 Hello, everyone, and welcome to the 11 a.m. to 11 30 a.m. session of the 2019 Open Simulator Community Conference. In this session, we are happy to introduce a presentation called State of the Open Simulator Community. Our speaker is Maria Korolov. Please check out the website found at conference.opensimulator.org for full speaker bios, details of sessions, and the full schedule of events. Maria is a published author and covers artificial intelligence for CIO magazine and cybersecurity for CSO online. She is also the editor of Hypergrid Business since 2009. In real life, she has run a business news bureau in Shanghai, covered wars in the former Soviet Union, and written about local politics for the Chicago Tribune. Now she's covering Open Simulator and experience about which she will share with us today. The session is being live-streamed and recorded, so if you have questions or comments during the session, you may send tweets too at OpenSimCC with the hashtag OSCC19. Welcome, everyone. Let's begin the session. Well, thank you, Galen, for those kind words. I appreciate the introduction. And hi, everybody. I'm sure a lot of you already know me, but those who don't, as Galen said, I'm the editor of Hypergrid Business, which is at hypergoodbusiness.com. There's my real-life picture up there on the screen from this summer. And yes, I've grown up my hair. If you saw me last year, my hair was quite a bit shorter. And I'm here to talk about a decade's worth of statistics from Open Sim. This talk can go for hours, so I'm going to try to be brief and get it into 20 minutes. I'm going to be covering the monthly stats I've been collecting for the past 10 years, the surveys that we've done. We did two surveys just in the last couple of months. I'll be presenting some of that data for the first time ever today. So here's the overview. This year has not been a great year for Open Sim. Active users are up because they only go down when a grid goes out of business. But land area is down, and so are active users. And the total number of grids has stayed steady. There's been about 391 grids that have been active this year. Now I'm talking about public grids that are accessible to the public, either by creating an account on the grid or by hypergridding in. This does not count grids that do not make themselves, that don't publicize them as public grids. Like a grid that's open only on part-time in someone's basement, and it doesn't count the couple of thousand or so grids running the dream grid installer or all the grids run by schools and companies. And we've heard about a lot of those today, and we will be hearing about more of those as this weekend continues. So there's a lot of private action happening in Open Sim, and educational action, and non-profit action that doesn't show up in my statistics. So these are the grids that are accessible to the public, either via login or via hypergrid teleport. And for the most part, they have been hypergrid enabled. Last year, in-world shutdown, that was the last big grid that was not on a hypergrid. Right now, the only major grid left that's not hypergrid-enabled is the TAG grid. Dream Nation is also another one that's not hypergrid-enabled. Evanation, virtual highway, and in-worlds are all gone. As a result, 98% of all land area in Open Sim is now on a hypergrid-enabled grid, and 97% of land area, 98% of all active users are on the hypergrid. The hypergrid also has a big marketplace, the Kitely Market, which delivers to hundreds of grids. And we have a hypergrid currency, Globet, which is also widely used at multiple grids. So the hypergrid is definitely becoming the kind of community, the kind of metaverse that I really expected Open Sim to be from day one. It really is. And I'm really proud of the state of the hypergrid and the way that it really, everyone is really connected in Open Sim, and that's really positive thing for me to see. So this chart is of active users over the last 10 years, which started out at a few thousand users, around 10,000 back when I first started keeping track of the statistics, most of them on OS grid. Now we're up to around a little over 33,000 active users on the public grids. And this is down a couple of thousand from last year. And the land area has gone down to around 73,000 standard region equivalents. A lot of grids have variable size regions. So you have like a few areas the size of nine standard regions. And I count them in terms of standard regions, because that's what user see. I mean, nobody knows what the actual database, how it counts it. We did a survey this fall of what people think of their grids. And about 400 people voted in this survey. And I found out where my readers spend most of their time. And that's for the most part is OS grid. Followed by, followed by on the lost track of my slide here, followed by digital worlds, which is a commercial grid by Terry Ford. OS grid is a public open source grid and then a Canadian grid and Kitely, which runs the Kitely market, which is a big, another big commercial grid. And 91% of our readers would recommend their grid to other people. So for the most part, I mean, for the overwhelmingly most part, people in open sim love the grids that they are on. We also asked people to rate their grids. And you can see from this chart behind me that for the most part, the ratings for grids were uniformly high. And the difference between the grids was only like a couple of fractions of a percentage point. The grids that came out on top in this year's survey were Kraft, Encore Escape, and Utopia Sky. Kraft is a big nonprofit grid based in Europe. They're known for their art scene. And Encore Escape and Utopia Sky are two of the smaller public commercial grids. Kraft was voted tops in technology, content, and support in the survey. And Encore Escape also did really well and tied for first for community technology and support. And Utopia Sky was one of the other grids that got a perfect score for support this year. So people really like what they're getting from the grid owners and administrators. OpenSim users also like to travel on average. Our readers have been to 4.6 different grids. Now, this is just the grids that they remember visiting. I'm sure lots of people visited lots of other grids that they don't remember the names of. And the most visited grid was OS Grid followed by Kitely, then Metropolis. And OS Grid and Metropolis are both public nonprofit grids. I also did a sentiment survey. And this was just this past week. I have not published the numbers yet. So you're getting these numbers for the first time ever. The full story will be up on the website next week. So for the most part, people are extremely optimistic about OpenSim's future. Only 7% were very pessimistic. 11% were somewhat pessimistic. And everyone else had a positive view of what's going to happen with OpenSim. Which is a good sign because we're having some drops in the statistics, as you saw. And there's some worries about the role of OpenSim. It's going to be high fidelity, just pretty much shut down all of its virtual world operations. So that's kind of sad. Some of the other companies have also been struggling with virtual reality and seeing some uptake about it. Second Life has had problems getting traction for its new Sansar platform. Everyone seems to be kind of waiting to see what's going to happen next. And we're at this inflection point. But as far as OpenSim goes, the people who are currently using OpenSim are happy with it, plan to do more with it and are optimistic for its future. In fact, they are extremely optimistic about the amount of time that they're going to spend there. More than 94% said that they're either going to spend the same amount of time or even more time in OpenSim next year than this year. And I would like to add in that I will, too, on a personal note. About a year ago, I was actually considering shutting down hyperboot business. It's basically a full-time job running it. We've done 3,000 articles over the past 10 years. That's an average of nearly an article a day. So that's a lot of work to do it. And our ads are free. So this is purely a volunteer effort. But it draws me back. And I'm really excited about doing more writing about virtual reality, in fact, including some fiction writing. So definitely you can expect to see a lot more of me next year as well. And several new people have joined up to do regular articles for the hyperboot business website, which I'm also really happy to see. In fact, I welcome anybody to send in columns, story ideas, press releases. We've had more than 200 contributors so far to hyperboot business. And we're more than happy to see anybody else joining us as well. So as far as recent technical developments are concerned, people are more satisfied than unsatisfied. But there's been some progress in the OpenSim technology, as we've heard this year, earlier this morning from the developers panel. But it hasn't been as radical as some people expected it to be. The progress has been very slow and very incremental in OpenSim. And some people are disappointed with that. And I heard about some of that in the comments, which I'll be sharing in more length on the website next week. People are also generally satisfied with the OpenSim ecosystem, with the grids, people, and content that are available on this platform. VR was a very divisive question in this year's survey. A large percent of our readers, 32%, or nearly a third, said that they did not think that VR has anything to do with OpenSim. Anything to do with OpenSim's future, which is a pretty big, and to me, kind of a shocking result. And the rest of people were generally split about how important VR is going to be. OpenSim is not currently really optimized for virtual reality. There are ways you can kind of jury rig it into an Oculus Rift or a Google Cardboard, like we heard from another presentation this morning. And I have done it. I have visited OpenSim on a Google Cardboard headset. It is possible, but it's not a wonderful experience. And one of the fundamental reasons is the frame rate is optimized to work well on a visual display monitor. And in virtual reality, if the frame rate goes down or there's a bit of a lag, your body starts thinking that something's wrong with your vision. Maybe you've been poisoned. Maybe you should throw up. So that really, really hurts the user experience. And that's a fundamental characteristic of how OpenSim is architected. And Second Life had the same problem. They threw out their plans of trying to create a VR viewer for Second Life, which they were experimenting with for a while. And they put their efforts into Sansar. It is really, really difficult to rebuild a virtual world infrastructure to have a steady frame rate when you've all along been optimizing it for a good desktop experience. So I'm really hoping that some progress can be made and that we can do something. Because obviously, OpenSim, I think, would be a fantastic virtual reality platform where people can build their virtual reality world from the inside. But it will take a massive reworking of the code base and, of course, of the viewer. We need better graphics. We need consistent frame rates. We need much lower lag, more responsiveness. And maybe we'll get that with 5G, with new cloud-based deployments. We'll see. We'll see. It's quite a bit early. We don't even know what the hardware is going to look like for virtual reality once it all shakes out. So that's something I'm going to be keeping a very close eye on over the next few years because it's something that's very interesting to me, close to my heart. I've also asked people what they think about the progress of VR in OpenSim. And for the most part, people were neutral or unhappy with the progress for VR support, which kind of makes sense because I was explained there are some big structural issues for getting OpenSim into virtual reality. I also asked people what features they wanted to see in OpenSim. So this was an open-ended question. People could write in as many features as they wanted, and people use different words to express them. So I pulled out the ones that came up most often in people's comments. So first of all, everybody wants a dedicated viewer for OpenSim. This was an issue of some debate this year because Firestorm for a while said they were going to have a separate viewer for OpenSim so that we could have OpenSim specific features and tools in the viewer, and we can leave off all the stuff that's unique to Second Life and all the Second Life promotional materials that we currently see in the viewer. But then they decided not to do it because they had a lack of people who were able to work on that. And people are split on that because on the one hand, keeping up with Second Life gives us the drive to move forward for some developers. But on the other hand, it does mean that we can't have some nice things in OpenSim that we could otherwise have if we had our own viewer. So that's something that a lot of people are interested in. A more modernized code-based. So there were several different takes on how this could go, but that's something that came up a lot that we need a code review that brings the OpenSim server software up to date. Because as I mentioned before, we've had some incremental changes. Now we might see some bigger improvements as a result of the new scripting engine that came in from Avination, and that was also discussed earlier today on the developers panel. So we have some new physics engine options going on in OpenSim and some new OpenSim-specific scripting commands. But those are really major, major revisions of the actual code base. And it's probably going to be kind of hard to do because a lot of developers have moved on to other projects. So that's something that I'm also keeping an eye on and I'm very interested in what's happening with OpenSim. As part of that, people also want to see more documentation for the OpenSim code and features and the few detailed specific things that they want to see, which I will cover next week. People want to see better content protection. There's been some controversy this year about stolen content popping up on some grids and the steps that grid owners have been taking to crack down on copy-botted content. It makes OpenSim look bad, makes creators hesitant to come here and share their products. But for me, the hopeful sign is that for the most part, creators on the marketing market have a choice, whether they're going to be stay on one grid or be open to the hypergrid and share with everybody. And all the growth has been with the hypergrid, with the shareable, exportable content that can travel to other grids. And for me, that's a very optimistic sign that merchants are seeing that by making legal content available in an easy way to everybody in OpenSim at a very low cost that they're going to make more money, they're going to be more profitable, and people will be happier knowing that they have legitimate licensed content that they're using. I personally get a lot of my stuff from the Kylie Market, including the hair I'm wearing today. Thank you very much. And I really love seeing what's going on with that platform. Okay, Maria, I'm out of time. I'm afraid, just very briefly, I know you still wanted to talk about better hypergridding, web-based viewer, Bakes on Mesh. Well, those things are self-explanatory. Yeah, I think so, too. You can read them and you can move on. All right. And that was my last slide. Aren't I good? Thank you, Maria, for a terrific presentation. There's my email address, maria, at hypergridbusiness.com. Send me press releases, survey ideas, comments, columns, opinion pieces. All right, thank you, Maria. As a reminder to our audience, you can see what's coming up on the conference schedule at conference.opensimulator.org. Following this session, the next session will begin at 12.30pm in this keynote region and is entitled, Future of Social Worlds Panel. Also, we encourage you to visit the OSCC 19 poster expo in the OSCC expo 3 region to find accompanying information on presentations and to explore the hypergrid tour resources in OSCC expo 2 region along with the sponsor and crowd funder booths located throughout all of the OSCC expo regions.