Hello everyone. Stranger and I are standing here at Sakurajima and we are about to take the Kintsugi tour. We were waiting to see if any others were going to join us and if not, let me go ahead and get us warmed up, right? So let me show you the content from the conference and of course this is where we're standing, right? I'm eight slides into the session that I gave at the Open Simulator Community Conference and this is a design by Spinoza Quinnell, better known as Dr. Andrew Stricker, who couldn't be with us today. He's going to try to connect via Zoom but he's not sure he would get out of his obligation at work. So what we're looking at is we see Sakurajima, the volcano. We see these five stations and they are mirroring a design we did last year for the Ikigai principles, which are the principles that help you to live a wonderful and centered life, right? And we were thinking about how we recover from COVID and from loss and in our group over a three-week period in 2021 we lost 16 people, including Dr. Barbara Truman a few weeks later and so we were very sad, you know, there's no other word for it. Eight of them were children who came to the farm where this network is located and would spend time with the farm family, with the animals and on all the animals there are pets, they are family members, they're not food. So it's a wonderful place and located there is virtual harmony which is our our grid and of course we run many grids at virtual harmony probably 18 or more different grids but this is one of them and it's called Sakurajima and it is named after a place in Japan where one of our researchers was born and so we were helping her get back to her roots. We were also trying to heal after such extreme sadness and loss and by the way stranger your microphone's open so I just want to let you know and of course I'm going to get messages I better close email this is the last two days before final grades are due so those of you who are educators know what I'm living through and I taught 15 classes this term so I just closed all of them except for the last two and then I have two others that'll continue yeah I know crazy right so this is all nighter mode right and I am in Colorado I know I'm here on on camera and that's what it looks like outside because it's been snowing but it's about to warm up so the ground's about to lose some of the snow but it's been pretty wild over here and we had an intense fog similar to the clouds up there and you're looking at Garden of the Gods in Colorado Springs so here we are in Sakurajima too that's what I love about virtual worlds so we're not going to stay in the slides but let me give you a little context before we go around the stations for those of you who may have missed our session the the thought here is these are contemplative pathways for the wounded healer and what we're thinking of is healing our inner spirit we're always carrying a little bit of grief with us you notice the heart right here and you see all this little gold work here that's what Kintsugi is about is repairing something that's broken and making it a thing of beauty how do we make our lives a thing of beauty after you know such a horrific event that affected everyone around the planet well so we're building on this Japanese term we're building on the roots of Francisca Yanakura who's Frankie Antonelli in the virtual world and she's one of our fellow researchers from University of Central Florida now they're working for a living right whereas me I'm just grading so I'm hosting the session today and you'll notice all the lovely pottery here as you go through the stations you too get to break the pottery and rebuild it you know so that's the goal as we go through these five stations is to to understand this contemplation we're going to have and how we overcome this painful experience and come up with I love the image of the cup of tea you know because um you know even the tea cup you know is a thing of beauty after it's been broken and repaired in this fashion now this is building on some research and you have to realize we're geeks right we do a lot of reading and this is building on Henry Nguyen's research from Notre Dame you know from the university and also his work at Yale and Harvard and he is is a contemporary and a friend of um or at least an acquaintance of Dr. Stricker Spinoza Quinnell and Spinoza was so taken with his book and of course we lost him too so uh so we're extending our understanding of empathy and altruism and acceptance and having a forgiving spirit for everything we do you know and so we think about that these are the five principles of Ikigai that we featured in both our our last year's design and in our VR app that we created for the meta platform uh and we what we did was we took Sakurajima this region we're about to explore and we um took the good parts of it put pulled it into unity and created a VR app from it suitable for the Oculus or the meta platform and that wasn't easy to do because the thing on your face that you wear when you wear a head mounted display device is like an android app and it's very small and Sakurajima is two terabytes of content it is very large so how do you fit a large thing into a small thing well you have to make choices you you don't obviously stage all of your experiments and you you don't get the full panorama the full experience um but anyway these are the five principles that we're going to discover in the five stations i don't know if we're going to cover all of them today but um i love them and for those of you who watched the movie Zombieland right Zombieland had the rules remember the rules and they were on the ground you know like seat belts and things like that well it's also um finding joy in the little things that was one of the key ones towards the end of the movie and of course it was the what okay if you saw the movie there James and stranger do you remember what the thing was that the Woody Harrelson character desperately wanted all throughout the movie you know what it is it's a little snack cake right oh no a twinkie that's it he wanted a twinkie and all throughout the movie he's his quest is and when he finally gets one of them it's finding joy in the little things of life and that's that's the that's that's kind of the moral to that story but it's pretty funny uh the Zombieland featured it too uh so here's the grid map this is where we're standing and of course i'm not going to stay on the slides i'm going to move back to the stations we're going to wander around them and see what we can discover and i'm going to take on the role of a usability tester which is my role at virtual harmony i do less physical design here although i can and love it the reason is andy is fast he uses cheetah he uses hexagon he uses maybe my uh a little bit but he uses a lot of different tools to very quickly model in 3d in in mesh and when i say quickly i'll say andy i need an airplane that i can crash and hold a simulation of of crew communications on and how we survive a real-life crash and next thing you know in a couple of days i have an airplane that i can crash you know in mesh so uh and and and he used to do this quite quickly and he has a day job you know this is the tinkering we do in our nights and weekends right but anyway and so we're going to go to these stations and explore it and we're going to let stranger also be um our test subject as well you know experiencing this lovely place and instead of showing you more slides i'll just give you the link to them let's do the share right and i'll just copy the link done i'll put it in the text chat for now and we'll where we put the video we'll put that link with it okay so you have a copy of the slides and then here's the poignant thought that that goes through our minds as we're building and experiencing this simulation i am a wounded healer when we dismiss people out of hand because of their apparent woundedness we stunt their lives by ignoring their gifts which are often buried in their wounds the compassionate life is the life in which we believe that strength is hidden in weakness and that true community is a fellowship of the week that's a quote from henry newan and of course we think about um that as we go through the experiment and here i was testing it a couple of weeks ago right with the team what you see on screen is um aljanar noir on the far left myself in my spacesuit as my os grid leer um it's been osa quinelle in of course a kimono and uh francesca yannacura who's frankie antinelli on the far right and this is her homeland so without further ado let's move on over into sakurajima okay and uh so joys has joined us okay and uh i've i've been on the grid and i don't see anyone looking for us so i may i'm gonna grab the people okay okay so well yeah so well let's i'll share um oops i've copied the wrong thing so of course we need to share with joys the url and we're we are not publishing this to the public so my apologies and the reason is because um we do a lot of experiments here and a lot of classes with students right and of course we don't want to um do deferpa and other rules we don't normally mix students and non-students now i will tell you right now i don't hold any furpa related conversations in world i teach in world and i've taught 60 classes what we do is we focus on design testing the concepts um the deep probing skills why this matters that kind of thing we save all of the housekeeping of education onto the course platform you know and handle it there uh that way we're always good okay so james is here and strangers here and uh reanna will be joining us in just a moment well let's go ahead and and start moving forward because i know the recorded part we're probably going to keep it kind of short so whoops i went the wrong way i think yep i went back home those are some cabins for those who go the wrong way we'll all go the wrong way i did you know this is my home at sacra jima and what's so cool is andy creates homes for all of us everywhere we go let me show you what i mean and here i will extend my draw distance oh it's at 128 that's because i installed a i'm on a different viewer actually i'm on the contraband one i need to upgrade to the 17 and i've been using the alpha as well uh you can't see the cruise ship from here but there's a cruise ship out there that may be why we landed in the water is he pulled it up when he replaced it with the mountain anyway the cruise ship is huge it has 10 10 cabins on it same as the 10 cabins behind me so we all have our own cabin including delightful duvango hers is still here her home yeah and we miss delightful uh that was barba truman dr barba truman um she was one of my graduates and of course an active community member researcher and transdisciplinarity and she believed in the power of these worlds for education well you went too fast there stranger this is the first station so we'll let james be oh you're coming back good see that piece of pottery yeah well you go near it and you look at the signs for just a moment and he's big on signs by the way so um you'll notice here's the early parts of our slides and explains why we're here then you look at the um the it says click to receive a contemplative pathway and anyway go ahead and click it we'll watch and see what happens it's the sign right over the pot okay stranger i see yeah yeah you just left click i know with the pot oh okay i get you oh my you broke it what that's so andy right he has you break it first and then it rebuilds reforms and notice all the little magical qualities coming out of it from the gold yes yes when you do this you should get a copy of it in your in your um yep i did in your inventory yes and of course um each one of these has a theme i don't see it going back to so maybe you have to click the second sign or click the pottery make sure you pick up your pieces see if you can click the pottery on the ground now oh yeah maybe more than i haven't clicked it i just saw i just saw some articles yeah i did too so it's thinking about it maybe the gold bond it will take a moment you know or you didn't have enough wounds i don't know there you go so that means now check your inventory and you should have a copy you don't have to keep breaking it unless you wish to but it's up to you um so here's the first one it says discovering what sparks the soul leading to a life with purpose in small steps his work mirrored the icky guy five principles and since the two of them work so well together that's why we're blending them um now from a test engineer perspective let me do the practical if i was doing this i would widen this sign right i would i would stretch it stretch everything but i don't have permissions on his stuff and so my first act with andy is andy i need permissions the second act is andy everything has to be full permission so that the team can collaborate and change things and those are things we do together but this one he put together as a labor of love and of course um as a point of healing for all of us because we're still carrying that baggage right that pain of loss okay moving along and of course this is a beautiful space and look at all this mesh that he has created what you have to realize is we don't go out and find mesh from other people or objects or anything all the textures and the mesh is created by andy okay yeah even the emitter he hasn't worked with emitters from others he's created his own now every once in a while i introduce him some propaganda i give him a tree or two that i found somewhere in world and he will study it but he will make his own and so uh and notice there's a little winding path of this way we're not i'm not going to roll that way but i noticed you can go have tea or sit and and dream and think you know in the shadow of sakurajima volcano the reason that looks a little bit different is he got this from google maps and google earth and you know and then and then modeled it over terrain uh huh yeah okay he decided to go for authenticity we often build things and then we later change them to get them closer to the actual space uh yeah and so and this is like i said it's only maybe a month old maybe two weeks old it's not very old it was right before right around the time we were proposing the conference now there's another one up here and see i don't know what their numbers are because i'm not looking at the handy little map you know but so we could go that way across the bridge or we could go up this way let's go up this way all right these stairs just look so interesting right and of course he's not trying to make them look like stairs he's trying to make them small avatar so i don't know if i can take such big steps uh you may have to hop then this is when your page up key comes in handy and you can fly in in our property we allow we allow flight we don't stick to realism and the reason is is because Cynthia is always busy oh yeah okay this time i'm going to do the simulation okay so we can see it from my perspective what the user sees and of course we're getting a little more of the story here connecting with others and nature in harmonious ways and that's why we had the little reflection spot midway up is to of course give people the opportunity to do just that and he's put this slide content on the other side okay so we click here and by the way we upgraded this grid recently it is now running the latest version of open simulator <IP_ADDRESS> and it's using y engine and we are using the mariah database so we're not using version 10 because that no longer syncs with some of the resources that we have here at for open simulator okay now i'll touch the other side just to see if that's what stimulates it and you'll notice it gave me an object it told me excuse me it told me let me there we go that um the broken pottery shreds have been put back together by a wounded healer as kintsugi pottery and it's waiting for oh someone else broke it's what happened and so i got the message on it so if i check my inventory of course which is of course a mess uh the recent is more recent than you ever would think right in the objects i should have the stations and i do it gave me two of them quite possibly because someone else touched while i was or my touch in the right side maybe this is all one thing see and so as a test engineer i go inside this content take a look at what he's doing i normally study the script look at the note card the instructions that he's sharing and so i didn't even realize we were getting a note card let me see what does it say aha so we get a note card as well uh and this is to explain and also as a souvenir and i love this there's a quote here did i offer peace today did i bring a smile to someone's face did i say words of healing did i let go of my anger and resentment did i forgive did i love well these are the real questions i must trust that little bit of love that i sew now that will be many fruits here in this world and the life to come well these are beautiful thoughts and i know when we were going through the conference i know people were thinking that wait a minute they're famous for doing the space program stuff and the oh and by the way you're supposed to share a thought um it might have been one word your gift what what's that i've i've shared one one word beautiful surprise that's wonderful it you can share anything and they are going into a database i will tell you we are doing research and and i i have to admit i have clicked some of these and put in various themes um i always uh lear yes i just want to let you know that hi hi yeah i see you okay it's so good to see you well we are here at the kintsugi um in sakura jima and if you want to join this list i'll give you the url so you can pop over or james will that's if you can see the chat if you if you're comfortable where you are we'll just take you on the tour yeah we cannot hear you but that's okay okay there i am i mean what i'm trying to do is turn up my sound and my regular computer and i can't okay okay um well i'll keep talking so you can adjust the sound and we are recording i always like to let people know right because you do have your camera on and and you look gorgeous but you know i always like that you know behind me i have a lot of dishes waiting for me and and other things from last night or this morning so well yeah so i'm using a a backdrop of my hometown in snow hey there's joice hey hi this is so far this is just us joice may have stepped away for a short time but yeah yeah good okay it's good to see everyone and you have to realize this is like a little treasure for us now i know this may sound seem weird i know i know people were looking at me like oh my gosh they do they do the mars work in trying to figure out how we're going to live and breathe on mars this very serious research so what is the saccharidema business right and of course the goal here is each of us has been affected by not just covet but everything in our lives and trying to recover is not something you just do overnight you just don't get out there and and feel quite the same plus the sense of loss and sadness we have and then our views of the world and others around the world and of course of conflict so we built this to help and remind us of what matters most in life so this theme was connecting with others and nature in harmonious ways well that's two of our stations now we have a fork in the road i'm going to let one of you pick which direction you'd like to go in will we go to the right or to the left the left let's take a peek the left has more stations and the right seems to have a community center so let's go to the left i was going to let you choose but it's not much of a choice there are signs though and let's take a look now as a test engineer what i would do here is i'd say i'd stretch this vertically a little more so that this script is a little easier to read i would also comment and you have to realize we built this for us right not for the world at large so we're not thinking about fonts that are friendly to persons with dyslexia you know who are experiencing and we're not thinking about some of these other things but i'd be looking at this i'd say you have two prims fighting for rendering here you know need to take care of that z flickering here and that's the kind of thing that i think about as the user experience the and of course there are sounds and i'm not playing any of my sounds i'm not even sure they would you'd catch them on the recording and the reason i don't is usually there's a lot of sound he likes sound and some of you may be hearing them right i have it turned down but i'll turn it up well there are some stations where i remember algeron going through and testing it a few weeks ago and she said well that's a lot of sound and so i just put mine on zero until i can share that kind of feedback you have to realize sound is beautiful but i really prefer it to be ambient and and random unless it's a waterfall right yeah okay so here we are and this workstation you know it's kind of tricky getting up these steps notice i'm so from the user experience i would say you know and by the way this this tip comes from ubert ubert you're more off is he always says create a prim that's um you know a rectangle that has been tapered make it invisible and put it over here so everyone can walk up the stairs yeah and you never have to worry about another stair in your life of any shape or whatever you just got to have that invisible prim to the width of this opening and bam you were up i know strangers up there going hi i did it what's your problem but of course i have heels on okay i'm teasing okay so the theme of this one is really my favorite because this is my mantra finding joy in the little things of life everything fascinates me and for anyone who just joined us elisanna this is about the research of henry newan from the university of Notre Dame who also was a researcher at Yale and harvard in thinking about the wounded healer you know and and what kinds of messages and gifts these give to us we have bridged it with our icky guy work and of course i'm scratching my eye here i have a skylight over me and a window right here with you know and mountain snow reflecting so i feel like i'm in a spotlight like in any event so let's do the next one and let's see who's with us um has anyone not know you guys have all done it i'll go ahead and do it just for the camera so this is a beautiful piece of pottery and of course we're going to click here and it gives us a piece of the pottery it gives us the no card with the saying and each one of them has a different saying and then it's going to rebuild then here what's going to be our gift to the future of course it says to enter your reflections and mine's great joy and thanks i'm very thankful to be here and to me if we can share that with the world that makes this a far better place now the quote that i keep reading is this bottom one you see here on the no card that it gives you and of course it's kind of faint and for the audience for the video especially and this is not a pro video this is like a class and i do this oh many times a week here we go when we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives mean the most to us we often find that it is those who instead of giving advice solutions or cures have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand the friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion or who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement the person who can tolerate without knowing not curing not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness that is a friend who cares what andy's saying here is we have such strong bonds at virtual harmony we've been together for 15 years as a loosely coupled weak tie network i have something in my eye my apologies and and we have some sun in your eye it looks like i do i have like everything and um we have felt powerless you know in the face of coven and the face of loss we lost those eight children in a bus accident who who came to the farm and and spent time with aljanon who writes children's books and and speaks and this was a little camp of kids who live in a special place in the mountains there um who are separated from their families who are in recovery from pain and loss and so these were children in need they had gone on a field trip down to the shore and when they came back they died in a car accident and and unfortunately there was a fire and so we were so struck by with grief and bereavement it was really hard for us to continue working so he's created this as a place of healing for us for all of us and you'll notice it gives you the piece of pottery so all these little pieces now of course i gotta rebuild the pottery right maybe it's the right side maybe it's not or maybe i'm supposed to be clicking on the pottery itself and you'll notice the sparkles the the particles kick off it gives me the saying again and sure we'll give two gifts to the world right my next one is of course um well it's obviously healing because healing is well we never forget those children and the people we've lost we move on and we take with them um discovery and hope for the future the discovery of the world the things that we're doing and why these spaces matter see it's not just the fact that i click an object and it breaks the pottery and then it gives me the no card and the the message it's the fact that my interaction with this work forms a connection it's like that line in the movie out of africa at the end where she says will africa sing a song of me will the land quiver with the color that i have worn will the children make up a song in which my name is a part of it you know is there something that causes us to continue long after we're gone that makes an impact on our world and that's what we're thinking about with these simulations well now i'm shifting my attention to where do we go from here we are down aren't we and the other simulations seem to be up and across a bridge maybe i was supposed to take the fork to the right and then over well this is station four it said so that seems right but we've only have we done four i i think i skipped one then because look at maybe maybe there's right because you you and stranger handled the first one so we need to get to five well let's go this way and i know there are bathhouses here by the way uh where we all take a soak and we celebrate Thanksgiving here with lobster and crab and you know and of course it's virtual for anyone who would not eat such a thing you know um and that's the way to the bath house i do think but let's see okay taking a peek taking a peek yeah see i think we need to backtrack and i'm going to take the fast method this is what i love about virtual worlds for anyone who's new to them okay when i was at the crossroads i was here okay and now i can grab my friends or they can fly over right they're they're all very savvy but if they weren't i can send them a teleport offer teleport and that's what i love about these spaces yeah i know you can fly here and you're probably already here but i'm demonstrating for people who are not used to navigating now what i did was i'll tell you right now i i teach my students this i say you know being able to move smoothly and well and fast is power skill this is why we teach here so we always go to the preferences to the movement and i always have teleport to click the point double click right so i have double click active and then i always grab the people so if i wanted to go see what james was up to or someone else i double click their name and then i teleport to their location and voila voila you know super prof right i wish i could do that in real life that would be fantastic but anyway so we'll go this way and of course we could have walked back up the steps and come around but i'm being lazy right and that's one of the joys in a virtual world i do not have my animation override currently working so in those i'm giving this little hop right that's fine i do love i will tell you right now when i was a child to be able to look down and see water and see little nestled areas and see little caves and that that to me was a place of wonder and one of my favorite things in life and i was always hiding out in those kind of spaces uh so we get a tea ceremony when we're done yeah so here we are and we're at the fifth station and this one's called being present in each moment and place this is one that i don't always do well because i multitask so i will have a lot of monitors going i will be in several different areas answering questions i i'll have i have eight headsets one that's been caffeinated and i will toggle between lots of headsets and lots of different things and i've trained my apps in windows to allow me to have many different sound sources and so being present requires me to stop for a moment and to focus on one thing and you'll notice today that's exactly what i'm doing i'm ignoring all my other communication methods and things we're doing and we're here just doing this one thing and of course this is a beautiful teacup and so as we click and click on it and i think what's happening there goes is it breaks oh my that's a lot of pieces that would be serious work to use kintsugi to repair um but it can be done and there we go yes so now we have our last station and we have our pottery and let's see now what's cool about this and for those of you who are not used to open simulator worlds is we know that scripts don't always behave okay and we know that if it's going to misbehave it will especially during a demo and of course the fact that it's working quite so well for something he put together so quickly is indeed wonderful so here well i noticed even a little lag when i was moving so it just could be internet and and there is indeed what's also we when we went to y engine we started noticing that we were getting some lag as we're rendering different parts of the property and so um so we often sit and relax for a little bit and then go on these tours so this one tells us compassion asks us to go where it hurts to enter into the places of pain and to share in brokenness fear confusion and anguish compassion challenges us to cry out with those in misery to mourn with those who are lonely to weep with those in tears compassion requires us to be weak with the weak vulnerable with the vulnerable and powerless with the powerless compassion means full immersion in the condition of being human you know as i read these words i'm thinking back to my early days in college i was part of the americor which at the time was the volunteers in service to america and of course they had the peace corps which most people know about the um the americor is here in this country and it asks us to spend to devote a year working with a population that's endangered and in my case i worked with 10-year-old boys who had had to use violence to survive they had harmed at least one person and they were in a juvenile program and to help them heal and recover from this terrible event we had to figure out what to do next so i spent a year with them 35 hours a week in case you're wondering and this is while i was going school and i was taking 20 hours of classes which is full time is 12 to 16 so my my excessiveness and excessive behavior began then okay and then anyway but these boys taught me so much but um what a profound experience it really was it shaped my future and um it forced me to live in the neighborhood where they lived and so they only gave me $200 to live on and that included rent food school gas everything okay and even then i know you're thinking well that was the dark ages but um even then you couldn't live on that okay so i had to find a place the only place i could afford had a gas leak i thought i was going to blow up every day right or die of gas so i had to leave the windows open well have you ever lived in an endangered space with the windows open around the clock and of course i did have problems towards the end but uh but it was a wonderful experience because i lived and walked their walk and talk you know i understood their needs and and we were suffering together and and they do that with the peace corps too where they do deep immersion put you in with the folks so that you have empathy for their can not just for their condition but for the problems they face and how how they struggle to face those you know and so uh it gave me a great humility and it's interesting because that's something i always liked about virtual worlds and open simulators the idea of empathy and you know professor chris milks you know virtual worlds being the empathy machine that's right and it will put you through an experience the one thing it doesn't do is teach you what it's like to only be able to afford a carton of eggs for the next two weeks to live on and you're like well i can make egg sandwiches but then you want bread right and of course i start to feel like i'm in a game only that was life yeah and what it was like and i would buy things that you know and stretch them in in amazing and interesting ways but anyway going through a year of that really teaches you um you know compassion and and a deep understanding of the the struggle the boys were having because the system didn't really understand why would you knife another person why would you shoot another person to survive why would you well why would that happen at age 10 and i says oh i can see why that would happen now you know having had this experience so you know what i did with them i did 4h i became an assistant cooperative extension agent i volunteered my time i took the boys out to the 4h fair and had we took care of 16 animals and we learned and we i knew nothing about taking care of animals on a farm okay so we were all doing it together but but people had dropped off their animals and weren't take work they weren't feeding them because they knew that quite possibly someone might buy them and they might become food so they just kind of emotionally detached but we were looking at them and say wow there's animals out here for a week without food you know so we took over and then uh we went to camp we went to you know summer camp we went to a lot of different places and we we started thinking about our world and how to make it a better place and i took them through all the 4h materials and uh it was it was just wonderful really and so um by the end of the program you know i feel quite confident that they moved on to a far better life and i was a better person for it so being present in each moment and place well there's more to see at the property but that's the primary part of our tour i see we're only 44 minutes into our time maybe it's time for a cup of tea huh okay and uh and we couldn't take a bath but now i know that this ritual works but i don't know quite how he activates it you know and it might be something he needs to do you can click sit properly and what it'll do is it'll override like right now i have an animation override on even though it's not completely working and of course he's overriding it so you have to click the menu option sit properly stranger so click on your pillow and then you got a menu option in your upper right corner there you go there yeah so he is yeah and he's put us all in an angle so that we can enjoy the view yep and of course views let's talk about our camera this is something we need to work on is the shared environment i tend to spend a lot of my life either in sunset or sunrise or i do a lot of customization of my world so that i can see the world with different kinds of lighting right now and he likes it at midnight by the way this is how he designs yeah i didn't you know how it is we start we begin i'm all about usability testing right but now when we stop to smell the roses i'm thinking oh the designer designed this from a yeah from a midnight perspective with that in mind right yes but some areas are a little bit dark they don't have all have lighting so of course i don't go to midnight immediately not naturally but that is how it's designed and of course sakurajima has a lot of other simulations just so you know i would just let my camera wander through a few of them down the center we have the little prayers and the little uh during covid we would we were very busy trying to figure out ways to heal our world and of course um uh this station back here is where you post them here let me get closer looks almost like a way of posting them and you can i'm nowhere near it so gosh knows how it would work right now i suppose i could stand and go there right it looks like i hit one of his seating arrangements yes i did where i took yep that's the bench and uh when you click on some of these you can also do this simulation as well it has told me to look in my inventory for a folder called ima and then and to um to then do what it says these are little prayers for the future and you may wonder are we of a faith that does this kind of thing not really we are a mixture of faiths that all come together but we still want the best for our world it doesn't matter our personal beliefs we all come together with great respect for each other now i'm not sure what it gave me um it's here somewhere probably my note cards nope i don't see it they're supposed to be a folder here and i just have too many things let me do a filter for those of you ever teaching in world and you're trying to demo your stuff i'm showing 21 days of stuff that would be why there we go let's just try one and uh yeah okay so whatever it was supposed to give me it did not give me at this time so from a usability testing perspective i'd say andy this station here needs an update and the reason it does is we designed this under x engine for scripting and now we are under y engine so all of our scripts needed a little update you know and some usability testing to check on their behavior but hey look at you guys you found me i'm a minimap person so i'll just find dots on the minimap oh see so you're pulling up this little guy and using it i don't use this very often because well to me it's always just a little odd you know but uh it's good that you you're active with the minimap i notice other people use it too it's from gaming i think oh sure well i use minimaps but i need them to be super large you know and and to be able to enlarge the contents on the map i needed to pop out um otherwise i i don't see very well so yeah i do do fairly well for someone who can't see though very very true yeah but there you go oh sure there you go and you can see we have walkways and we have um beautiful oh stranger i'm echoing from your microphone actually it might be mine it might be listen as no listen did you want to add something there strangers yeah that's okay i was just smiling along oh good well you know you're always welcome out and you know how we are we um we have many many simulations and many grids but this is what we're doing to feed our inner spirit okay and of course each of us has a cabin here and and uh everyone's name see aljanon is dr stricker's wife betty stricker who is a children's author and um one of our team and jj drink water who was the librarian of caledon and also is our science fiction librarian this is her house who each of us has a home in virtual harmony everywhere we go every property and so uh that makes it nice yep and there's mine and jj's nearby skylark is aljanon sister so we brought family out here too so this is a family event too yeah it's not just the research team uh here's delightful's okay and so barbara truman space and some of her spaces she decorated and others she did not um this is just the base setup and then she's put a few things up here for tea oh and sushi she knows how i love sushi me too all right yeah but anyway she's always with us well that's kind of the the composite of our tour for today but i want to thank the open simulator community conference and um my organizing team u james for the maid for the streaming joy spent court for being the master mind behind all of this and everyone for pulling it all together see now you can see i i like to see all the textures by the way which is why i like the different lighting but um uh i want to thank everyone all our volunteers listen up for greeting people stranger for helping to show us the user experience because we need new people to come by and show us what is it like to be new and and how can we support and strengthen our world you know through these um through these not just simulations and our shared events but to stimulate our developers we're very thankful for our developers without you developing the software developing the viewers we wouldn't have this experience so we really need everyone to feel energized and on fire for another year it's spent in virtual worlds and that's why we do this it's not just to gather and and uh to show cool tech it's really to think through notice that was the sculpting right he did a sculpting there for that door and i always love looking at that you know when things deform or reform um i don't know if you were on the um arcadia asylum tour but on that tour they explained how they're converting some of those sculptees into mesh uh to get to get them to not deform like that and to to behave under certain conditions a little bit better and of course curating the work of people who have gone before us are fallen you know uh is a very powerful thing to do it's our it's a shared legacy then and we are part of that experience so i want to reach out and thank everyone who attended the conference who spoke at it and of course to everyone who made it possible well that's my remarks for today um why don't i turn the floor over to our guests the senate did you have anything you wanted to add as i poke the other eye yeah no i was very glad to be able to get here actually talked about sushi i was running to get sushi for an expected guess i have not ate today i brought some crackers close but i didn't get them open so this is a lovely space and i of course i love the whole feeling behind it and the oh yeah that it represents it's amazing yeah you mentioned that that andy did a lot of the building he did all of it what are you talking about well no no no i mean you know some of the objects you said were actually uh you know designed the terrain but uh were any of the buildings got retrieved from stores or no other other no let's take a look yeah i know i know it's quite easy to now get yourself as the creator of everything you upload but he does it all yeah so what he does and so if i showed you let me take you behind the scenes for just a moment um here we go on the grid dashboard if we went to pompe which is currently offline you'll notice there's a volcano there right yeah if i showed you the terrain map it's the same overall for this however for this event about a few weeks ago he decided to grab from google maps and google earth theirs and then turn it into mesh and then bring it in here so i guess this is kind of like something that's i don't know if i can actually go there yeah i can so it's not hanging off the the server property but this is something that's coming from the real world how it looks obviously it's not erupting okay but but uh yeah because i looked at the mountain i said you know andy the mountain has changed you know it used to be a repurposed pompe and now what is it you know and of course um he he just he's trying to go for more realism so like when we do the grand canyon or when we do mars we used to use our version of the grand canyon and re-texture it for mars in the early days you know 15 years ago and now no no now he goes and gets the actual maps and and he gets a lot of content from nasa and brings that into those simulations yeah yeah but no this is this is stuff he did it is amazing to work with someone who's a brilliant researcher he taught quantum mechanics and intelligent agents at oxford for donald broadbent and donald broadbent is famous for his coining the term selective attention so if you're familiar with his work and broadbent came to the air force academy when andy was teaching statistics there he was teaching it not in the traditional way he would take the students down to the library and he'd rip open the map room and he'd pull out the maps and throw them across the table and he'd say okay now we're going to think about how statistics apply to this experience of how you find yourself and how you think about your world and how you think about what's happening in it and he would tell little stories and the cadets just love that and he became famous for his little stories so broadbent came from oxford to the air force academy here in colorida springs scooped andy up and said i need him to take a sabbatical to come teach at oxford and andy and i how we're connected is we went to high school and college together and i was the little bully female who would we would walk along and i have a grocery sack of books and i say andy you need to do this and andy you need to do that so i was kind of that girl you know and um and all throughout our lives you know we we've always had a commitment to our world and to thinking about the world in really strange and interesting ways where we went to school i would go up a tree and read books on the school property and watch the world walk by under me and watch the leaves fall and think about the world and i was painfully shy see whereas with andy i was never shy because we would always talk you know and we took all these very thoughtful classes together and and we took classes in general semantics and and and thinking and having great respect for everyone and so you know he uh i wrote an article for the educa's review in 2008 for the back to school edition about my classes and andy saw it and said oh my gosh are you the same one i said kid there be another with my name you know and so um yeah and so he reached out and asked me to join the team and i've never left ever since then we've been doing simulations together and and by the way we do a lots of different simulations but he's doing most of the mesh and design and scripting for them and i do the critique and say andy we need to make this a little more usable this is where we'll be on sunday we're going to be celebrating christmas and of course we did capri to celebrate during covid right with our cruise ship and all our wonderful stuff huffman prairie is where you take off in a rocket and nowadays when you get in the rocket it's a dazzling set of commands and controls you have to you have to power it you have to fuel it you have to do everything before you can take off yeah it's pretty wild and then when you take off you wind up on a different grid as you're flying you wind up on the mars outpost right so it flies from one and these are grids these are not regions and the reason we're using grids is he has learned he can get better performance and more grids active at the same time through his architecture now ubit has another thought on that so uh that that's a wonderful conversation for anyone who's hosting regions and grids this is where i teach on lobo he was calling it lobo world and i said oh andy i feel like an amusement park or something and i'm not you know yeah my my place is messy that's where students get messy and everyone designs projects meanwhile we have mcmurdo station which was one of barbara truman's loves this is where we went to the Antarctic and i'm watching the time i see we're about out of time but we have a lot of fun exhibits there and we have a game we play uh where we have to find missing things and and of course retrieve them then she loved racing so we created a grand prix we even have a drive in there and a bowling alley that works okay so we go bowling yeah and that was for barbara it's called pricks is extreme well we bring it online we took these some of these offline so we'd have stability today uh new harmony was our first site and that's modeled after new harmony indiana a place where two utopian societies in real life um worked and they created over 300 inventions and a forerunner for the arts and industries building at the smithsonian that architecture and a bunch of other stuff and then here's where we are at sacred jima uh slippery rocks falls is a series of games that we have and some of them are quite elaborate and some of them are team building and of course character strengths for lisanna and her research uh she worked with the researchers who were responsible for the theory behind it and studied with them meanwhile we have pompe where you can do chariot races and we do we hop into chariots and go around circus maximus you bet and of course you'll notice the volcano in the background and then the planetarium is now a copy of it sitting on oscc and that was devoted to barbara truman right and then jack's world is a dinosaur world that andy built in two weeks with his nephew eight-year-old jack who came to stay with him that summer and in two weeks they built all these dinosaur mesh models and uh automated them and created this great experience and a learning museum attached to it and the departure for it is from from space so when you're in the catacombs below mars and you're looking for the star gate we it's all realistic until you get to the star gate okay okay and then that takes you over um uh the catacombs take you over to jack's world then interstellar is where it takes you if you go through the star gate um it loads interstellar which is based on the movie and a fanciful place that we were thinking about the deep thoughts we meanwhile we created a game that's grid it crosses all the grids and you're looking for dragon eggs and it begins here in the highlands and so there's a bunch of puzzles and stuff and then last but not least this is where we celebrated graduation for students during covid who couldn't get out and of course we had scuba diving and dancing and you name it and of course our cruise ship is on the tranquility sea and we have others too but these are the ones yeah that we have available yeah so that's our work at virtual harmony and i want to thank everyone for coming out today and for joining us at the conference any last thoughts there joys see you're muted by the way sure um you might you uh i mean thank you leah for doing this and uh i might say that you might remind folks too of the the planetarium region that is uh in the grid and the osc grid right um i thought i said that she did cover oh did she oh then i'm sorry that's okay but yes but great minds think alike right but that's definitely a place obviously like besides this hyper grid um absolutely or that folks can continue to keep visiting that throughout the year check out the new updates to the planetarium that's right and the planetarium is cool there's a lot of hidden things there's a lot of games and stuff and if something's not working let us know right now it's an experiment because you have to realize we have y engine scripts on it so if something's not working we are going to be upgrading the oscc for 2024 i think and when we do we now have a test bed for for testing any changes to scripts and how we can get everything flowing smoothly we did all that i say we andy did all that in like uh less than a week which is really speed demon yeah considering he works full time and he writes he writes a blog each week on ai and strategy and he's read a thousand books to prepare that blog you know so um he's busy busy wow but anyway thank you yeah thank you lear this is this is great and i think uh i think with that i'll end our recording and so uh we'll uh we'll work on on getting that published so thank you everybody and then we can stay here and chat anyone who has uh further questions but we can consider this the end of our of our program bye everyone yeah


Good evening. I teach at the Roberto Clemente Middle School in Germantown, Maryland. And I brought some, alright, Maryland. I brought some awesome 13 and 14-year-olds with me tonight. And I brought with me a class that I teach called Rock Band.  Equitable, enriching and engaging. Equitable, music education for schools in this country that have music education programs. If kids want to play instruments at school for free, they can. Clarinets are available, trumpets are available, trombones are available. But not every kid wants to play that instrument. Some kids want to play electric guitars or drums or keys. And they want to learn to rock out. But the problem is, you can only do that if you have the money to afford private lessons or go to a rock camp. It's what we call the pay-to-play program. And that is inequitable. So, we believe that rock band and every type of music should be offered for free in public schools. Not only that, it should be enriching. They don't just go and get the jam out in the corner and do whatever they feel like doing. We study the history of popular music. We start right in the 1950s, and we study the music in the context of the culture. Chuck Berry in the context of segregation. Moving on right into the 1960s, the civil rights movement, protest music, Bob Dylan, Black Empowerment, Motown into the 70s, into the 80s and into the 90s. And with each of these decades, the kids are getting an enriched education in getting to study the music and the history and the culture of our times. But the last thing, and this is the part I did not anticipate, engaging. I knew the music was great. We all grew up listening to it. We still love it. What I didn't anticipate was that when these kids got up on stage to perform, we weren't just cheering them on for doing a great job. We were involved in the process because this music is music that we grew up listening to. It's our music. If this music, if we wait to teach it another 50 years, no offense, but we're all going to be gone, and who, you know, it's just going to be history. By teaching it now, it is engaging. Our grandparents, our parents, our kids all enjoying this music together. So enriching, engaging, inequitable rock band brought to a school near you. So ladies and gentlemen, may I present to you a group I'm very proud of, the Roberto Clemente Middle School Rock Band. Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to get through this thing called life. Electric word life, it means forever and that's a mighty long time. But I'm here to tell you, there's something else. The after world. A world of never ending happiness. You can always see the sun day or night. So when you call it that shrink and Beverly Hills, you know the one. Doctor, everything's going to be all right. Instead of asking them how much of your time is.