 session of the 2020 Open Simulator Community Conference. In this session, we are happy to introduce a session called After COVID-19, What's Holding 3D Virtual Worlds Back and What Can We Do About It? Our speaker is Ramesh Ramlal. Ramesh Sharma Ramlal currently leads DeepSemma 4 LLC, an e-learning and simulation solutions company. Please check out the website found at conference.opensimulator.org for speaker bios, details of the sessions, 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 at OpenSimCC with the hashtag pound OSCC20. Welcome everyone! Let's begin the session. All right, thanks. Thanks everyone for being here at this late hour, and I know everyone is pretty much very tired, you know, after two days of very interesting talks. So for this last talk, it's going to get a little bit more philosophical and maybe courageous to look at maybe to be a little bit self-critical and try to find out, you know, to look at what's happening outside our community, and then try to see, you know, how we can make things a little bit different or a little bit better or, you know, try to evolve. Okay, and so the title of my talk today is After the COVID-19 Crisis What's Holding 3D Virtual Words Back? And what can we do about it? I used the word back, not in a negative sense. I mean, it's just, you know, from the perspective, from one very narrow perspective, of looking at market sizes of different technologies, etc., and try to look from there, you know, about trying to compare adoption rates and things like that, because you know, around 2008, I was a big fan of, and I still am. Actually, I own a company doing those things, but there's been a lot, I mean, we've been doing simulations and all these things early on around 2008 and got, you know, papers published in the Journal of Emergency Management and things like that. So let's, I was thinking, okay, I had like a stream of consciousness and I recorded it on, as an audio file last Friday, I mean this Friday, two days ago, and then I mapped a video on top and tried to make it interesting. Hopefully, I've succeeded. So let's watch this clip, okay, and then if you have any questions, you just ask, you know, and I'll try to answer through the clip you're supposed to start answering. I'd be quiet. My thoughts about why virtual worlds in general are not finding similar levels of interest as videoconferencing platforms during this COVID-19 crisis. What's holding 3D virtual worlds back and what can we do about it? We are here exploring this issue together, so feel free to share your own thoughts or questions as they arise in chat. This talk is more like a stream of consciousness, and it has a somewhat loose structure, but I'm sure you will find the interconnections. I will spend some time on conferencing applications before segueing into 3D virtual worlds. So the first question I have is COVID-19 a showstopper or a catalyst. There is general consensus that COVID-19 has accelerated the digitization. Thanks for the opportunity to present at the OSCC 2020 New David with the WebEx ancestry who turned into a Goliath within a year. One year ago, most did not know what the Zoom application was or what it offered. Now it's almost a verb or an adjective for a videoconferencing session. One can ask why is it that Zoom became the most popular conferencing application when there are so many competitors around? Why are so many people of all walks of life eager to embrace Zoom sessions? Yes, with conferencing platforms during this COVID-19. Thanks for the opportunity to present at the OSCC 2020. Today I am going to share some of my thoughts about why virtual worlds in general are not finding similar levels of interest as videoconferencing Zoom back classes from home and even you can even see religious meetups or meditation sessions happening in Zoom sessions goes without saying that I'm not pointing to the most common use case which involves remote work. So who is the clear winner among collaborative technologies? It is certainly video conferencing applications. We can ask ourselves why is it that when forced into geographic separation the first reflex is to reach out to a videoconferencing application. Zoom recognized this and they started building an ecosystem of applications around web conf an ecosystem of applications around web conf around web conferencing applications which turned out to be core rather than peripheral in collaborative work processes. So everyone now is doing it really. Microsoft will team and scan. Thanks for the opportunity to present at the OSCC 2020 in terms of an effective technology to connect people without hitting some technological constraint. Is that a bad news? I don't think so. I think it's a good news because there's a lot of work that remains to be done. But what can we do to make virtual worlds a place where people will come back to for work and play? There are many unexplored domains when it comes to 3D virtual world design. One of the advantages when you start working in unexplored domains is that in many cases tactically it's still possible for researchers with modest bootstrapped financial resources to still work in the field. Fundamental problems that need to be addressed typically require more pen and paper activities and less exorbitant bleeding edge hardware. So anyway I believe that unexplored domains kind of level the field. So let's have a look at examples of such domains. Okay, one of them is there are ample opportunities to study the pain points or the challenges that teachers or subject matter experts face when trying to make effective use of 3D virtual worlds for learning purposes. So you can try to identify them and then design your offering that is your 3D world technology around them. There is an obvious need to reduce the ratio of virtual environment content creation time to subject matter content creation time. In short you want your users to spend more time creating quality subject matter content rather than the virtual world that holds that material. How are we on our end accelerating the the creation of content in general both in amount and quality? Our philosophy is simple split the world into parts thoughtfully so that you can assemble those parts in order to yield new content. So reusability and sharing of products so that they can be evolved is key in our view. The ability to import and manipulate text and image data in virtual worlds need to be offered as a core standard functionality. User content generation either from scratch or from creative assemblies of existing parts will remain king. So we are trying to support that. These little parts can help users create small exhibits which themselves can be assembled into museums or classrooms or large campuses and so on. Such a simple strategy can help to allow teachers to create environments that they need quickly and painlessly. We also have another strategy to increase adoption of virtual worlds. We try to encourage the design of minimal user interfaces and create systems that provide the optimal amount of freedom. Yes too much freedom is bad. One could achieve this by automating the more time consuming tasks in virtual environments. Example navigation, camera control. All these are time consuming tasks and if we can find a way to make these simpler and faster we will do it. What do we see as future possibilities? For shared environments that require long hours sitting at the desk in the near term working with variables will probably remain sorry working without variables will probably remain the norm. Users will prefer to have many of their 3D virtual tasks automated so we will continue to expect point and click operations on 2D surfaces for pretty much at least the next few years. We will also see new ways for self representations beyond avatars with limited expressivity and this of course certainly doesn't mean that you know we should shoot for higher fidelity avatars. There are many other things that we can try to represent a user or their activities and the next point I wanted to talk about is about the need for hybridizing approaches for mixing approaches because I believe that the future will be more about hybridizations of various approaches because each have particular strengths that we want to leverage. So I think we could see in the near future a mix of video conferencing and 3D world applications where the natural affordances of both are blended and made available to the user. This is just one example of a hybridization. We already see as another example of hybridization the injection of real-world environments into virtual worlds. At the simple level we see the creation of simple 3D panoramas from pictures obtained from Google. We do that, but at the deeper more advanced levels we will see more intelligent photogrammetric approaches and so on. So the field is wide open there. The next point that I think will be of interest is what will be the state of the art for information representation in 3D worlds. I think we'll be seeing fundamental changes at the level of how we represent information in 3D spaces. Over the centuries we have been good at compressing complex data through both syntactic and semantic compression methodologies. We have reduced for example a horse to a powerful line drawing on the wall of a cave. We have discovered the power of abstract representations that gives us insights in large numerical datasets or complex observable physical phenomena. We might need to reinvent presentation, brainstorming project management tools and so on in this menu. And perhaps why not? Let's not hesitate to revisit and recombine all the range of approaches that have worked in the past and try to adapt them to this new 3D virtual medium. And I want to end with a main question with an important question. Should we rely on forced physical separation to highlight the importance of 3D virtual worlds? We cannot do that. We cannot rely on forced physical separation due to a pandemic, you know, to argue for the utility of a 3D virtual world. It's time that we refine, amplify and evolve the environment so that it becomes obvious to people why they should spend time there. We should start looking at virtual worlds less as an escape from reality and more as a catalyst for self and group empowerment. We are already implementing a number of products towards these goals. So please get in touch with me if you have the skills or resources to help us in this endeavor. We are always happy to collaborate. Thank you for your attention. Any questions? That was an excellent session. We had some comments in the text chat. I'm scrolling up to take a look. But most of them were just talking about the video production and of course Zoomies. We had some comments from Cindy Bolero who mentioned ScienceBase is using a breakout room with a combo of Zoom and the virtual world. She wasn't sure if you were familiar with that and the fact that they can relate to that tech but soon realized they don't have to be on the webcam. And then of course she's a virtual world trainer for Zoomies so it requires a bit of adaptation and orientation I suppose for people to be comfortable with it. Frank Ruloff mentions companies see home working more as a standard for the 40% of week. So now the question is there's some cultural shifts we're noticing. What do you recommend Ramesh to adapt to these because this may continue after COVID. We may have future crises that we have to adapt for. So where do you think we're going with this preparedness? Oh yes. Okay. There are two things here. One is for the preparedness simulation stuff and things like that where there's a valid reason to be in an environment and immersed in a particular situation and rehearse things where the 3D aspect of the environment makes sense. But for a lot of the business conferences and where people are signing contracts or making deals and you know buying, selling, stocks or whatever they are doing in fact you know the video conferencing application seems to work well. I know people from governments, between governments instead of flying to their meetings for very important international affairs stuff now doing Zoom sessions. So and I'm looking at this from a purely you know unbiased perspective as an investor in technology myself. If you look at the stock price for various companies dealing with digitization and business they are very very you know task-centric. It's about security, it's about encryption, it's about you know the least common denominator, at least that replaces face-to-face for it seems to be to be video and even in the news media when people are being interviewed they are now just doing the interviewing you know the pundits or whatever just doing you know video conferencing. So I see that you know that's one one vector of evolution. Another vector would be which is really very very courageous and you really need to make superb breaks where it goes deep to to topics of how do we represent information. You know we used to think for example at one point in the early days of Second Life that we could use like 3D graphs and all kinds of 3D visualization visualizing air traffic data and all that stuff but at the end of the day people who study information visualization know that whatever visualization you produce it can be evaluated by based on how much of the information density of visualizations and then you start thinking you know maybe all these 2D representations are not like don't precede 3D they actually they actually evolve out of 3D so it's it's more complex. So what I see in the future is that in 3D worlds we will still be interacting with 2D media but you know if things are very simple enough then then yeah if we have avatar to avatar interactions and you know without without having to wear headsets I think we'll be fine but we need to invent those new tools inside those 3D environments because the mundane people who are not gamers they need something to do in the virtual world it's either productivity or social okay if you don't have social but at least give them productivity and that's what I'm hoping that we at least on our end are going to try to make possible so you know that's that's what I'm trying so I tried to invent a presentation approach here with this clip because I was trying to say okay what can we what what how can we use this 3D world and try to make something you know that transland transense the 3D environment and that can be accessed on the web it's all experiments just just you know just playing really I just play that's what I do well thank you and you know I don't know if you saw Selby we're about to wrap but Selby had brought up an important point you know in the text chat so you might want to take a look down the fact that everything costs whether it's your facilities whether it's you know supporting students whether it's educators all the physical costs as well as the virtual costs so we think about these things for me in answer to your question it's about interaction and creativity the more vested a student is in demonstrating their thoughts and giving them form in some fashion that's what forms a connection that's much more profound for my students than watching video or or just socializing I mean socializing is wonderful don't get me wrong but but it seems that when there's a physical commitment to what you're learning and even if you discover things that you don't know when you make mistakes there's some some magic sauce there that's really important for them for forming those connections in the mind oh yes definitely I spent 10 years working like this so I know what you're talking about but sometimes I miss I miss people that's right that's right well I'm we're going to go ahead and wrap up please don't stop the conversation on my part here thank you very much for a terrific presentation and for putting so much thought behind your video as a reminder hey take care remiss