things like entry control, moderation, that sort of thing. So Hubs in of itself doesn't have a lot of that, it has some facilities for it, but it turns around and relies on things like Discord for those facilities. Sure. So it's a bit of a different model, right? Yeah, it's a different model, but I'm already seeing in your answer all those different parallels there with what Adam was saying about it. It is always possible to plug these external systems in, assuming of course that the external systems are stable and reliable themselves, you don't want to integrate them and then they go away. I think the interesting difference is that because Hubs is based on Open Protocols underneath, it would be fairly easy to bridge a Hubs chat even if it was, regardless of what it's using, over to any system and pull together. If that system allowed bridging, which as Adam says is possible and likely. Yeah, well over and beyond that aspect of communication, of course what we call, well we certainly hear, called teleporting and I guess really the way Hubs is at the moment, each room you join or each environment you join with a link is going to open up in the browser as a separate tab. It's the only way you can actually follow a link to a hub and then find a door in that hub that will immediately teleport you to another hub and keep it in the same tab or is it? Yeah, yeah, so you can, right. Within a Hubs, so within Hubs you can take, if you're on the desktop client for example, desktop client in a desktop browser, you can paste things or you can create links in World and if you click on them, just like in an old browser, you follow the link to that room and it loads up that room and you start it. So you can jump from link to link to link, just like you would on any web page. Right, and indeed the way we do here with the Ibogrid, we jump from grid to grid in the same viewer. Once you're in on your home grid, that's your base and you can jump wherever you want. Okay, Ghoster, now I was actually kind of mind boggled when I came over to the Endgame Studios because you immediately, well not immediately, but eventually you showed me how that I can quite literally take a copy of the studio and create a new instance for it. Now I know in Science Space Adam uses this idea of InstaZinc too, but as a user it's probably as well remarkable because you know in the world of copy protection and everything else, the fact that I could click on the whole environment and copy it. Open a new instance. Yeah, so the thing with VRChat as a whole, as it's not as open source as some of these other programs here, they do require you to just basically do a checkbox to say, hey, this is your own content, you're not using copyrighted stuff, that sort of thing to protect themselves. I'm not going to say there isn't, but there's definitely a lot of copyrighted items on VRChat, but the idea of the InstaZinc, I assume, has been around for a long time, especially in a bunch of games where you can create lobbies, multiple different lobbies, and being a single one without hundreds and thousands of players of everyone online in your own instance. And the other thing I wanted to just quickly touch on Discord real quick is more of a user side of that. It actually is very nice to use because it shows, hey, you're playing this game, hey, you can join this call, hey, you can watch. You have so much integration to many pieces of content and games and social programs from Discord, and you can even set up your own custom bots like, hey, so-and-so is getting online, hey, there's a vent, you can click this link, you can do web hooks, different things like that, share images, videos. So even just having Discord, if you're not going to use it for all of its features, it's just a nice chatting program and an upgrade from some of the older stuff. But I must admit, on my Mac, the main thing I use now, I've got various virtual vessels, but I have two windows on my own screen, and on my left, I have Discord, and on my right, I have a browser, I better not say which browser, well, I'm here. I'm complete with plugins and sidebars and everything, and there's almost nothing I can't do between those, and for every link or two I'm following and tweeting about on the web, I'm just switching my attention to the left and clicking on groups and news streams coming in through Discord, and the only thing that competes with that slightly is Slack, but Slack is more limited to my own affairs. It's also a paid platform, so you do have a monthly subscription on Slack? Yes, absolutely. Well, I don't know, I mean, the free version is very limited, yeah. It's good for personal use, but not for you. It's expensive if you want to run it from an enterprise point of view, I think. But so is Microsoft's new copy, copycats, teams, cattle over there. Oh yeah, well, they'll copy anything, won't they? If they see money there, they'll be it. Yeah, the trouble is, Windows is so ubiquitous, you know, they'll get a whole layer of people signing up for that, you've never even heard of Slack, even though it's probably the better. Well, I think they're different, right? I mean, I use Teams and Slack and Discord for different things, and they all have different features. Teams is amazing in its features if you're in that ecosystem, which we are at Church Attack, for example, where I'm at the right. Yeah, I mean, I know a lot of people may ever have used Slack and various other things, but they are doing it because they work in some kind of enterprise, where in that situation, you choose the tool set for the job, independent of things like personal preferences. I might not even be using virtual worlds, you know. Okay, now, I mean, we've had lots of discussions before about interoperability. And more and more, it's not going to happen, it's not going to happen. And of course, now, we're getting to the point where people are actually saying that, you know, VR itself, the inverted commas referring to hardware and headsets and stuff like that, is kind of running out of steam. Now, I think the Oculus is an HTC 5 and all that stuff. They are sort of expanding, but oddly enough, it's in the enterprise and, you know, surgeons and in, you know, in business. As for people using it at home, if you're a gamer, I find a lot of gamers have latched onto Oculus in particular. But outside of the gaming environment, it really isn't taking off. I mean, there are a few people who like the idea of a, you know, iMacs type video screen in front of them, but that's not virtual reality. That's just a big TV screen in your face, you know, a bit like some of the 360 video. But increasingly, a lot of that hype about VR, maybe I hope it's the wrong word, did actually shift the focus of what's going on into the spectacle, as it were, of what you can get with a headset and away from the social side of what we call social virtual worlds. Places like here and or your platforms where, you know, people can communicate, they can do things together, they can visit things together that are being created in those worlds and they can collaborate most of the time together on different things. And although I've seen instances of things that you can use in a headset to do painting or to build and stuff like that, it's not, it's not the same thing, you know, and I'm one of these people, I hardly ever go into a headset to be honest, I've been, you know, I've been one of these people and just said, you know, the platform is the first thing, you know, if I can go in in a headset, if I can go in on an iPad or an iPhone or an Android phone, if I can go in on the desktop, all that is fine. But whatever is available to me, I want to be able to get to that world with whatever is available to me. So I might want to go into a world quickly, when I'm out and about with a phone, or I might just want to go in simply on the desktop because I really don't want that, you know, 100% immersion where I can't hear or see anything in the real world at the same time. You know, so you've got these degrees of things. And some people have actually said, of course, that headsets and VR contraption far from being good for social things like social worlds is actually anti-social, because you sit in a room often with other people around with your headset on and you can't hear them see them or anything. So it must be crazy. Yeah, exactly. It's a bit of a contradiction. I do love the videos you see of people wearing headsets and doing things that they don't realize. How in a very, very general sense, right? Do you see any future, I'm going to go around all of you on this, any future to even a marginal sense? I mean, we've covered communication, obviously, of interoperability amongst what I would say is the social platforms. And well, one thing I'm not going to bring up in this question, but I'm going to bring up afterwards is the likelihood of Facebook jumping into this and taking the whole thing over. But for the moment, do you just see any avenue of interoperability, even if it's five, ten years down the line? Sorry, was that one for me? It's for all of you, actually. But yeah, it starts as well. I'll barge in and ask that one. I think the answer is that you're going to see interoperability in parts, not whole. So for instance, up until now, the standard format for transferring a 3D file from one program to another has typically been FBX. It's the one that almost every package supports. And it's got a good superset of the features that you want in a 3D model translation. That's now moving to something called GLTF. As far as I know, most of the newer virtual worlds are at least paying lip service to GLTF support. We have it. I know others have it as well. I know Hubs, I think, is GLTF-based exclusively. So that's, for instance, one way that we'll get some degree of portability. We will find that the 3D formats for uploading files will be standardized if we're going to take those from one to another. How much further that progresses? I don't know. I think that the thing you're going to look for is that there's got to be a commercial incentive for this to happen, for it to happen. It's rather, I mean, in some respects, it's a little bit disappointing, because when the web first appeared, I mean, it started as an open standard, and the commercialization of it happened later, rather than the way around. And that gave a completely different set of priorities and incentives that really did encourage the idea of having everything open and transferable. You could always look at the source code for a web page, those kinds of things. I think that there's some disadvantages to trying to do that now. And one of them is the increasing complexity of all the tools and requirements to actually get content going. You can do basic level content on your own as an amateur pretty easily, but to sort of do the professional high-end work that people are beginning to expect in games, particularly high-end games, I mean, there's huge amounts of skills and all the rest of it that need to be transferred, and I have completely wandered off topic. But no, no, no, I'm tall. Yeah, but my point is that I think that we're going to come to the interoperable standards by being dragged to it. It's not going to be something that's starting out as the thing. What's going to happen is that you're going to have someone who works in two worlds simultaneously, and they're paying customers of both, and they say, all right, I want to actually use my work from A and B and B and A, and that's going to force the companies to at least do some important export options that can work between the two. That's how it's going to happen. It's not going to happen any other way, I don't think, because as I said, the incentive structure is not right there to support it. The alternative would be if something became incredibly popular that was open sourced and did have those correct incentive schemes, but I think in today's discoverability market, that's really difficult. Doing advertising at the moment, for instance, is quite expensive, and you have to go through people like Google and Facebook and everyone else to do that, and that costs a lot of money. Organic discoverability is very difficult to do. That's part of my fear about the Facebook thing. I think maybe the ubiquity of something will come. If everybody wants to be part of it, they want to have a Twitter account, they want to be on Facebook and all this stuff. I was on Twitter at the very beginning, and that must have been on it for five years before it became a household name, like it is now. I sent out newsfeeds on it. That's what we were all doing amongst each other now. It's become something totally different, but I keep wondering if back in the early days of Second Life, we were talking about the metaverse and this interactive thing where we can all meet. Of course, the technology that took off at the time was mobile phones, smartphones, because it was convenient. Everybody has a Facebook account, everybody has a mobile phone. If somebody comes along that says everybody needs a virtual environment, like I once asked Microsoft, were they ever considering a room system in 3D for their desktop? Because it made sense, instead of having a desktop picture and icons, you could actually have a room where the icons were objects that you clicked and doors you could walk through, somehow a sitting room to a library and the different programs would be in situ. I don't think that's going to happen, but just say it did. Everybody would want that. Now, I imagine with the right promotion, something like hubs could get there, but again, I'm worried about Facebook because nobody's really started, you've got Miwi and things, but nobody's really starting a new Facebook, because Facebook itself has become the ubiquitous thing and nobody wants to start all that again or download more software and be running five different Facebook alternatives at once. But if Facebook came up with this thing of every Facebook member having an interactive 3D page and moving from there, I hate to think what it would look like with all the answers. They have announced that. That's what Facebook lies in. Exactly. Yeah, which is the sum of all our fears is what I say, but let me move on to guest and player on this general topic. Do you see any threads, as it were, where at least a degree of interoperability might come to social worlds? So I'll jump in. I think you probably want to take it at multiple levels. When you started the question, you were talking about accessing it from different devices. I want to get in the world from whatever device and the device you might want to use might depend on your situation. Right here in my home office with the door closed, I would be perfectly happy to be in a VR display because there's nobody around. But if I was in a cafe, that's a very different story or if I was on a train. And then there's the content interoperability, which I think is what Adam was mostly talking about. There's all the other interoperability, right? Like the stuff that OpenSim has dealt with in terms of trying to bring together different worlds with one client and so on. In some ways, the first one is just a software issue. So with hubs, it runs in a browser. So it already is accessible from every device. We ran a conference, a remote conference participation set up at the ACM WIST conference this year. And I was chatting with one of the people in the room. He was like, yeah, I was at home and I used my Quest. But I've watched most of the talks because I've been watching them while I commute in the morning. He was in Sweden and the conference was in New Orleans. I've been watching them on my iPhone on the train and I was talking to him on the desktop or in my VR gear. So I think within a world, the multi-device stuff is possible and lots of platforms like VRChat are trying to do that. The content stuff will happen. But I do agree also with what Adam said that the interoperability, especially at the messaging and interaction level, that'll be really hard. I mean, you look even at Twitter, which you were talking about, I can't use my favorite Twitter client anymore because they decided again a few years ago to block all the third-party clients being effective. Facebook doesn't even allow you to access the feed externally anymore. And post externally, you have to go through their client or the webpage. So you're right that there's these strong incentives to deal with that last level of interop where they really could interop. But I think it's interesting you were saying that does Microsoft allow a 3D desktop? Well, in some ways, that's what the Cliff House and Microsoft Mixed Reality and their VR headset, that's what HoloLens has right now, which is you put icons, you put windows, you put them in 3D around you and you can go with that. So I think the interesting part with interop is going to be when is going to be in the VR and AR head-mount space where you're already in 3D effectively and then you're jumping from one 3D world to another. And that's where the interesting stuff I think is going to be. So you really think the headset thing is still going to be the future out on domestic users front, shall we say? Eventually. Eventually. I mean, there's actually, you know, I was going to resisted jumping in when you were pooping them. The desktop VR connected devices, the Vive, the Rift, the Index and so on, those haven't seen marketable growth. There's a lot of goes and quests that have been sold. And when you move outside of Europe and North America and move into the Asian countries, for example, there's a ton of people using VR devices. The primary use is what you were describing, which is video, but there's like video. Co-watching, there's, and it's because you live in a crowded environment, you want to be able to watch and experience. I'm laughing because I recently acquired a Facebook portal. It's the three of them, tablets and whatever, but I versioned the plugs into a TV via HDMI. And it's got a camera that follows you about, but you can't Skype on it or Discord on it. You can only use Facebook Messenger. And it's got the video sharing in, but you can't share any video online. It's got to be a video that's at Facebook, copy YouTube or something. So you spend your money on this thing, and then you're trapped in an ecosystem that actually to me doesn't provide anything useful, but it's typical, I guess. Goster, your thoughts on the sense of interoperability that may come? Well, I know definitely, especially in the VR community, when VR chat was kind of having some issues that there was a big talk about trying to make some interconnected hub of platforms. So you can go to, like, all the different VR platforms, social platforms at the time, which were, like, alt space, rec room, VR chat, Neo's VR hadn't really taken off at that point. Pavlov, onward, different types of those games that allow multiplayer to basically have a single interconnected hub where you could just walk through a door or click a button and go to that world. I don't know what happened to it, that idea, but there has definitely been a big push, especially in the VR community, to find some kind of way to connect the platforms together in some meaningful way. And while this court does that a little bit with, you know, helping you, allowing you to, you know, jump to a world that the person's in or be able to watch them as they play their game. Certain aspects of it, like I believe Adam was saying, it's just not financially feasible, because any game that has a big community associated with a smaller community through a hub of some kind will either lose some of their users for the features that that other platform has, or they will gain a very limited number of users by doing it. So having something that you have to, you know, join for. I wonder if that will be the case as time goes by. I mean, I remember, I have a content management system that I use called Close with a Z. And when I first started using it, you know, all my posts on Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn and stuff all came in in a highly organized manner, show me who they were from, you know, and, you know, I get tweets and LinkedIn posts from the same person group together, it would work all that out for me. And then suddenly everything to do with Facebook disappeared. And it means that now if I want to check up on Facebook, I have to log into Facebook. You know, you can't get at your feed or your friends through any other method. It's not curated for you anymore. Yeah, but I just wondered down the line, if this is going to be an obstacle, you can have, you know, we got everybody in the planet is in Facebook. But slowly, I mean, people are realizing they don't have time to spend 24 hours a day in Facebook. They need another way to get, you know, that information out quickly. And if something like Facebook forbids it effectively, I wonder if over time, people would begin to think, you know, God, I'm wasting so much time in there for something that, you know, I can't get the information out of, I can't aggregate it in any way, except by going in there. And, you know, I wonder how much that will continue over time, you know, when attitudes change, you know, as a society and as a generation that has basically grown up and lived on the Internet, I can definitely say that everyone wants everything all the time. Like if I want to take something from Facebook, I want to have it. I could either download it to my computer or I could share the direct link. And what the problem is, if I share the direct link, you know, nothing against Facebook, you have to log in to Facebook to sometimes see those things. Or, you know, I want to share it from a different platform. The, as we, as the Internet grows older, I would definitely say that more and more likely there will be core programs or core features that will slowly do this integration work that allows you to go from one place to the other. And there will slowly become less and less variance out there. So, you know, how like we had Skype and Skype was big, you know, 10, 15 years ago, whenever it was, and now Discord's the new big and upcoming chatting voice program. They're slowly going to phase out the ones that don't have the features that 90% of the people don't want or want and kind of consolidate down. And that's what we're looking for. Especially you, you would sort of agree with me that kind of the Internet generation of one, I'm not, but I think I am. You know, we want everything and we want it now kind of thing. So, we want that convergence of data, you know, in our face. So, we actually, the last thing we want is a platform that tries to trap us in it and limit the data we can get our hands on. Yeah. Yeah. It's, the best comparison I can make is if anyone has, you know, Steam, Bethesda, Epic Store, Origin, all these different platform launchers to just play a single thing. Yeah. And most people, they just agree that Steam is probably the best one because it's got most of the games that you'd want. It has a launcher, it has a decent interface. They recently updated it like a month ago to look better and function five times better as well. So, consolidating the one platform is probably going to be the way it goes. I think I actually had to download Steam to get to yours. Yes. Although, actually, I realize now I can, I do actually have where the Oculus goes, that's my condescension. And I think I can get to be addressing that too, if I remember. And going back to the point, sorry, real quick of, you know, using different headsets, as I believe Adam or Blair was mentioning, there are many, many games, especially in the VR community, who are trying that. They're trying to get as much interconnectability with different platforms. So, whether you're using, you know, the Quest or an Oculus or the Go or the Samsung VR or a Vive or any hodgepodge of made up systems that you can make on your own, as long as it works and it follows this API protocol, you can connect it. So, especially with custom controllers. Okay, we're coming down to what is probably going to be about the last 10 minutes. I've got a ton of questions here. At the moment here in OpenSim, there is, we're almost waiting for a new standard of viewer, you know, a much more updated system for actually viewing the code. We have guys in you on that front this year. But one thing that is very obvious is that people don't react well to some forms of change. In other words, you know, if this changes in an interface, they're not too happy because there's a learning curve in learning the new bits. But it gets worse in what we're talking about, you know, a greater metaverse. You know, if I go into science space, or I go into hubs, or I go into VR chat, the tool set for navigation and doing things, the whole interface is a new thing to be learned. And I wonder in my mind, how many worlds can I be in when every one of them has got a different interface, you know? Fortunately, the arrow keys tend to work in most worlds. And if they don't, I've got WASD and stuff. But I think you know what I mean. You know, for the more interesting things we can do, every world, every platform seems to invent its own kind of tool set that doesn't necessarily follow the other ones. And, you know, I spend an awful lot of my time, you know, trying to operate a camera, for example. Oh, which world am I in? What keys do I use? They're not the same. Now, Marcus, who's in charge of streams here, actually, has actually said in chat, he kind of had to know about performance challenges for hubs with regard to JavaScript and WebGL. And then he says maybe Adam's experience of trying to use Unity on the web. That's actually going beyond that question. That leads me into something else I was going to come to. One thing that we've been able to say about OpenSim here, actually, is that despite slicker-looking platforms and everything else like that, it remains a very good, not only collaboration platform, because of what you can do in real time on the spot, but also a general creativity platform. I can make a build here or do things here that I can do with the in-world tools. And then I can export those things. And I can export them in a format that will then allow me to put them in Science Space or rather, Unity in Science Space's case, or I can bring them in to hubs. And I guess I can bring them into VR chats and a load of other places. So, although this isn't interoperability in in-situ, so to speak, I mean, for creative teams and things like that, an individual platform, especially like OpenSim here, can actually be the key, even though you may be creating something that you deploy as a standalone scene somewhere else on the web page or in a particular other world. Unity, in particular, I know Adam here uses Unity as the Austrian platform for Science Space, but I mean, I think people in VR chats and hospice, presumably, might well be using Unity for components. Let me move to Blair for that in case. Unity is the main editor format where you can assemble the worlds. And then there's actually an SDK that VRChat provides, which allow you to upload to their server so that you can, you know, access the content. So we have to use the Unity editor to put stuff in. There is no, like, Unreal Engine editor or custom editor that we use. Yeah, but effectively, I could build a TV studio and I could build it here in OpenSim. I could then export it and it could be, you know, I could have the same studio, the same look of it in Science Space and in VRChat and possibly hubs, Blair. I mean, hubs, so hubs right now, rims are GLTFs and they're created with a, there's an editor called Spoke, which you just can get to from the front page. And it allows you to assemble content in all kinds of different formats into a room scene and specify the metadata if you want, like, you know, landing zones and stuff. So anything that you can export to GLTF, you could use to author, I mean, there are people who offer in Unity and use their GLTF exporters. With the 2.8 update to Blender, there's been a lot more people starting to use Blender for things, which is really interesting. I haven't been able to convince myself to learn it yet, who has time. So I think there's a lot of that. I mean, the really interesting thing for me, I think, is that Unity is actually, it's the in-world editing tools. Where is the sweet spot? Right. The problem with Blender and Unity and so on is that they're not novice friendly. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And whereas, so I've been at Mizzone for three years on leave from Georgia Tech, but I'm a professor and years ago, when Second Life open sourced their client, we made an augmented reality version of the Second Life client, which we, initially because we wanted to do AR Peshinama, and that seemed like a good platform for it. But we had many islands over the years, over a large number of years for research projects. And it was just, I haven't seen anything that feels sort of this similar sweet spot that you mentioned of being able to edit as a novice. Unity and Blender don't do that. Yeah, I'm going to be focused. I've already got the flies. Okay. The other thing I had that is related to this at one point is not only just say I built a studio, a TV studio or something in OpenCM, and I dropped it into Unity for a bit of conversion or whatever, and then I uploaded it into Science Space and did the same in VR chat. Back on the interoperability, I thought, well, if that's instance, that build, as it were, that I'm going to deploy on various platforms, having authored it in one and converted it for the others. If there could be, say, scripts running in that studio, JavaScript, or whatever, and those could be converted to, do you think it might be possible where we're going to start building things that could be in worlds or on the web that will, the objects themselves will be able to communicate with each other independently of where they are. So somebody's sitting in the copy of my studio that's on, say, the web somewhere, and somebody sitting is in a standalone virtual client could sort of communicate that could be like chat bridges and various display systems that are replicated in all the different instances of the thing I've built. I need a quickie answer to that from each of you. Well, that's a complicated question, but I think you know what I'm saying. I know that there is such thing as the web RTC, real-time communication, which can be used for both voice and video. And if you have the right setup, you can use like a special shader that works across multiple platforms to give it that ability for you to be sitting in one instance of it, let's say in science space, and for it to be broadcasted to any of the other platforms that support that said shader. So it is possible right now it's just a problem of getting support into the different platforms. Sure. I mean, I think to go to the question of especially interactivity is something that's going to kill you because the language is one thing. It's the APIs and other stuff that are the real rubber hits the road. So I find it hard to imagine having interactive content across many disparate platforms for the reasons that Adam mentioned at the beginning. There's the business models of these large platforms. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah, I'm very much thinking of the creators here because I'm well, I've got history and creativity, but I can't do any of this. I mean, I'm a user and as Adam will tell you, as soon as I tried to make a studio in science space, I spent five minutes in university and just gave up. Some people can do it, but it's the learning curve again, it's beyond me at the moment. So I tend to focus while I'm doing what I'm talking about here in terms of being a user. I want things to be nice easily and connected to actually use. I did have more questions, but I'm beginning to look at the time here and I think I'm going to have to start rounding up before they actually poke me in the chat. I'd like to ask each of you to finish on as it were and, you know, 90 seconds or something to try and put your own platform into the background for a second and give me your impression of how you think what we call the metaverse or the future of social worlds is going. You know, in the very general sense, forget the interface devices, forget the particular platforms or whatever, but, you know, how you think it would develop over, I don't know, a year or 10 years or whatever. I'll put you on the spot there, haven't I? Let me start with, who's going to be first? So I tend to be, I've been thinking about this from a VR and AR head-mount perspective, right? And lately, and when you look at it from that viewpoint, you can imagine that any whichever shell you're using, whichever top-level thing, is essentially your entry into the metaverse and all the different platforms are essentially a part of it, right? So if you go watch Ready Player One or read a book like that, each of those worlds in the Oasis could be thought of as, one of them could be VR chat, could be a web page, and you're bouncing between them the top-level interface, which is your desktop on your Windows or Mac and it's your shell and whatever, is kind of like the home there, right? It's like we don't think of it that way because when I'm on my desktop, it's 2D and I'm sitting in my room, but if you look at the VR versions like that, it starts to feel that way. So, you know, and that, taken from that viewpoint, with something like Hubs or other open-source web-based things, the web is just one of the programs that is hosting one of the worlds that you're visiting, and it might have certain features like, you know, Hubs will allow you to do self-hosting soon, where you can be running your entire virtual world yourself with your own control over it. That's one slice, but VR chat gives you a different set of advantages. Another thing to be... That's indeed as well. The other things we have in open-source, I mean, my own region has to by a company called Outworlds and basically it's on my own computer. So, my simulator, my assets and everything is on my own computer and I just hypergrid out to where I want and come back when I'm finished. Adam, you're a response to that question too, maybe? Yes. Yeah, no, I actually, I very much agree with that. That's the direction things are going to go. The problem right now with delivering 3D content, if we think about this in a much more general terms, delivering 3D content right now is an absolute dog's breakfast. We have the latest AAA games. Each of those has built their own 3D engine. They've built their own rendering pipelines. They have built their own content streaming. They've built their own all those bits and pieces. They have built themselves completely unnecessarily. The reason is we lack a standard. We lack a way of being able to actually get all the last mile of energy out of the graphics card, which is why they build engines. It's why they do those things. But sometime in the future, at some point, we actually are going to settle on standards. We are going to have a standard 3D model format. We're going to have a standard system for loading assets. We're going to have a standard for all those things and it's not a big step from us being able to take that and then actually associate that with over the internet. So that everything just sort of streams down onto the device you're accessing in a very standardized way so that the important differentiator between all these 3D applications and whatever they are is the content that's associated with them, the content, the scripts and things like that, rather than the actual fundamentals. I think that's the end goal. That's where we will end up and virtual worlds are a really important part of this because what they are is they actually are the potential platforms that they underneath. They're the framework that you could build all these things on because it would be fantastic to be able to actually hop from a social environment to a massively multiplied game, all have one platform, all download the content as it goes. And it effectively has something on the environment where every door or gate goes to what you want basically. I had a program on Windows back in Windows ME days. It was just called rooms and it did a wonderful job of looking like a second life with objects that link to anything in my system or any application. So I had a library with bookshelves linked into each PDF and everything. Of course the moment I wanted it on a second life it crashed the engine that was running the desktop. So it goes to, did you have anything on that by the way I think? I'll just make it quick. As long as there's a capitalistic market involved and there's money, everyone is going to try to do their own thing to make it not open source. So try to push for more open source platforms on your own in your own way whether it be the social side of it, the actual program side of it. Just work to make it more open and slowly everyone else will follow. I think that really is an answer here because it's something we know very well and open soon is that if it's open source, the potential behind large is open. You're not up against too many proprietary systems or anything like that. I'm not saying when you were talking, I suddenly have visions of these new, somebody this week has got a working quantum computer running or something. Maybe at 15 years time, quantum computers have run all this and you're better actually have a viewer that will understand what platform it's going to before you even think it. We'll need good bandwidth too, of course, but we never really know what the future holds. They haven't prompted me yet but I know they will if I don't get off. Right. Oh, something was another Skype buzzing on my watch. Okay. Well, I think that's been great. I just wanted to do a quick check out there in the audience. If we head over to... If we head over to, what's it? Explore 3. How many of you will want to come over and ask us questions? Just a yes from the audience very quickly because we may do that if enough, if you want us to. If I don't see anything in chat, we won't. Meanwhile, I'd like to thank Blair McKinsey. Thank you, Blair. We're welcome. It's good to be here. Thank you, Ghost of Smith. Thank you. Thank you very much. And thank you, Adam Frisbee. You're more welcome. Thank you for reminding me. Okay, and somebody else can stop me. Right, so I think we're off.