June 16th OMI Meeting

9:07AM opening

Nova, Humbletim, iFire, Evo, Robert, MBCool, Cause, Humbletim, Lachlan Ford, PreposterousFox, Shadow, Shaw, Spiral

Agenda:
Community Group Charter
Virtual Space Design
Community Ops Tools (Jin)
OpenCollective
Virtual World URIs spec
OMI Space discussion

Community Charter will be ratified next week June 23rd, please leave comments on term limits and other key issues via Github.

New Participants

Tom FFiske -0 immersive wire newsletter, UK, journalist for metaverse media
Dylan Fox -= XRAccess - XR Accessibility working groups (https://xraccess.org)
Lachlan Ford - interop focus

Jesse's proposal for a creative shared space for collabs

* Evo - we know platforms like Hubs; when thinking about collaborative spaces, what direction do you want to go in? e.g. lightweight webXR experience, vs. something fully media enabled
* iFire - want to start w/ base that all platforms can achieve, then move up from there... can be difficulties w/ e.g. YouTube API keys
* Evo - good RTMP multicasting is important for virtual events
* Robert - if we were e.g. to watch WebXR awards, could have views in multiple spots, stream between dif spaces, etc.
* Evo - multiple roles: design of objects, design of space, implementation
* Need top 3/top 5 platforms list
* Robert - if there are people interested in implementation projects, which platforms would they want to work on? Open to doing Hubs
* iFire - have a champion for Hubs; would like one for VRChat but not me
* (general agreement that VRChat is hard)
* Evo - VRchat important for avatar interoperability
* Robert - Rainwolf very interested in that space, strong connections in creator community
* Shaw - VRChat will have 30-40K concurrent users; much larger than other platforms for social
* Nova - Hubs, Jel, Frame, NIOS (sp?), VRChat
* iFire - having VRChat, Hubs, and ____
* Shaw - XR Engine team is committed, have resources to commit
* Evo - some worlds won't play well; others like Roblox will let us split something off and tinker
* iFire - candidate that requires...
* Shaw - Quest has good interoperability - if you can do it in one, should be able to port to the other
* PreposterousFox - would love to see alt text, meta information for screen readers propogate across spaces
* Nova - multiple levels of captioning
* Caption for whole object
* Caption for each component
* Fox - need to determine metadata for objects; is it UI? is it decorative?
* Nova - could limit rendering for blind folks
* Robert - GLTF working group has started attaching metadata to objects in scene
* Based on Adobe standard for adding metadata to media
* Could possibly be used for screen reader support
* iFire - does this require artists to place alt text for every object?
* Robert - pretty generic; originally done for attribution, but allows tagging sub-objects of GLTF with metadata
* Need to be more descriptive of what semantics are
* Fox - happy to serve as bridge to XR Association - representse Google, Microsoft, etc.; working on this problem
* Robert - Jin doing work in crypto space, wants to give presentation
* Need to find time
* Evo - Open Collective is toolkit of resources for open source groups
* Fiscal accountability & transparency
* Need to apply
* Would allow us to take grants, bigger projects w/o needing overhead
* iFire - Q: make profits?
* Evo - not necessarily - would lead to more outreach, events, etc.
* But could earn funds to circulate in community - grant program, etc.
* OpenAI has three separate orgs
* We could grow and branch off, but need a place to start
* This could give us standardized, accountable, transparent base
* Shaw - 501cd - people can donate, but not write off on taxes; figuring out what it takes to be full nonprofit
* Business benefit - want to get big boys to play, tax writeoff is strong incentive
* If we're giving code as public good, it makes sense to pool resources
* How to appeal to idealist and skeptic?
* DF - XR Access found institutional home in Cornell Tech - could try to find an institution that shares values and has nonprofit machinery
* Evo - Open Collective takes 10% which is a little high but still in line with the rest of the industry
* May want separate channel in Discord for organizational development questions
* Robert - journalist at NYT wants to write a piece on the metaverse
* Conversation is starting due to NFTs, Fortnite, Roblox, other digital worlds growing in popularity
* Want to make sure that group's opinions are accurately captured
* Metaverse as "interoperability between worlds" - bridging virtual worlds
* Less a single platform owned by a single corporation, but more seperate worlds communicating with one another
* Evo - can't have a metaverse without interoperability
* Nova - No one corporation can create the entirety of the metaverse; we're the ones trying to make the glue that can form the true metaverse
* Need to hard reset that term
* iFire - so many things we want to push as a message - which is most important?
* Evo - key term is **interoperability**
* Nova - have to redo the term metaverse - very structure of the word indicates that "this is everything there is"
* Spiral - consider metaverse as planets; trying to build rocket ship
* Shaw (discord) - The web is not HTTP. It's people working together as a community, the protocols are there to enable the idea. The metaverse is not 3D social worlds or blockchain or any of that. The metaverse is a network of organizations working together in a collaborative way, for the benefit of users.
Organization of organizations = the central theme
@Nova i hear ya but we might not win this fight
3D social worlds have been around for 20 years, with voice and video and everything in some form.
* Evo - virtual world URIs?
* Robert - thinking about metadata; need info about each virtual world to be able to link between them
* Current method of referencing virtual worlds are insufficient (e.g. VR Chat room)
* Need a 360 image of world you're about to teleport to/info on world
* Similar to metadata about web pages
* iFire - is there a badge we can put for accessibility in this proposal?
* PreposterousFox - a lot of information is going to be relevant to assistive techs
* Make an accessibility checker like the ones available for web? (e.g. AXE)
* Nova - make robot/neural networks
* iFire - could be self-signed; "I tried to make this accessible"
* Fox - way to automatically scan code/visual elements?
* Nova - lots of code is hidden - won't be able to just scan
* Will want to make minimum set of standards. Could have e.g. XR Access and OMI review and give stamp of approval
* Robert - definitely want to have the right conversations with GLTF, XR Access
* Robert - next meeting is same time next week; will be ratifying community charter, so submit edits before then
* Evo - think about how we can collaborate on dev days, events, etc.
* iFire - who's working on events?
* Evo - we all are; lmk if you have event ideas - collaboration days/dev days, etc.
* Let's discuss in Community Development channel
* Would be great to do something in SF bay area