 My name is Stephanie Mendoza. I've been going by SAM a lot more lately. So it's almost kind of odd to hear my name sometimes, but you guys can feel free to call me whatever. It's more comfortable to you. So when I first got to Portland, I actually... I didn't intend to live here. I was just coming through for some tech classes and I had every intention to return to Texas to finish those off. But after about a month of traveling around the Northwest and not doing what I initially intended to come to Portland to do, I found myself back and literally the next day I noticed that I had to repayment and there was no way out. So I had no real friends in the city and again, was intending to go home within a few days. I found myself living in my car outside of random parks and using public facilities everywhere and fortunately, I had a background in art and technology that I could weasel my way into various hacker spaces and maker spaces, places like Control-H and Make-Think Code, which welcomed me with open arms. And you know, regardless of whether they knew what my living situation was, as a 3D artist, I found myself immediately attracted to VR, but once again having not even enough money to feed myself, I was restricted until I got a scholarship to the Mozilla View Source Conference back in 2015 when they were unveiling A-Frame and I was fortunate enough to find myself in one of Josh Carpenter's talks where he was really excited about showing off this new framework that allowed anyone regardless of your status to have access to VR because of its cross-platform capabilities. So within a year of building myself up on my laptop, living out of my car, living out of hacker spaces, I find myself looking like this. So this is my avatar, at least I've frequently used avatar, so sadly, like GIF is not playing. But I call it Fugaz, it's an alibri he, which is a creature of 1930s fever dream and often a subject of folk art in Mexico. And I, you know, enjoy having claws and a tail. I almost suffer from, I wouldn't say suffer, but I almost get like these light feelings of body dysmorphia when I come out of social VR where I'm like, where did my claws go? Where's my tail? Why can't I fly anymore? Like, you know, I want to get to the top of that building, so see the parade, but I can't, and my brain doesn't want to make those connections. You know, and it's like, and I also worry about turning around sometimes. I'm like, oh man, am I gonna hit something? We're gonna knock it over. It's like the kind of self-awareness that you wish your golden retriever had. Yeah, and so this, these things affect you as you exit the digital world. So do a lot of your experiences, your personal experiences, and over time you do realize that like you are gaining new levels of awareness and like you're able to train yourself in certain ways that you didn't, initially expect that caught me completely off-guard, like my lack of fear of heights now that I accidentally trained myself out of. I used to be terrified of heights, or even public speaking. When I gave my first talk, my first big talk in front of a couple hundred people, I actually simulated the room in Unity that I was gonna give that lecture in, and then practiced and messed up multiple times in that simulation, and my audience was like zombies and tigers and like men in blue business suits and cops and stuff. Like whatever, whatever I could find free on the asset store to entertain my like, you know, wild little girls with like squirt bottles and stuff, and I'm just like yeah. And it made me like not afraid of that like, you know, out-on-the-savannah feeling, but that directed action learning can be used against us as well for like advertising and marketing and like straight-up brainwashing. So I have this like sort of, I'd managed to condense it down to a small thesis where it's like the digital world and the lessons learned in it, are not confined to a single simulated space, be it your experience in the environment or the experience that you have becoming something completely new in these territories when you choose to, and becoming something that you absolutely choose to be, which is a new paradigm for us, especially now considering like how, you know, trans people are under attack by the administration. Like this is a space where you can go and literally be anyone that you feel, anything that you feel. So part of that awareness has always been, you know, present, not just in virtual spaces, but in art in general, and so like I just kind of wanted to go down why I was able to make that leap from like absolute destitute homelessness, like sleeping in front of rich people's houses on Mount Tabor, because they had really nice views in like clean bathrooms. So number one, your browser is a portal. And as time passes, we will come to this realization more and more that we will literally be stepping through these digital portals, or those digital portals will be exiting into our space through mixed reality. But as soon as you realize that, the visual, like visualizing cyberspace will be much easier. Anything that most of us as technologists already acknowledge this. WebVR is cross-platform, so again, if you don't have a headset at all, then you can use your desktop. You can go to the library if you absolutely must, if you're that driven. It's a free open-source framework, so again, no cost to anybody, very broke and starving artist-friendly. And then you can get free hosting off of any number of platforms. My favorites are those listed above, so like Glitch, Shoutout to Neocities, because this is what I got started on, and it's run by a very close friend of mine, and then Codepin also, which automatically will like update your sketch. So you have like multiple windows and you're like writing your code, and it's like updating live and allows you to iterate and allows you to fork. And all three of these websites have that sort of power behind them, a creative power, a creative capabilities. And then finally, this is something that I'm still like getting into, but I see spreading, and I'm very excited about, which is the distributed web, and like VR's, like the excitement about VR in distributed web technologies, it's the idea that HTTPS is broken and that these highly centralized systems, or like the way that the net has centralized itself is counterproductive to the initial philosophy of the web, of being decentralized, of being open to everyone and not owned by these central powers. Which is obviously a huge issue when it comes to immersing yourself in putting your entire body in these digital spaces that are then run by the same people who are doing things like Facebook, for instance, and like what kind of power are you giving them over you when you're completely immersed inside of Facebook? It's something that I choose not to think about and choose not to participate in, because these things are available and it takes a weekend to learn. So let's, I don't know how many of y'all are actual programmers, and some of y'all might have seen this before, so it might be redundant, but some of y'all have never seen this at all, so I can give you guys a small taste of what it is to be a web VR developer or artist, however you choose to call yourself, but this is kind of all that it takes. You have your basic HTML page and your header that's initializing everything. A-Frame's actually up to 8.0, so we'll just change that 6 to an 8. But yeah, you have your title, your meta content, and then all you need is that A-Frame script and you just get that on their documentation page, and then you get to the meat of it in your body. All you have to do is open up a scene inside of it. Anyone who's familiar with 3D or Unity is familiar with this concept where you build your world inside of your scene, and then after you've opened up your scene, everything inside of that scene relies on three coordinates, your x, your y, and your z, for your position and your rotation and your scaling as well. So if you notice over there I have it highlighted, the x is red, the y is green, and the z is blue. And it's just, you just input it there, and there's even a, what do you call it, an inspector now that allows you to literally just pull it up like it's normal 3D software and reach in and edit things and then come out and update the code that way, which is a little bit more hands-on for people who are less programming oriented. But other than that, I mean this is extremely feasible for someone again in a weekend to pick up and then to really lift themselves out of whatever rut they're in if that's the issue or just to have a new hobby or to have a new space to explore because again VR is very exciting, mixed reality is very exciting territory and we need more people, more artists in there who are willing to come at it from less of a capitalist like make money perspective and more of a theoretical like, hey this is what it's doing, the humanity anthropological perspective because there is no media theory in this space or at least there is very little and what does come out as it's experienced. So we're right on the cutting edge of this. This is the other thing that I really love about it is that as someone who is living in their car, I owned very little and so in cyberspace I could have whatever I wanted. I can't watch Ready Player One because it's too close to home. So yeah, some really quick free resources that you can, you know, I'm pretty sure all of y'all are good and have jobs or students and stuff and can have better tools but this is for like anyone who again has very little. Blender free 3D editing software, absolutely amazing. Like I love Blender, like I have accessed all the highest and like 3D modeling software Blender is still like my love. Make Human is a really good editing tool for making like humanoid characters. There's like more than a few of these now but that was one that I became really familiar with and you guys can just all like, you know, I forgot what the other one was called. Like Morph3D, I think it's Morph3D. After that, so you can do a lot of scavenger hunting on Sketchfab and Thingiverse because it's just this massive repository of 3D models like this apple tart, or not apple tart, this fruit tart that is in the background and you know many other wonderful things. And then, you know, it'll spit it out in any number of formats but right now GLTF or that one at the end is coming out as like the .jpeg for 3D models on the web and I love it because it makes my life easy and I don't have to go out and do file conversions or like format conversions which are really really annoying. And then I want to say RIP123D catch but there's again also other free software that allows you to do photogrammetry to like 3D scan and capture your own real world objects so then you can digitize them and then infinitely duplicate them as you see fit and you can get, you know, captures of these fancy plates of cheese fromage de Noël or, you know, this burnt croissant that you kind of messed up your dinner and you're like, well, I don't want it to completely go to waste and so... And, you know, with all these things you can synthesize them into, this was my first experience I was really into vaporwave when I first got to Portland and there were all these like YouTube vaporwave mixes and there was one that was like this crazy underground Chinese like drag, or lion like palm tree like ocean experience and I was like, I can make that in 3D and then I can go inside of it and so I did and added a couple of things like I really like the connected to America online all the 90s like windows like just toss everywhere, it's like, haha, it's all unraveling or this free store because again, I'm kind of a little bit of an anarchist sometimes and I like everything to be free and I like people to just do whatever they want with whatever they want and this is one really good way to practice that in real time and so, you know, this isn't the only free store again Sketchfab is like by far king of it at the moment because you can jump in there and you can explore like all of those models in VR and they have their own applications for it which are great and they are like totally compatible with the sort of like in... the compositors that exist in like high-end VR headsets that allow you to like flip back and forth between programs so it is kind of like going to a store and shopping which is crazy where that we're at that point but it happened so I guess my last part is like but even though all this is going on, can VR really be free because just because I figured it out because I had that privilege of having like a college degree even though it, you know, did cause all of this to happen I guess that's the point of a college degree maybe just not linearly but you know, not everyone has that not everyone has the aptitude to like want to program to tell themselves that they can do these things even though they're so foreign even though while you step in, they seem familiar it's like that transition hasn't fully happened for like the current generation of developers or of people who are aspiring to be artists and developers in this space so I did have a small project that I made as my own personal solution to this it doesn't, it still exists but the domain name got squatted on me and I didn't catch it on time so I have had to remove that and I will be putting it back up under a new domain name it's just, I'll get to it but this was a map that I made of Portland's VR spaces and there were like about seven or eight of them at the time of last year I think before I was hired to actually build a VR lab so I no longer need to like go and find VR labs so, you know, big reveal I've actually never owned my own headset either I've always just, you know, sought out the technology wherever I could find it because again, I've never had as much as I do now but this is really all it takes is that these spaces do exist and people can be brought to them it can be hostile at first but you just like, you really get your sea legs in this space but yeah, you know, anything like volunteering just knowing how to talk shop and get you in and get anyone else in if you want to lend someone a helping hand you all have the power to do this I find myself doing it for a lot of people too but then I went out and built this in 3D space and like in social VR to show people from all over the world how cool Portland was and then I made a web VR version but again, it's not currently accessible so I will be throwing the new domain name back up whenever that does get whatever I do, acquire a new one and this is my contact info but yeah, thank you all