AvaCon Inc.^✦✔ @avaconinc

This presentation will highlight some basic best practices that have emerged over 15 years of bringing higher education students into VR environments. Then, areas where additional support and community could help stand-alone educators (with little institutional support) bring open-sim environments to expanded audiences will be raised, seeking to operationalize wiki-like areas of communication that could bridge educators and technologist through important shared concerns.

Topics integrate areas such as: professional and child-focused avatar creation, security, IT components, working with IT departments, institutional buy-in, instructional design support, and the like. The plea is to find collective and communal ways to share, develop and leverage a knowledge base that can facilitate conversations at the interstices of the expanding VR environments.

Eileen O'Connor / Eileen OConnor

Faced with evolving pandemic safety classroom protocols and procedures, and the ever present possibility (or probability) of a rapid switch to all online learning, educators across the academic spectrum are recognizing the need for flexible, adaptable online collaborative technologies that can alleviate the effects of Chronic Video Conferencing Fatigue (CVCF) and restimulate learner engagement.

For the past three years the SUNY Empire State College School of Graduate Studies has hosted half-day residency events in Opensim virtual reality as a means to introduce new students to the graduate programs to their peers, the faculty, and a broad range of interactive, immersive, collaborative technologies which they may consider for their individual degree programs.

The 2020 residency, held in October, hosted over three times the number of attendees than the previous year from a variety of different degree programs, a clear indication of the increased interdepartmental interest in exploring online interactive immersive technologies. Each successive annual event has incorporated participant feedback from the previous year into the programming development of the following event iteration This slideshow presentation outlines the iterative steps and methodologies involved in the creation of a large, successful, immersive, engaging and informative event in Opensim.

Scott Dolphin

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

Talking about Statistic usage of Open Simulator in the last year.

Mario Korolov

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

Welcome to the 8th annual OpenSimulator Community Conference. This year’s event features presenters across the globe who will be highlighting the user projects and core development work of the OpenSimulator platform. We will kick off #OSCC20 with an overview of the latest features in the OpenSimulator software update and conversation with Core Developers of the platform.

Find out where the platform is headed and learn more about the developers who make the software happen!

Crista Lopes, Cynthia Colongne /Lyr Lobo, Joyce Bettencourt / Rhiannon Chatnoir, Kevin Cozen / Andrew Hellershanks,
Melanie Milland, Robert Adams / Misterblue Waves, Ubit Umarov

Organized by Kay McLennan, Newbie educators as well as seasoned OpenSimulator educators are welcome — to swap experiences creating and using the OpenSimulator platform for learning simulations. Also, if relevant, seasoned OpenSimulator educators are encouraged to bring along any tutorial materials and/or teaching content you want to share with the group.

You’ll hear many genres of blues here including blues rock, electric, old school and contemporary
With Kith Whitehawk

Musical Performance of James Olmos, playing Acoustic Guitar and singing Original Songs.

Libertybelle's influences range from the all time greats in Rock to the best and brightest in country! She loves country and Rock as well as blues. So you will hear those influences when you listen to her perform.

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

After many years of using VR environments in graduate classes, and teaching others how to create these environments within graduate courses, I will be designing pre-developed VR environments for youth, in K-12 schools and in other youth-oriented organizations. I plan to work with the affordances such as though now coming available through Kitely’s Virtual Private Networks to create a youth-safe interface and a practical registration system, and, very importantly quasi-designed environments that simplifies d