 Hello, everyone, and welcome to the 3.30 to 4.30 p.m. session of the Open Simulator Community Conference. There are going to be two fantastic sessions for this session. The first one is the State of the Metaverse, and our speaker is Maria Korolov. Maria is a published author and the editor of the HyperGrid Business since 2009. She's also a notable science fiction author. Please check out the website for more details about her bio at conference.opensimulator.org and also for the session details and the full schedule of events. The session is being live streamed and recorded, so if you have questions or comments during the session, please send your tweets to atopensimcc with the hashtag pound OSCC23. Welcome, everyone. Let's begin the session. Thanks, Lira. Thanks, everybody, for having me here. I really appreciate it. I love talking about myself. Oh, I mean, Open Sim. Um, so yeah, so I've been writing about Open Sim for, um, what, 14 years now? Oh my God. Um, this is insane. I've been gathering statistics and occasionally doing articles a little bit less over the past year or so because I've been doing a lot of other stuff at my day job, which I will be talking about in the next presentation, half an hour from now. Um, today I'm here to talk about what's happening in Open Sim, uh, statistics-wise and on, uh, the metaverse in general. So um, and as you know, some of you know, hypergrid business collects monthly statistics, all the grids, the land area in terms of standard region count, standard region equivalence, active users, and all of those over the past 12 months, each of those measures has hit a record high for the 14 years we've been covering Open Sim. So if anybody tells you that Open Sim is falling behind or whatever, the numbers do not support that. Um, so a bunch of grids have closed, but a lot of new grids have opened this year and have stuck around. So total this year, we've had 591 grids active at some point over the course of this year. A lot of it is thanks to Dream Grid, which makes it possible for anyone to set up their own grid. It's a distribution of Open Sim. There have been other distributions of Open Sim before, the DivaDistro, that Dream Grid is based on, that makes it easier for people to run Open Sim, so we've always had something like this, but people are really taking advantage of it to create small grids, private grids, group grids, company grids, etc., etc. We have become more judicious at HyperGrid Business about what grids we list. We only list the grids that are clearly public facing grids and not something private just for one or two people. So we looked at grids that advertise, that have websites with Republican register, that promote their events publicly, that kind of thing. So this is the number of public grids that are welcoming outside visitors. Again, record high. We also had a record high number of active users these last 12 months. Now this was exactly 12 months ago, the numbers have declined since then. They last hit 44,123 in November. So we did hit a record high this year, but then it kind of bounced around within a couple of thousand underneath that. And here are all the active users. This is for the end of the year each year, for the last month of the year or the November of the year, depending on when this conference was held. And nearly all the land area and all the active users. So the green part of this chart is the hypergrid enabled grids. So for the most part, all the active users are on grids that let people travel in and out and almost all the land area is on grids that let people travel in and out. And you can see how the land area has grown. And several times the size of Second Life right now, mostly because it is so inexpensive to have land in open sim. So we've covered a few big stories this year. We had several conferences took place on the Hypergrid International Expo, OSFest took place in September. We had a lot of grids celebrated big birthdays this year. Oh, and Avitron closed open closed again. I just wanted to mention them because I stopped covering this grid. The last time they shut down and opened again. I was like, you know, we're not even going to go into that. But it's always a big splash when it happens because a lot of people lose their lands inventory and assets. So be careful about what grid you commit to. OK, so I'm going to go quickly through this. These are all the grids that were founded this year. There were over 80 total that are still around. So these were grids that appeared this year that have stayed up. And we had, like I said, 80 over 80 grids total are are are. Have launched this year and these are public grids that are welcoming external visitors. And this is I should probably move through these slides a little slower because it's taking a little time for the previews to load up in my viewer here. So anyway, and that brings you November. And I want to talk about this state of virtual reality and the metaverse. So unlike OpenSim, which has been doing very well, the metaverse in general, not doing that great. So so so I've been trying to cover virtual reality in the enterprise for quite a while. I talked to the head people at Ford who are using virtual reality to design automobiles. I've talked to people who use virtual reality like in other spaces. And I've pretty much not been able to find any companies that any major companies that are really doing stuff with it outside of small marketing things. And it's it's been a little unfortunate. So investment has dropped significantly. It went from 3.7 billion in 2021 to 7.6 billion in 2022. Facebook, Meta rebranded and put a ton of money into it. So far this year, we've only had 700 million in investment. So a tenth of what we saw last year. So even if we do get more money during the second half of the year invested, we're still probably not going to see a significant amount of investment in the metaverse this year. And there's been a sharp drop off in interest in the metaverse according to Google Trends since 2021 as well. And same thing for our headset sales. According to IDC, they've been declining since 2021. And I've seen the IDC projections from a couple of years ago. And they were like, and we're going to have 100 million headsets sold this year. So that didn't work out. According to surveys of business leaders, the barriers to adoption include user experience, a lack of content, and a lack of consumer awareness. Those were the three biggest ones. And now, so last year, people did expect to see positive impact from virtual reality. But this year, this 95% has dropped down and I forgot to update this particular slide. This year, virtual reality is far down on the list of emerging technologies that businesses are expecting to see positive impact. The number one is generative AI. So a meta lost 11 billion so far this year in 2023. And that's before the end of year numbers are in. Disney discontinued metaverse division. Microsoft laid off its entire metaverse team and stopped working on its virtual reality HoloLens headset in a significant degree, so the 10 cent and Snapchat. So a lot of big players have been backing off from this. And if you have any questions, wow, I went through this fast today. So if you have any questions, you can find me at maria at hypergridbusiness.com. And I hope that there are questions. I don't usually talk. While we're collecting questions, why don't you show those slides again? Some of them didn't res for me, so I'm not sure that the live stream audience really caught all of that wonderful content. You had some wonderful many, many grids starting up and a lot of data there. Yeah, any questions from our audience? So yes, huge number of public grids. And so I hear from people who I shall not name that it's a problem that we have people on the hypergrid and they're traveling between different grids and bringing content from one grid to another. And all that stuff. I don't think that's a problem at all. It is a huge advantage of OpenSim. It's the reason why OpenSim has an advantage over Second Life, is the hypergrid. It is our biggest differentiator. Is it in the trough of the Gartner hype cycle? I think so. I mean, I do think that eventually the metaverse will get here. But right now, I'm thinking that it will be in the form of augmented reality rather than virtual reality. Kind of like Zoom, but without a monitor. Like the Zoom people will be floating in space around you and you'll have restaurant menus in space around you and games in space around you, which will mean that our cell phones will be upgraded to a new cell phone kind of style interface that involves some kind of hologram. And there's a lot of cell phone manufacturers are all working on this first through glasses and next through various other technologies that are coming along. But that's a long, long way away. So are we going to get there? I think so. I mean, I've been a big fan of virtual reality from the beginning. But right now, gaming is the big use case for virtual worlds in general. And things like Grand Theft Auto. Most of the big name games are immersive, where people are interacting inside virtual environments. So clearly, this is something that people enjoy. And games do usually take the lead on technologies. Whether this will eventually translate into social uses and business uses. Facebook tried, but Facebook has been investing a huge amount of money. So I don't think that the lack of investment on a part of industry is a problem. Yeah, I've got a bunch of helmets on a shelf behind me right now. I actually gave a giveaway on Craigslist. I announced I was giving away free helmets. Like about a dozen people showed up to get them. I still have a helmet that I bought a few months ago that I haven't even opened. And it was like a couple $100 one from HP. Because there's no rush. There's nothing particularly I want to do with it. And so it's just been sitting here next to my desk. Yeah, I do think it will eventually get here. But I mean, Apple's investing big in this. Facebook's investing big in this. I think it is the eventual direction where we're going. But we still have a lot of stuff. The Apple VR helmet costs several thousand dollars. So maybe a few people will buy it because they're big Apple fans or because they have an actual business use case for it. Like people do buy the Microsoft HoloLens for business cases. Like automobile design, things like that. And maybe at some point they will turn this into your consumer device. And if it becomes a replacement for a cell phone, then yes, people will buy I think a new headset if it replaces your cell phone or if it replaces your video game console. But as an add-on to your video game console or an add-on to your cell phone, it's kind of a high price to pay. And the big problem with a headset is that you don't use it every day. So you forget how to use it, which is the problem that I've been seeing with mine. I've been away from it for a few weeks. So if I put it on, I have to charge it up. I have to run the upload upgrades on the software. I have to remember how to use the user interface. By the time I do all that, my meeting's over. It's easier to hop on to Zoom, which I use every day. So if it's a replacement for a cell phone, for something that people do use every day, then yes, I think we'll see very broad adoption. But if it's an add-on that people only use once in a while, then it's a much harder sell for it. So somebody asked about the trends on themes for the grids. I haven't seen any particular trends. I've been disappointed in that many of the grids seem to follow the same kind of basis. Our social grids, we love our users and we have some events and we have some performers and we have parties. And so I haven't seen a lot of big differentiating creators in grids. So the problem with differentiating yourself is that you're marketing to a smaller population. So I think it probably seems to grid owners that the broader base the grid is, the easier it'll be to market it because everybody can join. But that's actually a marketing challenge because if a grid is everything to everybody, then it's kind of like not really for anybody in particular. So yeah, I think that I would love to see more specialized grids that are focused on particular types of games or particular types of activities and really promote those things heavily. And so I've seen some grids for geographic communities, for some kinds of specific role-playing and I would love to see more of that. All right, so bumping into things. Yeah, the latest Facebook headset that I've tried out has a little bit of see-through stuff. So it kind of shows you the room around you kind of. So you don't bump into things and it gives you guidelines as to how much you can move so you don't like destroy things. But yeah, then that's one problem that AR solves because you're still in your own physical environment. But the AR things are added on top of that. For VR, you probably either wanna be sitting down or standing in one place or you wanna be in a special built VR environment, like an escape room or something like that kind of thing. And if there's an escape room in my town, that's also a VR location. So you can do escape rooms and you can do like VR in the same place. So that kind of thing. But for movement kind of games, of AR is probably a better bet. So yeah, I can't talk about fixing scripts. That sounds like a question for OpenSim developers. But I would love to see more AR games like Beat Saber kind of thing or Fruit Ninja where things are flying, fruit are flying at you, but in your actual living room. So you can see where the TV is and you can see all this other stuff. And a much lighter headset, like a pair of glasses form factor so people can actually wear them for a longer period of time. And I think we will get there. Technology is getting lighter, batteries aren't getting better, display screens are getting smaller and higher resolution, but it takes longer than we expect. And of course, I love the VR YouTube tip fails. Yes, but we're getting fewer of them. So that's also sad. Thank you Maria for an informative and interesting presentation and stay tuned because she's gonna be right back, okay? As a reminder to our audience, you will want to check out conference.opensimilar.org to see what's coming up on the conference schedule. You won't wanna miss our next session which will begin at 4 p.m. in this keynote region and it's entitled How Generative AI Will Change Content Creation and Coding. Also, we encourage you to visit the OSCC 23 Poster Expo in the OSCC Expo 3 region to find accompanying information on presentations and to explore the hypergrid resources in OSCC Expo 2 and the sponsor and crowd funder booths located throughout all of the expo regions. Thank you again, Maria and the audience. We'll see you shortly.