 Hello, everyone, and welcome to the 12.30 to 1.30 p.m. session of the 2023 Open Simulator Community Conference. In this session, we are pleased to introduce the presentation in conversation, Mal Burns Talks with Tissue. Our speakers are Mal Burns and Tissue. Mal has used virtual environments for nearly a decade or more and is concerned about user interfaces in general and has a wealth of media and design experience behind him. Tissue works at the intersection of design, research, technology, and market to develop innovative products, leveraging AI and spatial computing for entertainment, games, AVs, robotics, intelligence, augmentation, and augmented ecosystems. Please check out the website found at conference.opensimulator.org for speaker bios, details of this session, and the full schedule of events. This session is being live-streamed and recorded, so if you have any questions or comments, send your tweets to at OpenSimCC with the hashtag pound OSCC23. Welcome, everyone. Let's begin the panel. Well, thank you, Leah. And I would say just before we start that if you have any questions, you can direct them at Leah and she'll forward them to us as we go along, although she'll be looking at general chat as well. So, yeah, you can kick on over and get the window up so you can message her. Right. Okay, well, it's very good to be here. It's the third time I have this weekend, of course. And originally, I was going to do a future panel here. I'm taking some people from OpenSim's earlier days and students today and looking at the future. But at the end, we'd have been here for days trying to do that. So I was in touch with an old friend here, really, to shoot and thought, well, she is ideal. And she, for example, co-founded the All Conference, AWE, with Ori Umbar, isn't it? And even this summer, I've got a film from her doing various panels and things there. And I interviewed about 12 years ago on the program I had there, which I hope to revise someday, called Crossworlds. But all of that set the stage for me, as it were. And I've been chatting with Tish, or yesterday, I think, catching up. And there really is so much to catch up on. So what I'd like to do first is go back to the early days, but not for long, and then move into the new exciting times we live in now, really. So Tish, basically, let's put it in your world. I know you started in film, and then you moved into technology. And you were one of the first, you and I, for example, used to teleport out of Second Life and into OpenSim, because it's here by the end. How many people can say they did that? Tell us more about what you remember those days. Yes. And just, I mean, what was interesting is I got into film actually through technology. That was my ticket in. I was basically early in the days of computer animation. So I probably wouldn't have been able to get into film if I didn't take the technology path. But that was very, very, very fundamental, in a way, because at the time I got into film, it was about layering motion control photography, so you could layer effects on the top of real worlds, have spaceships flying and have time warps and things like this. And so it meant that the start of my career was really looking at the future, like, what would the world look like? Because that was usually our clients would say, well, we're working, the film is set in 2050, and how would this look in 2050, right? And so it's like augmented reality on film, layering effects, so they blend seamlessly with real world scenes. That does actually explain a bit about, you know, partly why I haven't been as active in virtual worlds lately. And what I was very, very involved with Second Life and Early Sim in the early, in the OpenSim in the early days, but I'm still excited by OpenSim, by the way. I'm very excited to see how it's grown, fabulous. But just so, you know, the little piece there is that my dream has always been that we should have a seat, you know, that famous spectrum of AR to VR, where you can, you know, go to slide to complete immersion in the virtual world, but you can also slide the other way where the real world is more present than you present, presenting an augmented view. I have always believed that should be seamless. And just again, this, I think, just to frame this, that was what I was looking at first in Second Life, we would like, and also, this is another huge thing, I believe the superpower of spatial communications is that it connects us more closely with the real world, right? That actually, now, this is why, when we get to questions, I'm so interested in this community's learning, because obviously, over the last decade, virtual worlds have not broken that, that this vision of the seamless spectrum between AR and VR has not been something that has been possible to be realized. And actually, I think virtual worlds found their niche and some of their biggest successes in their isolation from the real world, right? But this was the whole debate, wasn't it, Mal, and Secondly, you remember in Second Life, I was always wanting, always like upset that the messaging in and out was choked, because it had to be to sort of make the experience good for the in-worlders. And, you know, it's just, this is my fundamental interest is really having computing, which virtual worlds and all of a sudden reality of like a serious part of, not, and this is again, we have questions on this, not diminish our amazing bandwidth as human beings engaged in this incredible, you know, real world. That's my real, you know, real interest, because I, you know, I mean, and so I did not, I have not spent, I mean, I'm very interested in some of the community, some of the things that they think about the future of people think about the future of VR, because when you listen to me, you know, Mal knows this, don't you? That and you could talk perhaps about some, you know, you saw this too, because you were involved with the IBMers and doing the Wimbledon thing in Second Life. But that isn't the way things have developed as far as I know, although Mal told me, people are, I mean, you told me there is an open simulator that is really working on a simulation use case, because I was, that was always very prime to me, but is the much sort of open? Well, open simulator is a sort of distant cousin of the internet engine. It doesn't use havoc and that stuff, but we share a viewer, so there's a lot of similarities, but we've got things like non-playing characters and switching, which is the Second Life doesn't have, because it seems huge, it has to limit what it can do in its walls, guards, it can sort of explode. But the thing I did mention to you, I think, because I can't remember when you were last here, whether it existed, but I know, I know you remember Krista Lopez or Lopes, I think, I always go wrong, she mentioned the hypergrade. In fact, I saw it demonstrated oddly enough in Second Life at the top. Interesting. It was a sort of schematic with 3D layers showing how the hypergrade worked, and at this time it was a top layer, a bottom layer, and a middle layer, and you could go from one point to the other without going through the middle. That was sorted after a few years. But it means that although all the goods aren't using open sims based software, you know, they're all separate. Some can be like Second Life, some can be far, far removed from that model. But when they want to be, they can all be connected, as most people here know, about the hypergrade. It makes just to a grid and another location on that grid as easy as a simple teleport in Second Life. Second Life takes you to locations on Second Life, but here we can go to location and state which grid we want to go to. So we've already got a sense of interop. And I always view this platform as a template for a metaverse, but it's very particular. You can't plug other things into it. And that, you see, that's the interesting thing. You see, I actually agree. I mean, okay, maybe frame my difficulty with the term metaverse. I mean, I say this with great, I mean, I'm very attached to this spatial computing community and VR community and AR community. It's been my whole career. And I'm equal, you know, I definitely are pretty unhappy with the damage I've seen to this community in the last hype cycle around the term metaverse, right? Yeah. And I Yeah, I mean, because essentially, I mean, and I think this is something for this community, we now, you know, now to obviously move past its ridiculous situation in a way. But I mean, to be honest, trying to sort of muster a sort of, what we call it a revolution in tech around a dystopian term like the metaverse. I mean, where would that go? It's like, that's what I never have understood about this whole recent cycle, hype cycle is, and I think this is the real question, because some of the success about a virtual worlds has been in the sort of dystopian idea, because the real world's so awful, that you a virtual world would be a better place to be all the time. That's the metaverse paradigm. That is snow crash, that is ready player one. Right. But it's, I don't always have to know it's true, you know, because one thing that annoys me is, you know, you go to visit a sim or something, not more in second life than open sim, you know, you suddenly find you're going to get, I forget what the phrase is, like killed or something, it's damages enabled and people are role playing zombies and they're role playing dystopias. Yeah, it's not, you know, more so than the platform maybe is if you see what I mean. And this I think is the real, the real challenge for this community, I think, because remember we are in, I mean, this is the problem after experiencing that crazy hype cycle with metaverse and meta and all of this stuff, right. People like feel sort of everything's hype. So now, I mean, but there are real transformations in tech, they happen rarely. But when they happen, everything changes. And we are, I mean, this is not a hype cycle about AI. This is something seriously new that a lot of us have been waiting for a long time. And the way I like to describe what's happening with generative AI, and you can experiment yourself with the prompts and see if I'm even a prompt engineering level, you can understand this if you're clever. But these are essentially, we have a universal solvent universal translator between all kinds of symbolic systems, not just between humans and machines as we see with these, you know, text, text driven interactions with generative AI, but probably some of you have seen Google's vision of Gemini. But it goes even further than that. And this is, it's not just a new one, new UI. And this has always been a challenge for AR and VR when it's been presenting itself to the world is, UIs are not where, you know, big disruptions happen. They, you know, it's much more happens in a much more fundamental level. This I put in the bag of the internet, PCs, now generative AI. So I mean, everyone in tech, and that's why I'm a little, I'm a little, I want to encourage the AR and VR communities, everyone, everyone to think about what this, what this transition transformation we go through means for the future of AR VR because, you know, you can't really guess you can put your, you can just sort of, no tech disappears, like radio disappears with TV, you know, I'm not curious that you, one of the words you mentioned describing, you know, AI a minute ago was solvent. No, like a glue, and now see, well, yeah, do you think, you know, that AI could be the solution to the disparity between platforms at the moment, could it write code is a glue? Well, our worlds have come together, for example, rather than glue, glue, and it's interesting. So interesting, you picked up on the word, because I didn't want to say glue, because it's more profound than that. That's why you solve them. But solvent sounds. So why you solvent? Is it, it dissolves the barriers of communication between humans and machines, machines, using different St. Lobby languages, nature, animals who use different languages, it dissolves that. It's not really the, it's way more profound than the bridge, you see, and I think that's, that was the problem with a lot of that's why the metaverse thinking of sort of which really focused around interoperability between a virtual world paradigm, which has been done here, actually. Yeah, it did us a descriptive concept. In fact, that's where was pulled from. And, you know, in Second Life Days, when we used that word, if we weren't talking about the Snow Crash version, we were talking about our own version, and we thought Linda Nouse was the center of the universe, we didn't see the wall back then. Then we escaped, you know, but it's actually said it's a bit like the web, web one was about information and sharing and stuff like that and, you know, opening up the world and democratizing information, basically. But web two came along and it became, eventually it became what we call social networking, although I prefer to use the expression anti-social network, because it locks you in and takes you away from socializing after time. And now, of course, we've got AI on this front too, but I think there's a danger that as you mentioned with Meta, for example, you've got companies like Facebook, or Meta as they're called now. You've got Google and, of course, you've got Musk. And, you know, everything, everything YouTube that used to be free now wants to be paid, unless you watch the television version where the adverts aren't like television, they just interrupt what you're listening to. People listening to this broadcast on Google, unless they've got Google, plus whatever it's called, they may get an advert that cuts into this talk. It doesn't just delay the talk, it cuts into it. And it seems to me that it's almost a monopolization thing, but all the big companies are taking over that vision. And you and I, I know agree on the people-centric side of this, you know, we don't really want to see these big companies gradually slowly taking over. You know, look at the files with open AI, and then Microsoft getting involved, and then two separate boards, you know, one was commercial, one was- I'm glad you brought some of these sort of, you know, the sort of, you know, really big problems up early, because before I get to like, rah-rah about the future in AI, and what I think I think it's important to mention, there's a few elephants in the room with AI. And one of the huge elephants for, I mean, my whole AI simulation project in a minute is geared to make our planet healthier and better, right? And yet using AI, which is at the minute, because of, you know, the way we, you know, the way we are building these fundamental technologies, is essentially, it's extreme. I mean, this is one of the most power consuming technologies that you could possibly imagine. And guess what's happening right now? Everyone, you know, I mean, almost every big company night now is training a model for themselves. And that's where the huge power consumption, I mean, so we have a big problem then. Now, I've got lots of things I could talk about that. I spent a lot, I mean, one of the reasons I've really been working, you know, at a sort of, at a level of tech that is, you know, only done by big companies that, you know, is, you know, looking at new approaches to the actual, you know, powering of this tech. And there is an answer for tonics is the answer, but gosh, that really isn't a rarefied world of a few players like Apple. And so that's one elephant, right? And then the other elephant that Mal alluded to is this business structure that most of our technology has developed under where, I used to say, didn't I used to say this back in the day, we've literally only got five computers, we use, you know, the PC was supposed to bring us all in. And essentially, it, you know, boiled down to five computers in the cloud from five companies or six or three or four, however many they're very few. And that is, and then the business model for all of us, it's like, you know, basically has been advertising. And we've seen all the problems of this interest. I mean, I just would say one little nice thing for virtual worlds in that they're isolation, that social isolation from the internet, actually, I think, how virtual worlds not become part of all the bad things. Yes, it's actually, I mean, Linda now will make a big thing about telling us how they're very successful and make a lot of money, but they are barely a pinprick on the map, you know, the same has probably got a larger land area, but in terms of occupation, it seems more, it's even smaller. And there is kind of, as you say, a safety in that, you know, and that's your nervous about jumping in. If you know what it is and what you're doing and can absorb that, I'm escaping from all that. I'm exploring, I want to explore without the hassle of politics and religion and all the things that go with it. And this is why there is, there is a what you call it, they call it a fork in the road now for virtual worlds because it's up to people who love whatever it is you love most about this to get involved with this transformation. It's not that hard, honestly, they've consumerized everything from, I mean, and this is where we have to give thanks to Facebook, Jan Lacoon and Llama and all the open source work they've done has, and if you go to hugging phase, you've got tools and but this fork in the road, you have to, you know, you can't just say this is another hype cycle, it would be like the metaverse in two years, because, yes, always the way people behave around tech is hype cycle, there's all problems with that. But, you know, PCs weren't a hype cycle, the internet wasn't a hype cycle, and nor is this, this change in in how we, how, how models are interacting with everything. And I mean, it's, it's extremely interesting how this happened again for that idea of the universal solvent or is it a universal glue, it's more like a universal language between humans and machines, machines and machines. And so it's really for people in virtual worlds, the big thing that's happened obviously I'm jumping up and down now because finally the technologies I really wanted to be in place when I was in Second Life and early open. I mean, can you imagine it now? Like, you know, basically a few shots from your phone, and you can play, you know, create an interactive spatial scene, which you can also interact, you know, with in language, if you're using a LERF, and you can also now with a, you know, again, you know, generative adversarial network, you can also make this, you don't even have to worry about getting three good poses. I mean, this is, this means that that thing that are, you know, malnourished. I used to go on and on about this really. This is why I started with Ori, did augmented world expo, is I really believe that, you know, that we can use simulation. I spent a lot of time working with Will Wright and that's why I got really inspired. But simulation can be a tool for everyone to understand their world, world better. And, you know, obviously, even though it's a very simple simulation that we have here, certainly people in virtual worlds and augmented reality are in the forefront of where simulation can go. I think, I think also people often mistake, I mean, I love the word simulation, of course, because we're talking about simulations we're living in or performing in or meeting in or even creating it. But there's a lot more to simulation than that. I mean, Fett Roestel, for example, he will try and simulate anything, but it's the mathematics and things of it that, you know, he wants to make sure he knows how universal basic income will work without the faults. So he makes a simulation. It's not about but it's a similar sort of thing. And our friend Ian Hughes, who originally was hoping to join us here, but can't make it. Yeah, he just recently finished a presentation which was really extending that. He said, you know, where he abused the word the metaverse, of course, but he said the metaverse. Yeah, but you brought up a good point, Mal, when Ian and people in IBM and people in Second Lab used the term metaverse. It was actually important because it was a term used to fight the kind of wall garden approach, right? Yes. And that's, it was, you know, how all these terms like, like there's a lot of terms like that that get start off as very negative and then communities reappropriate that. But it's always a, you know, it's always a difficult thing. We there's many other terms that, you know, that it can go wrong. And I think it didn't go badly wrong until this recent hype cycle. And then it went badly wrong because it was, became the metaverse at first. Do you remember also back in the day, there was a scale thing. It was, oh, I wonder what's his name. Another Burns, not Will. Yeah, Will Burns, wasn't it? That's his name. He wrote a book actually where he had the layers and you had sort of, he started at the bottom level was metadata, right? And then it moved up to metaverse, meta worlds, then the metaverse and so on and so forth. But he described what he saw the metaverse as being as basically the fundamental layer was just metadata, very simple. That's where the, everything was a meta something but meta data. Exactly. So it was a really, you know, and I think what was interesting is once it was used by Facebook, you know, in the way they used it and then to promote the, you know, the VR glasses and the legless avatar experience, that's where it went right back to its dystopian thing because after you spent a day in the first early headsets, you felt very dystopian. And, you know, it just It's orientated as well. Yeah, yeah. But this is what the fork in the road is all about, is that really we now, I do think anyone in tech, unless you want to say, okay, you know, even with when television became a thing, radio is still important, I want to stay with radio, even when the PCs became a thing, mainframes didn't go away, even when the internet, you know, became a thing, there were still, you know, islands that didn't, you know, tried to keep themselves separate, right? Oh yeah. But this, you know, that's going to, that's definitely, I mean, I say this, you know, with a little sort of, you know, just caution because the, I mean, it is interesting how the charm of the VR has become its separation to some degree, it's the one place you can go where, I don't know, VR chat was super successful. Why? You can make yourself into a sofa and meet people who sit on you, I mean, these kind of things actually are some of the magic. But, and you could use, I mean, this is why I think people have to think about this fork, because of the new technologies, this sort of universal solvent of the transformers and generative AI, now virtual worlds really can realize my dream that I've had in 15 years now. And this easy integration with the real world and really having a true slider between AR and VR, that's all going to happen because the major obstacles are now in all the major things are in place. Now, that's something obviously, of course I'm all in on that, doing my, you know. I think the technology is going to happen now, I've always made the, I've been going to my visiting Stonehenge kind of analogy, but the idea is you've, you know, you've got a phone, so you can go somewhere, you can enjoy the real world, you can then use your phone to produce an augmented layer, and then that layer can seamlessly move into a simulation layer, which is, you know, it shows us what people would be like at Stonehenge living 2,000 years ago or something. And you're exactly right. You get the gradual transition from the real to the historic, you know, recreation, it's not fantasy, it's just it's the data we have, which of course is more and more all the while. But, you know, we come to the hardware thing, I mean, you've actually mentioned VR a lot, so I don't tend to use the word VR these days because it reeks of what I call helmet land. And, you know, a lot of the leading ways to promote that again, you know, have given up on helmets because... I think, yeah, the good thing about Second Life and Open Sim is they never got tied to that, did they? Yeah, I agree, I'm a helmet and was escaped in both of these paradigms. I quite a clever UI, that's why there's actually, that's very interesting, it's no coincidence that Second Life and Open Sim use this same viewer. But I do think you cannot, if you look at it, because, you know, in early, one of the things that have really kept Open Sim and Second Life as important communities through all the ups and downs and changes in tech is because the tools for creation were accessible to a larger group of people than actually they were even online, like building things with prims that, you know, it was still hard and people became expert craft people and some people just bought them. But the, this shift of how you will generate content, I mean, is massive. I mean, as we speak, you saw Nvidia announce they're putting nerfs neural radiance fields on a chip. The realism that people will expect and in most, you know, in virtual environments, it's not really, I mean, you're right, Helmutland, but this is truly Open Sim is, it's not really, I'd like it to be more of a simulate and have more simulation experiments, but it really is a virtual environment. Well, I have to, that is one question that was coming up with, you know, we had a panel of discussion on the viewer and things yesterday and, you know, the, I'm quite curious, because we talk about plugins, what can you do to modify it so that is the Lindenware and now it's going to separate and things like that. But it does occur to me that in just in the same way, you can bring media on a premium into second life or you can import something from unity as an actual static thing. There must be a whole lot of things that AI will be able to produce that can also be imported into Open Sim to enhance it. And I think, I think there may be a change coming now because it's, we don't know actually what the future is, all we have is our kind of feelings. And voice and chat-driven, chat-driven creation, text-driven creation absolutely are going to be, I mean, if nothing else happens, that's got to be for even to keep your, what you call it, yourself, you know, your value, you're going to have to do, that's the minimum. But I do think it's this decision about where you want to play on this spectrum, that now this sort of real connection to the real, between real and virtual worlds and augmented virtual reality has been enabled. It's fair enough, I think, to say, well, we want to use generative AI in, you know, our virtual world actually in a way that keeps our separation from the real world, but you can still use the generative AI. But these are real, these are real. This is real, a big change happening. I mean, yesterday we had Loan Wolf talking and also Ian Hughes in his presentation touched on this sort of already we can use AIs to terrify our virtual world. Exactly, you know, we don't have to go and get a region or, you know, five by five Sims region. You know, I spent years for the one I've got in here playing around in it because I was manipulating things from the sky and it was such a big area, but now I could actually prompt an AI to produce the entire terrain valleys, hills, rivers, you know, just as you can describe things you want in the painting and it artificially creates that, it can also do the same thing with terrains, you know, it's already learned what a valley is and what a river is, you know, the simplicity. There is, you know, I think these things will be able to slot into opens in, you know, so, but we don't know quite where it would go. But before we get to the first questions, I'd like to move forward because you're doing a lot and I know particularly something that really interested me. I forgot them again. What's the company called Orbital? One of your guests at Orbital. Oh, yes, you can see what I've been doing in the last year. It's really quite, yeah. Yeah, the new project. I like the idea of using AI to generate solutions to the real world problems, the marine marine ecology stuff. Well, you know, that it's really, you know, my dream of using simulations to really address real problems playfully. That's what I would say. I'm not, you know, obviously scientific level huge simulations that run all the time, but they're run from the sort of top of the pyramid as a society. I think this is, you know, these the absolute fundamental tools of simulation for me is prediction. So that you can have a chance to see how things will turn out without wrecking your world or wrecking things. And I feel and the other thing that actually has, you know, stirred me, you know, to sort of focus on a project that is really more about bottom up simulation in the spirit of open sim. This is a bottom up simulation. This is not about, you know, one company deciding to sort of rule the simulation world. It's a negotiation between lots of people and lots of companies. And I think in that sense, as a community, it's really quite exemplary in how we should have, how we should work together because, you know, one of the huge problems now, particularly for people, I think with XR startup, say, is the complete, you know, the way that XR got sort of collapsed into this idea of, you know, helmet land and Metta's idea of the metaverse. And, you know, the problem is now what we always were really pushing back against in virtual worlds is that one company or one, you know, that one ring to rule them all, right. And unfortunately, right, that's been one of the hardest things to really unwrap and change. And again, a bit like the whole metaverse hype cycle, one of the best attempts at this was to reinvent economies outside advertising. Unfortunately, a bit like the metaverse, we had this whole sort of thing, we've had this whole thing with NFTs where because of its implementation under a lot of fiefdoms, right, it actually essentially hasn't produced an idea of a new economy. In fact, you know, it's been quite, it's been quite, it's been useful, you know, in some circumstances, but by and large that hasn't worked out because, again, I won't use the term metaverse, but if I'm use more like an example, this wonderful open sim community, which is very diverse and has lots of different companies, different individuals, right. What would be so empowering would be to be part of the larger economy, you know, economies of scale. I wonder about that because, as you know, Rosdell's one of his projects is FairShare. Right. Virtual emulation of universal this is a benefit, universal basic income and, you know, and he actually says that that's the inspiration for the the Linden dollar, oddly enough, because you get a stipend because of the problem there is you have to be a paying user in the second life in the first place to qualify for the stipend. You can't just go in and get a stipend, so that's my mistake. But, you know, he even asked me, so who would I talk to in open sims to get that working? A few of us commented, sort of, you've got to understand, there is no centralized body here. We are totally decentralized and mostly devs are volunteers as well. So you can't just walk in here and say, how do I plug in the FairShare system. And also, of course, the actual commercial grids that are part of the hybrid green will probably then moan, you know, well, we don't want this to spend their money with us, you know, if I pay that, you know. But you're right, you know, the world is facing a system where we have to have a new kind of economy. Yes. Where distribution globally is fair. It's actually in the real world too, which is quite interesting. It's not just, and, you know, I'm not, you know, I do think one thing, it's a bit like the bad experience we all had with the latest hype on the metaverse, the bad experience a lot of people had, for some people had a very bad experience with the, you know, new approaches to economies and blockchain and NFTs and all the rest of it. But that doesn't, you know, we've learned a lot. I do think, you know, that these, I mean, I did actually see the Linux Foundation mentioned this, the, you know, they're still using the term metaverse, which I don't think is a good idea. But, you know, there are groups trying to work on a truly you know, open to, you know, open economy driven by NFTs and blockchain and, you know, crypto and all that. But it could, you know, you can, these things mature. And just because it's been rather awful and people use the paradigm basically to scam people, or they weren't scamming, it wasn't everyone who scammed. I haven't, I don't have much faith in the digital currencies in that sense. Because it certainly not perform well for our society. Yeah, at the end of the day, something that starts as an idea, just gets integrated to, you know, with the banking system and everything else that's already there, it doesn't really provide an alternative. It's just an electronic coin, is it worth instead of a coin? I do agree. Now, I mean, just like, I think, virtual worlds are going through a rethinking, all of that is going, is going to be rethought. And this again, this is why I would just say, I mean, unless you've got a very specific plan to not be part of the generative AI thing, it's really important to dig in. Because, wow, I mean, I don't know any, I mean, forget about the virtual worlds. I mean, we could do a hands up. Is the anyone here who hasn't noticed how generative AI has changed the whole work scene? Yeah, I'm going to shortly ask there about any questions, but you can do this thing where you can, you can answer the questions we put to you. We're just a Y for yes and an N for no. So should we try that experiment? Yeah, yeah, it has any, I mean, forget the virtual worlds for the minute. Does anyone, have anyone not noticed? Because the future is always unevenly distributed. So it's not about, if you haven't noticed, that's not a problem. But has anyone not noticed how generative AI it's going to change every single idea we have about work? I mean, it's already changed everything I do, by the way. I mean, it was impossible not for it not to, but I would be an unusual example because obviously I'm, the future is unevenly distributed and I've been going after the future. But anyway, does that, what are people's thoughts on that? You could do a yes, no. I mean, just a simple thing. Okay, that's not a really... If it's too hard, don't worry. I can't see Jordyns at the moment. So maybe they will do the same. We driven them up. Maybe we driven them up. I can't see a few of them. Just think about a future they don't like or something. Yeah. And there have there been any questions you've been picking up on? We've got about 10 minutes. Well, we had some, but your timing was good. You were, you were kind of talking about those topics as the questions came in. Lisa had one that I pasted it in earlier. I don't see. Here it is. It was the words community of users doesn't seem to apply to helmet world users, does it? And you just happened to start talking about communities and helmet people. And then I asked the question, AI may prevent us from having another hypes. Oh no, James out loud said that he was teasing. I asked if we think of the metaverse as the connected 3D web, in other words, like a family of technologies that different than our current web or streaming video web. Have you followed Will Wright's work in using and he's he was using non fungible tokens and characterizing I guess Foxel avatars or unique avatars for that game system that he then wants to be able to take them to other worlds. Other well, just an update on that because I didn't work with work for years. Yeah, that's what you hear a little about. Yeah. Well, okay, as far as I know, they've actually abandoned that NFT paradigm and partnered with New Manta and AI company. So that's exactly where that went. And I think that's that's sort of exactly what I'm saying here is that you know, it's not that that whole moved to new economies from blockchain NFTs was intrinsically bad. It was more the way it turned out just wasn't useful. So they've actually, as far as I know, I can't speak for them, but they've actually moved away from that. I saw one tweet saying that and they have now partnered with a large AI. It's one particular approach company New Manta. You can Google all this. But but so so just to go back to your question, you know, because Will I would say Will and I now really do. I mean, we still believe in the same a lot of the same things. I think I'm just much more heavily doubled down on the idea that the real beauty of this technology comes when it helps us understand and communicate with the real world better. That's I want to talk to the animals. I want to hear what the glaciers have to say to me in their language. I want to be part of that world a lot. And I think that's why I'm saying there's this spectrum and people, you know, if you go fully into the sort of game world, right, you're going to have less of that. If, you know, and if you're, I always buy I've always, you know, ever since my experience actually working with World for four years is I always want to make the world more playable, you know, that's that's my mantra. And I have the wonderful phrase gamification. Oh, God. Yes. That's another thing of like, you see, this is everything has a kind of dark and a light. The dark side of making the world more playable is gamification. We need new economies, blockchains and NFTs, definitely, you know, were kind of a spark. But the way it turned out with these kind of, you know, basically lots of little fiefdoms with their own currencies that they could, you know, escalate and, and, you know, with the value of things with using, you know, all kinds of hype and the various. I think a lot of the phrase interop can be interpreted today. You know, you talk about fiefdoms, which is fine, because I see exactly where you're going. But, you know, let's go back into ancient history before we have modern economies, everything comes from exchange and barter. And the fiefdoms would obviously have to exchange things with their neighbours. You know, the the grain patrice would give grain to the person who provides the meat or whatever, you know, they did. And, you know, it's only when banking came into it that money became a commodity in itself that things really started to go wrong. So, I mean, I'm very keen that the simulations could do this. But before we go, I'd like to know a little bit specific more from you about the marine thing and orbital. They're sort of bringing that simulation technology, two things like saving the planet from the decay of coral reefs and things like that. Yes. Obviously, one can run a simulation to see what's going to go wrong if we don't fix things. But how does this, how do you see the system helping us actually fix things? Yes. Well, I think the real, okay, take the coral reef, right? Now, one thing, we do have a lot of amazing science beginning, you know, bringing together all these technologies and there are huge giant simulations of interactive coral reefs based on real data. So, obviously, there's, that's that level. But again, you know, this is partly from my experience with Will and my love of the Sims and my love of these playable paradigms, right? Is my, I think orbital is about how we can have, so, I mean, I don't know if people ever understood, you know, looked into the Sims, but essentially anything is, everything is, it can be an agent in the Sim. Poop can be an agent. Your house is an agent, right? Yeah. And that paradigm in a game, obviously, you tune that. I mean, all of that is done with old school AI and actually you tune it for emergent behavior because in a game, all the kind of really rather risk gay and crazy things are actually quite exciting. But I see that model being, you know, where, you know, you can have a fish as an, it would be an agent, upwelling of cold water could be actually modelled as an agent. A global, you know, much more global ecosystem could be modelled as a number of agents. But the interaction of these agents is just as accessible by ordinary people as the Sims was. But it's not being tuned so people can have fun burning up each other's houses or, you know, all the fun stuff that you can do in a crazy game. I think people will, yeah. Yeah. But so that you can really connect in a new way with our, I mean, this is really where I got very inspired by, is he a British or Canadian designer, Bruce Mao? And his paradigm that we need life-centered design. And that it really, what it means is instead of putting business on the top of it and nature underneath, you put nature on top and design from that pet premise down. And I mean, I was so inspired, I honestly, I'm committed to what I call life-centered AI. And as I mentioned, there's some big elephants that I'm not tackling at that level. But this paradigm puts nature first. And the only way to put nature first is use these amazing, this thing we're calling the universal glue, the universal solvent, these transformers, these large neural nets, to really understand each other. Let's understand the fish. Exactly. We have two minutes left. So I'm going to ask the key question. Oh, really? Did we tear through this? Yeah, time flies. You know, 50 minutes. But a key question really for the end here is, I mean, my vision is that maybe, you know, I'll be wearing a pair of, I have to wear reading glasses and glasses for everything these days. So a pair of glasses that just connects to my iPhone is fine. You know, giant screen and whatever. If all this becomes ultimately mobile, mobile, you know, you can get on the train and go into a virtual world because you've got glasses and you've got an iPhone. Not the full VR thing, but just the idea that you can put your glasses on. If this technology gets smaller and more accessible, if a pair of VR type or AR type glasses becomes as commonplace as our headphones, we play music on, you know. What is, you know, we then have a situation where things we're saying have not become ubiquitous, might become ubiquitous because of the ease of use of the technology. Some people think technology should be invisible. The end product of the technology will work. Oh, I know. And actually, I have a really, I mean, there's a wonderful designer who actually believes all screens, even lightweight glasses are just an insult to our human bandwidth as they confine us. But, but one last point on this because you, you gave the use case that I think, well, yes, you know, the helmets are definitely not, not fun now. But I think it's beyond the fact because that this technology is definitely ready to pop now. The eyewear of all kinds is going to pop absolutely in the next few years. It's, I know people have been saying this forever, but things have, things change when they change, they change past. But, so let's assume that we are going to be able to have eyewear that is lightweight, comfortable and, and can transition easily between augmented and VR. But you still have to ask your question in the virtual world is, you know, because virtual worlds have kind of enjoyed their isolation is, what is, you know, what you've seen, that's interesting. We could even, you know, come back to this term metaverse, right? That's another thing that's incredibly wrong in my view with using that term because again, I'm a person that fundamentally, if you're not enabling people's relation to the real world and improving it and making it better and, and giving it more bandwidth, not less, because obviously a virtual world is too small. I'm really going to have, I'm going to have to cut this off here. I'm going to, you can see in the chat here, ready to wrap, one minute. Oh dear, sorry, sorry now, but that, but that's, that's the thing is that the, you know, you know, we've said helmet, heads or whatever, and there's, it's, that's going to change soon too. And I think really, what's really clear is an idea of a metaverse that isn't really strongly related to making, you know, the real world and making, you know, real life better in the real world, probably is going to be very niche. Yeah. Okay. Well, we're going to, we've got to continue this sometimes somewhere anyway. Yeah, we do. Thank you very much. We know it's, we know it's, we get it. To see this community flourishing, my best wishes for all the amazing work you've done. And I really hope that, you know, this moment in tech just brings a huge fruition to lots of people's, you know, vision and, and dreams and things they've worked on. Because Great things. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Wonderful. Thank you. Thank you everyone in OpenSim. Joyce who made my avatar, Leera, everyone for making this happen. Thank you. Wonderful. Thank you, Mal and Tish, for this great session. As a reminder to our audience, you will want to check out the 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 1.30 PM in this keynote region. And it is entitled, The Open Metaverse Research Group. Also, we encourage you to visit the OSCC 23 poster expo in the OSCC expo 3 region to see accompanying information on the presentations and our speakers and also the hyper grid resources in OSCC expo 2 region along with our sponsor and our crowd funder booths located throughout all of the OSCC expo regions. Thank you again to our speakers and to you the audience.