 Hello everyone and welcome to the 2 o'clock PM to 3 o'clock PM session of the 2021 Open Simulator Community Conference. In this session we are pleased to introduce the presentation, The Metaverse is Coming and OpenSim can show the way. Our speaker is Maria Korolow. Maria is a published author and covers artificial intelligence for CIO Magazine and cybersecurity for CSO Online. She has also been the editor of HyperGrid Business since 2009. Please check out the website found at conference.opensimulator.org for speaker bios, details of sessions and the full schedule of events. The session is being live streamed and recorded so if you have questions or comments during the session you may send tweets to at OpenSim CC with the hashtag OSCC21. Welcome everyone. Let's begin this session. Well thank you very much for that introduction. I love being here back on the stage again. As you notice this time I came more prepared. My jacket now matches my slides. I am like all about The Metaverse and the future today. So I have been covering this space like you said since 2009 and I love the idea of being in The Metaverse. If I had a choice when staying in The Matrix and not I mean I would totally make a different decision than they did in the movie. I think they were totally wrong. So when I first came in this was in 2009. I was at a conference that IBM was having in Second Life and it felt like I was at a real conference. That feeling of presence, that feeling of immersion, you all know it because you're here. For me that was the big eye-opening moment of I'm in a different place. I'm in a different place and this place is real and this place is valuable and this is going to be something amazing and what I thought at the time was that it was going to happen immediately. And I thought that The Metaverse was going to revolutionize how we shared experiences the same way that the internet revolutionized how we share information and I still think that it's true but the path to The Metaverse has been a little rocky and a little different from what I expected. So if you guys want to talk to me about this or write about it for HyperGrid Business, my email is right up there. I welcome your opinions, your essays, your contributions, announcements of what you are doing. So let's move on to what The Metaverse is in case you are watching this on YouTube or in replay because you googled what is The Metaverse? Let me find out. Let's go take you through it. The word meta means above, beyond or about the thing itself. It's something that's above our current universe, beyond our current universe or it's about our existing metaverse such as for example meta data is data about data. So The Metaverse can be interpreted in multiple ways. In the first kind of basic level definition is it's a layer of information that overlays our physical world like Google Maps or Pokemon Go or even cave wall paintings. This is something a level of information of data of meaning that we place on top of the world. So in that sense we have been building this metaverse since we invented language and that is the most generic sense of the word metaverse, rarely used. Another common sense of the word metaverse is shared virtual environments, desktop based environments like Second Life or Minecraft where like the one we are here in now where we're interacting with people via avatars in an immersive platform using our existing computers, existing phones, using screens and we've had this for more than a decade and this is a huge, huge universe, Minecraft, World of Warcraft, all these shared worlds, Roblox, they're gigantic, super popular with children and a giant billion-dollar industry and something that's being invested in continues to be invested in. So we may be seeing usage kind of leveling off in Second Life in OpenSim. We've hit record high numbers this year but we still seem to be not really taken off the way I was hoping to but it is a giant, giant, giant universe of content and for many people this is the metaverse. For me as well when I think of the metaverse I do think that the OpenSim metaverse is one kind of metaverse and finally we have the metaverse in the sense of the matrix, shared virtual reality environments. So this is where you would wear a headset or have a brain implant and you actually feel that you are literally inside another world where you can look around and it feels like you're someplace else. You've gone inside a computer, you are a virtual being and this is awesome and very cool and very compelling and we're just starting to see this happen. So I picked up an Oculus Quest 2 headset a couple of weeks ago and I've tried dozens of headsets, all the high-end ones, the HoloLens and Oculus and HTC Vive and everything that's been hitting the market for the past few years and this is definitely the most usable headset out there today. So if you guys are in a market for a virtual reality headset I strongly recommend the Oculus Quest 2 that just came out. It's about 200 bucks to 300 bucks depending on where and how you buy it and it's an all-in-one headset. So you don't have to plug it into the computer, it's wireless, you can move around it, it's got hand trackers so you move your hands and your hands move in world which is very kind of immersive and very compelling. But we're still not like fully there, it's still heavy and awkward to use, you can get hot in there, people can get motion sickness because the motion in world doesn't match your physical location, you can bump into things and knock over your computer and step on your cat. So there's downsides to it. AR environments are an intermediary step where you can see the world around you but it's overlaid with virtual objects. So for example, you might have a virtual cat sitting on your desk, it looks like a hologram like the Star Wars holograms and I think that augmented reality is probably going to be a big mass market introduction for the metaverse for a lot of people especially for virtual meetings and business events. Games like Pokemon Go have already shown that augmented reality can be very compelling. It kind of puts a magical layer over your existing world and it's very, very cool. Yes, there is a pass through camera and Oculus Quest 2, somebody just mentioned that in the comments, but it's black and white and very grainy and so for example, if you're having a business meeting in world, you can't use the pass through camera to send somebody an email or look something up on your calendar or take notes on your keyboard. The quality isn't quite that good. Okay, so moving on, we've had the idea of this entering the metaverse principle back now for what, 40 years almost? Wow, oh my God, that's a long time. So in the movie Tron, a guy got pulled into his computer. In 1992 is when the term the metaverse was coined in the novel Snow Crash by Neil Stevenson. I highly recommend his books and this is the beginning of the cyberpunk era of science fiction where there's often a dystopian virtual world in which we're all inside computers or a lot of the action happens inside computers. And obviously we had The Matrix in 1999, you've all seen it, the new Matrix movie is coming out soon. I already said that if Earth is in a really bad shape and the aliens are providing you food and drink and keeping you in this wonderful virtual world, I would just ask to have to get building control over it so that you can create stuff in that world. Why not? Why have the aliens create everything for you when you can create stuff yourself? I mean, that's the main thing that The Matrix was missing is like individual creativity and world creation, world building. So if we had that whole setup would have been great. And I would like to see if they do that in the next movie, but I kind of I kind of don't expect much. Ready Player One basically took the movie Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory and put it into a virtual world where though aces is basically like a 3D version of Second Life and the guy who runs though aces decides to leave it in his will to whoever solves a puzzle, basically an in-world puzzle, which is an awful way to do corporate succession planning. Just as Willy Wonka's method of finding a successor was just like ridiculous. And in this movie, as in many kind of things that are set in the virtual world, things that happen in the virtual world affect the real world. Like you have to solve something in world in order to affect something that's actually happening in your life. And I do think that's like a valid approach, but not necessarily the way they did it in Ready Player One. And also the idea of a single monolithic world controlled by one corporate company. Oh, I can't possibly happen. So then comes this year. So this year, if you guys have not seen Zuckerberg's presentation about Meta and you want to watch a horror movie, you go to YouTube and you watch that now. It is the creepiest thing I have seen online. And I've seen a lot of creepy stuff online. So the idea here is that Metaverse is going all in on Facebook is now going to be called Meta. And the Facebook itself is still going to be around, but part of the Meta brand. The Meta is going to be like the umbrella. They're putting 10 billion into Metaverse development. And they're pushing for Metaverse, for their version of Metaverse to be for socializing, for gaming. They plan to have some mind reading capabilities. And they want to use it for business. And Zuckerberg addressed the issue that maybe companies don't want all their users to have to use their Facebook accounts to do work. Maybe this is an issue. So he suggested that the answer to this is to create work profiles for Facebook users, which is the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard. And yes, you do need a Facebook account to use the Oculus Quest headset. It is a ridiculous thing because of the privacy concerns are immense. You can't trust Facebook for anything more than kind of like a secondary marketing effort that you do. Unless you're the smallest possible company, you're not going to rely on Facebook to do your marketing. You might have a page on Facebook, but you're going to have a website, a mailing list, a whole bunch of other infrastructure. Nobody is going to want to have their Metaverse presence be in Facebook. Maybe they might have an event in there for the public or something like that. But the privacy concerns are just enormous. In a virtual world, when you're wearing a headset, the company that's running the virtual world literally can see where you're looking. They can see who you're talking to. I mean, literally every single gesture that you make, every eye blink, every facial expression that you have is being recorded and analyzed and aggregated. And that's just ridiculous. We cannot have that. Please. Okay, a bunch of other news happened. I'm going to go through it a little bit more. So, a huge flood of investment into everything related to the Metaverse. Nvidia's Omniverse has a lot of corporate supporters probably because of the whole Facebook privacy issue. They've got more than 500 firms signed up to this, which is kind of cool. It's still corporate control, but more decentralized, more distributed. The market size is projected for the Metaverse to start exploding next year. A lot of investment in Metaverse-related activities this year. It crossed 10 billion, more than double, nearly double what was raised last year. And there's lots of reasons why we're getting ready to prime time. We've got faster processing, cloud, AI, we've got the bandwidth coming down, the line, especially with 5G. We've got lots of virtual payment systems. And the headsets are slowly getting to the point that it's getting there. Yes, Unity is making big investments in the Metaverse. A lot of companies are. This is a huge thing. Headset sales are up. I'm being urged to hurry up on this. Yes, I love Unity. They do run a lot of the virtual world games and environments right now. And it's, Science Space runs on Unity, one of the platforms created by OpenSim early core developer, Adam Frisbee. Meanwhile, another big trend that's happening is the future workers virtual. 70% of companies are planning to adopt a hybrid work model permanently. 97% of people want some form of remote work. 58% of people would put their jobs if they couldn't work remotely. But there's an 18% drop in team morale and cohesion. We're working from home. And this is something that Metaverse could address because of that feeling of presence and immersion. And I strongly suggest that these companies look at how OpenSim works. Nobody owns the Hypergrid. It's kind of like the World Wide Web with lots of different servers, lots of different viewers. Even have a multi-grid currency like Globetts, kind of like PayPal for another payment platforms for the actual regular internet. We have multi-grid payments in OpenSim. Globetts owns the Globetts platform, but anybody else can set up a similar kind of payment platform. And I kind of wish they would. Globetts had some problems this year. We have a free open source virtual world server that anyone can adapt. We've got the dream grid in the pool. Check out where avatars can travel from grid to grid. We send messages from grid to grid, send announcements. Fully super simple. We need that. We don't have these things right now anywhere. Everything we have now is the privacy issues are and please, guys, invent a VR version of them. I beg you, please, all of you guys out there in the audience here, go on with that. If I can help, just let me know. All right, there's my email address and here's the link to the slides if you want to look at the pretty pictures again later. All right. And they're kicking me to get off the stage. But do you guys want me to take questions? Is there time? I don't think so. Nope, we are at time, but that was fascinating. I do wish you had more time to talk about it all. Thank you, Maria, for an informative and interesting presentation. As a reminder to our audience, you will want to check out conference.opensimulator.org to see what is coming up on the conference schedule. You won't want to miss our next session, which will begin at 2.30 p.m. in this keynote region and is entitled Charonet Creative HQ, Integration of NFTs, AI Art, and POS Blockchain in 3D Immersive Virtual Worlds. Also, we encourage you to visit the OSCC-21 poster expo in the OSCC-Expo-3 region to find accompanying information on presentations and explore the hyper-good tour resources in OSCC-Expo-2 region, along with sponsor and crowd funder booths located throughout all of the OSCC-Expo regions. Thank you again to our speaker and the audience.