 This session, we are happy to introduce a terrific session called Storytelling Tools, Historical Immersion in a Modern Store Region. Our speaker is Galen. Galen is an educator, historian, artist, radio broadcaster, storyteller, empowerment coach, and virtual world builder. Welcome all. Let's begin the session. Thank you. Hi, everyone. Thanks for coming to listen to my story or talk today. I say that because what I'm going to talk to you about kind of oddly enough goes along with some of the theory that you've been listening to. And so I'm going to show you some practical uses of storytelling in a 3D immersive region. And this is a little bit different. This is for those of you who like me might be a little, would we call financially challenged and you need to help fund your own projects. And so that's what I'm going to talk about today. Storytelling is an excellent way to engage visitors in a region that is historical and has to fulfill several types of needs. I encountered this at a time when I couldn't afford multiple regions and one would have to do. So my single region went to work, doubling as an immersive historical region as well as a store for both historical and modern objects. The challenge was in melding authentic medieval objects in their historical setting with sellable objects that were popular, but not authentic or even medieval. Today I will talk about ways in which I worked with or overcame these obstacles in my regions on different platforms. Delandria Rising is the one you see here and that is in Kitely and Delandria Isla is in sign space. The time traveling avatar lands into Delandria Rising Arrival Grove and that's what you see here. In this image you can see the teleport doors on the left and right, the region map and the gate in the distance. The medieval setting is to the right of the image and that's down the hill and the slope to the right. Open Simulator often is a built-in parceling system so we can add boundaries, descriptions, streaming audio and lighting variations for each parcel. These tools are useful in telling a story and in setting one parcel area apart from another. I place the medieval setting in the center of the region and set up the store around the perimeter. The About Land tool which you can get by right clicking on the name of the land at the top of your firestorm viewer. This brings up a window with the parcel description. Here it explains to the visitor why they are not immediately in a medieval setting nor do they immediately meet role players or NPCs. Travelers arrive safely here it says, hidden from the curious eyes of medieval residents. Search for signs of the history and stories of this region. Be careful to blend in. Failure to do so may alter the awareness of those who live here and our history. As the visitor looks around they may decide to use the teleport doors to visit the monastery to the left or the relaxation circle to the right. One is historically immersive, one is not. So the warning in the description is a teaching tool as well as a clue to part of the story. This map is a wonderful region teleport map tool. This one by Fritigern Gothly. You can see the white lines on the top down view which at a glance will show the astute traveler the parcels around the region and the perimeter. You can get the map and the parcel boundaries by using the mini map tool and you can look at it. If you want to in the bottom of your viewer, here it's shown inside the red square at the bottom of this image. Right click and ask it to show you parcel boundaries but not objects. I enlarged the image to nearly full screen, took a screenshot and then edited it to add the labels of certain region areas. You can get the script and a note card in the box in front of me which I'm about to put out or at this link and let me just put that box out here and you can buy this box for zero OS. Should the curious traveler walk to and through the gate, they enter the store. The gate is not medieval, in fact it's Victorian so it would not be appropriate to place it inside the medieval area. The hat would like to be medieval but it's more in the fantasy realm so it cannot be in the historical setting either. It can, however, be purchased within world currency to wear inside the gate. The music changes from the agrival grove to the shopping path, signaling the transition from the arrival grove to the story of the lost merchant's trail. The store items are carefully placed along the trail around the region. They mark the boundary and help to retain the immersion of the historical center. The new parcel has its own description and this one explains why the medieval villagers would not enter the perimeter trail. Students or visitors who come to role play as medieval residents will have been asked to abide by the canon of the story. Once a favored route for merchants and pilgrims, it says, the trail is now used only by time travelers. Recent storms and earthquakes devastated areas around the perimeter of the world. All seems calm now but residents would not approach the trail for fear of ghosts. Regular visitors arrive in a time warp area and are free to explore since the medieval villagers or NPCs cannot see them. The trail is designed to draw the traveler along it with interesting items to interact with and to buy. The traveler can see the medieval setting and there will be way markers on the path describing what they see at a particular vista. If the traveler has parcel boundaries, tools turned on, they can see the edge of the trail as they walk. You can see that here, the trail is all along the perimeter. The peasants, of course, and the medieval villagers cannot see this because, well, they're not time travelers. We're going to visit one specific area along the Lost Merchants Trail to look at a few more storytelling tools in Open Simulator. For just a moment, we're back at the Arrival Grove and have clicked on the area in the Red Square, the Abandoned Cottage. One of the fun tools in Open Simulator is the Object Description Text Box in the Edit Tool. Most objects allow a visitor to see the title of the object and the short description and you right-click on an object or in a Mac, I think it's alt-right-click or alt-click to bring this up. Most, I've added a bit of the story to every object that I've placed for sale along this perimeter. This one says, Delandre Venat, old, wise and dead oak, and the description, even the strongest of dying near the rifts growing in the age of Bottegan Teyer, one life given to find protection for all. And for those of you who are Ururu or Mist fans, you'll recognize a little bit of the Dene language and so there's another story out there somewhere that's being written. Every dead tree in this tree collection has a reason for being dead. The Abandoned Cottage has a reason for being there as well. So if you've never found objects descriptions to be interesting, check them out along the trail. Each object collection contains a note card that explains how the items came to be in their locations. The story here ties the objects in the ghostly hollow to the historical setting around it, and also to other stories in other virtual worlds. In each note card is a bit of authentic history, a bit of item description, and a bit of pure story. In this way, the story rationalizes the store and the non-historical items in it. I don't have time to read them to you, so the examples for the dead trees and the abandoned cottage are here in the box, as are the descriptions. They just show you how I have the story set up and how it sort of merges into the explanation of how to use the items when you buy them. Some of the story is only in the note card that comes with the foresail collections, making them more valuable, I hope. One other area in this region is completely set off from the main land mass. It's the meditation area where I sometimes hold relaxation sessions. To make this work, I separated a section of land into Isla Mystica, an Avalon-type mysterious island. The medieval residents believe that if they enter the beautiful isle, here you can see it's under construction, they will never return. We haven't done enough research to find out whether that is actually true, but we take advantage of it. It provides another category of time-traveling activities, and another store is there. You can relax well hidden from the medieval people, or you can walk through the teleport door in red, you can see the rectangle around it, to the garden house Skybox store above. And there you can see the garden houses and the vendors, and there's another door that takes you back down. Don't worry that your walk along the trail will be observed very easily. The medieval residents see this view from their fields, the healthy crops, the trees, and the monastery above. You can see the red roof there, that's the monastery chapel. And you can see this chapel, by the way, in Expo Region 2, booth 6. I have just the chapel set up there so you can go inside and see how it was laid out. At any rate, this is their concern, not the trail. And others would probably not believe them anyway, and tell them to stay off the trail. Okay, let me move on. A fairly new platform called Sign Space presents a different set of tools and obstacles for the indie educator artist looking for ways to finance a project with an in-world store. The allocation of space, land, and acreage is quite different, as are the tools. For example, land, square footage, and sign space regions can be 20 times larger than one-in-open simulator, and the larger land still uses fewer resources. However, most of us like to fill up our land, and the megabyte size becomes the limit, or I should say up to gigabyte sizes. The download size for the visitor can become very large indeed. The marshalling is still under development, and lighting across same-region areas not so easily modified in world. The demarcations of the historical and modern settings are harder to define, unless land masses are physically separated. For me, this is no more or less difficult, just different. What's the same for me is that I want more space than I can afford, because I still need multiple functions from the land. More open spaces means more money. But once again, I make a single-region-do-double-duty. My regions in sign space are much younger than an open simulator, and the platform tools improved regularly, so I'm constantly experimenting. Only the monastery chapel is in the medieval region right now, so my examples will be in Delandria, Isla. Built on the game engine unity, sign space makes use of a powerful quest system to immerse the visitor in a story. Transition smoothly from history to modern time, I use the quest system as often as do physical distances to merge different functions. I also sculpt the terrain to separate land areas and use bridges and store-vendor objects to create believable boundary markers for students or role-play visitors. Delandria that you see here is an extension of Isla Mystica from Opensim, or from Kitely, and is part of that time travel story. Still, some modern items that I sell in sign space aren't suitable for the region theme, so I still need a method for retaining the immersion of that theme, which is actually relaxation. One helpful tool in sign space is the vendor object. It points the user to my store, and I only need a few of them near different items in the region so that the rest of the look is preserved. Here you can see my NPC showing off her hat, and the sale vendor stands next to her. We can't yet purchase items right from the region itself, so every purchase is done through the sign space marketplace. The vendors point you to the item, my shop, or a category of my shop. As in Kitely, I could make a vendor out of my not very medieval hat or another hat that I sell. Here is a behind-the-scenes image of some story creation tools I use in the region. The image shows just a bit of the Unity editor, and the region as it appears there. The scene in the center looks the way it does in the live world. Below that is the quest canvas, showing two of the many steps possible that move the user through the story. The red rectangles show how to edit object, the rock in the region there, as the quest NPC for the user to click on and begin the story quest. The quest NPC object, here shown as the rock, you can see the little hand just barely there. This starts the story when you click on it and the quest for the user. This next image shows how the beginning of the story can look. The user can continue with it or wait for another time. Then there is the dialogue between the storyteller object and the user. The user, oh, you can, I'm sorry, you can choose the colors and transparency of the dialogue and whether it will give out hints on the right side of the viewer. Leaning against the tree in front of me is a sticky created by my colleague Julian 3D. These stickies work live in world and make for great hint signs, note cards, and communication notes around the entire region. You may or may not recognize the old wise and oak from the ghostly Hallows in the Lost Merchants Trail in Kipley. More of that story is told here in Delandre Isla. As you can see from the dialogue, this part of the story is about medieval science and the theory of the four elements of Earth's creation. In the next image, you'll see that I'm collecting items as part of a quest. I don't have to collect them or even finish the quest, but neither will I get to hear the next part of the story if I don't. Hopefully, the story is compelling enough so that the visitor continues. As they traverse the region looking for those elusive collectibles, they also see me pointing to my hat or a vendor next to a tree or other interesting things. Once the quest is over, maybe they'll go back and see what my vendor wants to show them. I won't spoil the story for you by showing you more collectibles, but I will give you a URL so you can get to either world, Delandre Rising in Kipley or Delandre Isla in Science Space, or you can use each sign up separately. Do say hello and give a nod to the old oak. Maybe this isn't actually dead after all. One last thing I want to share, Delandre Worlds will continue in these two platforms and will also become part of Horizon Worlds, a project that is designed to bring you teaching and training worlds in yet another unique way. You can bet another nun's monastery will be there and the villagers will be there too. Stay tuned for more about this project. I'm excited about another new story and store to meld. Thank you for listening. I don't know if we have time for any questions, but if we do, I'm happy to take them. Any questions from our audience? Let me take a look here. So let's see, there was some. I just see your chat, and I had a couple of whispers, but they were asking about the setting. Any questions from our audience? Let's see. But also, there's applause, and thank you. Those were wonderful scenes. And it's interesting to see the comparison and the two strategies you use between the two different spaces. There's a deep connectedness between them. Yes, and that's where the storytelling actually comes in, and I realized that a lot of the tools that I was showing you are very common. What perhaps is not quite so common is the way that I figured out how to use them because I had to make this region do, it actually does triple duty, and a lot of indie artists and educators, you know, it may not seem like a lot of money to rent a space and build it yourself and do everything yourself, but you know, things pile up and they accumulate. And I wanted to share this with others who might actually be in the same situation that you can use these very common tools that we have in both Open Simulator and in Signspace to do a lot of work for you. And sometimes you just need to sit down and think, OK, if I'm a villager, you know, because I'm a medieval historian, you know, this is what part of my training is being used for, is sitting down and saying, OK, if I'm a medieval villager, I would not go into the Lost Merchant's Trail unless I was either very brave, very inebriated, or very ignorant. And so it's safe for me to say to the traveler, you know, stay inside the trail, listen to the story, tell the story, and then when you go out into the medieval world, either dress the part, that's part of what they would, you know, that we would tell them, or don't talk to them, because they will run away from you and cry ghost, and you'll traumatize them for life, you know, that sort of thing. There's a comment from Gamisa. You have no preference between Signspace and Open Sim then, because he says, I perceive sign as developing more now for you. That's a difficult question at this point. For me, the aesthetics of the region are very, very important, and unity as a game engine does allow me to develop a region that looks exactly the way that I want it to look. Signspace itself is still developing, and so it's something of a learning curve to start building and get something up to speed, say, within a week. Now, they do have a tool that actually allows you to convert an Open Sim or directly to a region in unity. There are specific tools that will help you, and people that will help you walk through those steps, so that is really cool. I haven't done this with this region, because I actually started over with the medieval region with the nun's chapel in their dormitory, because that, of course, is what's most important to the nuns. And so there are things about both of them that are very functional and useful, and Open Sim has been around longer. For aesthetics, I think unity would have to be my choice, though. I hope that answers your question. I'm not trying to be vague, but. Thank you, Galen. And thank you for a fantastic presentation.