 Right, well, greetings everybody and welcome back to the, well, the start of the afternoon sessions here at the Avonsook Community Convention of 2018. This panel is, it's become a kind of tradition. It started as the viewer panel, then it became beyond the viewer panel, then it became beyond the beyond the viewer panel. Well, we're going just to add another beyond that. There are so many aspects of the virtual world, but, you know, there are the viewers and then there are the servers and then there is this sort of a gray area in the middle where they actually have to connect to each other. Now, I, one of the guests who was going to be on this panel, Adam Frisbee, who's obviously an OpenSyn founder, but also now CEO of Science Space, he's mid-transit, somewhere between Australia and Hawaii, I believe, so he can't make it, which in a way might just be opportune because as many of you know, this conference started off with a bit of a bang when Melanie Milland announced some things to do with viewers. And also in a talk last week, which was summarized again recently, Crystal Lopez is on the other side here, also talks about the renewed interest in the viewer tech. So maybe finally we are moving to something that really qualifies discussion as a viewer panel. Yes, we're back to viewers. Anyway, I'm going to introduce the people who are here today generally. Melanie, you met this morning. She is part of the OpenSyn core. She used to run a grid called Avination, which had a separate code base, which has now been opened up and incorporated into the OpenSyn code base 0.9. Crystal Lopez, of course, who was the inventor of the hypergrid, never to forget this. And as has been commented earlier on, indeed, just in the last hour of the VIP session, renewed focus on the hypergrid as being OpenSyns. I always call it the killer app of OpenSyn, though it's not really an app, it's protocols, of course. So welcome to both Melanie and Crystal. I'm also joined. He was at the Mr. Blue Robert Adams, who was at the developer of the VIP session a short while ago, and has a fair things to say about the viewer. So welcome, Robert. And Singer Girl Mode. Singer Girl Mode, I'm just going to give a bit of a different introduction because she's doing a few different things. She's a singer, I guess what. But on top of that, she's a developer of 3D Web World, as spelled with a zeb, which is a virtual world in a web browser. And it's over a year in development now. It's great to have made great strides with over 30 regions devoted to art, education, writing, music, community, and more. Now, we'll talk about this. In fact, I think we'll probably start by talking about this. The web worlds have a great similarity to OpenSyn, except they're not what networked. In other words, you might be able to take... We were talking about cyber lounge here last year, where the principle being that you could say build something in OpenSyn and then just export it and stick it on the web. And although it's not connected to the hypergrid, per se, it will be more or less a copy of the same build on the web. So you might, for example, have a night club or something. And you want to invite Facebook friends there. So you put it on a web page rather than send a link where they've got to download a client and then find a way to wherever you are, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. If Adam had been here, there would have been a cross connect there with Science Space, which is built in Unity, in fact. But it has a WebGL version as well as a standalone client. And it allows you to see similar things in both Science Space and the web client. And in some cases, those spaces you're looking at were actually built originally in OpenSyn. So they were built in OpenSyn and exported to SineWaves application, then made available to Science Space's web version. So it's all... There are issues here about the future, whether something that's a viewer on the web might eventually be able to communicate, have the protocols to communicate with the greater hybrid network. And finally, joining us is Will Burns. Will Burns has been with us before. Will... Let me see. I can never remember my... What do I call it? Synonyms. Here we are. Will Burns is a synthetic environment, SME, with over 20 years of experience within marketing design research and the implementation for all areas of synthetic immersive environments. He is part of the IEEE Virtual World Standard Group and beyond. And he has been a defining force in the area of the metaverse with published research in association for computing machinery and a contributing author for various academia. And I'm sure that this goes on, but that's where I'm going to stop or will be here all night. Right. At this point, I'll just give you my LinkedIn to get everybody at this point. Yes. If you're in our live audience, you can click on the links. If you're watching on TV, tough. Right. Or maybe... I don't know. Maybe the people doing the camera work at that moment can even put the links up, but I expect there's a lot of work for them. Okay. Let me start. Will, I suggest you just come in with comments as we go, because I know you have a fairly pertinent self of you here, and you might like me be able to prompt questions. I would actually like to start this session with Singer Girl, because what you're doing, Singer Girl, is very... It's kind of different from the main viewer trend that we'll obviously end up talking about. So maybe I'd like to... I know for a while you were writing to me about getting things clear, because cyber lounge, digital thing, for example, is a totally different thing. And I believe... Is it the nonprofit thing that Thinker of Melville does is also a bit different? You all sort of talk together, but your 3D world world, with the Z, is a very particular thing. So maybe I'd like to talk to us about it, and the ways in which maybe it interlinks with OpenSim itself, IE, for also being... Sure. Sure. Happy to. Hello, everyone. So it's an honor to be here with you today. 3D WebWorlds, first of all, Thinker of Melville does work with us, and we're honored to have that participation. So thank you, Selby. 3D WebWorld is a virtual world in a browser. Basically, we can take builds that we make in OpenSim and put them on a web page. And in reference to how we can use that with OpenSim, is if you are a grid owner, we could perhaps duplicate your welcome region, put it directly on your website, and teach people through a 3D environment how to actually join you on the grid. We've done that with Bill Blight's OpenSim.life in Inspiration Island. There's a tutorial where you can walk through and learn how to download the viewer. The beautiful thing about the virtual world in the browser is that there's no download and no plug-in required. We actually have two portals. We have 3D WebWorlds, which is 3dwebworlds.com as it's listed there, and also 3dportals.com, which I'll put both those links up in just a moment. And 3dportals.com does not require any login at all. There's no avatars and no social tools. If you choose to login as a guest or a user on 3dwebworlds.com, you do have the avatar, social tools, you can customize yourself, you have a profile, you can chat with other users, you can teleport other users and things like that. And to Robert's point, yes, Robert and I have worked closely and I've always enjoyed that. He's done some great work. He actually has a couple of regions up on 3dwebworlds, full-scale ores that have been converted, which was awesome work. Thank you, Robert, for that participation. I also want to give a shout out to Sally Davis. I saw that she was having trouble with her audio, but one of the things that we really concentrate on in addition to the arts is education. And having an educational background myself, one of the things that I wanted to make sure 3dwebworlds highlighted was the fact that we could have immersive classrooms. And we could have immersive classrooms where specific pages were embedded on websites. We do have a working chalkboard, we have a working test system. We've come quite a long way, so if any of you educators out there want to give it a shot, you know, tap me on the shoulder and we'll get you set up with some of those tools. We'd love some of that feedback. So we're expanding every day. Great. Something I have always started wondering about, you know, this goes beyond service to web and viewers really, but was the idea, you know, we don't have a platform compatibility between something like Science Space built with Unity, OpenSim built with, you know, like Lyndon Prims in Heritage or something, or indeed other engines and stuff like that. But I've always sort of thought of the idea of, you know, let's say you can build something in OpenSim with Compactis and then export it as an AR file, but somehow have things in the build independently cross-communicate. Now, presumably something like Voice is an ideal thing where you could have the in-world voice in an OpenSim venue in a web world that's actually duplicates of the OpenSim venues. So the venues would look the same, though they wouldn't be on the same world, so to speak, but it's like the Voice channel or things like that could be integrated so they're on base. There is a Voice channel, correct. Yeah, so we do, we import the builds, there are some differences about the builds. We, to get technical, we leave out any windows that need to be transparent. We have to add those as separate trims. The reason being is because we export from OpenSimulator as a Kalata, and then we actually take that extra step and convert it to a GLTF. Webworlds will take a Kalata, but GLTF loads faster and uses fewer browser resources, so the browser likes it better. So if you, especially if you have a large region, you want to take every effort to make sure that the load is small. Sure, and yeah, classrooms are an ideal example of course, because often on OpenSim they're run, they're off the hypergrid anyway, they're around closed doors because I don't know, the kids are underage or something like that. Also, I mean Avacon's own grid has a Rocklist library on it, for example, and I imagine something like a library would lend itself to having an incarnation in a world, but also having an incarnation just on the way for people that want to go to the library. We do actually have a writer's section that is quite successful. We have a writer's group that meets in 3D Webworlds every Wednesday night. There is a librarian and a bookstore in development for them, and also Selby and Thinker, Melville, and the Monday Writing Group have been working on creating a quest. We actually have the ability to land in the region where a quest begins, and the user must then follow the clues, and the clues can either be just information or we have it where they sometimes they might have to answer a question to get the next clue. So that was one of our most recent updates, and we thank the Monday Writer's Group for joining us. I still built blight is commenting in chat here about shared voice and stuff. The other thing, I think it's back in the days of I was working with a T.T.V. in our second life, and we had a way, well they had a way I should say, I don't know how it worked, of I think it involved connection with IRC, but it meant we were actually able to chat from second life into other servers and stuff and relate to chat about. So this is text chat of course, rather than voice, so I think those can be sort of connected too. Right, Bill and I work closely, OpenSim.Life, which is as great as my home grid, and so we are constantly working on updates and how to connect the two worlds. Well, WebWorld, 3D WebWorld can stand on its own. One of my main interests was to connect those millions of users out there that when you say virtual worlds or eyes rolled in the back of their head, they don't really understand what you mean. So this was kind of like a soft transition. So we've been working on those kinds of things, as well as a doorway. That would be an easy entrance point that does a downloads for them. And then also, Bill has been working on a fork of the viewer that also allows you to see the WebWorld inside OpenSim. So you could put a media on a trim and actually move around the WebWorld. I keep trying to do that. Right, whenever you need something, whenever you really need something outside the box, you know, you call Bill Blight or Robert Adams to my left, MSA. Yeah, it's funny because, you know, we are also in another way talking about worlds within world tier. You know, I like the idea of being in a virtual environment, in an all-inclusive world like the hybrid, and then seeing the web and things from inside it. So of course, the first thing I do is, you know, kind of put web worlds or science based on a print, you know. Yeah, well, so I think that I think the real message of all is I'm meant to be thinking the other way around. But I don't, you know. Kind of the idea was so that no matter where you were on what device, if there was a classroom or an event inside OpenSim and you were on a phone and only had access to a browser that you could still attend and everyone would be able to talk and chat and commune with each other. So you and I are on the same page with that. All right, Bill is also mentioning Discord, of course, but I'm holding back on the use of Discord channels, which has grown recently. Discord is not a viewer, but we will be talking on that tomorrow on the hybrid panel because it's, you know, it's one of the other ways people on the hybrid can communicate in parallel. Right. Discord is a great option. It does require you to have a Discord account then a separate login. So yeah, we've been working on that too. With the decline of Skype. I'm surprised everybody hasn't got to school by now. Anyway, moving on. I'm going to cross over to Will just to get you in before we move on. Have you any thoughts on that? Because obviously your focus is on the overview and interoperability and things. And we're talking about parallel strands of the connection saying a web world and in world. Have you got any thoughts or designs on that? Or do you have a feel for anything that might be changing in that direction with multiple platforms? Believe it or not, believe it or not, I don't really crap on all virtual worlds. Like I see the bigger picture, but I also see how everybody else's stuff actually matters. Like a web world is a person I don't like them, but it's because I'm more high end. You know, I like the big big stuff, right? But I also know that web worlds do play a purpose. They play a very important purpose, which is they have to play the lowest comedy nominator because of browsers. But that's fine because for their use case, they are filling that use case where students have to come in and do things in a simple manner. And they don't have the complexity and high end stuff, which is fine. And the same way I can see that about how OpenSim has that effect as well. So I think when you go into virtual worlds, you have to start by asking what's your end goal? Like are you trying to do this for millions of people? Are you trying to be the mainstream? What's your end goal here? If your end goal is you're looking for something that's easy for students to use, can access it from almost any device, and you've hit your goal. Like you've hit your market, even if it's a niche market, it doesn't matter if you're mainstream, it just matters if you've supplied that goal, if you've offered that solution. Right? So I say the same thing all the time to Adam. You know, if Adam was here, he'd probably be rolling his eyes at me, but I say it all the time to him. I say, I'm not a big fan of sine wave, but it's also because I have a different goal in mind for the bigger picture. I say, but what he has is a great use case. It caters to a specific niche. It does it exceedingly well, and that's all that really matters. I only take issue with virtual worlds when people say, let's make this into a mainstream thing. Then I start pulling everybody back and go, you don't want to do that. Maybe you don't, because maybe you're not ready for that, or maybe you need some changes forever, which is why I was at the code thing here earlier. I was saying, break it, by all means. Don't live in the shadow of yourself. Break it. It's rather like this thing we had a few years ago, things starting up, even services like Twitter, they're six months in, they're becoming successful, and they suddenly realized they've forgotten one thing. Scale, scale. Well, it's something I told Philip Roseville in 2005, and his historic answer was, I beg to differ, and we all know how that worked out. I said something similar when I was up in Wyndon lab last summer, talking to Abby out in his office. One of the things I brought up to him, I said, whose broad idea was it to let on live walk in here and then walk out? He goes, what do you mean? I go, they come in here with a streaming technology and nobody thought to incorporate that. You let them just walk out. He's like, what? I'm sorely tempted that sadly women don't have time. I'll have to get you on one of my shows, but I want to ask the question is Sansar appears to have failed fairly miserably, and now they're moving to Steam. Are they really serious that they're going to take out? My favorite quote from that when I was announced by Wagner on his blog, I said, they're going to be eaten by a shark, because if you think we're bad and give you constructive criticism, the public's not going to be so nice. They're going to tear you to shreds. Then you see back to the original point, after that conversation, if you notice, they're actually looking for streaming people now. They're looking for people to do that now. Whether I had any effect on that or whether I had enough sense to not smack website and go, what were you guys thinking? Get on that. I think it just seems to be a typical case of a bit late on the job. Those are Philip Big Head of a gone. Better late than never. We will see anyway. I mean, I'm like you. I just try to take a great view. I call all of this in my home, not the hyper grid my home, but I've got accounts on hyper dirty science space and other places, and I hop into those two a lot and other places from time to time. Let me move on now to the greatest thing. Obviously, Will and Singer Girl come in here if you have any comments on this. At the opening part of this conference, Melanie Milan sitting next to me on my left. Let me see. Left, yes. My left. You're right. I dropped her bombshell about some work that's been done. She's done in the Unreal Engine toward building a new kind of interface for OpenSim. Now, there were a couple of hiccups when she announced it because I saw people in the audience suddenly thought, oh, you're giving up OpenSim and making an Unreal thing, but this is not true. What Melanie is open sourcing is components for a user interface and an actual viewer that had been built using the Unreal Engine. It's not an Unreal World she's promoting. That will still be our regular OpenSim hyper grid. It is simply a viewer with enhancements that will be built or hopefully completely built using the Unreal Engine. And Krista coincidentally has also spoken recently about refocusing on the viewer side of things. And of course, as we know from the hyper grid and everything else, Krista's core thing is the code. As she says, she's lost when it comes to the graphics and the visual appearance of things. It's the code that makes it work. That's her forte. Whereas what Melanie is contributing to is, to my mind, the opposite side of the coin which is the visual impact. So, Krista, you were there this morning and you heard Melanie's announcement. I'd like to actually start with you because I remember at the time you had quite a few things in chat. Are you impressed or are you suddenly invigorated with ideas as a result of Melanie's announcement? Oh, yes. So I knew about Melanie's work for a while. We had talked about it before, but she was doing it in closed source because it was for some other purpose. But now I'm so happy that she is going to open source it because for those who have been paying attention, I have been sort of away a little bit from OpenSim for personal reasons, but also because I thought that about two years ago I realized that the server side was mostly okay. I mean, we can continue to find and fix bugs forever, but basically the main components of the server are there for what can be done with these second-life viewers. So if we want to take the next big step is really to develop another viewer that is going to be much better than this one. But that is such a daunting task that every time that I thought about how do you even start? Because it's just like there's so many options and you need a team of people who are motivated and come together just like happen on the server side. So I know that a few of the core developers have been dabbling here on the viewer side in particular Melanie and Yubit and Robert, Mr. Blue. And I was hoping that at some point something would happen that maybe would get us all together again on the viewer side. And maybe this is it. So I'm super excited. I can't wait to get my hands on whatever Melanie has done. I'm sure it's amazing. Great. Now I'm going to bring you in, Robert, as well, Mr. Blue. You were obviously at the core devs a short while ago and your thing here really is viewer too, isn't it? How do you feel about these events, the fact that Krista wants to go forward with the code, Melanie's contributing particularly graphical elements, I think, into the interface that will enhance things? What's your take on the great merger, maybe? Are you on? Is your voice at this? Robert, I'm not sure. Oh, he's saying that he doesn't have voice. Oh, you didn't connect him to them? Yes, sorry. Yes. I think there must have been a mistake at the beginning. You didn't get added in. I'm hopefully Joyce or somebody. I've actually pressed ring to try and add him into the call. Okay. That's not going to be helpful. That was a bit of an oversight. We normally check this before we go on there. Okay. I'm actually trying to add you in myself, Robert, but I think it's going to need Joyce or somebody on the back end to do it. And maybe I've got the wrong avatar or something there. It should be ringing for you, Robert. You might want to just check because I know you have voice on, didn't you, in the Q&A. So, oh no, of course that was in world. Right. Okay. Well, while I hope Robert can get some voice working here, let's move on. Now, Melanie, you kind of explained to me long before today, but also you explained to everybody today the sort of nature of what it was that you were contributing. What you're contributing has a lot and lot of work done on it, but it is in no way complete code at the moment. It is actually going to take people like Christa and maybe Robert to examine and see if their disciplines are right for working with it. That is correct, yes. What we have is, well, as I said, it's a daunting task to start from with a viewer. It would have been even more daunting if we had started with Naked OpenGL. So, the decision was taken at that point to not try to reinvent the wheel. When we started this was just the year that the big game engines started open sourcing. Before that, there were closed source license monsters for huge amounts of money. You would get very little flexibility. Then, all of a sudden, the game engines all went open sourcing and Unreal was actually the first one to take the step, I believe. Shortly after that, Unity became available. Those were the two choices we really had at the time we started this project. We settled on Unreal because we were thinking that the console world could potentially be conquered by virtual worlds. Unity doesn't offer the console option. And Unity offers a web option, but WebGL has multiple times already proven to not be capable of rendering large regions with live updates and unoptimized objects from OpenSimulator at an acceptable speed. That was discounted. We said we may want to do something on that in a second iteration. So, we went and used the Unreal Engine. The Unreal Engine has a bit of difficulty with dynamic content. Right. I should add at this point, by the way, Robert points it out, and I can hear it too. He calls it overmodulated. Your audio has got a bit of, you might want to either make it less hostile or move your mouse back from the mic a bit. But we heard you anyway. Yeah. Anyways, what I'm saying is that because of the game engine, we only had to work on getting the content in, and that turned out to be quite difficult because Unreal Engine is, as a game engine, also made for pre-optimized content and baked lighting and things like this, and getting it to work dynamically was a bit of a challenge. I've showed this already this morning where we actually had this imported, and it looked quite all right, except that everything was inside out. It's not even visible in this picture, but when you moved around, it seemed to warp in strange ways, and then we put other textures on there and noticed it. This was when we finally managed to get prims meshed and get custom meshes working in Unreal, which has a very, very limited support for procedural mesh and no support at all for mesh being uploaded and imported. Here we had shapes correct, and then in the next step, we got colors in. Yeah, and a final kind of fully rendered scene. That looks pretty good. And this was with textures and materials. I remember all these are native open sim content, it's only the few areas. This is actually Avination's welcome region, as it was at the time. Back in the day, yes. So yes, it's real actual open sim content. It's prims and meshes and textures, just open sim, and where this loads the geometries from an XML file because there isn't a network layer yet, this actually already loads the assets from the asset server using the open sim asset protocol because it's just plain HTTP, and that's good enough. Very nice. I'm super excited with this, Melanie. The Unreal Editor, you can run it inside the editor, you can compile it to be standalone. You can now run it with a headset or you can run it with a mouse and WASD. You can't run it in third person yet. There are also no avatars implemented. But one of our thoughts was to switch away from the Linden Labs avatar to an industry standard avatar that just uses the same mesh UV map, so the clothing will still fit, but that actually would be completely different internally, as far as the skeleton goes and includes the Avination, which would wake another pet project of mine that I tried to realise within the Linden Labs viewer, but didn't find much love and support for it. This avatar I'm wearing right now is a one-piece mesh, I mean, apart from the hand glasses. I'm busy there, my lips don't move, but basically it's in a format that I can stick in, say, science space or hyperdose or whatever, so it's the same sort of everywhere I go, but that is really a matter of uploading. That will still be a matter of uploading the avatar to OpenSim itself. It's not so you're going to have the avatar in the viewer, is it? I don't get your question. Well, you're saying you're talking about improving avatars, but this whole thing is about the rendering pipeline, isn't it? So this mesh avatar you see me in now will still have to be in OpenSim. It's not so I can somehow upload mesh avatar that becomes available in the viewer. It's got to be in the world itself. It has to be in the world itself, yes, but we were going to break away from the kind of avatar that Linden Labs uses, just simply have an alternate representation that would only be visible in this viewer, and that would be capable of having, for instance, like the spider, for instance, with eight actual limbs or whatever you want. Do you want to dragon that six limbs for you? So you're talking about upgrading, upgrading the implementation of this to be more capable than what Linden Lab has. Yes, there's something called the industry standard avatar, which is a package of mesh textures and animations all rolled into one that can be uploaded, like for instance, to games. Basing on those and having those stored as assets, we could probably quite easily realize this because the Unreal Engine supports those natively, whereas the Linden Labs avatars would have to be shoehorned in. Right, right. So that makes the hell of a lot more sense, actually. So that sounds awesome. Go for it. I mean, actually, well, you probably remember Bruce Joy from Varspark, who you know, obviously, at one point he had the open, I think it was called Open Avatar Project, which you basically went and created an avatar and you could download it in all sorts of formats, and it was designed to be a universal avatar. You'd be able to use anywhere, whether it's on the bottom of a web page or in virtually any game or any virtual world. Sadly, of course, I think that's gone by advice for now. But it's the same idea, is that you can, just like you go to PayPal and open up a wallet, you could go to a service and open up a custom avatar, then they would provide the necessary for you to put the avatar just about anywhere and everywhere you wanted. Well, if I could chime in for a second now. Yeah. I mean, I think a good example here, maybe for the audience would be when I come from SL to here, I export my XML for my numbers for my avatar, which is how my avatar looks the same. So I can export certain assets over and pull them over and keep them universal. So I think in that aspect, using the universal avatar format for the game industry, if you can still keep those sort of numbers and translate them over, you'd be on to something. Oh, the numbers aren't really the industry standard avatar in games. The industry standard actor, it doesn't have morphs. It doesn't have these numbers. Right. But there's other just it's the mesh you make it offline. Oh, wow. This would be interesting. I mean, if you're looking from a game point of view, I think it comes down to what's your end goal for. I mean, if you're looking for- See people going into the Unreal store and buying themselves one. It's not like they're horribly expensive. Yes and no. I think if you'd step back from a developer kind of mindset, like the example is today, I had no problem just uploading this hat. I had it on the back of my server for mesh and stuff, but the average person would not know what the hell they're doing. Finding hair or whatever. The average person does not get to do all this stuff. You're not going to jump through those hoops. The other question is, do you want to homogenize the experience? I mean, I'm not saying it's bad or good. I'm saying it depends on what your end goal is. If you're going for more cross-platform aspects and by all means go for it. I mean, it depends on what the goal is. It's a shame actually I haven't been able to get Robert on voice for some reason here. He's just actually mentioned in chat that it goes scrolling fast, doesn't it? The GL, hang on, I'm going to have to scroll back here. I've lost it. The chat here moves too fast for me. GLTF. That's right. He's saying that is why that is so adaptable because it's the mesh that contains all these different elements that makes it adaptable all over the place, basically. Okay, I've got a horrible feeling. I'm looking at the two o'clock and I'm looking for the quarter-bust or the half-bust. I can't remember. I'd like to go back quickly to Singer because Singer, what are your feelings? I presume you did hear Manny's announcement this morning and what Chris has been saying. As a developing channel, are you excited by all this? Do you see potential for it? Oh, absolutely. I'll also refer back to Robert's comment at the Q&A that revolutionary or evolutionary, and it looks like the advancements coming forward are going to be more revolutionary, which I think is fabulous. It's kind of what we're trying to do with our new thing is change, take what's good from the old, but build upon it and build something better. Yeah, exactly. Suddenly, my head can't correlate this revolutionary thing. I don't see why something can't be revolutionary and evolutionary. You take the good from the old stuff. Sometimes, it's better to start over and pick and pull the good stuff as opposed to building on top of it. Yeah. Okay, so I'm just testing seven minutes remaining. That was at 13-13. What is it? Oh, okay, I've still got seven minutes remaining, I'm told. Okay, I'm not in such a panic any more. Right, okay. So the future now, something I was going to ask, I might as well ask it now, so we can have a bit of time, is obviously, somebody like will take the big picture here and common protocols and things. Now, I always kind of wondered if one day we might have what will be called a Metavos viewer, which somehow will be able, will be a single viewer that will somehow be able to connect to different platforms and interpret their content and still be able to render it. So you might have a viewer that could render Unity content and then immediately render Unreal content and then maybe immediately render OpenSim content too. Now, I imagine that is miles and miles away. I mean, just this is a major step. Well, yes and no. Yeah, I'm going with that one, yes and no. As we have a viewer that can render measures, text choose and SL primitives and we have a world that contains the actual data. Now, for any other world, it's the same thing unless you're talking about having a DLC package like with a game where the stuff is actually downloaded onto the user's computer and then used from the local hard disk. As long as we're talking about streaming content, I don't really see why there should be any content that we can stream provided that the people who are streaming the content will open their formats to us. Yeah, in other words, the... That's the biggest in the room. Yeah. I just wonder, I think it's going to be a few years yet before things pan out, but I'm looking at what's happening with Sansar, they didn't have, for example, it clearly, I mean, it's got hardly any users. They keep trying to hype it up and make esports things, but nobody apparently has ever logged in. And going on Steam, I think, Steam's for gamers, isn't it? There's last place people, Sansar has no gaming side to it. And I think that will disappear from our radar, especially as I think probably an internet has made a vaping mistake in trying to launch a new world and not only build a new world for themselves, but also build their own authoring engine. Other people see the future and whether you like it or not, Unity, Unreal, and some other gaming engines have, I don't see it monopoly, but they are dominant in this world. But that, in a sense, has an advantage because the similarities may actually allow for collaboration and interoperability at some future point. Let's say you've got two completely different virtual worlds built with Unity. Technically, they could tweak each other to become an interoperating duo of worlds, but Sansar could never have done that because its fundamental system is alien to everything else. And I presume the same applies with the Unreal Engine, two worlds or something built with the Unreal Engine. I'm not talking about this viewer here, I'm talking about generally worlds. Then two worlds built with that engine might find ways to interoperate, whereas they don't at the moment because they're being marketed as separate entities. At some future point, they may need to become attached to a metaverse or something. And the commonalities of the engine underneath them may be the thing that empowers that. Well, again, yes and no. It depends on how these worlds are built. If the worlds stream their content, then theoretically anything that they can stream, we can convert and display. It may just be more or less effort and we need to have the protocols. But most of the worlds, say most of the games, even multiplayer games that are built on a specific engine use downloadable packs where you download the entire pack like on Blue Mars where you have to download the entire region and have it locally. And those formats would potentially be incompatible or proprietary and definitely not easily shared between engines. Like the DLC format that the Unreal Engine uses is a stackable VFS, quite involved. I'm not sure. I don't think we use it in this viewer. Please don't start using that. Please don't. Most game engines are based on a VFS actually. So the DLC can override content that came with the game. It's done difficult, isn't it? We also think while the obstacles we get, I'm going to come back to open Sim again here now. We're talking about how well the hypergrid is great, but maybe the groups and the messaging across grids doesn't work. We can jump over the click, but we can't text with a click across the grids. But also things like inventory, for example. At the moment, we're moving it with us from server to server, aren't we, if I understand this. I presume some of it sort of caches in an unreadable form in our system. But basically, we're not talking about downloading our inventory to our local disk. It's a thing that's constantly moving around and if there are any security problems, it's because it's presumably constantly moving with us as we travel from place to place. Inventory is actually server side and it's not moving with you from region to region, but rather you accessing the inventory server from each region that you move into. However, anything you pull out of the inventory becomes part of the region and it would then be deleted and reserialized back into your inventory if you pick it up again. The issue here is more one of control and monetizing content and anything else. If you could save something to your local computer, obviously permissions would become meaningless because you just make multiple copies of that file and then start selling the copies, even though you may not be allowed to. So the original decision by the labs that is the core of the inventory system as we have it today is that users cannot save anything locally. Later, viewer developers after the viewer became well understood added the feature of exporting things that they actually don't own. Everybody knows about those viewers. There is, I must admit I'm hopeless on the tech side of this. There's a lot of talk of blockchains and stuff like that for registering assets and wallets and stuff like that. I know hyperdose, you were looking at that a little bit, but I was reading that recently and I don't know whether it's connected or not, but Tim Berners-Lee has taken time off from all these other sort of things these days to work for a few months on re-decentralizing the web. It's not so much building a new web, but re-decentralizing God is it done to us? What's there already? I noticed in the details there, there's a notion of this thing basically called a pod that will contain all your assets, your identity, almost anything you want, like maybe your credit cards, your health stuff, but also all your online stuff and whatever, but it would be sacrosanct. In other words, it's like walking around with an ID card that only you can program rather than an ID card that somebody else supplies you, which is pre-programmed with information you've already given them. They've got your information and it sounds to me that this new system would involve having a really locked down kind of container, which I think is called a pod at the moment, which is totally secure and you will put information into it and you will have total and utter control over how much information is released out of it to any party you're dealing with. So it would be an end of data mining and Facebook and stuff like that, which I think is rather a good thing. Do you see our assets in OpenSIM or virtual worlds maybe moving in that direction? I put this as an open question and I think it's going to be the last look at the clock. I see it probably. I'm not going to say yes or no. I think it's a possible solution, but it still needs to mature. There's things like Zaya.io that are doing that now. They're applying that in a bigger way. I'm excited for it, but I'm also stepping back and saying, well, it needs to be proven. It needs to actually field test that before I jump on board, but I'm happy about it. It's a good idea. I did feel that when Satim is creating the internet, that's the way he's described, although the web in France is what we talk about. Here's involvement on that level. The whole project is called solid, I believe. It just strikes me that when somebody like the originator like him gets involved, it's going to stand the chance of exposure at least. When he jumps in and starts saying, okay, what the hell did you guys do to my creation? Hey, this is my baby. Were you done to it? There's several challenges in that kind of architecture. When we were designing the iProgram, there were a couple of possibilities, especially if we own the viewer side, then the possibilities would even be more real without changing the viewer. There were only so much that we could do. The idea of where are your things? Where are your personal things? They can be in your computer and that sounds great, but you have to keep in mind that you use many computers. You use a home computer and you use a work computer and the laptop and what not. Now what? Suddenly, if you want to access your own things, then you have to have some sort of networking among all your personal machines. Now we're getting into things like sinking the data in somehow and if you will push that to the end users, I think that... We lost voice. Right. We lost Chris's voice and we got a very heavy cough. What's all this about? He asks. We do need to wrap up though. Yeah. Okay. Well, the problem with these panels, they start to get really interesting and the longer they go on, the better and easier they get. Suddenly somebody pulls the plug because you had the time, but that is what happens here. I'm back. Are we at the end of the session? We are, but you can wrap up quickly if you want. I just realized it's almost 1.30 here. Yes, exactly. There's never enough time, especially when you get towards the end. My apologies to Robert Adams, who we pulled in at the very last minute and he's been wonderful in chat, but we didn't get his voice working, so that's unfortunate. I'd like to thank Singer Girl Mode. Thank you, Singer Girl. Good luck with 3D web worlds, and thanks for letting us know all about that. Thanks for having me. I'd like to thank Will Burns for his insights and such. Oh, that's a pleasure. Right. Of course, I would like to thank Krista Lopez. You can't have an open-summed hybrid panel without her in my opinion, but there we go. Thank you, Krista. Thank you. And finally, I'd like to thank Manny Millan, who was our real surprise at the beginning of the conference, and she was surprised on this panel too, so thank you, Manny. Thank you.