 This session, we are happy to introduce a terrific session called The Bridging Worlds Panel. Our speakers today are, besides me, right? Selby Evans, Dieter Heiner, and Sun Tzu. Selby Evans is a retired professor of psychology at Texas Christian University. He taught courses in psychological measurement, computer applications, and systematic problem solving. He conducted research in pattern perception and studies of cognitive systems supported by the US military organizations, NASA, the National Institutes of Health, and other government organizations. He has more than 80 technical papers in professional books and journals. He operated a consulting business for 25 years, serving various companies and government agencies in psychological measurement, problem solving, cognitive engineering, and computer applications. Other interests include computer science, existentialism, Zen, and Second Life. Dieter Heiner was born in 1966 and raised in Munich, Germany. Making first contact with computers and programming in 1981, he set the course for a master's degree in computer science from the Technical University in Munich in 1991. Since 2007, Dieter is a frequent metaverse traveler to provide a safe, simple, and reliable entry-level access to the metaverse. He started creating his own web-based virtual world platform from scratch at www.cyberlaunch.com. That's C-Y-B-A-Lounge.com. To be accessed with the browser without any installation or plugins necessary, to be able to use the platform for educational uses, Dieter founded the metaverse school in 2017, and he plans to start operation in early 2018. David Flesen, Sun Tzu, is a master training specialist and taught journalism and broadcasting for the US military at the Defense Information School and recently developed a college undergrad course on engineering and virtual worlds. He recently graduated from the Art Institute with a major in media arts and animation and is currently looking for opportunities in virtual and augmented reality. Welcome all, let's begin the session. Well, I'd like to welcome my panelists and to get us warmed up, many of you are probably wondering what are bridging worlds, right? What we're thinking about OpenSim is the base technology and how many of us come from different walks of life and different technologies, also from different needs. So Dieter, what stimulated your interest in creating web worlds? Okay, first, I started studying the actual definitions of virtual worlds. I've presented here some examples from Wikipedia so you can see what the definition of a virtual world is, but the main point is I've put the words in color, our persistency and people. So it means we have virtual worlds which brings people together and everything we do will stay persistent. And the thing was people test to go and say, oh, for me it's too complicated. I don't want to join a virtual world. I don't know what I have to do there. So the vision is to build a web world or a bridge between the real world and virtual worlds and have a very lean on small learning curve. Because what are the main obstacles for users? And really it is, many people have already problems with the installation and the configuration of a viewer. The navigation and use is too complicated. And as we had learned yesterday, only a couple of percent of users are really builders. The rest are just consumers of content. So the goal is to reduce this complexity. I've just made a few small example just to see where the web worlds will fit in. So we have a certain level of complexity for our known virtual worlds like Second Life, OpenSim, Kitely and all the other grids. It's even more complicated for new users if it's a virtual reality virtual world like Sensor. So the goal is to bridge the level of complexity to go from the real world and to introduce web-based virtual worlds to allow people for a soft transition into our realm. So what's so special about web-based virtual worlds? The main thing is it's running entirely in your browser. There's no installation, no plugins needed. You simply click on a URL and you can enter the web world directly. There's support already for many devices. So it's not only restricted to your desktop or laptop PC. You can use it on an Android or even an iOS tablet. And this means it's also supporting a wide variety of browsers. The web worlds are also much more easy to navigate and to interact with. That's part of because interaction is still limited. There are not as many resources available like in a free-fledged virtual world, but for newbies this is very interesting because they are not irritated by too much features. So Dieter, as you're talking about this, I'm kind of wondering what's the connection with OpenSim as far as content and avatar? How does this work? Yeah, so for now we are trying or improving the means to import content from OpenSim into the web worlds. So you can have a similar look and feel of your environment. And so it means you can have your OpenSim content made available for people just browsing the web. So I don't know if you saw Austin Tate's session earlier today with the OER converter. Does your work relate to that in any fashion? No, but I'm curious to try things out because I'm also able to import DAA files into my platform. I've already successfully imported a lot of things from OpenSim, so it could be either directly or as a branch of this development to use it to bring content into a web world. Now, I recall earlier this year you were talking about running some research to test this out. Don't let me stop you on the slides, please continue. But I'm looking forward to seeing how that went. Yeah, so next slide is about the use cases and of course, socializing and entertainment is always on top, but right now we can also use a web-based virtual worlds already for counseling, for education, business purposes like virtual meetings or conferences and also for advertising and marketing. What you've said is especially about the educational prospects. Yeah, now for the second semester, I'm already running a prototype and pilot phase for first semester collaboration environment. So a group of students build a virtual environment which will be used for the upcoming first semesters to do the group work completely online in a virtual world. So as I get weekly tasks they have to fulfill, they can do their work together using voice. They can share documents inside the virtual world and they can also drop and save and present their results weekly in this virtual environment to their tutors and the professor. That sounds wonderful. Now you know, you're getting into Selby's area too when you start talking about education. Have you guys been working together on any of this? Not necessarily the tests you've been running, but as far as the web worlds, Selby. And while Selby's getting his microphone working, why don't you go ahead and tell us, Dieter? Oh, there you go, Selby, hi. So Dieter, I know that Selby has a web world that he's using for office hours every day. Is that correct? That's correct. So we've established a server in the United States, especially for this purpose. So this is a non-profit virtualworld.org. Selby has daily office hours and everybody is invited to drop by, talk about literally everything. And the best thing is, we always collect the feedback from users there and which brings up for us new ideas which we can then implement in the next version of the platform. So getting a sense of how this works when we click a link and go into a web world, Selby, as I'm thinking about what you're doing, you talked about personalization and drag and drop. What does that mean for you? Well, the drag and drop feature, which Dieter has added to SelbyLounge, means that you can, for example, take an image file and drop it on the web world that you're in and it will appear, it will be brought into the web world and people can see it instantly. Well, as instantly as other things happen in virtual world. And the thing, you can also do that with a web on cram, browser on cram, whichever one you want to call it, which means that if, this is one I would use for all kinds of instruction, you can, if I have lots of things on my blog and many pages would be useful in instruction, I can bring that in instantly. Again, after a while and, but without having planned in advance. So this is great for providing instructions. We actually, I don't know whether Dieter will know, I don't know whether we are yet able to bring in videos. I did bring in videos and I think it works in some browsers but we can't use unless it works in most browsers. And the video, of course, works as well. We bring in a YouTube video and that works just like it just as it would in a, on YouTube. So we can bring in all sorts of instruction. We can also bring in, and this is what I wanted to mention, we can bring in collado files. So we can bring in objects. And I mean collado files with the, with the model in there too. So it's a 3D object. And those, that also, I don't know what, I would not encourage anybody to try to bring in a collado file immediately, just any random collado file because I don't think it'll work. But Dieter will be finding out and telling us more about how to set up the collado file. So what, go ahead. Oh, well, that sounds wonderful. So we have the convenience of content, easy to upgrade, to load into these worlds, which of course is one of the requests that educators have had, right? For curriculum because it's so hard, first off to teach using virtual worlds but secondly, to get all that content in there. So are there any other affordances that you can think of there, Selby, from your perspective? Cause I know you've been testing this out every day. Yeah, yes, well, of course we do, of course I would emphasize, we do have voice operating and we are able to build. I have built a little, and I don't even know how to build. Nobody will find anything on the market that I've built. But I do, I can build a little bit. I've built and I have done instruct provided tutorials on how all of the build, commonly used building things that are available right now. So that means that people can come into their world and I should emphasize if you come in and register, it creates your own registration on a cyber lounge world, you get a virtual world, a cyber lounge world available for your own use. And that means, and then you can go in immediately and start trying to build. And I say trying, cause you won't be that simple, but it wasn't that simple in second life either. That's true. So speaking of this drag and drop, I'm gonna pass the mic here for a moment to Sun Zhu who I think has a question for Dieter. Oh no, actually what I was talking about in that one was just addressed by Selby. I was just mentioning about how- Joey, go ahead and repeat the question. Okay. Well, I was just asking about dragging 3D models directly in world, but Selby just mentioned that you can do that with the coladas, the DAE files. That's awesome to hear that you're doing that. For those of you that may remember, there was a world from Sun Microsystems a while back called Open Wonderland. And one of the great things with that is that you could drag and drop your 3D directly in world. It was both a good and bad thing. It was good because it gave you access, but it was bad because not all models are created equally. So sometimes people would bring things into the environment that weren't very well made and that could actually cause some problems because the geometry wasn't done right. That's right. Well, thank you there Sun. So Dieter, back to you, right? So you were telling us about Cyber Lounge. Please continue. Yeah, so most of the topics we already discussed now also with Selby, yeah, the drag and drop features this was one of the proposals my students brought in because during a semester of coursework they have to import several dozens of documents with tasks and results and simply dragging these from the desktop into the 3D world then they're automatically a corresponding object is created. It's really helpful for them and it saves a lot of time. So for example, you simply have to click on a shelf drag in your Word document and it will appear in world immediately. That's great. Did you have any other slides you wanted to showcase or are you not just we're wrapping up and to make this all into a real platform not just for offering a 3D world. I found that the Metaverse school earlier this year the goal is now to bring together students and tutors and educators in virtual worlds not necessarily in Cyber Lounge could also be using Signal Girls web worlds or an OpenSim platform. The point is to have the interaction and the collaboration features. So I really love Khan Academy but this is more or less for self-studies and the thing is for many topics we need a real one-to-one work between somebody teaching and the learners. You just mentioned something about Khan Academy and of course I have to think about that because this is the week of the hour of code. It's like the world's longest hour, right? Yeah. And so why don't you tell us a little more about what you mean when you say with Khan Academy? No, so the thing is Khan Academy is more suited for self-study. So you have access to a lot of knowledge but then you are left with watching a video even if you watch it again and again and the thing is I want to provide the interaction really to have like classes and online courses in a 3D environment where you can really have a tutor and you have several students which are able to ask questions and can get the support they need according to the personal learning speed. Oh, that's great. Thank you. So I know what's going on in everyone's minds. Before we start thinking about avatars and identity as well why don't we tackle the question, is a user-built web world, like a technology you're talking about here, is this going to be replacing virtual worlds or what are we advocating here? No care. Yes, that's my cue. Or you're a dealer. Oh, Selby, you can jump right on in there and then we'll pass it back. Yeah, let me jump in on that because I've commented on that before. Basically, replacing our kind of virtual worlds, no way. But it is a bridge. That's exactly what we should be talking about. We're talking about. It's a bridge from the web, from the flat browser, which we've been in and looked at and we all know how to use. It is a bridge from that to real virtual worlds. And if you want to follow that bridge, we can actually have people, the live people talking to you about how to do that. Okay, that's my point. Okay, so that reminds me and I know Joyce is probably thinking back when the MacArthur Foundation did their little thing in Second Life in October 2006 for the digital media and learning, thinking about all these integrated technologies and blended reality kinds of meetings. And of course, Krista Lopez's work with the Hypergrid as far as fostering through OpenSAM better meetings around the world. So we're trying to take that same initiative and think, how can we integrate more people who may have technological limitations maybe on mobile devices, maybe, because will your stuff, by the way Dieter, run on mobile devices? Yes, indeed, that's one of the major goals I had from the beginning because if you have a modern browser which is capable of running WebGL, the environment will also run on an iPad or an Android tablet. When I see that, especially in affordance, because we're noticing the world's not only moving to the cloud, right? For cloud computing kinds of hosting, but also to apps, right? App-oriented operating systems distributed. In fact, I keep wondering when the day is coming, when we won't have our desktops and our systems the way we have them today. And I know many of you are going, I'm already there, but not me. I'm kicking and screaming and hanging on to mine. Yeah, but I'm also supporting the Google Chromebook, for example, which is very popular in school environments. So I'm still testing every new release first on a Chromebook to make sure it's compatible with this operating system too, because it's really widespread in educational environments. Well, that's great. I know there's fans of the iOS out there going, okay, that's fine for the Chromebook. What about, and of course, the Microsoft Surface folks, the iPad folks, are you testing on any of those platforms? Yes, I also have a Surface Pro for testing. I have a professional iPad. I have the Android devices, a couple of these. I even added stereo rendering on mobile phones so we can use the environment also in a Google Cardboard device with real head tracking and everything. So we can also join a lesson in a real 3D environment, which is more or less a marketing feature, but still nice to have. Oh, that's great. That's great. So is this your last slide? Should we head over to the... This is the last, yes. The next thing is only just the links you mentioned. Good, good, good. And Selby, do you have any last thoughts or that you wanted to say about this technology before we started thinking about avatars and identity bridging? Good there? Okay, great. So let's see. So SunZoo, I know yesterday, you graciously gave us an orientation into some of your work thinking about avatar identities and bridging. And many of us think, you know, one of our challenges is as we move between worlds, and of course, Mal Burns touched on this yesterday too, you always want to be yourself wherever you go, whatever yourself is. And it could be lots of different selves. Often people ask me to say, how many avatars do you have? And I says, well, I have lots of Lear Lobos, right? But I seem to be very similar everywhere I go, right? So what are your thoughts on this? And I'll let you take control of the viewer for your part of the avatar identities. Okay, thank you, Lear. Yeah, I think a lot of it is, it depends on the people in the use case. Sometimes people want to look the same. Sometimes they want to look different. It all depends on the person and the application. Like for example, I know from speaking with General Herron on her work with the soldiers that were coming back from the war or they were trying to adjust to their new life afterwards because of things that had happened to them. They were, many of them had lost limbs and things like that. And some of them wanted to look the same as they were in real life, right down to the wheelchair and the specifics of it. And others wanted to be something totally different. So it just, it all depends on the person. It depends on their use of the environment. And it's different for different people, but a lot of people tend to want to bridge the two worlds together and they want to look somewhat similar to themselves in real life. And I think even I've seen with a lot of my friends over time, they tend to bring more nuances of their real life to their virtual life over time because it's a part of them. And it's kind of hard to separate the two because it's more of an extension for a lot of us of our real life. It's not like just a game that we're playing. It's actually part of who we are as a person, both the virtual and the real. So one of the things that I was taking a look at was avatar identities. I did a presentation on this yesterday. I'll share a little bit with you on it. If I can go to my next slide, see if it takes over. Okay, good. What I wanted to show you a little bit is about how you can actually create something from real life. Cause as I noticed in the title of this, when they're talking the bridging worlds, I guess the initial focus on that is bridging between real life and virtual. So let me show you one. I hope I can get this to work out. I was trying to bring, I do have a couple of images I brought in world if I have to to give you something a little bit new on this. But let me see if I can do this as a add URL event. Hopefully this will work. It's from Google Plus. We'll see. If that does it. And I don't think that's going to work. So what I could do is it okay to raise the pram here and just put it on a pram? You can start to try. All right. We're fine with it. Let's see if you can. And while you're doing that, I posted a link a few minutes ago while you're setting up your content from Nancy Sherman's work because you mentioned General Herron and Nancy Sherman spoke to our Global Learning Forum event on moral injury and on avatar identity. And she came into a virtual world. She had just flown in from like, from the Middle East, literally got off a plane, came in and then hopped into a virtual world. And it was an open sim in virtual harmony. And we were very impressed with her agility because she'd never been in one before. And of course that this comes to mind when we think about speaking in a session where you've never been in a virtual world. And by the way, now you have this broad exposure. There was a four-star general in the room with us while she's presenting about moral injury and healing and how the use of identity is so critical. Anyway, so what's here? I'm taking a look. I see your content appearing here and it, yes. Okay. Good. Who needs screens? We can make our own, right? Absolutely. So, okay, so let me just put up an image here. I'm gonna show you, there was a movie that we did a presentation on inside of the world, one of the worlds that I work in, which is called Sign Space. And we had the producer from a film called Loving Vincent. This is being made by a bunch of oil painters in Poland primarily and also UK. Over a period, I think of about seven years. And what they did is they made full wall-sized paintings in the style of Vincent Van Gogh to basically tell the story of his art and his life. And one of the things that I did as part of my job with Sign Space is I was asked to create an avatar to look like the producer, director, who was going to be coming in to give a presentation and walk through a virtual art gallery. So that's where these tools for me have really come into play is I take real-life people and I replicate them with avatar tools to make them look like their real-life selves. Because a lot of times they want to be able to do that. And I'll show you here. Let's see, let me make sure I'm doing it just on the face. Recent items. Okay, so this is what the actor, or excuse me, the producer, director looks like. Let me make that full bright so you can see it a little bit better. And so as you can see, he's got the beard, the mustache, the blonde hair, the shirts, with the logo on it. Pretty easy, it's nice black shirt and pants. His shoes are a little bit on the unusual side. So what I did is I did something fairly similar to it. It's not exact, but in fact, I'm gonna edit this and I'll just bring one forward so I can have the after view. And then this is what it actually looked like when I was done. I would admit that's, there we go. So as you can see, that's the avatar once it was inside a sign space. And I can also put them side by side if you'd like to see. And I've done this for several avatars already. Now these ones were done with a program called Adobe Fuse. So it gave me the opportunity to recreate somebody and I'd make it exactly like I could have recreated the socks on his legs, but I didn't have socks in the original one in Fuse. So I'd have to have painted it on the avatar myself. And I decided, it wasn't that big of a thing. It's kind of like one of my friends told me that created the Paris Sims in Second Life. When you create something, you can create a memory just by picking up some key things in the landscape. And it doesn't have to have every single element. It just has to have some of those key elements and it really pulls it together and the person feels like it's themselves. So sometimes it's just pulling some things together to really make it feel like you're there. So I'm gonna just push these two, thank you. Gotta push these two up to the top and just do a very quick walkthrough because I don't know if others have seen my presentation earlier, but I'll just go through real quickly on a whirlwind tour on it. But these were the different technologies that I've used in the past and I'd gone over in my presentation. Adobe Fuse, which is what I use for the ones that you see up there. There's also one called Adobe Mixamo. There's one called Autodesk Character Generator. Some of you might remember that from the earlier days, a company called Devolver that got bought by Autodesk. They did a lot of work with Unity before they were purchased. Make Human, which is an open source software solution. And then 3D Humanoids is when I just ran across about a week or two ago, that works with Blender as a plugin. It looks very impressive. So especially your folks that are used to using Blender, I suggest you hop in and check it out. You can make avatars and I think clothing options might be in that one as well. So that might be a really good way to create some avatars that you can use between worlds. Or if you're trying to make your avatar look more like yourself or somebody else, that might be a good thing as well. There's the Morph Character System, Morph Studio and Ready Room. They're all by a company called Morph 3D. And then finally, kind of on the high end of things is iClone. So I'll just quickly go through the slides just to show you, I'm not gonna spend too much time on it because I have done this on a pre-presentation earlier. This, excuse me, SunZoo. This time, we're interested in this content but now we're thinking about it in terms of how we take OpenSim, characters, identity, ourselves and then use this content. I mean, can we bring any of this back into OpenSim? Can we, see, I'm thinking both ways. I'm not just thinking of taking content from world out to others but I'm really thinking about a blended reality experience. So as you go through these slides, I want you to think about that and then think about some of Dieter and Selby's work and how everyone can benefit from this. Please, go ahead. Well, like for example, now you mentioned, and I haven't been in your world yet, Dieter, I expect to go in there this next week to check things out. So thanks for the invite and the information that you provided on that. But I did look over the videos from Selby and things like that. One thing I'd wonder about is can you bring an FBX in? Because an FBX with animation would be quite useful, possibly for NPCs just to have them doing a idle animation or things like that or maybe you could have them affected by in-world AI. So that would be kind of interesting to see. Like right now in Sansar, I can't bring any animated characters in there. I brought in elephants and rhinoceroses and things like that but I've noticed their geometry doesn't look exactly the same as it did before I brought it in in some cases but I can't bring them in animated yet. They're not at that stage yet of development. So for a solution like you're providing with your world Dieter, it would really be nice if FBX with animations inside of them could be used somehow. That would be awesome. That would give educators a way to at least add some life to the land. I've seen some of the work, for example, from Ferd. He's done some awesome things with animals, grazing, milling about. It makes you feel more like you're in that real world, feel like you're connected. And I think that's what a lot of people wanna do. Now, as far as can we use these in different worlds, I think you can pretty much use most of these in most environments without a problem where it becomes an issue if you sell them. So if you're just using it for your own personal use, that's one thing. If you're using it for commercial use, or if you're using it to sell solutions to other people, then I would say definitely make sure that you check out the terms of service on it before you start using it, because you wanna make sure that you're not doing anything illegal. So like fuse, yes, we can use fuse in environments, but I can't make a fuse avatar and then go sell it on the Unity Asset Store, because that's an open environment that anybody could grab it and then use it for whatever they wanted for it. And then also the way that you're using it might have a limitation as well, because some of these companies specifically specify that they don't want to use for sexual things and things like that. So you wanna be careful that how you're using it is something that's appropriate to the terms of service. So, but fuse is a pretty good one, but sometimes it uses your own risk. It's not currently under development right now. So you might find that it breaks at times and you have to uninstall and reinstall. I will note to you though, if you look at the top there on the right, fuse is actually available in a couple of different flavors. If you go to steam, steampowered.com has a few elements on their site that actually give you earlier versions of the fuse engine. But you can also get the most recent one up on the Adobe site as you see there in that link as well. Now, I personally like some of the elements of the older version better, but then you have to export it out as an OBJ and then use the auto rigger from Mixamo or rig it with your own software if you so choose. See now, this gets into Kay McLennan's point on the fact that all this rigging and all these other technologies are of course a barrier for students or a barrier for educators who really want a simple way to think about their content and to think about their identity and getting all these things ramped up very quickly. So of all the technologies you're showcasing here, is there one that you recommend for educators or for social use that's fairly lightweight or has less of a steep learning curve? Well, you're gonna have a learning curve with any one of them. If you wanna keep things so that, the two that I would think that are really good, or let me make it, yeah, two that I would think have good potential here when it comes to education and for community to help develop. If people were to get on board and start helping with them, they could really take off. One is Make Human. Make Human's been out there for a while now, but it doesn't have a lot of people contributing content yet. I mean, I've seen some things like a Wonder Woman outfit that's been shared, but that's proprietary stuff that not everybody wants to use. It would really be nice if people would jump in and start helping to develop that because that could be a very robust platform that can be used for Open Simulator, for other virtual worlds. It could become a tool set if we help to grow it, but it takes people getting behind it to make it happen. And the thing with this is once you've created it, you can have it already rigged so you don't even need to use Avastar to bring it in. You could bring it in because it already has an Open Sim skeleton that comes with it. I believe, I haven't done that route on the, I did it on the Maya side, not on the Blender side, so but I believe because it has it already rigged for Open Simulator that it's already set up for that. The other one that's pretty good is this one I just learned about about two weeks ago and it's called 3D humanoids. It's by a gentleman named Manuel Bastioni. I believe this is the same person that, at least I heard just the other week that that was the same name for somebody that made the Ruth 2.0 avatar. So they might already be connected with Open Sim as well, if that's the case. So this would be a really good one and it works in Blender, it's a Blender plugin. What it basically gets down to is people are gonna look to see what has the best capability and community. So if you have a technology that's fairly easy for folks to jump in and use, but that also has some powerful tools for folks that wanna take it to the advanced level and that has a good community that's sharing things, then that's gonna make all the difference in the world. People love to get behind things that are going places. If we could help these open source tools out, in this case, the 3D humanoids and the one before that was Make Human, that would probably do a lot to help advance this community by further extending how these tools can be used. Hey, son, Andrew, I know we normally do questions at the end, but this is a panel, right? And we're a community. So Andrew is asking about, it's nice about the pre-rigging that you mentioned with the last tool, but now the question is, what about bento bones? Anything to add on that? Well, bento is the Second Life Linden Lab application. I know they've been trying to bring the same thing into Open Simulator as well, but I'm not real familiar with where it's at at this point in OpenSim. Do you know where we are at with it? You know, I don't know, but Franz Charming, I know has been demoing bento at the Nonprofit Commons meetings on Friday mornings at 8.30 a.m. They do meet in Second Life, but we do bridge across Open Sim in all worlds. But as far as the technology, I'm not up to speed on it. So, but I do think it's interesting. Okay, so Andrew will have to field that question for later so you can talk to Sun Tzu offline about that. Remember, for anyone listening or here in the crowd, please send me your questions. We will certainly try to tackle them. We have a few minutes left. So now, so now, Joey, as we think about this, oh, you didn't have to close out your slides. I love having some content up there. Oh, it's okay. Yeah, keep something up because I want to see something, right? You know, me, I need overstimulation in a big way. Well, that's a good one because, you know, we had a comment. It wasn't a question. And of course Larissa, I want to give a shout out for your work. She has quite a bit of research in tropical simulations and medical simulations, but as we think about identity here, and we're looking at all these, all these different representations of you, isn't that what we're seeing on the slide that's coming up? Oh yeah, these are all avatars that are made. But I noticed there's one that, at least one that's missing because I don't see a representation of your avatar. You know, when I first met you, you had a, so there are parts of you. And then I think there's some cartoon characters you did when you were going to school. Did you get a degree in game design and graphic arts and animation? It was mostly animation and special effects work is where I primarily focused my studies. But I did creation and things like that as well, but it's towards the end of the course, you focus on what you enjoy best. And I personally am very much into the movement. And that's something too to think about. When it comes to your avatar identity, it's not just how you look, but it's also how you move. It's all about different curves, you know? How you walk, how you fly, all that stuff makes a difference. So what I tend to do in Second Life, I'm probably kind of a little bit like Peter Sellers version of Second Life. I'm like a man of a thousand avatars. I like to change avatars a lot. You don't usually see me as the same person every day. I'm not that way. I just like to express myself in a multiplicity. And, but the one thing I try to keep similar, at least in the human characters, is the way they move. And I do that by using the same kind of animation overwriters so that my avatar, when you see it move, you know it's me. Okay, so that's the common denominator there is the fact that in OpenSim, we have animation overwriters that allow you to customize how your avatar moves, walks, sits, et cetera, dances, and so forth. Back over to Dieter as we're warming up and thinking about bridging this technology. And by the way, we have some examples I'm gonna be weaving in here just in a moment. But Dieter, when it comes to avatars in Cyber Lounge, and as far as movement, I know we've talked about voice and we've talked about drag and drop technology, but what about the avatar and the identity? Now you will be amazed because we are already using the same tool. So for example, the avatars you are now seeing in Cyber Lounge were created with Make Human, a little bit pimped in Blender and then exported for a web-based format. I also use the OpenSim skeleton for the avatars. The only difference is I'm using an external self written animation engine. So it's also very easy for users to create their own animations for the avatars. Hey, that's great. I've been in your world quite a few times, but not just through Cyber Lounge. Haven't you been working with the Infinite Metaverse Alliance and Singer Girl and some of the folks who've been doing some amazing testing and breakthroughs on their use of web worlds? Yeah, so Singer Girl and I are working together very closely on many, many issues and we also want to tackle now the avatar topic because maybe when you were in Cyber Lounge, you noticed I'm more the programmer, not the artist. So there really is a demand for customization of avatars and I think the base technology already is there. Now we have to bridge the pieces together, but the workflow to create avatars will be very much similar to the one presented by Sun Tzu right now. Hey, thank you. And coming into the chat, the local audience is noticing that I put up a link for web worlds and worlds are spelled with a Z at the end. So it's web-worlds, that's a Z.com. And when you load that, it instantly brings up, what's interesting about that is it brings it up so fast. So obviously if a hundred of us hit this all at the same moment, this could be, how robust is this, by the way, Dieter, if we all hit it at the same moment? I think that's what I'm asking here. I kind of want to talk for web worlds, but I think right now, as we made tests, I've tested or made load testing with up to 40 avatars present without big problems. The more avatars there are present, the resources inside the browser will get, let's say a bit reduced because the browser usually only lets you get about 1.5, 1.7 gigabytes of memory This is not a problem you have as a native viewer. This is just a browser problem and we have already discussed tricks to address this problem. The main problem right now is more with voice because WebRTC, if you practice it or do it like in a book, it's just a peer-to-peer connection between browsers. And so it means if you have 10 people talking, you already have 81 peer-to-peer connections. And this is about the limits of between eight and 10 people talking, it's okay, but more will usually crash the voice system, not the rendering engine. Well, thank you, that's wonderful. We're about to wrap up, but in the chat, and then this is for the live stream audience, right? I want to invite everyone to check out the webworlds.com site that I ended, by the way, that's worlds. It is hyphenated and worlds with a C, right? And then secondly, a Singer Girl adds that the next phase has a classroom for teachers. So are there any questions? So far I've handled all the questions that I've seen. So please IM me if you have a last minute question for our panel. And let's see, I want to thank our panelists for supporting this session. And on a last thought, Dieter, are there ever times when it's better, and maybe this is for you, Sun, you can chime in here too. So let me know which of you would like to tackle this. Are there ever times when it's better to create new content rather than bridge it between worlds? Sun, I'll let you take that first. Okay, I'll give you a case in point. We've talked about this a little bit recently too. I think on some of the panels yesterday, they were asking, well, is it abandoning OpenSim to go to another platform? And I don't necessarily see that people are leaving one platform to develop on another. Sometimes we just want to bridge between multiple virtual worlds, and we want to test things out and see what our content is like. And it's easier for folks to take what they've already invented as a starting point. But then when they get to the next platform, maybe that next platform offers capabilities that they didn't previously have. Like case in point, right now I'm picking one of the or files from Linda Kelly, that's a ski lodge, and I'm developing that, but I'm putting a more realistic environment for the nav mesh for the land and the trees, making it look a lot better, and then also working on the playability for skiing and ice skating and things like that to make it more fun, and then looking for ways to make the lodge more social. So we can extend things, it's not just a matter of taking it from one place to another, but also using it in new and exciting ways and seeing. And I think for the creators in a lot of cases, they like that as well. But then sometimes too, we can also get onto our, we can kind of rest on our laurels of only going and taking old content and pulling it over. Sometimes you have to start fresh because starting fresh will take it in new directions that you otherwise might have missed. Well, thank you. And I see we're now out of time. So I wanna thank Selby Evans, Sun Tzu, and Dieter Heine for a terrific presentation. As a reminder to our audience, you can see what's coming up on the conference schedule at conference.opensimulator.org. And following the session, the next session will begin at 10.30, in other words, in a few minutes, in this keynote region, and it is entitled Bringing Literature to Life in Open Simulator. Also, we encourage you to visit the OSCC 17 poster expo in the OSCC expo three region to find accompanying information on presentations and to explore the hypergrid tour resources in OSCC expo two region, along with the sponsor and crowd funder booths located throughout all of the OSCC expo zone regions. Again, thank you. Many thanks to our presenters and to the audience.