 session of the 2020 Open Simulator Community Conference. In this session, we are happy to introduce a panel discussion called The New Platforms. And our panelists are Adam Frisbee, Caitlin Meeks, Kalilah Lakeworth, Lacey Sansar, and Mal Burns. Mal Burns is the host of In World Review, a weekly news and discussion program which has been running for over 10 years. He runs a metaworld broadcasting to provide input and output services for TV, in-worlds, and the expertise for the same. Adam Frisbee is the CEO of Sinewave Entertainment and a major developer of the Sine Space Platform. Caitlin Meeks is the co-founder and CEO of Tivoli Cloud VR, formerly of Hyde Fidelity Inc. and Unity Technologies. Kalilah Lakeworth is the founder and leader of Verkadia Project and Lacey Sansar is the community manager for Sansar. Please check out the website found at conference.opensimulator.org for speaker bios, details of the sections, and the full schedule of events. The session is being live streamed and recorded. So if you have questions or comments during the session, you may send tweets to atopensimcc with the hashtag, O-S-C-C-20. And welcome, everyone. Let's begin the session. Well, thank you, Lea, for the kind introduction there. I'm gonna have to correct you before we go any further. Firstly, well, I and James Adler do Metaworld News, which we broadcast from Sansar, in fact, these days. In World Review is done from OpenSim, but we don't do it weekly at the moment. We just do it where McWide. Also, as pointed out here, Adam has just said he's actually known as the Chief Product Officer. See this? She's a visual title. And what you missed out there, which I think is quite important for us here, is that if you don't know, Adam was also one of the founders of OpenSim here, way about when, before he moved to Science Space and all that. But we won't be here today if it wasn't for people like Adam and the course later on, Crystal Lopez, you know, with the hyper grid. So, so anyway, back to the panel. Now, part of this panel is something we sort of had last year. We did have a brief look at what was happening with the open source code that Philip Rosdell left behind when he closed down high fidelity. Two of them, I believe Kitely is still offering a solution on that fund, but two of the main contenders here, they've got slightly different procedures and things in the back end, but the other one that's sort of collaborating now is, let me see, Vicadia, which is Kallila's platform here. And Tivoli, or Tivoli Cloud as I think I should really call it, which is Katelyn's, maybe, as it were. Now, also in the course of the year, I think it's this year anyway, Linda Knapp, the makers of Second Life, who have been working on a new platform that is always going to take over the world, gave up on it, so rather they sold it to a company called Wookie. And that platform is called Sansar. And Lacey here is the community manager for Sansar. Sansar is also primarily publicizing events, like I think everybody here is really. But the thing that all these platforms have in common, in my opinion, is they all, there will be others, but all these allow user-created content. And some of it complex, some of it less so, some of it that you have to create outside the known import. But generally speaking, it feels much more like it's in the spirit of what we had here with OpenSeam. And indeed, we'll garden though it is, Second Life is very much based on its user-created content. With the COVID pandemic on the loose all over the world, in fact, there's been a massive increase of people coming online. It's very strange, as I mentioned, I think yesterday talking to Ken, it seems to me that some of those old timers, as it were, and I'll say Second Life, OpenSeam, the science space, the words, haven't necessarily benefited from that. You know, sort of, I'm very fond of saying that, you know, a year ago, I'll give you a Skype call, was a ubiquitous sort of expression, wasn't it? Well, now everybody's forgotten Skype and they're all talking about Zooming. I mean, I'll zoom fatigue more to the point. And it's so strange how the pandemic has brought a lot of people online, but their destinations and not being quite what we thought they were. And I'm also gonna ask our guests here, maybe if they are addressing that in any way, how they feel about that, the best ways to encourage people to join, well, effectively, I still call the metaverse. So I'm gonna just run around all four of my guests to get a little update from them, so to speak, like events coming up and things. And I know, Lacey, for example, you've got Lost Horizon amongst others launching really big stuff throughout December on Sansar. Anyway, do you want to give us a little plug for that before we go any further? Oh yeah, sure. There's 10 different events going on inside of Sansar. The folks from Glastonbury, Shangri-La, we did something earlier this year in July. And if you wanna check out more on that, it's actually losthorizonlive.com and it should give you instructions on how to join. The exciting part for this time is that we are actually not just on a PC, so you can actually join into these events on your mobile phone and recently a browser. So come in and join, it should be a lot of fun, from an infected mushroom to a little gay brother and beyond, there's all sorts of bands playing. So I hope to see you there. Yes, I was very impressed earlier in the year with the Glastonbury event, replacing the real thing, Shangri-La. I mean, the use of real-life performers, obviously pre-filmed on the green screen, who were superimposed onto the virtual stage and you really have to be really close up to the stage to actually realize they weren't there, you know, that they were actually flat 2D, so very excellently produced. Now, let me see, Adam, you've had quite a few events in, oh, I'm trying to remember the name of that band again. Wait, so it was early in the year. My memory is not very good these days, but we remember we came and there was a band there, wasn't there, doing a sort of, they were doing a sort of tour of various locations. Unfortunately, that really doesn't nail it down this year. We've had so many events and activities this year. I mean, our pivot has been more this year, it's been very good for us on the sort of the education and the corporate side of things, which has been a little bit less public focused, which is really next year's big primary for us, but no, this year's been great for us. I mean, obviously the pandemic is terrible for everyone else, but for us, it's been quite rejuvenating. We've had a lot of interest. So much so, we actually have to close off from new clients about three months ago, just because the work we were getting was absolutely nuts, which is absurd, but we've been busy and feel worth it. It's funny to think that some people really are benefiting here. Our government in Brittany was just announced that they planned to bring in some new taxes for the people, the profiteers of the pandemic, which seems very nerve-racking, I suppose. But yes, I mean, I gathered a second life, I even had to close off, I don't know about new users, but certainly new land and stuff, because they couldn't cope up with the demand, and you know how expensive they are, so who knows? Okay, Kalila, of the platforms, you're probably the lesser known in terms of PR and stuff, but I do know that you hold quite a few things there. Obviously, most of the information I get tends to come from Discord channels and Twitter feeds and stuff, you know? So, but maybe a little summary of what you're up to and we'll be up to. Well, what we're up to in terms of events, we've been pretty busy with that, not nearly as busy as some of you guys, but we've been helping more of an international audience out with events, so for example, we've had Asia being a focus lately, specifically Taiwan, Japan, we've held events for startups in on location and then allowed them to all collaborate with each other, because typically what would happen is they would get together for conventions in a physical space, but that's just impossible. So what we did differently is allowed them to host smaller events individually there and then bridge them through Vokadia. Honestly, the way I see it is we are more enablers than hosts or implementers. So if you have a need, we let people join up, use the open source platform and keep the world that they create. And so, yeah, we've been doing it that way. So when you say enabler, do you see it as taking on clients and maybe charging them a little bit or something and then keeping a person there for them? Or are you also including just general users who might begin to start logging in and want to create their own little parcels and things? Oh, well, we support both, right? It's supposed to be open. Of course, you can only focus on so much at any different time, because we can't. We're not a company, we're a volunteer open source project and so we don't take on clients as the Vokadia project. It's really up for whoever's available who wants to work on things. So the whole Vokadia community has come together to serve these clients and it's actually worked out remarkably well because as you see, we've had some pretty big events and they actually didn't blow up. So I can share that with you. It was a silly question, really, when I came thinking, well, of course you're open source. Why did I ask if you're making money? Yeah, funny, I think. Now, Caitlyn, of course, you're in your... Well, I'll come to that in a minute. You, of course, I've been doing various events here and everywhere and I know the one I sort of... Oh, I even popped into the one with the... Is it San Francisco? It was an educational thing that was a doctor there. So you've been providing an event space, so presumably not just parties, but for education. Yeah, that's right. Well, we've done our share of parties and things. We had the lockdown dance parties, which were fundraisers that we used for every person who attended. We computed a certain number of work units to folding at home to fight COVID and completed quite a lot. We had three or four of those and the idea was just to have a place where you could gather and party during the lockdown. Although we have been working more on R&D and just developing our platform than event, than hosting and like recruiting events yet. But we did have a pilot program for the last semester with Simon Frazier University out of Vancouver. And with the university, we kind of facilitated their cognitive science department so that they were able to provide instruction in Tivoli Hall, which is kind of our lecture hall environment. And that had about 200 students who participated. Most not in VR, but a lot of them. And the instructor very much enjoyed teaching from within VR. So the events that we've had, we've been using a bit like kind of information gathering sort of experiences to sort of further refiring our platform and so that we can develop it to better support events like this in the future. We're very much like looking forward to having more events in the coming years. But we do have plans to be coming a platform that universities and other learning institutions are interested in using. I must say the one that we were mentioning just now, Vancouver, I think you said it was, is it got a lot of media publicity afterwards. I noticed, which really brings it to mind. I remember my assess fees were bringing in quite a few little posts about events. And then I looked at the small print and said, it sounds like, oh, sorry, I've got it wrong. It's only cloud, that was right. But it was in small print, the main focus was on the event itself. It made it to Vancouver TV news, certainly. That's right, yeah. Boy, remind me to make sure that when a news story is done, that it actually mentions the name of the core product being used. I did play on our news that clip from the TV news. I grabbed it and included it in our news. It was only two minutes. So we do that with short clips. Now, while we're on the subject, before we move on a bit, this is really for Khalila and Caitlyn combined. This time last year, and of course you were here last year, Khalila, I had a similar discussion. And you were both basically working with the open source code that Philip Oostel had let go of when he finished high-fidelity. And at that time, there were very separate projects. And of course, they are now. But following the discords and all the other things I followed, I picked up on the fact that the two of your platforms, and now maybe you're going to be beginning to collaborate a bit. I'm not up on the technical details. I just remember one of you posted something and I liked it. And the other said, whoops. So maybe do you have any plans to sort of work together in a cohesive way that we can understand? Or is it just a... Because the way you're using the open source code is slightly different, isn't it? You're not duplicates of each other's platform. We do have different approaches. Rakedia, as Khalila mentioned, is a volunteer open source collective who are really effective. And very productive. Whereas in Tivoli, we're a type B corporation, but we're also open source. In terms of working together, I'll defer to Khalila on that. But we are also working with another community member who wants to create kind of a, kind of an agnostic sort of working group that can sort of maintain the protocol standards so that if we diverge, or we already do diverge a bit, but as we diverge that we may still perhaps have a degree of interoperability, the same way that when HTTP landed, there was the W3 consortium sort of played a role in defining and maintaining the protocols. Exactly. I will, you know. That's something I've always, you know, so sad that we didn't have anything like that, like. Yeah. So we do now have. So to build up for virtual worlds like we did the web. And there is now, in fact, this W3 working group called the HFVRP working group, if you'd like to join. HFVRP. Yeah, High Fidelity Virtual Reality Platform. Oh, okay. Which is kind of the official name that Lynn, that High Fidelity gave the platform at, you know, after it was sunset. But I can't speak for Kalila, of course. Yeah. Well, Kalila, any comments on this? Well, I do love what we're doing and I do love the High Fidelity platform, to be honest with you. When I had started Rikadia, I could have picked from any open source code base, right? Could have been anything, but I figured that that is the best place to start from given how much work they had done. You know, Philip really had a vision and that's basically what set the foundation for what we have now. But the way I see interoperability is it's not just High Fidelity code. That's the thing. I think it's much wider than that, right? I don't imagine metaverse in the way of say Ready Player One. I imagine it in more the likes of the internet. And so I think to myself, interoperability is a lot deeper than that and I'm thinking about things, not just High Fidelity Virtual Reality platform, but things like WebXR, you know? That seems like so far apart, but in reality, what I would like to do is establish interoperability on a much wider level. And it's hard to do interoperability period, right? Because you would have to focus on your own platform and then try to collaborate with others. And if you don't have much time, let alone a company backing you, it's quite difficult. But I think it's worth pursuing in the wider context. So yeah, I see many opportunities for it to naturally evolve, to be honest with you. Not easy, not one bit, but I think definitely on the roadmap. Yeah, I think the problem is there is no existing protocol I mean, the closest we ever came to it was VRML, wasn't it, you know? Way back when, there's been nothing that really is a set of rules that can be built on. But one I think is actually rather interesting is to extend this a little bit. Well, I'll start. No, I'll actually ask you, Kailina and Khalida first. Have you any plans to be able to bring your platform out of a dedicated platform and onto, say, something like a webpage or a mobile app? Is that on the horizon for Cade or Giverny? Well, I mean, it all depends on the implementation. High fidelity did indeed have an Android app, for example. And so, yes, the platform can build into that, but we're exploring many ways to accomplish, taking it out of just native. So I don't want to say anything or make promises because setting high expectations, letting people down is far worse than just underselling and over-delivering. Yeah, just say we're thinking about it. Well, we're actually exploring. We are actually looking into a lot of these things and deep networking and architecture code, right? And that's what keeps it so busy. So I would say keep an eye out. That's what I would say. The possibilities of what can be done on the web are increasing hugely as we go by. And Kalila, any moves on that fun? Well, that was Kalila. Oh, yeah, sorry, Caitlin. That's all right. But I'll take that as an example. We don't have these little flapping things over people's heads here, so please get a bit confused. Well, actually, I would answer similarly. We're looking at a lightweight client that could make it easier for people who don't have higher-end VR rigs to be able to experience things, especially in the context of our classroom, sort of experiments, because not everyone necessarily has a high-end computer. And it's not trivial to kind of dumb down the current sort of core high-fidelity VR platform to work really well on lower-end gear. So it would require the creation of something. It could be like a subset of the main application that will work on the web. I'm just visualizing this sort of feature where we're talking about an interoperability, which sounds a bit strange, but imagine you've got a browser open and you've got five tabs, and each tab is actually a web incarnation of a different virtual world. So you can teleport from one world to the other by changing tabs. It might say, you know... Yeah, yeah, that would be lovely. Very odd. But this brings me back to, yeah. Well, here, of course, I can bring Adam and Lacey back in because Sansar, as well as being a standalone client, does actually have a mobile and a web interface as to some size-based, so I don't know about it. Do you have mobile as well? Is it just a web interface? Sorry, was that me or Lacey? No, I couldn't remember whether you have both a web and a mobile. We do. So we've got full native clients for iOS and Android, which are basically they are running the full viewer. We've had a web client using WebGL for a number of years. Now, I could scream in various languages for 30 minutes straight to complain about how bad WebGL actually is. At least if you want to do anything sort of high production values. But this year, we've actually been playing around with a new replacement for our web client, which is really good. I can give you guys a demo later. It's sort of in invite only, but come play a look with it because we have been able to get the full client running with really fantastic quality graphics and stuff on web this year. And it is really easy to get into these places. It's one of the things we're really looking forward to next year, because the idea of sending a link to a friend and having them join you in their browser instantly is so cool. Yeah. And Lacey, the Samsung version, this is a similar sort of thing. Did you have to make a special porting of the code for? So it's like, yeah, I mean, so you can attend events kind of like the one that we had actually this time last weekend with Elro and Boots house. And you can actually attend the events on these mobile and browser. We actually had 1.2 million in attendance this past weekend. And we were on the front page at Twitch for, it means a lot for a couple of hours. So it's definitely helpful for getting more bodies and more people enjoying these virtual events. Yeah, when you talk in the thousands, we realize how much stuff has changed really. Don't presumably they're not fully embodied avatars, are they? They're sort of representational presences. Well, they wouldn't be like avatars creating lag. You couldn't have thousands that way, could you? Or could you? So we have a way that we can actually scale up. It's called Avro, sort of for avatar broadcasting. And so you can make different instances, but also have some of the people be broadcast to specific instances. So in that way, you can have interactivity, also with the chat and reactions and all sorts of different ways without having to have thousands of avatars stack up upon each other. Of course, yeah. But Avro allows this to go theoretically into the tens of thousands. I mean, basically as much as you want or could have. It's the same as shouting as it's called, which I mean, Adam, you have shouting, don't you? We do, but we've also been bringing up the concurrency in regions too. I've got another little demo project this year where we've been putting 500 plus avatars in a single scene. We may actually be able to get up to about 1700, we think. And I can see them all. Yeah, yeah, they're all in the same, thank you. Yeah, I mean, I think the visual fidelity of the actual avatars, are they more like symbolic representations or? No, we're keeping full avatars. It can crunch your graphics card, having that many in world at once, but we're only talking about that the other day. Now, something else that you all have in common is I follow all four of you via Discord. I mean, obviously, some of you got Twitter accounts and you post that, in fact, it opens in here. I'm always getting Twitter announcements about an event that, you know, by the time I read Twitter, it's been on for 30 minutes, so I got both of it. But in Discord, it seems to be, and I mentioned this with Ken Bayer, I was interviewing yesterday, it was started for gamers, and let's extend any gaming technology to the virtual worlds. It allows for voice, it allows for text, it allows for you to embed videos, you can even watch the videos together. You can do an awful lot, except of course it is not a virtual world in terms of having avatars or whatever. But it does, you know, it does occur to me that if we don't have the protocols to have interoperability amongst platforms, i.e., you know, different sound source, sound waves, et cetera, then there is still the possibility for communication. I mean, the idea of this first occurred to me way back early in Second Life when, oh, it must be a decade ago now, they bought out, it was actually hosted by VVolks, it was a separate client that was on your desktop, a bit like Skype, and you could message Second Life users and indeed phone them from this little widget, this VVolks type widget, and the amazing thing is unlike some of the web clients, it didn't require you, you know, it didn't stop you actually logging into the platform as well, it just rested like a Skype in your system tray. And I always found that was great because if you weren't in world, you had an instant way of contacting people, and I think Discord has sort of filled that little gap. At one time it was meant to be, you know, Slack, but that went in our direction and has now gone in an even greater direction, but I do find that is kind of useful. Obviously you can't just project yourself into a virtual world, but let me see which is, there is a platform. Yes, I think it's Tivoli, isn't it? That has a plugin and maybe clearly you have it too. There's a plugin in the code, actually for Discord. So if you have Discord running whilst you actually come into the virtual world, it activates Discord on top of your world view. Oh yeah, well, we've got something that simply just kind of reflects which world you're in as well as like in our Discord server. You can see which worlds are online and how many people are connected and that kind of thing. Nothing like super tightly knit to Discord, but we really dig Discord both as a product and as a company and great community. So we're probably gonna be looking at things we can do to make them work a little more closely together. And I think, you know, so many platforms, I get confused these days a bit, but I'm thinking, I think again, there's Sansar here. There's no obvious way to use text chat, for example, is that they see in Sansar, but I have come across occasions where people are actually having a text chat, but they're having it on the side in a Discord channel. It may not even be Sansar's Discord channel, it may be a Discord channel that's been set up by venue or something like that. So, you know, people can actually, you know, talk in chat. I personally don't go with chat at all. I just like talking too much, but I mean, I just have a t-shirt saying, I don't do chat, you know, as a reply to all the people that said, I don't do voice, you know, when it came in. But several people at this conference have actually commented on the fact and in fact, Ken By mentioned it afterwards yesterday that, you know, he was impressed by the fact, he was a presenter, so he got to the VIP bit here with the devs and I don't know really fully knew what was going on, but he was commenting on it, I think it was, that how empowering it was to actually have the live fast-moving chat stream, as well as people talking in voice at the same time. Oh yeah. You were following two, you know, rapid conversations, probably better than you ever could in the real world, you know, where you tend to call such a one thing at once. We do have text chat actually, and I'm most of the time, you know, if I'm multitasking, I do actually use it personally myself, but no, it's definitely important to have for accessibility. You know, some people prefer to just use text chat and obviously that's cool, but you know, also the voice chat option, especially for VR, is very important, but Stanzar does have that text chat option and that is usable and completely, how do you put it? With the avros system, it goes through all the different instances, so you can connect everybody, no matter what instances you are in. All right, okay. I mean, like many things, there's a menu item that are hidden away somewhere that yet to be discovered by people like me. But yeah, but that duality would say, well, now the other thing, the other thing that again, all your platforms have in common here is the graphic fidelity, if you saw what I mean. I, you know, a second life, and indeed OpenSim here have come along a bit of a way, you know, they're not too cartoony, but you know, there's limits to, you know, how far they can go. I mean, you can bring mesh in here, but it doesn't always play as well as mesh does in a dedicated platform. Like all of yours, in fact. Lacey, your back end, as it were, the auto-ring software is of course the one that Linden Labs built from scratch for their version of Samsung, which you've now inherited, I guess. Yeah, we have our own engine. So when it comes to things like lighting effects and all the rest of it, you know, you can, you know, literally customize everything. I mean, it may be, you know, well, you know, it's far better than wind light. Let's put it that way. And the same with Adam, some of the first places I saw that Adam took me to in science space, you know, had been proudly built, you know, with all sorts of mechanics going on and all sorts of wonderful lighting. And, you know, our high fidelity, of course, ended up being the same and subsequently that's been passed down to Bully and Vigadia. How important do you think the graphic fidelity? Over and beyond the demands on the graphics card, but I mean, I just mean the general graphic fidelity is to the environment. There are some people that say, well, the avatar's not really important, it's just the fact that you're present with people and the world can be quite simple. Like, oh, I forget there's another successful platform this year, I've forgotten his name, my friend. It's very basic, but very workable. And all your platforms, which are very rich environments. And, you know, you've got the avatar, but you're also in a very rich environment. How important do you think this is? Do you ever get any feedback saying something so you like make it simpler? Let's start with, I don't know, Caitlin. Sure. Well, in the case of Tivoli and probably for Vigadia and just the high-fidelity VR platform in general and its derivatives, certainly great-looking graphics is important, but it's not really the only ingredient in the recipe for having a rich virtual world. What I would say that is actually a little bit more important to us is the fact that the worlds are persistent. That, you know, you go and change something, you break a stick on a tree and that stick is broken when you return to that world. So we're not just throwing up kind of like diorama worlds that people can see and then it's reset and reloaded every time. So for us, I would say that persistence is really important as well as capturing like really the subtlety of avatar movement and voice and trying to capture the nuance there. So when we say high-fidelity, certainly when I was working at Hi-Fi, what we were talking about wasn't as much of the graphics quality as it was the fidelity of the overall experience of the nature of the human that comes through in the virtual world. That being said, we do want sexy graphics, but it'll be a while before either of us probably will be up to par with anything resembling what you can do with Unreal Engine or something like that. But if we wanted sexy graphics, we would probably just use a game engine off the shelf rather than a custom written revolutionary core technology that stands out because it can provide the solutions that I just mentioned. Okay, Adam, Adam, same topic, really. The importance of the fidelity of the... Yeah, so this one I can actually answer with some empirical data. So yeah, do you talk about the volumetric stuff too? Well, no, no, no, I've been going backwards just to the fidelity of the avatar. So actually we experimented this year to see what people would want, what they would tolerate in terms of avatar expression and just general look and feel. When we launched the Break Room product that we did this year, which was sort of a corporate virtual world, you can just buy and dump off the shelf. You can just put it in your infrastructure and away you go. We experimented with a whole bunch of different theme packs for the people who bought them. So some people bought a sort of a low poly, very simplified, basic characters, but it was really well optimized for people on really old computers. And then we experimented with the high-def stuff, doing sort of all the bells and whistles, the highest and the high. And universally, customers ended up preferring the high-def stuff. We found that there was actually quite a strong negative reaction to cartoonified avatars that they really wanted as much realism as you could give them. So there's a little... Sorry, do you think this is because this was a kind of enterprise offering as opposed to public? Possible, but I think that the same thing happens even otherwise. I mean, my usual go-to is to rag on Facebook's virtual worlds because they consistently keep screwing up the avatars and they consistently keep getting people saying the avatars are ugly. I don't know why they keep persisting with that design, but I think that holds true. I suspect that the avatar fidelity matters a lot more than people give it credit for. I think especially, you've got to look at Second Life to realise that there's a huge market for the fashionistas, people supplying and selling clothing and animations and all sorts of stuff like that. And that tells you that people in the social world want to be... They want to be dressed up and do things like they did in the real world. And so that demands a certain amount of realism. This avatar, I'm wearing by the way, this is a lot of interesting for you folks there. This is made for me and it looks a bit dated and unfinished, but this is my... I have an identical avatar. This same avatar is in Tivoli and in Vicadia and in Science Space. In fact, the only place it's not is Sansar, which is all because we do the weekly news show from Sansar. And I know that James, by the way, they see who does the camera with me and co-hosts the news, you know. So we just become very keen on the environment in Sansar so quickly to get used to. And it just looks good on camera, even though we're just boring talking heads, you know, the screenshots, we've taken to it. Let's put it that way. But, you know, we travel all over the place, so no favourites here. Right, moving on again, Adam. Before we came on air, you were telling me, I don't think we can actually put up web pages or links here on the screen behind us because we aren't prepared. But you tell me about the volumetric capture and, you know, it's a way towards the future. And I mean, maybe it could contextualize that in something that is something in Sansar could, sorry, science-based could use. And maybe if the answer is yes, then it would, it might be something the other set could use too. Yeah, so I'm going to go on a slight tangent here. So we were talking a little bit about volumetric capture for the audience who weren't participating in our pre-call conversation. So volumetric capture is basically a real-time 3D capture. Use a bunch of stereo cameras and you record the person doing whatever they're doing from a bunch of angles and you actually use photogrammetry to turn that into a real-time streaming 3D model. So it looks and acts fantastically. It's really cool technology. There's a bunch of companies working on great stuff there. Microsoft have really been commercializing it more than anyone else. But Intel and a few other companies have been doing some cool stuff in the space. To answer the question, if you can support it, yep, we've been experimenting with it. There's a bunch of ways of getting that content into science-based already today. But real-time live capture is the stuff we're interested in. But I'm going to go off in a bit of a tangent there because we talked a bit about sort of Zoom fatigue. And I think the biggest part of Zoom fatigue that virtuals don't suffer from is the need to be on camera. When you are on a Zoom call and you've got your camera on, you are constantly watching yourself. You're making sure that thinning hair is not appearing in the camera shots. You're making sure you're not slacking off. You're not doing anything. I mean, right now I've got my hands on fidgeting. It's like looking in the mirror, isn't it? You've just got a previous... It is a mental load. So I think that for day-to-day use, I can't see us using 3D volumetric capture. I think that it is not something that people are going to be comfortable with. It is yet another level of invasiveness beyond video. I mean, video is already pretty invasive. But for certain things, I think it'll work fantastically. And one of them is live music, live events, those kinds of things where you've got a performance going on and a performer. That kind of thing, the 3D volumetric capture is just amazing. It is really next-gen stuff. Presumably, and I'm remembering what happened to the sound style here with the glass and everything. Presumably, you could implement the volumetric capture on, say, a parcel that's like a stage, but it won't actually necessarily affect the surrounding areas where the audience might be. Because I'm thinking when I went to Glastonbury and Sansar, I mentioned it earlier, well, they were prerecorded, unfortunately, but the real-world bands were filmed against a green screen. And they were then projected into the virtual world against a virtual background, several layers of background, in fact, and on the edge of the stage, and then the audience was in the audience. And as a member of the audience, it wasn't until you got your nose right up to the edge of the stage, you know, groovy style, that you realized that there was no third dimension to the band. It was actually video, but it seemed seamless against the background because it was green screen. Now, the curse to me, obviously, that if that had happened in Sansar and they had this volumetric type capture, the performers, and only the performers, would, instead of being that flat video against the background, could actually be more like holograms, you know, where you could be at the front of the stage and you could still move left to right and still get a sense of looking around them. Oh, yeah. I'd like to also mention that you can actually perform on the green screen fully live in Sansar. You know, we do a mix of both. Yeah, it's obviously easier for logistics to record it in advance when you've got a big event. Oh, yeah. Yeah, so presumably in both sides, how, I mean, Caitlin and Khalila, do you know anything about this, the volumetric capture thing? Is it something that's come across your radar and development? Well, it's not necessarily come across too much. I mean, in terms of immersion and bringing people in, something that's been a focus is things like eye tracking, finger tracking, maybe even face capture would be something at some point, but volumetric, I think is a bit tricky. So I agree with what was said earlier that it kind of betrays some of the major points of VR, which is avatars. You get to present yourself as something that you mean to, right? You're not just stuck with the physical realm and however physicality has decided that you'll be, you know, you'll look and present yourself. Avatars for you. So if we take your emotions and project that into an avatar, I think that's not a compromise. I think that's invaluable. I think that's something that people seek out. And I would like to push that forward a lot more. Right. Yeah, I think it's a case of what happens on stage too. It can be a separate thing. I remember when Philip did the, they had that sort of big, I can't remember what he called it now, that big festival the year or two ago in High Fidelity. And, sorry? Was it Malticon? No, it's actually like an outdoor festival. There were several different stages and you wandered around. And oh, what's his name played? Oh, go and get too old for this. My memory is fading. Thomas Stolby? Thomas Stolby, that's it. Yeah, thank you. Yeah. Yeah, that was the Futurelands Festival. Futurelands, that was it. Yeah. And I can imagine something had done that quite that big. It will be fun to do a bit with the stage that they didn't do on that occasion. I mean, the rather unsuccessful thing there was that Dolby's own performance sound was mixed in with the people gossiping next to me. You couldn't turn down the volume of the people next to you to get a clean audio from the performer. And also the stage was very close up. But I was imagining that that sort of event, you could partition performance areas to encompass a different technology, as it were in a particular instance. Now, I've got one final question to ask. And this is probably going to make a really dumb question because they don't develop or code or do any of these things. But I'd have thoughts and just checking the time here. Yeah. I'd have thoughts about what if I built a mesh construct? I don't know, maybe a house or something with a TV and the telephone system or something in it, right? Maybe an open sim here, maybe somewhere else. But the idea was that like my avatar here, I could deploy it in multiple platforms. What if inside this mesh, be it an avatar or a building, there was code running that was totally independent of the platform you were in. It's tackling, it's probably a fanciful way and it probably wouldn't work. But I'm wondering, is that a way of approaching interoperability where you put interoperable components in, say, a mesh object that would be reasonable, as it were, in multiple worlds? Your thoughts on that, if it makes any sense at all. Well, I'll field this one first and then I can open up for other people. So the short answer is it works for a lot of things. When we launched back in, what was it, November 2016, we basically had scripting provided through a series of sort of blocked components. So there was components for vehicles, for seats, for everything like that. We think about about 300 components around that mark that each had sort of some discrete functionality that can be tweaked and customized, but they were all sort of building blocks that everyone could use and it worked pretty well. For a lot of users, you were able to get the things you needed. There was components for all the common functionality. One of the problems though is that eventually you hit the point that people want to completely rebuild whatever component you've built and do their own tweaked thing. And that's the point which break compatibility here. That's the point at which you need to have a common scripting runtime. The web has one in its JavaScript, both the actual language and the SDK that the browsers ship with them. And that would be what you need to do for really, really complex interrupt, but for basic interrupt, it definitely can be done. You can satisfy probably 9% of users on that. Yeah, we're down to the edge here. Yeah, we're gonna be thrown off in a minute. Yeah, it occurred to me that last year we mentioned how OpenSim can be used as a construction platform to export a mesh that will then later end up in somewhere like Science Space. And I was thinking in terms of what you could put into a studio here. Anyway, I'm afraid we have to wrap. You know, 50 minutes is never, never long enough, especially for a panel. So that's gonna be it. Thanks for watching everybody. Thank you to Lacey from Sansar. Thank you, Lacey. Thank you. And thank you, Katelyn, from Tovoli Cloud. You are very welcome, and thanks for having us. Yeah, thank you, Adam, from Science Space. Thank you for having me again. And Lacey, thank you to Kalyla from Vigadia. Well, it's been lovely. Thank you for hosting. And with that, I'll throw over to my... I think Lea is still here to do the Vigadia roundup. I sure am. They do a roundup thing. Absolutely. Thank you to our panelists and to Mal for a terrific session.