OpenSimulator Community Conference November 8th – 9th

If EndgagetExpand doesn’t tickle your fancy then there’s another conference taking place this weekend that is well worth keeping an eye on, it’s the OpenSimulator Community Conference, which takes place on November 8th-9th. Unfortunately inworld tickets are already sold out for the conference but you can register for a free streaming ticket.

The basics of the conference can be found on the about page of the conference website, but I’ll give you a brief snippet :

The OpenSimulator Community Conference is an annual conference that focuses on the developer and user community creating the OpenSimulator software. Organized as a joint production by the Overte Foundation and AvaCon, Inc., the conference features two days of presentations, workshops, keynote sessions, and social events across diverse sectors of the OpenSimulator user base.

The OpenSimulator Community Conference 2014 features four themed tracks and a Learning Lab for hands on hackerspaces, speedbuilds, and more:

• Business & Enterprise
• Content & Community
• Developers & Open Source
• Research & Education
• Learning Lab

This conference features a lot of speakers whom followers of Second Life and virtual worlds will be familiar with. They include :

• Philip Rosedale – High Fidelity
• Nara Malone – Greyville Writer’s Colony
• Steve LaValle – Oculus VR
• John “Pathfinder” Lester – Reaction Grid
• Maria Korolov – Hypergrid Business
• Ilan Tochner – Kitely
• Caledonia Skytower – Seanchai Library
• Tranquillity Dexler – Inworldz
• Latif Khalifa – Radegast, Singularity
• Jessica Lyon – Phoenix Firestorm
• Kim Anubis – The Magicians

There are many more speakers whom some of you will be familiar with, it’s a jam packed schedule full of interesting looking discussions.

Philip Rosedale will be attending as a keynote speaker with a discussion entitled What Is The Metaverse? :

How will we build an open platform for VR over the internet? In this keynote presentation, Philip Rosedale will explore the future of the Metaverse and the challenges that lie ahead.

Nara Malone and other members of the Greyville Writer’s Colony will be presenting : Geeked Out Fairytales : Using Interactive Fiction and Gamification To Build Community Immersion :

Members of the Greyville Writer’s Colony join together to demonstrate interactive and immersive storytelling. We’ll include live and self-guided activities to teach how to use interactive fiction, NPC characters, game elements, and live performance to encourage deep exploration of regions and to build community. OpenSim is a vast world and filling that space with interesting activities helps region owners and community members connect with visitors when no one is available to greet them.

I had a very early sneak peek at this back in September.

Caledonia Skytower will be one of the speakers at : Library Out Loud : Bringing Stories and Literature to Life in Virtual Worlds :

Whether role-play, writer’s tools, or discussion groups, virtual worlds are full of stories being born. But is that all that is possible? How could a Library play a dynamic role in bringing literature and stories to vibrant life through the traditional oral presentation? The Seanchai Library was founded in 2008 as a library of the “living word” with the stated objective of connecting people to literature of all kinds: inspiring them to seek out, share, and create stories as a natural necessity of the human experience. With thousands of hours of live voice performance to its credit, Seanchai Library uses a variety of presentational to immersive approaches, utilizing the immediacy and intimacy of live performance teamed with the sense of community possible only in a virtual environment. Come and explore stories with Seanchai, and see how they do it.

John “Pathfinder” Lester will be included in a couple of discussions, one is : You Only Own What You Carry: How to Backup and Move Your Content Between Second Life, OpenSim and Unity 3D :

In this hands-on workshop, John will demonstrate exactly how to export your own user-created objects (both prim and mesh based) and move them between Second Life, Opensim and Unity3D. Attendees will be able to watch John’s desktop via a live screenshare and follow along on their own. Requirements: attendees need to pre-install the free Singularity viewer (http://www.singularityviewer.org) and the free version of Unity3D (http://unity3d.com). No previous technical expertise required, just a willingness to learn.

Ilan Tochner will also be involved in a couple of discussions, one of which is : Kitely Market : The Metaverse Marketplace One Year Later :

Kitely Market is an advanced, feature-rich virtual goods marketplace which delivers to all Hypergrid-enabled OpenSimulator grids as well as some closed grids. It creates a unified market that enables content creators and avatars from across the metaverse to transact using real money, without requiring content creators to maintain a duplicate presence on each grid. The presentation will begin with a quick overview of existing features followed by a short progress report and discussion of some of the lessons learned during Kitely Market’s first year in business. The presentation will conclude with a Q&A session.

Jessica Lyon and Latif Khalifa and others will be at : Viewer Developer Panel Moderated by Justin Clark-Casey :

This panel brings together developers of popular Second Life and OpenSimulator viewers such as Singularity, Firestorm, and Radegast to discuss the future of viewer development in these worlds. The panel will be moderated by Justin Clark-Casey, core developer for the OpenSimulator project.

Maria Korolov is going to be an extremely busy bee and will be at several discussions including : Women in Virtual Reality :

Although women make up a substantial portion of virtual reality users, enthusiasts, developers, and content creators, they are often underrepresented in positions of power in the industry, and face a variety of barriers, misconceptions, and discrimination in virtual environments that both mirror and differ from similar challenges in the “real” world. This panel will discuss the critical importance of diversity and inclusiveness in the emerging metaverse, and specifically address strategies to advance and encourage women’s contribution in the field.

Tranquillity Dexler will be at : Scaling OpenSimulator Inventory Using NoSQL :

When scaling out an OpenSim grid to hundreds of concurrent users, one of the first systems that will begin to show signs of stress is back end inventory storage. This presentation will demonstrate how NoSQL, and specifically Apache Cassandra, can provide unlimited scalability and low latency for inventory reads and writes.

Kim Anubis will be one of the speakers at : Does OpenSim Have the Critical Mass to Survive :

With Linden Lab working on a new platform, Second Life as we know it today could soon become a shadow of its current self. The days of using Second Life to provide a standard to match — and to innovate against — might be coming to an end. Second Life is also a source of a great deal of relevant training material, both in-world and on the Web and, of course, provides a constant flow of new users to OpenSim. Meanwhile, High Fidelity and other platforms will be competing to become the dominant technology of the 3D metaverse. Does OpenSim have what it takes to survive — and to flourish?

Steve LaValle will be the keynote speaker at : Virtual Reality: How Real Should It Be?

It has been an exciting adventure as we race to bring the consumer version of the Oculus Rift VR headset into widespread use for games, cinema, therapy, virtual travel, and beyond. Palmer Luckey’s 2012 prototype demonstrated that smartphone-based advances in display and sensing technology enable a lightweight, high field-of-view VR experience that is affordable by the masses. This has stimulated widespread interest across many industries, research labs, and potential end users of this technology. This talk will highlight some of the ongoing technical challenges, including game development, user interfaces, perceptual psychology, and accurate head tracking. Although VR has been researched for decades, many new challenges arise because of the ever-changing technology and the rising demand for new kinds of VR content.

There’s much much more too. This looks absolutely fascinating, the only real problem is going to be finding the time to keep track of everything and even VR can’t solve the time issue. This really does look like a fascinating conference and the organisers should be proud of the schedule they’ve organised.

Organising conferences can be a difficult business and when AvaCon and others were involved in organising Second Life Community Conventions there were a lot of arguments about the organisation, it was painful but I hope those early organisers can be recognised for having started the ball rolling on these sort of events.

Hopefully in years to come, Linden Lab will have a place at such conferences, although they are obviously not involved in OpenSim, they are very much involved in VR.

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