 Hello, thank you for coming to my talk. So today I'll be talking about XR and WebXR, how it goes beyond games and 360 videos. I would like to start by introducing myself. It seems that the display is broken, but I work as a sysad mean for collective 68. Oh, there we go. And I am part of the tech speaker cohort since the winter of 2017. I don't know what's happening. Anyway, so my hobbies are contributing to open source projects, one of which is Citizen, which is privacy-aware city navigation. I like to watch at least one season of Family Guy a day. I should probably stop doing that, but I can't watch any other TV show. And I want to study for genetic engineering. So since the display is broken, I had a joke about how I love using GIFs in my presentation. So I started getting involved with open sourcing the year 2015. There was this event in Tirana called Mozilla Weekend, and I didn't really think much of it at first. In fact, I'm going to tell you a secret. I wanted to work for Apple, and I thought what better way to gain knowledge than to gain it for free. But please don't tell anyone I said that. So obviously this is not what happened. I got introduced to the open maps hacker space, which is the hacker space in Tirana. And I got to be the guy who installed software on our servers, which is probably why most of the time they weren't working. But since I was only 14 years old, I got to experiment a lot with different communities, starting from being a Wikipedia editor to NextCloud. But being part of Mozilla has always been a constant part of my life. And I started getting more involved by speaking and organizing in various events. One of the first events that I talked at was Mozilla Academy No. 5. And I think my first talk had something to do with Firefox iOS. So let me tell you a story. I was born in Duras in the year 2000. It's a kickback city. We have access to the Adriatic Sea. However, it's not really advanced technologically wise. But when I was three, my family got a computer. And it was the most fascinating thing that I had ever seen. I used to play so many games daily. But when I turned five, we got internet. And this was a game changer. At that point, I realized that this TV-like thing, so back then we had CRT monitors, and it was bigger than I was at the time, I realized that I can use this to talk to other people, to talk to my cousins. And that's where I made the correlation that the computer is not just for entertainment. It's a tool that can be used in many different ways. So let's talk about XR. XR is defined as an umbrella term, which includes virtual reality, mixed reality, and augmented reality. But I think that it's a tool. And a tool, as I said, for the computer can be used in many more different ways than just playing games and watching 360-degree videos. So what alternative uses are there? Well, I know this isn't a great way to start a list of useful applications, but one alternative use is the military. And it will make sense why I put the military first later on. But there's also medicine, which is the best example of how awesome XR is, and it's currently the most used and researched alternative way for XR. And that is followed closely by education. And there are so many different ways that XR can be used that I don't think we have a lot of time to get into today, but you can ask me later on. So let's start with the military. I'm going to explain the usage of XR in the military by talking about examples and categories in which it's being used. So for examples, we have the aviation combined... Hold on. We have the aviation combined arms tactical trainer aviation, which is a mouthful. And what it is, it's an XR way to learn how to fly a helicopter, a military helicopter. And this has proven to be very effective cost-wise, because to fly a helicopter, you need a lot of fuel, and since a lot of people are going to be trained, it's not really that cheap. The program has gotten so good that it offers realistic environmental factors like dirt, smoke, snow, and so many more. But another way that it's being used is mission rehearsal exercise. And ICT leaders project is another project. And these projects allow people to train on everyday life, when being part of the military. And they play out as a game. They both have stories with the only difference between the two of them, being that MRE is more AI characters, has more AI characters, while LP sort of plays like a game with multiple endings, depending on the actions that you take. There's also war visualization, which helps soldiers on the field to see who the teammates are, and it helps the officers to know where the team is placed. And this is being more easy to implement, because technology is getting better every day, and we have more powerful devices in small size. But it's also used in planning and organizing. And one example of planning and organizing is that officers can have this office which is in VR or AR, and they can store their documents there. And when I heard about that, I immediately thought of Mozilla Hubs, because you can have meetings with other people in a virtual space and you can share your screen, you can share your docs, or whatever you want to. So in terms of categories, all the examples that I gave fall in either a training situation, a hybrid situation, and there are operations which are other than war or real-war situations. So the current progress is that development of XR is still being developed. It has been developing since the year 2005, and I know that war and military is a complex situation, but it's very interesting to see how XR is helping and how this field is helping the development of XR. As I said, war is very complex and it leaves a lot of soldiers with long-lasting side effects, and this is where we get into the applications of XR in medicine, because it has been proven to be effective in treating PTSD, but also ADHD or pain control, OCD, and much more. So I'm going to talk very briefly about what PTSD is. I am not a therapist, I'm still in high school, I haven't gone to college, but PTSD is shortly when someone occurs a trauma and the effects of that trauma last for a very long time. One interesting fact is that the phenomenon seems to appear more when the trauma was caused by another human, so let's say war for example. So far the treatments have been cognitive behavioral treatment and prolonged exposure, and the way that this work is that the person who is suffering from PTSD comes into contact with objects that trigger this panic situation, but they do this in a controlled environment, and this way they can process their emotions and work through the issue. Now the problem with this is that so far all the patients had to imagine the objects that will cause them panic and the brain is fascinating and will straight out refuse to remember certain objects, or it will remember them differently, and this is where XR really helps. Before I go and present how XR is being used, I would like to say that you should not try this at home. If you know someone who has PTSD, don't just give them an XR headset and say, hey, check this out. So the first study was done as back as in the year 1997, and it was on soldiers who returned from Vietnam. The developers built these realities based on a game which based its resources on actual Vietnam, and they made it so that you can fill the city with civilians, fake civilians, vehicles, and one interesting feedback that they got from the patients was that they wanted to have guns because they felt very unsafe and unnatural. Of course, the guns did not fire. This was not a revenge fantasy, but it was used in therapy. And in terms of results, in a small sample of 18 people, 18 showed and maintained improvements, and I do need to say that research still is being made and we need a lot of research because when you have small numbers you are going to get dramatic outputs. Another way that it's being used is ADHD, and the treatment for ADHD so far has been either meds or some sort of therapy, but meds need a long time to give effect. And for example, right-ling, which is one med for those who have ADHD, has been shown to increase tenses of kidney cancer. And XR is being used as an alternative way to that. Back when the study was first made, I have some stats here. The computer on which it run was 500 MHz of processing power and 256 MB of RAM. I think even my calculator has better spec nowadays. But the study was done in a control group of 10 people and 10 other people who got to receive the XR treatment. And there were a lot of improvements on the group who got to use the XR. So errors of omission were going down from approximately 13 to only 3 and the control group went only from 9.52 to 8.56. In terms of pain management, so a little bit of story, I broke my right hand in September of 2018 and I had to put it in a cast. And I kept the cast for three months and when I removed it I was feeling a lot of pain on my index finger, which was completely stopped from movement. And it would hurt every time I would move it. It would hurt even when I didn't move it. But a friend of mine who for some reason thought that it was funny to slowly touch my finger which was hurting, I noticed that the pain that I felt when someone else was touching it was way lower than the pain that I felt when I was the one provoking it. And the theory for pain management is that pain takes space of your cognitive functions. It takes resources from your brain. And when these resources are not there for pain, you do feel less pain. And this has been used recently. I wrote this article about kids taking vaccinations while wearing VR headsets and it's even been used in patients who have been burned victims. In terms of education, research has shown time and time again that it's easier to get information when you are constantly playing with it rather than just taking it and writing that down. Sometimes this is really easy to do, but other times it's impossible to see two galaxies collide with each other and see the effects that that creates. And this is why XR is being used because it's way easier to see that. And it's been used in learning new information but also in getting trained in that, in getting trained. So for example, the experiments, the uses that were made in war with the LP project. And let's start with learning. So at first we have subatomic particles, which are these really small particles that you can't really see. And even if your school has supplies, has microscopes, it's kind of hard for 20 to 30 people to see all that while also taking the lesson on the same day. And it's way more easy to provide 30 XR headsets than 30 microscopes. Zooming out of that we have molecules and XR is being used there to see the bonds that molecules create with each other. And you can see how those bonds change when, for example, you change to the state of the matter, you melt it or you freeze it. But then, as I said, we have these massive systems of planets and stars. And there was this game, I say game in parentheses, because it was called Universe Sandbox, and you could play around with the physics of the universe. For example, you could replace our sun with a tennis ball. And there are VR alternatives to that, and you can get even more immersed in the experience. It's even been using oceanography and zoology, but I did not have a lot of information about that, so I cannot explain that further. And as I said, in terms of training, there's the training on how to use a helicopter, but also alternative ways like learning how to ride a car, for example. And even surgeons, because surgery is a very difficult thing, and it's very costly to teach surgeons how to perform operations, and it's also risky because they are going to do the surgery on a real patient. And it's being used in transportation and medicine, in the military, and in many other different aspects. In fact, XR goes way further than just this. It's being used in sport and automobile manufacturing, and even in courtrooms or museums. Finally, someone made museums seem like so much fun to me, and I do plan to attend a lot more museums now. So how does all of this connect to WebXR? All of the examples where I didn't really go into detail about are they WebXR or are they XR? And the reason is because nearly all of them are WebXR. They are web-based because the web is so much more accessible. Nowadays, in a traditional XR, and it is way cheaper why buy a whole headset to get the XR experience when I already have some of the computational power for that. I mean, technology has come a lot of way. Nowadays, a potato performs better than my first computer. So this is why WebXR is really taking the field. And I would like to invite all of you to join the alternative use cases of XR. Let's make the world a better place. Let's develop more XR content. Even if it's games or 360-degree videos, getting the word out there that WebXR is really powerful nowadays and it's very easy to create is very important. So I want to thank you for attending my talk. And you can find the slides and the materials that I used over at budini.xyz.phosem2019. I can tell that the slides there will work. And I wanted to answer some questions if anyone has. Yeah, maybe we can also tweet the link after the talk. Absolutely. So yeah, questions. Yes, coming, coming, coming. So great slides, thank you. Thank you. Just kidding. Well, I'll check online. Yes. And plus I'm going to be that guy who is going to make a comment. Not a question, but that gives time to everybody else to think. Just to say that I work for UNICEF and we do VR and AR innovation funds. So that's a very concrete case of using kids thanks to VR and AR for education. So yes, you don't have to do just entertainment. VR and AR can be used for good. So if you have ideas or suggestions, please also come help. And yes, it's also based on a frame and most of the tools. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you. So any questions now? You've got more time to think. Don't be shy. Okay. Okay. Well, if you think of a new question later on, I'm going to be around FOSM today and tomorrow, and you can find me on social media. I was going to put my username there, but... Oh boy. I think we need to wear the glasses to see the VR... Yeah, it's probably that. Okay. Thanks so much.