 Hello, everyone, and welcome to the 10.30 to 11 a.m. session of the 2019 Open Simulator Community Conference. In this session, we are happy to introduce a presentation called Into the Future Web-Based Virtual World. Our speakers are Dieter Heine and Steve Levine. Please check out the website found at conference.opensimulator.org for full speaker bios, detailed details of sessions, and the full schedule of events. Dieter is the creator of the web-based virtual world platform CyberLounge. He has traveled the metaverse since 2007, evaluating grids on behalf of education. He is also the CEO of metaverse school, and he will talk to us about those today. Steve Levine, known in-world as Steve Franklin, is the founder of A Dimension Beyond, a small company working in design and support for VR, AR, and virtual worlds. He also works in CyberLounge technology. The session is being live-streamed and recorded, so if you have questions or comments during the session, you may send tweets to atopensim.cc with the hashtag OSCC19. Welcome, everyone, and let's begin the session. Hello, first epic thank you for having us again, and let me talk about a few things, where I see connections between our web-based virtual world and the OpenSim community, and especially ways how you can bring in new users to make aware of OpenSim, what is possible, and how to connect with your grid. On the slides, you will see some current snapshots from our platform, so just to give you an impression of how we majored over the years and what's capable already. So we will start with a short introduction. So this talk will be about solving a problem which is known to many grid providers, namely how to bring in new people to your grid. In my opinion, the number of virtual worlders is only increasing very slowly, so it really is a challenge to bring in new users and make people aware of what's possible in virtual worlds. And I think we can provide a new way to attract new users. Yes, Steve, go on. Oh, yeah, by the way, the big, long URL there, just click on the box here to your right and you will get the information on how to get into CyberLounge. It's much easier than trying to work that whole long URL. Yeah, so what are the problems we are going to address? So how can you bring in new users to visit your OpenSim grid? And how can you effectively demonstrate the content and features of a virtual world on your website, even for people who have never visited a virtual world again yet? So and also how you can support new users with basic issues like registering, downloading a viewer, all the things necessary before you can effectively enter a virtual world. And the simplest solution in our opinion is to integrate a virtual world region into your grid's website. So it means people can have a first glimpse into the meterverse just by opening a link or just by visiting your website. There's no installation required. There's no registration. And you can already demonstrate many features which are available in virtual worlds. So people can not really only see what's possible, they can really do it. And you can also use it to give or provide interactive support for new users. Well, not only that, CyberLounge is also a world unto itself. So you can expand it any way you really want to. So it isn't just that. Yeah, right Steve. So here's a list of the main features. There are many more. And I think the biggest thing is you can thanks to Robert Adams for his really great and effective or file converter. You can use your region and import it simply into a web-based virtual world. We support drag and drop for GLTF files. So it means you can have the converted or and simply drag it into an empty web world and it will appear in a couple of seconds. We also have text, voice and video chat for groups and also for one and one. You can stream audio and video. We have integrated in the meantime a physics engine. We have real-time lighting and shadowing. We are working on event-based scripting. You have a complete set of build tools so you can create your own content directly in the virtual world. You can drag and drop almost any content from your desktop into the virtual world. Images, documents, sounds, 3D models, full presentations means a set of slides. And if you drag and drop a URL, a web page on a prim will appear either with static or with usual HTML content or if it's a URL from YouTube, you will get a video player playing this video on the spot. You can provide files for downloading so it means if you are a grid operator, you can have an object which will give the installer of the viewer to your visitors and you can guide them interactively through installing the viewer for your grid. And one of our latest things we do, we are adding or we have added support for Oculus Go and currently working on support for Oculus Quest so you can even walk through the region in a VR environment using the Oculus controllers and interact with Scenery. Yeah, also the region size, we have a little question about that and I'm going to slip it in because it's appropriate here. The region size I think is a 4x4 if you go by... It's a 2x2. It's a 2x2, okay. 512 by 512 meters. So 512 by 512 meters and so you get quite a bit of room to build in. The front end, it runs HTML5, CSS, JavaScript, WebGL and WebRTC. Back end is just Apache, PHP, MySQL. Voice is provided by FreeSwitch. It works on all major browsers, on desktops, laptops, Chromebooks, tablet computers, smartphones and VR devices. Basically, CyberLounge is just a web page. So anywhere a web page will work, CyberLounge will work. So it's also when you talk about actually hosting it, it is still just a web page. So it's very easy to host. One of the things that a dimension beyond does is web page hosting and virtual world hosting for setting up a CyberLounge region is not hard. It's really quite simple. Dieter will get into the details of the works here. Yeah, so like Steve said, the architecture is really based on a classical web stack. So it means a full deployment is just setting up the database and the rest is copy-paste. So usually you can set up a server in less than 10 minutes. And you have full support for everything. So it's based on standard web technology. We have like in the final front end, it's HTML and CSS. Then the JavaScript layer with 3GS as in WebGL wrapper. M-O-G-S, which is a JavaScript port of the bullet physics engine. And we use Veto.js as a wrapper for WebRTC to be able to communicate with a free switch voice server. So in principle, this could also be a connection point. So if an open SIM grids runs on free switch, it could be or it would be possible to connect from both worlds. So it could connect from a native viewer. And you could also connect from a web viewer to the same free switch server. And the rest is a classical web stack, web server, PHP, MySQL database on almost any operating system. Yeah, the fun part about it is it works on almost anything. And you don't have to have a really high level machine to run it. We've tested on all sorts of things, some of them not so great. And it generally runs side allowance just fine. Yeah, just to give you an impression, as it is more like a peer-to-peer virtual world, which means a lot of load is transferred to the client, the server really needs a minimum specification to be able to host a session. So it means we had meetings with about 20 avatars present running on a single core with 512 megabytes of RAM. Yeah, so this kind of thing, it's so simple in the ultimate end, it could run on something like a Raspberry Pi or some old server you got in your closet somewhere. All you have to have is a decent internet connection to it. It also doesn't use or doesn't need any kind of extra special plug-ins or anything. It runs on a stock browser. Yeah, so just to answer some of the questions in the chat, I'm not sure, but the question related to the Chrome browser plugged in because Chrome in all versions, and we are testing always the latest version, supports all the technology we are using, WebRTC and WebGL, without any plug-ins. It also runs, I like it better on Chrome actually myself, but it does run just fine Firefox or whatever else. I've tested it on quite a few different things and so far I've been really surprised. Yeah, so the thing is in our testing pipeline, we test with latest versions of Firefox, Chrome, even with Edge, Safari Mobile, and Safari Desktop, and Chrome Mobile. So all these are supported and also including the Oculus browser. And even with Oculus, you have full voice support and you can join an event in virtual reality, exchanging information and talking with people, just accessing through a web page. There's just let me, there's one more question here while you're answering a couple questions. And Frank Rulof asks, can you jump from the web page into OpenSim? That's a problem not of the web page, but in principle, if you have a URL, which will open your view or can be used in your viewer, then in principle, it would be possible. But the thing is as we are web technology, the only thing we can provide is hyperlinks and then you have to handle these somehow. But on the other thing, it's possible to join a web world just by sending out emails with the link and if you click on the link, you are directly transported into the 3D world. We've got a question here from MicroMaze. He says, what about Opera? I like using it. Try it and see, it'll probably work fine. Yeah, I've not actively tested Opera lately, but in previous version, we had no issues because especially the Opera gaming browser supports all the technology stuff. So just give it a try. And if you have some issues, let me know and I will try to make it compatible. So just a quick outlook. So at the moment, the web-based virtual worlds are not planning to compete with traditional virtual worlds, but we just wanted to provide a simple access for really new users without any installations from any device. So I think we had a lot of discussions. What's the future of virtual worlds? Will be or maybe. And I think one direction, which we should not forget about this, especially young people are going straight to mobile. When I'm talking to students, 90% of the internet access is done through a smartphone or maybe a tablet, but they barely use laptops or even desktop PCs. So what we'll try to do is that over time, we will have a full set of features available, like I said, almost any device. And so we can use our technology from everything, from entertainment, using it as collaboration spaces and even to education. Yeah, well, that's kind of the whole idea. The future and the way things are going, especially with the younger people, is to portable devices. So we kind of have to be on top of all that. If you wanna see us and talk to us some more, we will be over at lucky number 13 booth in the exhibition area. Here's some various ways to find us. If you wanna know more, just click on that box and that'll give you the places there too. So that's basically it. Any other questions? There was a question that was asked kind of early on and I'm not exactly sure what it pertained to, but Alan Scott had asked about region sizes. It sounded like either for or conversion or as they compare from region save from open simulator across to cyber lounge. Yeah, it's a two by two region. So it'd be the equivalent of four open simulator regions. Yeah, about the scripting. There will be two approaches. The one is you can use plain Java script, which will be sandboxed for scripting. The other thing that we currently have in development for our scripting engine is something similar to scratch. So you will have a graphical user interface for scripting. You don't have any great programming experience. You can simply click your scripts together and have them run as you wish. But you don't have to know a real programming language. That's a key point. Yeah, well, the thing with cyber lounge is we're trying to make it as simple and easy to use as possible and as universal to use for everybody. We don't want anybody that can't use it. We want to make it so it'll work behind firewalls and all sorts of other things. So that was where the whole plot came from. The scratch version will be available probably in the first quarter of 2020. Yes, we have full mesh avatars and we've even tried successfully to have converted avatars from OpenSim into our platform. So it means we have an own animation system. We are just currently switching from the OpenSim avatars with a limited number of bones to have a new generation of avatars which have almost 170 animates. So bones you can animate, which will provide even facial expressions. And this means what we, in our development pipeline, we use or we are working with face tracking. So you can use your webcam to check your face and we'll have your facial expressions directly transferred to your avatar. And don't hesitate. Oh, go ahead. I'm sorry, I just have a question that has come in from YouTube. And that is, where do you find the software to create a web world like this? To run a web world or to create a web world? Well, the question was to create. Also creation tools for building a virtual world on the web are already included in our software. So it means you can start with an empty region and you can start building from scratch everything you want. Or importing. Like they can or files you already have and pop it right in there. But you can also use DAE files, GLTF files, any almost any 3D model, which can be converted in one of these formats can be created in there to attract in there directly from your desktop. Okay. We've got about one minute left. If there's another question. Well, the thing is too, is you can take like if you look at the link that I give you for a dimension beyond web world's page the web world that's in there is an actual or file taken from OpenSim. It's just an easy pop it over there. It wasn't modified in any real big way. It does need some modifications, I think in some ways if you get down into details, but it works really well and it's quite usable. And the graphics are really quite good. Very interesting. Okay. Any last thoughts for everyone? Okay, then thank you so much for your attention. And if you have any questions, please visit us at our booth in Explore Area 3, booth number 13. Yeah, you'll note that that particular booth has a different color and it has a big rotating cube on the top of it. So you can just kind of land there and just fly and zip right on over if you want to. Okay. Well, thank you Dieter and Steve for a terrific presentation. As a reminder to our audience, you can see what's coming up on the conference schedule at conference.opensimulator.org. Following this session, the next session will begin at 11 o'clock a.m. in this keynote region and is entitled SeaGate Viewer. Also, we encourage you to visit the OSCC 19 poster expo in the OSCC Expo 3 region to find accompanying information on presentations and explore the hypergrid tour resources in OSCC Expo 2 region, along with sponsor and crowd funder booths located throughout all of the OSCC Expo regions. Thank you.