Austin's Eye

Opensim can be  a tough place to get your arms around. It's like Second Life, but it also has distinctive features in terms of the technology and the culture. It's a dislocated, often quite mysterious place, in the sense that people often give a lot of weight to their subjective experience when talking about 'how opensim works'. 

That's a fun way to live the adventure, but solid information about resources, innovations, and changes to Opensim, (and where the two are related, in SL) is a must for anyone who's serious about understanding the platform. An outstanding source of knowledge is Austin Tate's blog. 

Ai Austin on RuthandRoth region OSGrid

Austin Tate, known inworld as Ai Austin (pronounced 'eye' not A.I.)  is an Emeritus Professor of knowledge-based Systems at the University of Edinburgh in the UK. 

His career in Information Technology started in the 70's, but his interest in computers goes back even further. We chatted during a tour of three sims on OSGrid, and you will find the HG Addresses at the end of the post, as usual.

It takes an eye for detail, and a talent for sharing complex knowledge in a way that works for both experts and casual readers, and Ai has achieved this with his blog, making it the go-to read for anyone trying to parse what's currently happening in Opensim.

One of the community projects he has consistently championed is the idea of an original open source mesh body for Opensim, called 'Ruth' and 'Roth'. That's the theme of the sim where we met up.

RuthandRoth sim has resources, information and teleports 

Ai Austin: This is the Ruth2 and Roth2 home region as you might know. Its where the open source Ruth2/Roth2 mesh assets and avatars are made available. The NPCs here are examples.

Thirza Ember:  Can you tell me a bit about how you got into computers to begin with?

Ai Austin: My first interest in computers was when I was about 14 or 15 at secondary school. That would be 1965 or so. I did a talk at my school on them, showing things like ferrite core memory, which I found fascinating. A year or so later I travelled up to Leeds College which was an hour on the bus from where I lived - kids could do more things on their own in those days - to do a night class in programming. COBOL was taught there, so that was probably my first programming. I wanted to go to University to do software related work.  I was much more interested in USING computers rather than designing and building them. That's is a theme that continued throughout my career and interests. I ended up going to Lancaster University in the UK. My studies covered Software, Programming, data structures and (luck for me for later) a very early course in AI in the UK.  That would be 1969-1970

Training for Success seminar back in 2010

Jumping ahead a bit, I was curious how he, and the University of Edinburgh, got involved in virtual worlds.

 Ai Austin: We had our first Vue region in Second Life May 2007 and had about 10 regions a year or two later. So a mini-continent. We maintained paid for regions on Second Life through to March 2019. The first OpenSim regions were started in July 2007 so following on quickly. Here's a timeline of that.

Thirza Ember: So you had both options from the start, why was that?

 Ai Austin: we did not assume SL would last for a long time (glad it has though) so we immediately made sure we had a route onto later platforms. OpenSim gave us in the University a way to be sure we could continue whatever happened to Linden lab and Second Life.

The Safari has been visiting Ai for years - for example, we went to the oil rig build on OpenVue in November 2014 and then  in 2022 we visited his personal sim Space City, where he gave us a talk about a possible innovation for a transferrable 'suitcase' of assets that you would be able to take with you to any platform. 

Really, he was trying to get us to think about the concept of metaversal interoperability, but, canny educator as he is, he posited the idea in something many people like the sound of, the chance to port your distinctive look to any game.

View of the VUE sims from Black Rock region

Black Rock region houses the Supercar garage (more about that later) and from there, you can see the famously detailed oil rig build, designed to give you a 'first hand' experience of the noise, danger, and excitement of a working rig. To the right in this photo is the Edinburgh sim, and to the left you can just see OpenVUE region - here's a map of that.

Thirza Ember: Can you tell us a little bit about which University Departments used the Virtual worlds?

Ai Austin:  There were perhaps a dozen units and departments and many groups inside those that were actively involved in using Second Life and virtual worlds. Central units like the Library, Alumni, Disability Office and Corporate Services were involved as well as academic departments. Online graduations took place as mixed reality events linked to the main physical graduation hall.

MOOC Meeting in SL, in 2015

Eventually, the SL component of the project was discontinued. But it was far from a traumatic experience. 
Ai Austin:  Though the costs of the Second Life regions always was a funding issue and we had to work hard to maintain interest in putting so much money into the facilities. We were already using multiple virtual worlds  like There and Forterra OLIVE (for professional simulation tasks). Naturally, we assumed there would be development and potentially some platforms would become unavailable or move in inappropriate directions for a University. We made sure assets could be re-used in multiple contexts. We looked at self hosted Second Life using what was called "Second Life Enterprise" at the time, but that concept was not continued by Linden Lab. In July 2007 we starting experimenting with OpenSim as self-hosted capability as that was attractive in a University context and we had the "Openvue" as a shared facility from 2008. I would say though that Second Life was easier for staff and students than trying to set up on and use OpenSim.

Robert the Robot and friends

One of the luxuries of opensim is that it's pretty easy to have a sim for yourself, and build on it for fun. Builds tend to persist for many years, so there's real depth to the history of what has been created here, or brought here from other platforms. 

Here are two of his many robots on sim Space City. You may have guessed that the greatest inspiration when it comes to sci-fi for Ai Austin is Gerry Anderson, the creator of Thunderbirds, Space 1999 and many other cult classics. That means, a visit to these regions isn't just about education and opensim development, it's an opportunity to widen your cultural horizons if you're not familiar with supermarionation, or revisit some cherished memories. Either way, what a trip!

Ai Austin: One of my interests in in early Gerry Anderson TV. Supercar, Fireball XL5 and Stingray. I have spent a lot of my life on Search and Rescue applications. I told Gerry that myself once when I met him and he was delighted.

Supercar, on Black Rock sim

Thirza Ember: You're well known for your work in blogging about virtual worlds, providing news and views about the platforms, how did that get started?

Ai Austin: I got interested in that form of shared communication back in 2009/2010. I was doing an MSc in e-Learning taught via distance education methods with our School of Education. I did that to understand the methods and tools better as I became responsible for the early development of the School of Informatics distance education and later MOOC programmes. The MSc showed a range of platforms and tools and amongst them we used a range of blogging and micro-blogging platforms. So when our School and the University provided the WordPress blog platform for staff and students I took to that right away. 

Thirza Ember:  So, no info-hoarding for you!

Ai Austin: I have always considered open sharing of educational resources important. Our AI planning systems were right from the start (back in the 1970s) licenced in a way that allowed for re-use and sharing. That's a way to build a community of interest, get feedback and extend capabilities in a way that can benefit all. 

Ai Austin and in the background his version of the Fireball XL5 rocket

Thirza Ember: And apart from your blog, what social media platform do you favor?

Ai Austin: I use twitter/X as one way to get pointers to relevant and interesting content. I often use a blog post I have read to go explore some tool or virtual world location. I make "Resources" posts in my blog to point at web sites, download links for tools and recall links to other relevant blog posts.

Thirza Ember:  So people can follow @batate on Twitter / X to get that information.

Ai Austin: Back in 2000-2002 I directed a large project involving 30 organisations spread over 4 countries (CoAX) and we shared knowledge and assets between those involved.  We created a simple tool to allow for push notification of relevant information to subscribers of certain parts of the content and status information was encoded in the notifications.  It was a sort of Twitter system (without the scaling that involved). We switched to using Twitter with structured syntax and URL content in tweets soon after it became available in 2006. I still use twitter/X that way with structured information in some entries.

HG Addresses

hop://hg.osgrid.org:80/RuthAndRoth/132/118/24

hop://hg.osgrid.org:80/Black%20Rock/125/121/22

hop://hg.osgrid.org:80/Space%20City/225/242/22