 Hello everybody and welcome to the 9am session in the business and enterprise track. As a reminder to our in-world and web audience, you can view the full conference schedule at conference.opensimulator.org and tweet your questions or comments to at opensimcc with the hashtag OSCC14. This hour, we are happy to introduce a terrific panel on women in virtual reality. Our panelists include Julie Lemoyne, the founder of 3D ICC, which offers the enterprise-grade TERF immersive virtual reality environment, she was also the founder and head of the Fidelity Center of Applied Collaboration and a four-time E2.0 speaker on social media. Jacqueline Mori has 25 years experience in developing innovative technologies for virtual reality environments. She spent 13 years as a senior research scientist at the Institute for Creative Technologies at the University of Southern California, where she created novel virtual reality telehealth care activities. Gwynette Ryder Sinclair is a research associate at the Institute for Stimulation and Training at the US Army Stimulation and Training Technology Center and runs her own private company One Virtual World Development. She specializes in immersive virtual scenarios designed for interactive training, collaboration, and curriculum delivery. And Karen Zestudil is an expert in adult education and virtual learning. She's also the creator of Sagiversity in Second Life. And along with all the other members of this panel and myself, she's the co-founder of the Women in Virtual Reality Organization. Welcome, everybody. Let's begin the panel. My name is Maria Korolov. I'll be your moderator today. I am the editor of Hypergood Business and also one of the founders of Women in Virtual Reality. The goal of our organization is to promote and celebrate the contributions women have made and continue to make in virtual reality and to attract greater numbers of women to this field. I would like everybody to please save your questions for local chat. We will be taking questions at the half hour mark. Our organization was founded this summer and already has 34 members, including many of the most influential women working in virtual reality today. And you can see some of the pictures of our members up on the slide. Our first speaker, Julie Lemoine, heads up a company that is one of the three leading and immersive platforms for business users. She's actually doing a full presentation about how to pitch virtual reality to enterprise clients an hour from now, so stick around for that. But right now, Julie, can you please tell us a little bit about your company to get us started and about the women who've influenced you in your work in virtual reality? OK, thank you very much. I'd be delighted to. So, yeah, we started our company about five years ago, the current company. And its name is 3DICC. It doesn't exactly roll off the tongue, but it's meant to talk about immersive collaboration for the enterprise. So, one of the things that we did in the very early days is a lot of the audience who may actually know of the original work done by David Reed and David A. Smith in the creation of Croquet way back in the day, early days of immersive environments. And eventually that work led to a couple of companies. Croquet was one and then it was renamed Teleplay. So the platform turf that we are providing to enterprise today is, I guess I would call the commercial result of that work. So many, many years of work. But my career, which is interesting, I think to bring me here, was as an end user. And so as a community member, I did many, many years in second life, even in OpenSim, although I'm relatively rusty compared to some of my panel members here. And so our platform, which I'll talk about a little bit in the next talk, but mostly talking about how to pitch towards the enterprise, is very focused, not a single focus on the consumer base, always focused on the enterprise environment. And it is a platform. It's not built on top of a grid. So it's a grid itself, if you will. So it's a unique platform. And then that historically was owned by the venture capitalist. So I think one of the more interesting things that has happened with this immersive capability for the enterprise is that we, in 2011, I was actually the spearhead that purchased the environment back from investment. And it is now owned by the creators. So this is the underneath the plumbing for the immersive environments that people build on top of our platform. So I don't want to take up all my time on that kind of conversation. I want to talk a little bit about a couple of women that have been amazing to me. Now, there are so many women doing amazing work. So I'm just going to highlight a couple here in the area of a very male industry, still very male, is the industry of construction. And so I have had the great pleasure, and they have been very influential with some of my work, of working with Dr. Renate Fruchter from Stanford. Some of you may know actually know of her work at the PBL Lab there. She's been doing amazing work for many, many years, more than a decade. Her organization's been winning awards for distance training and for work in the architecture and construction industry. And she has been using immersive environments basically for agile construction management and saving and proposing and saving millions and millions of dollars in this very complex industry. That a wake of an eye or a miss of an important agreement can cost tens of hundreds of millions of dollars. And so this kind of savings when people can be together looking at shared artifacts as well as in our platform we can drag and drop large architectural models in and walk them is very innovative and profound to the industry. And then there is another woman who has just, we've been working with a lot. And I'm going to stick sort of to this example in construction. And this is Dr. Anja Drichter. She has just recently received her PhD a couple of years ago. And what she's doing and we're doing a lot of work with her lately is putting, if you will, the catchphrase is sort of putting neighbors back into neighborhood design. So we're working with her again in the architecture and construction notion of bringing citizens into the engagement around the way in which urban redesign is done. And so if you think about immersive environments in that area, it's very innovative to add that engagement back in where the public can come and be part of even deciding how you rework a public park and walk in the models and meet with the mayors and that kind of work. So she's done her entire PhD work on that several years ago and found all kinds of amazing results when the public engages and that the barriers are disappearing on the inabilities or the lack of ease with which you can do it with the sort of supply and demand of technology becoming more and more capable of supporting this type of rendering that we're in now. So that was the sort of opening that I was hoping to give Maria. Is that about right, Julie? That was perfect and inspirational. Thank you. Sure. Our next panelist, Jacqueline Morey, is currently working with NASA to create virtual world solutions to counter the effects of psychological isolation on astronauts traveling to Mars, which is just about the coolest use of virtual reality, I personally could think of. Jackie, can you tell us some more about your experience in virtual reality and about the other women who have influenced you? Sure, I'd be happy to, but I have to go way back for this. I started working in virtual reality in 1990. So I guess that's pretty makes me a big antique in the in the industry. But I found it both really, really exciting. It was so novel. It was so amazing to immerse yourself in these 3D worlds. But at the same time, I found it incredibly boring. There was nothing really exciting to do in these virtual worlds in these virtual environments. And I wanted to work on making them more meaningful to us as human beings. So I wanted to work on getting emotions into these virtual environments. And that set a course for my entire career, where I was looking at these immersive environments, not for how cool they were to be in, but what they could do for us as human beings. So I say I work in virtual reality for meaningful applications of things that can make life better for us as humans. So both in traditional virtual reality and in virtual worlds, which I call the social form of virtual reality, I've been doing this since 1990. One of the areas that we started working on a few years ago with the Army Medical Command is mindfulness as delivered in a virtual world for for veterans and for soldiers to see if if we could give them mindfulness classes within a virtual world, would they be as effective as mindfulness classes in the physical world? And we're in the last year of a three year study to see if that's the case. So we have developed an entire method for giving these mindfulness classes in the virtual world. And we did that with experts from the San Diego Mindfulness Center. So I don't know if my slides are up, but I have a picture of that in my slides. That's the headshot. And there's a little bit of the mindfulness work that we're doing with my company that I founded a couple of years ago called All These Worlds. That company was founded directly out of the work I was doing at USC's Institute for Creative Technologies, where we started the virtual world work for these meaningful applications. Another thing that we've been working on is with TATRIC, some amputee virtual environment support systems. But as Maria mentioned, the big thing that we're working on with NASA is this emotional support for astronauts who will be going on long duration spaceflight missions. And this has been extremely exciting work. We had six months to give them a prototype of what we would do for astronauts in the form of a virtual world that could provide them both social and psychological mitigation of some of these effects that they're expected to encounter on these long missions. We knew we wanted to do things like virtual vacations so they could go and work in, go and visit a coral reef or any of those type of things because they're going to be pretty isolated from external stimuli. They're not going to be able to... Sorry, that's my Twitter thing. I guess we're getting a lot of Twitter comments right now. So that's what that little beeping is. They won't be able to look out the couple like they do at the International Space Station and see Earth and all its glory. It's gonna be pretty dark out there on the way to Mars. So we did put in virtual vacations and a family communication center which is in one picture there that looks like a museum building. But we're working with a lot of other interesting ideas and one is these extra-tars which are basically bots that fill up a space so that if the astronaut goes into a club or a dance hall they're not going to feel alone because there's only gonna be six of them on these missions. So the extra-tars are interactive. You can talk to them and they can make polite conversation but they can also just make a place feel full. Another thing that we're working on is what we're calling surrogate-tars and this is a way for family members to record actions with their avatar that can be played back later for the astronauts because there's a 40 minute communication delay so everything is gonna be asynchronous. And what's exciting about that is we're really getting some AI and some other methods in for people to have their avatars act more like them. So that's kind of new exciting research that we're doing and all of this is happening in OpenSim. We're running our own OpenSim servers. One thing that we're going to be hoping to do when this goes live is to crowdsource interesting experiences for the astronauts. So if somebody wants to make a virtual vacation that NASA would vet and put up for the astronauts they could do that and get that recognition. We have weather rooms so they can see what weather's like back on Earth. We have interesting games, scavenger hunts and other kinds of shared memory games so that the astronauts can stay in better touch with their family members and friends. So that's a little introduction to that work. As for the women who've inspired me going way back into the early 90s I have to have a shout out to Brenda Laurel and Rachel Strickland and their team who did this amazing VR piece called Placeholder at the BAMP Center when they were doing their virtual reality program. It just had so many amazing ways to interact and it was a shared experience which was very unusual at the time for VR and that one experience has stayed with me as sort of a pinnacle of what you could do with VR. And then another woman is Margaret Dolinsky who has been doing virtual reality art now for 20 years and probably has the largest over of work for VR for aesthetic VR that I've ever seen. So those two women, okay. Thank you. Thank you, Jackie. This is really exciting stuff. I'm really happy to see the role that OpenSim is playing in all this especially. Going on, our next panelist, Gwyneth Sinclair is working with the military to develop virtual training simulations and with private clients researching the effectiveness of virtual curriculum delivery. Now there's only so much that she's allowed to tell us because of the sensitive nature of her work. But Gwyneth, can you talk a little bit to the degree that you can about these projects and about the women who have influenced you in your work in virtual reality? Hello everyone, can you hear my voice? Mm-hmm. Great, okay. Hello and thank you for coming to our panel today. I'm very proud to be part of this new organization, Women in Virtual Reality and it's gathered together many women from many different areas. So I'd like to tell you a little bit about what I do. One of the things I'm doing right now is working with a research experiment with three universities, a University of Texas, a University out of New York and a University out of California that want to remain unnamed. And it is for middle school children who often have been told they are not smart and never will be. And it's a demonstration of neuroplasticity and they are using three different mediums and researching which medium delivers the most information and has the best transfer of knowledge. And they're using a regular book, they're using a ebook and they're using our 3D immersive experience which is sponsored by Rutgers University as a matter of fact. And I don't have any pictures from that again because of the nature of the work, it's sensitive. But you'll see on my introduction screen and on this screen that just came up from Kansas State University, there's a font being used and it is specifically designed for dyslexic people who have difficulty reading and it's been very helpful in the experimental 3D immersion space for the middle schoolers who do have reading difficulties. So one of the other projects that I worked on that was my first big development was a four region campus for Kennesaw State University. If you could please hold on the slides, if you could back up one please. This shows what I refer to as transitional replica design. You'll see on the left the orientation center which is obviously an original design. There is no immersive world orientation center at Kennesaw State University. And what I do and what I speak to when I talk about transitional replica design is using elements from whatever the real space is that you're replicating or trying to create an immersive experience for. And you can see on the lower right there Burris Hall building. And even though the orientation area is not on campus, it blends seamlessly and it is actually back around behind the Burris building. And the Burris building is a replica design in the sense that the front of the building is almost one to one replicated with all the details whereas the actual building is a block long and as you can see this one is not. So there you have a transitional between real and the physical world of the space and the 3D immersive virtual world of the space which has more open spaces and doesn't necessarily replicate the full size. But people know where they are when they get there. Another thing we did with this particular campus is we had four regions and we had several events that we sponsored. One of the things I do is sponsor and manage nonprofit events. This is the four region stage. As you can see clearly the delineation where the four regions meet and then there are ramps for people in bridges that want to cross. This was an international endeavor and something I really enjoy about the virtual world is it gives us an opportunity to reach out to people from other cultures. This is a very relatively famous band in Japan and this was a fundraiser for a peace group that I also belong to that was initiated by people within the virtual world. So going on to speak about women that I've been influenced by, they both are that I always speak to they're both part of our organization. The first one is Pam Broviak. She's an experienced civil engineer and she does supervision of public works and engineering departments. And one of the things that I really appreciate about her work is she has tirelessly tried to promote the use of open sim and initially second life for local government agencies, how they can use them for training and how they can reach community members by inviting them in for them to attend virtually. And she has done an excellent job of that. She's also a member of the Moses Military Open Sim Strategy Enterprise Grid that I work with through UCF. And she has been very instrumental in helping that community feel more like a community even though their research is all doing their own things. And the other woman that's been very influential in my life and is a good friend in real life is Barbara Truman. And she has her own company, Fusion Unlimited Networks Research. It's a nonprofit. And she is looking for ways to take the greater Orlando area and gather together some of the forces of the people that are doing what she considers to be good things for the community. Usually nonprofit organizations, everything from environmental to educational endeavors. And she would like to see them come together in virtual world spaces. And she is tirelessly out there promoting and going to different organizational activities and events and showing them the affordances of our platform. And I'm really, again, happy to be here. And thank you so much, Maria, for inviting me. Well, thank you, Gwyneth, for taking the time to be here today. We really appreciate it. And our final panelist is Karen Zustudil. And she is the glue that brings women in virtual reality together. She's the one who's running everything behind the scenes. And although I'm the public face of the organization, I would like to say that this organization wouldn't be possible if she wasn't there to do so much of the work. So thank you, Karen, for that. So I was hoping you could tell us a little bit about yourself and also about why an organization like ours is needed. Why the time is right right now for women in virtual reality. Okay. I was one of the first people in my area of the state to teach in a virtual environment. And we all know how virtual reality is growing at such an unbelievable rate. And I believe that it's, as women pioneering in the field of virtual reality and technology, that it's important to provide good role models. And I've been inspired by so many women in the group that I can't thank them enough or even explain what motivation it's given me. What originally brought me to virtual worlds was second life. And I was brought to second life through a conference that was held by one of the professional associations that I belong to while I was working at the local community college. I was immediately impressed with the concept and I wanted to share it with others. And after I had attended this conference in second life, I was totally amazed by the whole experience and the processes behind it. And it was then that I decided I wanted to teach in this environment. So being the first in this part of the state to do something like this was really a challenge and there was a huge learning curve. And I had to hurdle this to prepare my class for my students. As I learned more and I prepared for my class, I found that I was able to use a sleutle system and I used that to set up systems to move data from the web to second life. And through that, I could assess my students' progress. And I found it interesting to see that I was able to control the variables in that system and in that format to represent any changes that could occur in real life. Then after seeing a small part of the possibilities of what I could actually do in this environment, I wanted to know more. And I wanted to meet more of the people that were responsible for making it all possible. As I started doing some research on virtual reality and virtual worlds, one of the first things that I found was that there's very little reliable data that's available regarding this. And as I continued to look for information, one study that I found was done by Tracy Chow, who's a software engineer at Pinterest. The information that was provided and gathered by Chow was done as a voluntary head count and by anonymous submissions. The results I thought proved to be rather disappointing. Although the numbers were preliminary, the tech companies that did provide information indicated that total participation of women employed in virtual reality and technology only averaged less than 13%. So then I looked and researched more and I found another study that was done by Elance in April of 2013, titled Women in Technology. In that study, there were more than 7,000 participants. And these women felt that they were able to find more opportunities in the virtual world in these career fields than in the real world. And approximately 70% of these women stated that online work gives them more opportunities to succeed. And they felt that they couldn't find that same success or opportunity in the standard workplace. Some of the reasons that they gave for that, I thought were interesting. One was that they felt that in world or in a virtual reality situation, there was gender neutralization and that their recognition was now being based on their skills, their merits, and their accomplishments. They enjoyed the greater flexibility for work and life balance. The online was providing them the ability to be an entrepreneur or to work as an independent contractor. And the online work also provided in an intellectual challenge that gave them more opportunities to assist them in learning skills that they might not otherwise have had the opportunity to learn. So it was interesting to note that in the one survey that I read, the women that were asked what they believed to be the top deterrents for pursuing technology related careers was the lack of role models. Approximately 45% of these women stated that it was a lack of a role model that was an issue. When these same women were asked again what might change that situation and help them become more successful in these types of careers, they again stressed that more role models are needed. And in saying this as an educator myself, I looked at the National Center for Education Statistics and it noted in one of the reports that approximately 76% of public school teachers are women. This is a pretty influential group when you think about it. As educators and trainers to learn more and lean more toward the use of virtual reality in the schools, colleges and universities as well as online and encourage the use and growth and knowledge of this technology, these teachers, these women will by their attitudes either directly or indirectly influence the future of women's participation in this field as a career choice. We've all heard the expression that women are from Venus and men are from Mars and it's true. This isn't to say that one gender is better than another in any of these fields. It's only to note that due to the nature of the creative differences, women have a lot to offer that may have been previously overlooked. As an example, and this is kind of a silly example to be honest, but it was one of my favorite things to do in world, one study indicated that when women were buddied up with a partner and asked to do some virtual shopping, the women stated they enjoyed the experience more and they were more prone to purchase than they would have if they had just done that shopping on their own. This could actually be a key concept for marketing and something that could really be utilized in the future. It was also a woman that tested the Oculus Rift headset and found that women in general suffer physical symptoms using the headset that men did not. So overall, as we look at how women are contributing to virtual reality, we can see that women are not only pioneering new passwords used, but they're starting new businesses and they're influencing what aspects of virtual reality are gonna be used to educate and entertain future generations. And I think it's gonna be pretty exciting. Thank you, Karen. Thank you for your presentation. Thank you for those eye-opening statistics. I will ask a couple of questions of our panelists and then we will open it up to public questions. If you have a question, please post it in local chat or on the Ustream channel or on Twitter, wherever you happen to be. You can also contact me directly at maria at hypergoodbusiness.com or you can visit our website at wivr.net and connect to us from that site. So what I wanna know is, is do women follow different paths into virtual reality than men do? We have a broad spectrum of women on this panel. So I'm not suggesting that women are one thing or another thing compared to men, but are there maybe a wider variety of ways in which women enter virtual reality or maybe a different percentage in terms of how they experienced it? Would anyone like to answer that? Well, this is Julie. I wouldn't mind making a comment overall on this. So as a platform provider, I think the hard sciences are historically off scale for women versus men and the notion of going into hardware and the hardware side of virtual reality, even though we've had many, many years of women in software engineering and I have a software engineering degree and many of the women here do, but we still have fewer women in double E and engineering in that area. And so I think you're gonna just see it statistically that way still in virtual reality because it's that way in hard science. And so I would say one of the things that we see a lot of is the notion that women are harnessers of virtual reality environments, but maybe not as many women in the hardware side of it or even in the software side of it. And I was unfortunately, right? So we still have that like unbalance in the world as a whole. So I would just make a comment like that. I just sort of state the obvious. Jackie, what about you? Well, I wanna talk about this from a historical perspective and I agree that maybe we're not into the hardware as much although I think I know some women who are, but historically that's not true. The guys seem to be into the hardware, but that gives the women a really amazing place to contribute to the content of these virtual worlds and the development of them as they progress through history. In 2007, I finished my PhD, which was a computer science PhD, but it focused on the art of making these virtual reality environments. As part of that work, I did a complete listing of all of the sort of artistic virtual reality applications that had been made since the beginning of virtual reality. There were about 100 of them in 2007. The interesting fact is that 70% of those 100 applications were headed up by or run by women, which I found absolutely astonishing. So I think there are ways that women contribute that are extremely important and whether it is coming up with the ideas for the content or how we make them meaningful or how we make them more applicable to us as human beings like the idea that women have more susceptibility to simpsickness. I mean, I think these are things that help us solve problems in the end. So I just wanted to put that out there that 70% of the first 100 sort of artistic VRs were done by women. A follow-up question in the same vein is from audience member Tyler Roach, who asks, I've been a host of Riffmax Karaoke, a virtual reality karaoke event. Wherever we have a woman sing, she blows away all of the men. Do you think women being more social creatures than men would benefit more from virtual reality? I'd like to address that, this is Gwynette. I think that virtual reality by its nature allows for a very unique type of social interaction. And everyone's heard about how people that aren't normally social in real life can be social here, people that are compromised because of any kind of disability can be social here in ways they can't in real life. So it has many affordances that enable people to more freely socialize than they may be able to in real life. And it also allows people to, in some grids, choose to be someone other than themselves. And generally, if you choose something like that, the theory goes that you're representing some aspect of your inner self. So it's an opportunity to create another kind of expression of your consciousness. And I like to tell clients that when they say to me, what is this even for? Why do we do this? Especially when they're men, it's hard for them sometimes to understand they want to see the return on investment, they want to see something they can handle, I think more than the questions I hear from women clients. And I think it's a good place for men in particular to come into, especially social grids, like Second Life or some open sim worlds, and be able to experience more freedom in their social interactions. And it helps us as women, I think the opposite is true for us. We're able to learn more of the mechanics of things. I mean, I came into Second Life knowing nothing about 3D development, and now I do 3D development, I'm working in Maya, I'm working in programs I never would have been attracted to before because they seem too technical to me as a writer and an artist and an educator. So I think it's a great opportunity, a crossover for both men and women in this environment to learn aspects of their own being that they haven't been able to express before and express it in relationship to each other. I have very different relationships with people in the virtual world than I do in real life. I think that often I find them more satisfying on a professional and personal level. Do you, does anybody here know if there's any effort being made to study and quantify the gender differences in virtual reality? I've not seen any, but I would support them. This is Gwyneth. It does sound like an interesting topic of study. This is Julie. There was quite a bit in the early days in Second Life. So I was born at the beginning of Second Life. I always say my avatar was born when Second Life opened up. So there was a lot of research at that time and it seemed to have sort of dwindled off. And so I think it's really interesting that it will spark up again, given what's going on with some of the changes in head-mounted displays and inoculus and all the interest in VR that's popped as a result of that. So I do think we're gonna see an upturn again. And so I just bring that up as a comment. We have a couple of minutes left for questions. If anybody has a question, please post it into a local chat. And I have a question for my panelists, is if I'm a woman and I wanna get into virtual reality, because it's such a hot thing right now, what are the pathways into it? Do I have to go get a programming degree in 3D graphics or are there other avenues that I can go into virtual reality with to participate in the metaverse that's coming down? Jackie? So I think what you have to do first is follow your passion. And whether your passion is creating things, so you're doing 3D content creation or sort of coming up with these grand ideas or connections to the community needs, I think you have to follow that first. And then getting involved with virtual reality is just another way to support your passions. That being said, if virtual reality is the way you want to go out and do these things that you have an innate passion for, I would suggest that you contact me if you're a woman that wants to get into this and maybe do some internships or to get involved with the kinds of things that we're doing. I'm happy to take some interns that we can train up and let them know what's going on and what's gone before. I think being mentored is one of the best ways to get into virtual reality. I wish we'd had that back in the early days, but we didn't. And I think I'd love to get back in that way. So I'm not speaking for everybody here, but I would bet that others have that same feeling. In addition, yes, yes. I was just gonna say I wanted to share my failure to hire several women in engineering in my company just recently. And so it is a little bit tough to find the kind of experience that, I was looking on the commercial side to get some engineering experience hired into the company, but we're talking about like small talk, software developers and things like that and admins, hardcore techs. And so it was very interesting and I would have loved to hired women and I was asking around quite a bit to try and see if I could put my money where my mouth was there. So yeah, I'm just gonna second the, look up our website and give us a call, right? Okay, this is less of a gender question as a more general one. How can we make people connect to virtual reality for the future? Yeah. And that's a good question to end on. Well, Julie, I'll tell you my next panel when I get to talk on virtual reality and in the enterprise, we'll go right into that in the areas for enterprise. So I'm gonna take myself out of this one, but it's like make it utilitarian for business and you're gonna start winning there. Oh, right. Make it meaningful for people. Make it, make things that they need that give their lives meaning, that solve problems that make things easier for them. That's how you connect people to virtual reality. I have to close, so. I'm, I won't. Oh, I'm sorry. I'm really sorry. They're telling us we have to close out the channel. I wanna thank everybody for a terrific presentation. I hope we can stick around for a couple of minutes. If anybody wants to ask anything more in chat. As a reminder to our audience, you can see what's coming up on the conference schedule at conference.opensimulator.org. In this room, the next session will be virtual reality in the enterprise with Julie Lemoine at 10 a.m. Thank you again to our speakers and the audience. We'll be back shortly with the next session.