 Well, good. Let's take the show on the road then. Thank you all for coming, and welcome to Vertec or Caltech's presence in virtual worlds. My name is George Rogovsky. I'm a professor at Caltech director on the center for data discovery. First, this tab. Which my street cred because I know some of you, but mostly. About 10 years ago, actually from 2008 to 2012 with the group of colleagues, we run an experiment called meta institute for computational astrophysics, which was the first and perhaps maybe even the only so far. Professional scientific organization based in virtual worlds. And so we wanted to see what this technology can do for us, including education, but also scientific collaboration and data visualization, which turned out to be very important. So back then, like many of the old timers involved in education, I thought, this is it. This is going to be such a transformative technology. And, you know, a couple of years, everybody will have an avatar and this would be the normal way of doing things. Well, that's not how it happened. So even though we established our satisfaction that second life even back then was already a killer app for anything, including human interactions, such as public lectures, university classes, office hours, collaboration meetings and so on. It didn't catch on. So after 2012, I pretty much not really disappeared, but didn't spend much time in second life and started looking into it again recently. So, well, so the question is, why did it not catch on and there are many reasons for this back then and maybe to some extent still, there was a great mental inertia. About the update, this happens with all of the really modern data technologies, information technologies, not much you can do about this. Then there are things like a really difficult second life interface, which unfortunately is not a lot better now than it used to be back then. And it's really bad in comparison to more modern user interfaces and that precludes a lot of people from really sticking around. Then, of course, second life acquired something of a reputation because of course that's what all of the reporters would write about all the weird stuff and porn and everything and that kind of turned off a lot of people who never tried it, never know what it's about. And I would say a lot has to do with really poor management of LinkedIn labs where they really didn't know how to use the user talent and efforts properly and so on. And then since then, graphics became increasingly obsolete compared to the state of the art user interfaces, really poor functionality. So I'm kind of surprised that the second life isn't all that much better now than it was 10 years ago. And that's a lot of time in internet years. So I looked what's around in terms of education have been to a few of the virtual world's best practices in education conferences. I see some of the same people I knew back then, and I'd say it's a very seriously underused resource or platform, not just second life, but all virtual worlds in general. So what did happen is there is a lot of adult education by which I mean things like university extension, people who have not finished their university degrees and now trying to learn more. And there's been a lot of great deal of that and some of you have actually been actively involved in it. Apparently there've been lots of kind of one off experiments that somebody sets a class for the real university students to do something and works more or less. But usually it's just one time or maybe a couple of times and the students do not come back. And this is a very important point to which I will come back later. So as far as I can tell, there is still no stable permanent presence of any real university with real students with real classes getting real credits, etc, etc. There's only sporadic effort here and there if that. Remember that in the heyday of second life, there are like 350 university campuses in second life. And now there are some of them. So why is this happening? Well, what's been happening in the last couple of years, few years, first of all, games got a lot better in terms of graphics and functionality and social acceptance and so on. And people are much more open to the idea of virtual interaction spaces, social media and everything else. For the past few years, there was a great deal of hype with the advent of headsets for immersive and augmented virtual reality, extended reality. And that has passed the peak of a Gartner hype curve. Now I think maybe slowly recovering. What happened in that arena is that of all the VR AR applications that require headsets and basically moved to enterprise regime because it didn't really catch with games. And then of course the pandemic happened and that brought the urgency of any form of online education really to the forefront of many people. By the way, you do not have to persuade me that this is better than Zoom or any of the traditional flat screen technologies that people now use. I'm totally in favor of it. I'm just trying to understand why the world at large did not catch on. Well, one thing that we've been doing at Caltech with Santiago Lombeda, scientist who works with me in the Center for Data Driven Discovery, is to start building virtual teaching spaces and especially virtual teaching labs. And that's very much work in progress and has many aspects to it and maybe someday Santiago should actually give a little seminar presentation about it. But the idea here was that virtual teaching labs, if constructed well, can really fill the gap in online education. MOOCs have solved the problem of scalable content delivery. But MOOCs are missing two important pieces. One is the human interaction student to student and student to instructor. To some extent, social media can help with that and they do, but not very well. And by the way, I had office hours in second life when I was doing my first MOOCs and very small number of students showed up, but we did show up. That was great. And one more thing is that, well, students can do these virtual labs whenever they want and Caltech students like to do things at 2 a.m. and not get up in the morning. And also you can do things that are impossible in real life. You can shrink to the size of molecules in bigger than galaxies. You can build nuclear reactors if they melt down. Nobody gets hurt and so on. So this is something that we will continue pushing regardless of the truth. Okay, so let me tell you then about the Vertec project. After the pandemic hit and I just saw how ill-prepared everybody was to really do proper educational experiences in education general. I decided to take a good hard look at what's available out there, not just second life, but any virtual worlds. Because I think because of the cats has been too plunky and too expensive for most people, virtual worlds, which are accessible through mostly every flat interface would be the way to go for the next few years. So there are two parts to this. There is of course the educational users and we've been all poking at that for a long time. But I would say an even more important thing now are the social and psychological benefits for the students. Students are suffering from loneliness, from lack of social content. And it's actually becoming a real problem, especially for the incoming classes. You have freshmen who are now normally before pandemic getting the strange new university world. They don't know anybody. They left home. They make new friends. They make new social networks. They learn from the old students and so on. And now that's all gone. It's very visible, especially since our students tend to be more of a kind of nerdy types and many of them are somewhere in the spectrum. And so these social benefits of having a community with whom to interact are really, really important. And we see this happening. So I thought what we really need to do is provide a viable alternative to things like discord and zoom and whatnot for them to socialize and make new friends and just have a good time together and then work together and collaborate and so on. And eventually we can do the teaching as well. So that was the genesis of this. We got some support from Caltech's provost innovation education fund and I use some of my own discretionary research funds. We bought the site in July. It builds up by October, roughly speaking. And then we got some of the students, Caltech and elsewhere, coming to tell us what's wrong, what we should do differently. I would say by and large, students were very positive, but they gave us some really useful advice and I'll mention some of that in a moment. We also struck a collaboration with the Art Center College of Design, which is a small but excellent design school in Pasadena. Santiago, who works with me, also works with them and Professor Jenny Roddenhouse had a class that could really use this. So I thought this would be an interesting thing. We could build this. So why don't we have that cohort of students as well. And then mixing with Caltech science and technology nerds. That would be an interesting experience too. Well, it didn't quite work out in terms of synchronizing things, but Art Center students have been here. They've been doing projects. You will see some of their work when we do the tour. And I think that's been an interesting experience overall. The major reason why we haven't seen many Caltech students so far is, well, they're busy. We give them an insane amount of work and they just don't have time, but the school will end in a week or so or less. And then I suspect that we'll start seeing more and more. Plus, I'm getting Caltech administration really interested in this because of this problem of psychological well-being and benefits for students. And so I think we'll start seeing much more of a presence in December and certainly January. And maybe in winter, but certainly by spring, we'll start this venue for some instructional work. Okay, so here we are. Vertec and the name, by the way, is play on Caltech because Caltech is in California. Vertec then is in virtual reality. It is place we're standing now. So let me tell you more about this. First of all, why did we come here? As you probably know, there are many virtual world one of these out there. And most of them are really trash in terms of the quality of graphics and avatars and functionality and so on. Have you been to verbella conference? I don't think I need to say anything else. Avatars in particular, I think are a real key to this because of the Proteus effect. People identify with their avatars. They identify their friends with their friends avatars. And that is what really brings the social and psychological benefit. This subjective sense of actual human presence. Other than that, you know, you may as well use it. So I took a good look at everything and basically do to just on basis of quality of the graphics and avatars. It came down and functionality came down to three choices. Second life, open simulator and science base. Science base is if you don't know, you'll be using unity engine, which is exactly the right thing to do. And it's built by some of the refugees from Linden labs and they know exactly what needs to be done. And that's how I was hoping to see for all these years, but it's still too early. Well, another factor was how much pre-existing 3D content is there and how easy it is to build stuff. And of course, second life wins their hands down. Open sim, being essentially derivative of second life, follows next. Science base is going to be much better, I think, but right now it doesn't have all that much and it's more expensive. Speaking of cost, well, open simulator of course cost is more or less zero. Second life cost is low and science time space is higher because the young company, you know, if you want to hire developers, those are unity developers and they command high salaries. This is not parameters. Security and privacy were major concern for us. Open sim is good because you can completely control who can enter your world. Science base is probably going to be good. They're definitely trying to make it work well. And in second life, well, it can be arranged through restricted access. So normally the only people who can be on this sim are members of the Vertec Group, which is members of the Caltech community and anybody else that we make an agreement with. Basically professional education. And that's it. You know, nobody else can come in. Well, not for these three hours, starting at nine a.m. this morning and ending at 12 noon. The access is completely open. And then after that we'll go back to the closed access. And from the other side access to the adult content in a part of the community. That is something that we absolutely had to worry about. And so what we managed to get is this app produced by LinkedIn labs that lets you create your own avatars through their database. But you can make them so that do not have even box to check to access adult sims. And that's exactly what we have. So students or anybody else who has access to this app. And that's exactly what we have. And so what we managed to get is this app produced by LinkedIn labs that lets you create your own avatars through their database. And that's exactly what we have. So students or anybody else in Caltech who goes to Caltech portal gets an avatar that can go to PG and moderate sims, but not adult. And that's pretty much what the only thing we can do. Now, of course, students will figure out in a nanosecond how to go around this. But avatars that the school issues to them cannot go to nasty places. All right. And now the most important factor is what do the users want in the startup world? This is the first question you ask. What do your customers actually want? Not what you think they should want, but they really want. So here we're dealing with 18 to 22 year old cohort. They're mostly gamers, they're Minecraft generation, they're digital natives, and they have high modern expectations for graphics and interfaces and everything else. But here is an important one which I think explains a lot of the previous favors to engage students. They want to have something else to do in addition to the school related activities. That was the crucial factor for us choosing Second Life because in Open Simulator, there isn't much to do. Even with HyperGrid, there really isn't much to do. And in Science Baseball, they're still developing. You want to have more stuff, you have to pay for it and so on. So that was the single biggest factor for us to choose. Building this in Second Life with all of the precautions that I just mentioned to you. So what can they do here? We will go on tour and you will see things. They can collaborate. We ask Caltech students and encourage them to work together on homeworks and so on. They have to do exams of their own, but for homeworks, anything else, more interaction, the better. So we have these digital light boards that are actually Google Jam boards and students can doodle on them, interact and write down and so on. And they have pleasant places to sit down and discuss whatever they want to discuss, whether it's school related or not. And you'll see some of those. A lot of places for nice interactions here at the ground level. We built a little cafe with the board games and their bicycles that they can ride around and race. And I have to confess that every time I rode one of these bicycles, I fell off the cliff, but okay. And they can just hang out with friends and talk about whatever they want. And I hope that they will start groups like Science Fiction Club, LGBT Club, whatever they want. It's going to be for them to be their space. And you can just really relax, not school. So an effort was made to build this ground level on the scene, like a really pleasant environment for them to relax and so on. I think one of the mistakes that a lot of schools have made is try to replicate real life campus buildings and only that. And they look blocky and ugly and dull. And so here, the idea is to have an attractive environment to get them in, to get them to enjoy themselves. And then we can worry about buildings and so on. So in fact, we do plan to have them build Celtic buildings they want to build, just as a creative challenge. Celtic students like to, you know, like their houses in which they live. There's a student center and you'll see a beginning of a replica of that and so on. But ground level here is intended as a pleasant socializing relaxing spot. All the building building happens at platforms that are one, two and three kilometers above the ground level and hold up to some of those. So for example, Santiago on beta started building the actual replica of the real student center at Caltech called the commitment center. You'll notice that red gate thingy. That's because the place is called the red door cafe. It's a traditional thing. And our center students have been also looking into how to build virtual campuses and so on. You will see some of their work when you go to the higher platforms. But Professor Rodin House is giving them interesting things to do in Santiago is guiding them along this. I think they're having reasonably good experience as well. Okay, so what do we do next? First of all, we expect that this will pick up with Celtic students for whom this was a build. And once the start happening, we will really appreciate any volunteers, people who know what to do to meet newbies at the arrival plus help them start. We provided as much written help and links as we can. But as you probably know it, there is really no substitute for somebody holding your virtual hand and helping you for the first hour telling you what. So I will organize some kind of a sign up for this. And as I said, any time as much time as you were willing to spend would be greatly appreciated. So we can talk about this later if you're interested in volunteering just send me a message and then we'll figure it out. And also, I think the experience with art center students was interesting and will be principle open to collaborations with other institutions, other groups. If you have a class, but don't have a good venue. We can do it here. If you want to have seminars or any other educational related activity. Just talk to me. I think it would be a good thing if we can have different groups of students interact with each other, you know, get out of their bubbles, see what other people are interested in and so on. So again, at 12 noon today, the open access will close and only the members of the group can come in. But, you know, if you make an arrangement with proper group roles like we did with our center students and so. All right. So that's pretty much all I wanted to say for my introductory presentation. And now we'll go on a tour. Just to give you a quick orientation. This is of course birds I view their teleporters everywhere. Feel free to use them. You can explore on your own to your heart's content. We're now on that thing on the right to the empty theater. The center of the same is the arrival plus I has two buildings and main building. See it in a moment in the cafe on the southern side of the island is a beach, including a beach house that can be also a classroom conference room interaction spots. There's a nice waterfall in the north. West inside. And also, there are some Easter eggs that I put in for students. Also, we have two sky boxes, which are male and female avatar changing rooms. And there is a lot of good gifts there and you are really welcome to take any of those that you want as long as they're just for your own use. And not shared or got forbid sold anywhere else, but feel free to take everything you like. Okay. That's all I have to say. So any immediate questions and then I'll start walking into the room. Come along. So I'll take questions in the local chat. How many students do we have what depends what you mean by this caltech has approximately 900 undergraduate students and incoming classes like 250. We only had maybe half dozen or 10 of them for beta testing. And, you know, I expect that we'll see certain tense of them coming in at different times. Can I increase the capacity of the same in terms of the avatars? I think that's basically limited by the architecture of second life. If this is wildly successful, which I doubt, but it might happen. I'll just buy another island and tack it on in terms of the land impact. We did buy an extension. Thanks to the art students who really want to go fog wild building stuff. And that's not an issue, but there is a limit as well. What do I think about cyber lounge and 3D web roles? Yeah, they're okay. But again, the quality of the avatars and functionality are just not big. And this factor of having other things to do. Places to go. Interesting new builds to see games to play. Well, that is all very important. And I don't think that any other virtual world can match second life in the available activities. I very much hope that science space will get there. I'm rooting for them. I think they're doing the exact right things. They're just a little too early. And we need something like right now. So is there a way to do that? Yeah, I think that all of the virtual world can match second life in the available activities. I very much hope that science space will get there. I'm rooting for them. I think they're doing the exact right things. They're just a little too early. And we need something like right now. Is this for all students? This is for any and all members of the Celtic community who want to do anything here they want. It's the virtual extension of the campus. And what kind of classes? Well, I don't know yet. I mean, I'll do office hours of my own classes, but I'll introduce other faculty to it once I know that students are actually here. The most urgent thing I think was to provide social psychological relief space for the students. They're under a very high stress situation. Of course, pandemic made everything much, much worse. So let's see, do I keep writing G? I've put it as M for now to be a little more open minded, but they know that all the rules that apply at Celtic campus, all the protections against harassment, all of that apply here as well. And of course, we will enforce them rigorously. If it turns out that we need to switch to G rating, we will. So let's see. Do I need experience builders? I think we're okay for now. And in fact, we do want to engage students in building their own. This is an opportunity for them to exercise their own creativity. And we do have games on in the cafe board games and there is a volleyball court on the beach and they can raise bicycles around and add as much as needed. So let's see. Well, I kind of doubt that we have sex said at Caltech, although I haven't looked. But I suspect that this generation does not need to be told anything in that department. Do we teach unity 3D development? We don't. We hardly do any graphical design or art their efforts, thanks in part to Santiago and beta. I'm interested to see what faculty in our humanities and social sciences can come up with because of course you can do many interesting experiments as well. I mean, this was a big thing in second life 10 years ago. And I think Prof. Professor Bukowski at UC Irvine is doing that. Tom Bolster Bukowski in second life is doing classes and things in in second life. I mean, right now I don't want to kind of put students off by actually giving them yet more schoolwork. I think like into the like this place to see if there's their place and then we can start getting them into educational issues. Simulations. Yes, the part of our virtual labs effort is related to this. And that's a long story because we want to do a multi-platform fully interactive system of virtual labs. But that will be probably for another talk. Let's see. Yes. Well, I don't actually I don't know what classes we have in psychology and so on. Caltech is a weird place. I sometimes say that that's the only school where class in mathematical finance counts as part of humanities. This is not the job. This is true. Let's see. Well, I mean, we'll we'll respond to them. We won't we'll listen to what they want. And maybe, you know, we can put public lectures. One of the things I'm thinking of doing is which are very successful back in the Mica days is to have public lectures, although these will be open only to the group members. And for example, keep torn who is a Nobel laureate because of gravitational waves is our family friend and super nice guy and plan to ask him to give one of the first lectures here to the students. I bet that will go down really well. I mean, we could have liberal arts arts centers may decide that this is a really good collaborative spot for them. I'm totally open to explore any and all of these possibilities as they come along. Yeah, of course, I'm happy to keep science circle as well as other major education educator groups in second life in fully informed of what we go what goes on. I'm perfectly happy to get suggestions and advice. You know, many good minds who have been thinking about these things for a long time and just talk to me. Listen to any good ideas. Do we have calendar? No, we do not. Eventually, of course, we probably will. I may well decide to parcel off just this amphitheater to have that openly accessible if we decide to have truly public lectures, but right now this is a low priority item. Yes, if there are any interesting links, do send them to me. I collected a bunch of places and there is a not card giver on main plots or nice places for them to go to but open to any and all good suggestions you may have. Although I suspect that students would not be interested in looking at more educational places. We're looking for places for gaming, whether it's quest based games or role playing games, or just cool places like Inspire space that does cool spot and I still like it. So, yeah, I'm open to any and all suggestions. Just send me no cards and we'll take a look. Right. Oh, so if some of you actually are really working on this particular thing like. Yes, something maybe really interesting to do about that too. So, as I said, I'm open to any and all good ideas about collaborations, having to do something with education and just well being of students now. Okay, so, right. Well, there are many other people, some of whom are here who have actually been involved in this very actively for so many years. And I think the best thing is to join those groups. I try to attend some of the meetings as best as I could. But, you know, truth be told, this is just a little side project for me. I have many other things that have to worry about and can't really always attend some of those. Well, shall we go for a little tour now? I will walk over towards the main Plaza just tell me what's out there. And maybe we'll go to a couple other spots and then go to higher levels, but, you know, chances are you can probably just go and explore on your own. And we'll be booted out at 12 noon. So, there you have it. Okay, off we go. A huge amount of information on our website, which I realized and never told you about. So here is the URL. This is an easy one to remember. And when you go there, this is actually for our entire virtual reality lab. One of the options there is a beer tech. And so you go there and there is plenty there to see and read and do whatever you want. I would also appreciate any good feedback you may have on about the information we put on the website. But it's intended to get people prepared to come here and then experience on their own. All right. So here we have two things. There is a cafe here, which is a poor substitute for the actual red door cafe at Caltech. And yes, here the board games that people can play or just sit there by the fireplace and enjoy themselves. They can have their own real coffee in real life and then pretend that doing it here, they can grab a bike from the rack here and then ride around. The main building, so to speak, at least for now, is this one over here. So this has first this comfy discussion space here, you know, students to sit together and talk whatever they want. But also then on the other side, this is currently set as an interactive whiteboard. But I was really thinking of having a video screen so I can watch video lectures and comment on them or watch whatever they want. And then in the back over here is like a little conference from by them have to go there. But which also has an interactive whiteboard. And if you I think if you click on it, you'll see some noodles that were already made. So we have those all around and we can add more as we need to. Let's go back. Yeah, I see now that we don't really have good capacity. And yes, we do have a robot robot cats, which actually Caltech students do have their own cats, emotional support animals. And I hope to actually find better robot cats somewhere. This is what I can find easily. Yeah, cheated and I teleported here, leaving my guests stranded on the beach, but I suspect they'll be able to find their way back. They seem to be enjoying themselves on the beach, but let's see. Okay. All right, let's kind of mosey slowly people probably catch up as we move along. The Oak here is meant to represent circle Angleman Oak, which was one of the iconic things on Caltech campus. And it was judged to be about 400 years old. Then 2015, it got fungal infection and had to be cut down. But it's well remembered. And I thought the interesting thing was that, well, obviously it started its life right around the time when Galileo was making his discoveries, and then died in the year when LIGO detected gravitational waves. So here it lives in virtual reality. Okay, let's walk through the forest to fire circle, which I think is a pleasant hangout. Isn't this a nice spot to just sit down and bullshit with your friends about whatever you want. Right. Of course, you can drop down to the beach if you really want to. If we walk then north through the forest wood or rather north northeast, we'll get then towards the waterfall area, which I think is another very pleasant and relaxing spot. Well, I personally love the sound of flowing water. And so for me, this is a really nice spot to sit down and relax and then mess with my inventory or whatever. Yeah, that's one new thing in second life relative to what we had before is all this mesh 3d content. And it's wonderful. Some real professionally done and just buy it. You don't have to build stuff. So a lot of stuff you see, including some of the ground you're walking on is all mesh creations. Let's go back towards the center of the same and then start teleporting to the upper levels. But, you know, if you think that this is boring, feel free to just explore around on your own. But let's go there and I'll get into the first level, which is where we have sandbox and some builds. So I'll say start teleporting to level one, the sandbox and we'll catch up over there. This level is intended to be essentially a sandbox for Caltech students to build stuff. What you see here is beginning of a replica of Caltech student center, which Santiago built. Santiago, I don't know if you wanted to say a few words about it. Sure. Can you hear me? George, can you hear me? Okay. I'm not sure my microphone is working. Oh, okay. At least, yeah, go up in here. Excellent. Yes. So the idea here was to start exploring what students would want to do. So there's just two concepts. First of all, when people see something familiar, that helps them feel bonded. So that's what we're trying to do here is create something that looks a little bit like the commitment and commitment if you see the pictures that George was showing before is very blocky. It made it very easy to do it, just plain prints. But the other idea was to make it a little like exploded, take off the roof, start exploring what these spaces could become other than just standard, you know, we don't want to do a standard coffee shop. We don't want to do standard auditorium, just what it means to start creating interesting spaces that could be scripted. So for, I don't know if you see in the inside, there's like a little green area with some blocks inside the building. That's actually a project that we're doing with some of the students to actually connect it to a running simulation. So we can actually run it like a real live game. And the cool thing about the simulation is that it's running on a server using Rust. It can communicate hopefully with Second Life soon, but it also communicates with a plain web browser doing Babylon, as well as a full virtual reality in Unity. So it's basically just starting with exploration of basic things that appeal to the students that look like something familiar, but it's not overwhelming and it's not blocky. It's not, sorry, it's not too constricted, but it just kind of starts opening the imagination as to what could be done. And I think that's kind of the whole exploration that we're doing both at these upper levels, as well as the stuff that we're doing with ArtCenter where we're doing a class on whole virtual campuses. Yes, that Student Center is constructed. That's a great way to put it. So, you know, one of the things that we have for us is if you fly up here, this area up here is actually a full, in real life, is a brand new auditorium they built for the Caltech Orchestra. So the idea was again to start, what does it mean to actually create a space where people can collaborate and listen to music together. And so we're just exploring all those different visual elements and placing them in this world. And from this spot you can see there's a pond over there towards the north side or east side. That is a play on a DNA fountain that actually is a Caltech and in the distance you can see an auditorium that actually has some videos. And again, that's almost like two or three buildings kind of mashed together, you know, roof blown off and all built with very basic trims with the whole idea of kind of creating these modern collaborative spaces. And the idea is that once the students come here, they'll start adding to it and creating new things. And just the professor that I teach the class with ArtCenter has this concept of, you know, there's lots of silly things. There's a lot of silly things in second life. You know, the fact that you can be any avatar that you want, the fact that social space, you know, you can butt up against somebody and you feel a little awkward, but also you feel like, okay, this is silly, there's no reason to feel awkward. That whole silliness, just embracing the silliness and opening it up and saying, okay, let's do things here that try everything. So that's kind of the beginning of stuff. And we're hoping, I think there's a giant elephant towards the end and the cannon as well. The cannon is a basic element that actually is in Caltech campus that, you know, MIT keeps on stealing every other summer. There's a whole story behind that. So that's why the cannon is over there. And elephants actually one of the symbol for one of the houses. Caltech houses are the good one. But yeah, thank you. Thank you Santiago. I suggest that we now go on to the second level where creations of ArtCenter students can be seen. The teleporter is in the middle of the platform, but I'll go and put down a few more to ease the traffic. So for the eight of us here, I'll say this once and I'll repeat it again once people come back. So Caltech is like the number one school sometimes in the world. But at least tech, you know, we're always up there with MIT and Harvard competing the number one spot. And ArtCenter is similar, is like the number one or number two school in art and design in the country. So the one thing that we have in common between Caltech and ArtCenter being an engineering school and being a design school is all the machines that we use. We use bandsaws and we have all these shops to actually build stuff. So as part of the exploration that we had for for virtual campuses, we started looking at what would what is the one thing that would be useful to actually that has collaboratively been both places. So so so one of the things I did, for instance, this project that you see right in front of us are actually this idea of the machines that you would see at a machine shop kind of blown up, you know, 100 times in size. And what would it mean to actually create, you know, social spaces within this, you know, giant machines and also have the ability to actually learn how to use these machines. And especially for students who have not come into campus yet in a freshman, we're starting at Caltech and ArtCenter. This is a way to actually be introduced to these spaces, be able to stand next to somebody and say, Hey, what does this machine do? How does it work? Also learning about the machines themselves. So so I encourage you to just fly around the space. It is gorgeous. It's, we're two weeks away from from our finals. So we're getting really close to actually finishing up so there's still work in progress. And if you have any questions, just just just follow. And by the way, there's at least two or three students from ArtCenter here among us. So if you have any questions you can also answer for you. So again, for those who just joined us, the one thing that Caltech and ArtCenter have in common is that between an engineering school and a design school is that there's lots of machine shops where you can actually get to build the three printers, like bandsaws, all sorts of fun equipment. So the idea is as we explore this idea of virtual campuses, you know, how can we create a space that actually lets you start feeling like you're in the machine shop, feeling like you're learning about these machines. And at the same time as embrace the whole social aspect of second life. So maybe we can start walking towards that one. So there was the question whether this machine was scripted. The machine is not scripted yet. For now, it's all just sign based how you actually start, you know, looking at each of the machines would be yes. And again, there's just one machine right now that has the fully, the full space. You do in the machine. So you can see this is already the base for it for one of these giant machines. And we have already kind of like a welcome space right here at the bottom. You have samples of the machines themselves here. You see, they're exploring also what it means to one of the big things in both the machine shops at Caltech and ArtCenter are the safety equipment, you know, goggles. So they're actually, we're actually encouraging, we're actually giving out these goggles that people can wear. We're coming home to the whole distribution things, we'll have to make it easier for people to wear these things. But, you know, but then if you come back out here. So you can see this moment, the machines as a small scale out there. But then up here, you can actually start traveling if you jump up and start flying. You can start getting a feeling for how large this machine is. Here you can actually see actually explaining what each of the different parts. They're actually color coded. So if this, if this, if the sign has a color, you can see the part of the machine that actually does that thing. You know, ArtCenter is all about communication, connecting art. So just even the sign themselves and how we display those signs, how this design is useful and beautiful in some ways, just aesthetic and communicative. That's all things that we're exploring throughout these classes. So, so the class itself is just a big learning mechanism. And we get to produce things that hopefully the students can learn and take with them as they become designers. And go into the real world, but also kind of starts exploring what second life can do and keep on growing and actually start tapping into. Into into into, you know, virtual spaces and how we can learn and communicate with each other. Oh, yes. So somebody mentioned that racetrack. So we have about five projects going in in our class. They're groups between one, two and three. So this one project that we have right here is the machine space because that's one thing that we have common between ArtCenter and Caltech. Well, the other thing that we have common between ArtCenter and Caltech is actually both hackathons and and car design, you know, ArtCenter by far is the number one school in automotive design in the world. So, and then Caltech has, you know, all these, all these self driving machines with one many, many, you know, of the DARPA races. So one of the things that we had is one of the students actually creating a hackathon where he just gives you a block and a script. And then it's up to you to start creating your driving car and tweaking it and changing it. So that's the racetrack that you see. I think he took off all the signs on the beginning, how to teach people how to how to script. So that's part of it. How do you teach through science and by looking at things, but how to how to how to start to start doing the communication and the scripting. But you see it kind of the beginning of all this stuff. So, I think I had a question. Yeah, and another. So if you start, if you come all the way to the top, this bridge right here is actually that it looks very much like the main building at ArtCenter. It's done by a, I want to say Gary, but it's not Gary, but it's, it's, it's, it's one of the most famous architects whose name escapes me right now. Maybe one of my students can help me out by typing it in the, in the chat. But, you know, this bridge is one of the main attractions of this amazing, gorgeous campus that we have on the hillside at ArtCenter. So again, this idea of exploding the arts, the student center, exploring the buildings and mashing them with something else. So this is a machine that also has a piece of real art center in it. So the idea is, yes, people can learn. Yes, thank you. Craig Elwood, the Elwood building, of course, I should know. They were my teachers and is Elwood one to one. So, but we used to have a giant sphere that's at our center here. So the idea is that, you know, people can come here they can learn but hopefully they'll just start finding places to hang out. And even the idea of the Instagram generation, you know, the idea of taking a selfie. There's plenty of selfie spots out here. So there you go. So maybe we should just head over to the third level, but I think people can just go ahead and, you know, explore on their own at this point. I'll be at the third level if anybody wanted to ask some questions, get some cool nanotechnology stuff happening. You're welcome. So they're exploring this kind of highway system that we could drive through and the whole experiencing of creating a car driving through this highway system. It's actually very engaging and there's lots of amazing things you can do, everything from signage to just the driving mechanism to seeing things and the views as you drive around. That's very American, but it's also just, it can be quite fun. And then if you follow me all the way to the end of this black structure, one of the other things that we're also doing that also is in common between Caltech and ArtCenter is materials. There's material properties. There's people exploring how to use materials and the idea of nano materials. So these are this idea of how do you understand nanoscale and second life can be a great thing to do it. If any of you know how to change your environment, changing it to midnight actually works a little better. But this is kind of the entrance to a possible exhibit on nanoscale technology. So again, the idea is that you can create these structures at a very extremely small scale. And you can start seeing these structures right here. So obviously you wouldn't see a real scale. So this is, you know, and the idea that they're extremely light in weight, but extremely strong. And extremely, they can support lots of weight. So as you travel into the actual space, then we're exploring these nanostructures both in a way to understanding and also kind of as art pieces and sculptures. So this idea of these things can just kind of balance, have great balance. You have a nanostructure right on top there, a dandelion kind of representing how lightweight it is. And then you have a nanostructure holding up just this gigantic rock. Again, just to simplify how extremely strong they are. So this is the kind of thing that we are really encouraged by. The ability to think of everything that we have in real life and how to not translate it directly into physical representations inside three representations inside second life. But really kind of start exploring what it means to understand and represent this in more old metaphorical ways to understand these things. And I think this is both useful for our center as well as engineers from Caltech. So this is kind of the beginning of that exhibit. And then there's, you know, we eventually we had one of these structures you can actually fly through, but it was a little too large a number of prims so it's been taking away for this tour but it'll come back soon. And then just other stuff. A gift shop would be fine. So a nanomaterial. So again, so a nanomaterial is a structure that you build at the atomic level. So you're actually putting extremely small molecules and atoms together to actually build physical structures. So if you look for nanotechnology and Caltech, you'll see there's some very cool tech talks. And you can build, you know, everything from cloth to hard materials that are extremely strong, but extremely lightweight. So I'm not sure how much in production the materials are yet, but yes, there's something that both Caltech and ArtCenter are looking into from different aspects. And I think that's, so again, this is work in progress. We're inching towards the end of our term. This is one term's worth of work. There's a couple other projects that are at different levels floating around. But yes, feel free to explore the first floor of Vertec, the second floor of the third floor. Note that you can always go directly to the address bar. We are at elevation 3,000. If you go to elevation 2,000, you go to the other place that had the virtual art, the virtual student center. And if you go around 50, don't go all the way to zero, then you can also jump directly to the first floor. So we're at 0, 1,000, 2,000, 3,000. Cool. So if there's no other questions, I'll probably head back to the second floor to level 1,000. Oh, my students have taken off. So I'm going to head off to the second floor and feel free to jump on the car.