AvaCon Inc.^✦✔ @avaconinc

While virtual worlds might be emerging pedagogy for many, as veterans we have an dystopic opportunity to show other educators how deeper learning can take place in immersive environments. Come join us for a discussion on how to showcase your worlds and once again open the portal to the creative, educational, technical, and experiential metaverse.

Chris Luchs / Abacus Capalini, Kae Novak / Kavon Zenoka

This panel will discuss the spontaneous social architecture and journey of the Virtual Harmony community. The Virtual Harmony community offers 12 Open Simulator grids supporting its work with small communities, immersive 3D courses, and learning simulations. Speakers will share their journey in the virtual community. Highlights will include an overview of Virtual Harmony’s Gemeinschaft framework for resiliency in times of dissociation.

Five areas of the Gemeinschaft framework to be discussed by the panel are: kinship and fellowship, psychological and spiritual nourishment, creative ideation of art-of-the-possible, collaborative design and creation of virtual habitats for Gemeinschaft, and harmonious healing and resiliency from co-living in Gemeinschaft. The concept of social dissociation will be briefly described along with healing recommendations.

Andrew Stricker / Spinoza Quinnell, Barbar Truman / Delightful Doowangle, Cynthia Colongne / Lyr Lobo,
Elizabeth Stricker / Algernon Loire, Francisca Yonekura/ Frankie Antonelli, JJ Jacobson / JJ Drinkwater, Kathy Flitter / Lyn Skylark

We’ve been escaping into virtual worlds for decades. With the resurgence of VR, now is the time to go to the next level. Let’s take a look at what is needed out of the software that will ultimately empower us to live our lives virtually.

Kalila Lakeworth

Andrew Stricker / Spinoza Quinell

Panel discussion moderated by Mal Burns

Adam Frisby, Caitlyn Meeks, Kalila Lakeworth, Lacie, Mal Burns

Too Laggy? Then check out this presentation by Bluezy Bleac on understanding “lag” and how to deal with it. He will be explaining the things that cause lag, the reasons behind each, and possible solutions for each of them.

Bleuzy Bleac

A presentation about A Dimension Beyond Inc. and how they have taken a different path on hosting OpenSim, Halcyon, and cybaLOUNGE grids. We will get into the in’s and outs of hosting DreamGrid OpenSim Grids.

We will talk about selling hosting in different ways and the in’s and outs of the different ways. A Dimension Beyond decided to do hosting differently and we will explain how it works. We will also share experiences in hosting Halcyon and cybaLOUNGE.

Myron Curtis / Darkeagle Darkstone
& Steve Lavigne

My owl says, “This presentation must be a keynote.” That is not true, it has to be THE KEYNOTE. In case you arrive on time to listen to the keynote from the beginning then you will know for sure what to answer when you are asked next time, “What do you do for a living?” Then you can answer, “I MAKE AMERIKA ART AGAIN.” And when the person shakes their head or even worse gives you a sign of stupidity, it will be time to tell the naked truth, “I USE OPENSIMULATOR.”

This presentation is based on social science. This presentation uses an AI. This presentation is Art. This presentation is disruptive. The “K” in Amerika stands for a reason, a reason that will be uncovered. In fact, this presentation is all about you. You, being a person who may have heard over the years, “Oh … Really? You still work with Opensimulator, isn’t that like old SL?” In fact, the person might be thinking: “How boring.”

Kisma Reidling / Juliette SurrealDreaming & Reiner Schneeberger / Art Blue

Storytelling is a wonderful means of getting our language learners excited. Recreating such a story in a virtual world would provide a great setting for roleplay and fanfiction. Yet, how difficult is it to recreate scenes of Alice in Wonderland, Harry Potter or King Arthur and his Round Table in OpenSim? What about character creation? Changing avatar outfit, clothes and accessories?

When creating the scene, what building skills are required and when it comes to storytelling, what skills are required to come up with a captivating story? These main three challenges will be addressed in an EVO session and we hope to recreate collaboratively a story in OpenSim. Organised by TESOL America every year in January / February thousands of language educators mingle online to learn from each other in a free-of charge 5-week workshops. This year we invite participants to join us in creating story – and perhaps it is the story of EXCALIBUR…..

Heike Philp

Moderated by Maria Korolov

Planned Panelists:

Lisa Laxton

Mike Lorrey

Open Simulator is an open source project written and maintained by volunteers. But the people writing the code cannot test every facet of this huge project. They depend on “reporters” to try everything out, verify when things are fixed and report new issues. Any of us can be reporters but to be effective there are procedures you should go through. Don’t just whine “X doesn’t work! Fix it!” You should go through several steps to submit a good bug report. It is not easy! I’ll go through the steps with some war stores of experiences I have had reporting for OpenSim. I hope to encourage more people to help improve OpenSim by reporting bugs and I hope to show you how to improve the quality of your bug reports.

Kayaker Magic

Decentraland is a decentralized virtual reality platform powered by the Ethereum blockchain. Within the Decentraland platform, users can create, experience, and monetize their content and applications, accessed by common web browsers.

Michael Lorrey / Mike Lorrey

With the sudden need for more virtual environments, everyone is scrambling to investigate alternatives. Open-source virtual worlds provide great opportunities but are best discovered through professional networking. The Community Virtual Library shares a plan for networking across the metaverse.

Becky Adams / Elli Pinion, Valerie Hill / Valibrarian Gregg

Panel Discussion – moderated by Mal Burns

Our group has been developing applications for the Opensim virtual world platform for a number of years. We describe our goals, the design approaches that emerged, and our development processes. We share the best of our lessons learned. These stories from the trenches will be useful to individuals who (1) are interested in the behind the scenes aspects of our effort, (2) are looking into starting their own adventure in developing serious virtual world applications or (3) are interested in how we are facilitating virtual learning environments.

Ann Nowak, John Mela, Kevin Cozens / Andrew Hellershanks, Ludovic Lotoah, Ramesh Ramloll, Sue Caxton

The presentation looks at the history of swimming places in and along the River Mersey in the north-west of England. It shows how they developed from humble horse-drawn bathing machines via an innovative floating pool moored mid-river to what was the largest aquatic stadium in the world in its time. Swimming pools frequently occupy a cherished place in personal and shared memories and this suggests possible applications for virtual recreations.

Graham Mills

Isabel Valverde

“Hybrid Tech” means combining tools in optimal ways by playing to their strengths and mediating to their weaknesses, relative to the use at hand. In this session hybrid tech will be demonstrated via presenter narrative and audience participation using laptop and mobile devices to access Augmented Reality, Web 2.0, and Web3D applications and environments, all from within the OpenSimulator environment.

James Neville / Sitearm Madonna

We are going to Amerika. This was the call many of our ancestors followed and it is again to become the call. Let us give this call a voice. [You will hear, “We all living in Amerika. Amerika ist wunderbar.” ….] You heard Rammstein is singing: Amerika ist wunderbar. America is wonderful. We have this kind of a wonderful America for you. It is called AMERIKA.ART — Amerika Art is the new format for an immersive art show. It happens in virtual and in the real place, the village Amerika, Germany. Let us look at this place in the way Google calls Actual Reality. Then the concept of the immersive Art challenge will be outlined. It leads to a new term for the arts: Actual Virtual Reality and to a come together at the AVRDays 2022. The call for AMERIKA.ART starts in January 2021 and the presentation, the Grand Opening, will happen in May and June 2022.

Kisma Reidling / Juliette SurrealDreaming
Reiner Schneeberger / Art Blue

Wolfie, singer, performer, brings to her stage an endless repertoire of songs. This nightingale songstress will charm the hearts of all, with not only her many years of performance experience, her awards, but a sweet unique voice of excellent sound and tone.

For one hour Kathryn will be spinning 80 hits at the OSCC Music Stage

Cherylann Hawk will be playing for an hour. Cherylann's songs of love & introspection are a heavenly blend of alternative pop, folk, country, jazz, reggae, indigenous rhythms, and children's music.

LISA LAXTON & FRANK RULOF
This presentation from Infinite Metaverse Alliance® (IMA) and Thales Group discusses development of a new open source viewer for the OpenSimulator community focused on improvements in usability, accessibility, and interoperability. Development is driven by inclusive “design thinking” while adding capabilities for the future to address gaps in development aimed at the needs of new users and those with different abilities that may be digitally marginalized.

RACHEL UMOREN - Each year, there are 2.5 million newborn deaths, most of which are preventable. One of the top causes of neonatal mortality is when a baby does not breathe at birth. Newborn resuscitation training reduces newborn deaths, but knowledge and skills from in-person training rapidly decay, sometimes in a matter of weeks after training.

VALERIE HILL / VALIBRARIAN GREGG & ALYSE DUNAVANT-JONES - This presentation will share an overview of open sim projects developed by the Community Virtual Library. The CVL Hypergrid Resource Library, located in Avacon and Kitely, as well as several other projects will be highlighted.

Shocking Title for an OpenSim Conference I know, but let me tell you about my OpenSim Journey. This presentation will showcase the work I’ve done and then try to get answers for the depressing decline in schools and teachers interested in OpenSim collaboration and creation. Let’s talk about OpenSim and please change my mind.

KAE NOVAK & CHRIS LUCHS - Join us for an exploration of the liminal state or in-between state that exists between the metagame and players in games and virtual environments. This liminal state has now extended to transmedia experiences to include the LitRPG genre. This panel will discuss the exploration of the liminal state where a player (learner) can take advantage of the duality that facilitates deep learning and creativity.

ANABEL ORIGIN - Language Teacher & Lecturer
Our objective is to illustrate an example use case for the RezMela system.
We will focus on a few built creative scenes that can be shared by students in order to achieve specific gaming and learning goals.

The RezMela platform is primarily designed to address common usability issues that end users face when creating and using virtual worlds. We describe its core components: 1. Modules, 2. Apps, 3. App Sets, 4. Map Sets and 5. a Context sensitive Heads Up Display. We illustrate how these components work synergistically to make virtual environments easier to produce and access.

Join Mal Burns and guests Ilan Tochner, Kalila Lakeworth, and Caitlyn Meeks as they discuss open source worlds and their latest offerings in Kitely Organizations and Tivoli Cloud VR.

KAY MCLENNAN - Professor of Practice, Tulane University
While the use cases for OpenSimulator learning simulations continue to expand, many of the early types of virtual world educational simulations/activities remain relevant today. Attendees will learn about new uses for OpenSimulator learning simulations (including examples of VR-ready simulations) as well as review examples of proven in-world and out-of-world educational simulations.

LISA LAXTON & FRANK RULOF
Presentation Abstract: This presentation from Infinite Metaverse Alliance® (IMA) and Thales Group discusses progress towards improving open source code used in a self-hosted secure voice solution called EchoVoice. This is an alternative to ViVox which is commonly used for voice communication between avatars in OpenSimulator regions.

ROBERT ADAMS / MISTERBLUE WAVES
There are configuration and setup complexities when adapting OpenSimulator for deployment using Docker. This presentation will detail running OpenSimulator using single containers and multiple containers (simulator and database) whether in standalone or grid mode.

The 2 year EU funded project GUINEVERE has come to a close and the final project results are being presented. There are quite a few give-aways for the participants in form of studies on the theory of game design/ gamification and best practice guidelines for teachers. The GUINEVERE server in OpenSim has been the sandbox for the teacher training and several games have been created which are stunning in variety and building and scripting skills.

The integration of a web based virtual world in a grid’s homepage can attract lots of new users by the ease of access and the ease of use. These users can then be guided to join your grid to experience OpenSim’s advanced features.

We have developed a VR tool for training the ability of public speaking. It shows an environment where the speaker confronts a virtual audience that reacts in real time to the speaker’s features, such as voice or gestures, and to his or her biometrics (heart rate or skin conductivity among others).

FEATURED ARTISTS: LIBERTYBELLE LYRIC, JAMES OLMOS, AND DJ SHELENN AYRES

6:15 - Singer Libertybelle Lyric
7:15 - Guitarist/Singer Acoustic James
8:15 - DJ Shelenn Ayre

7:15 - Guitarist/Singer Acoustic James
8:15 - DJ Shelenn Ayres

Creating an in-world event of any size is a challenging endeavor. For busy educators creating even a single activity can be just another hurdle that prevents the wider adoption of virtual worlds for teaching and learning. We need stop reinventing the wheel and start creating content in way that we can share with each other. This presentation will showcase a proof of concept immersive learning activity for any virtual world event that will engage your participants and get them excited about the possibilities