SIGGRAPH '22 Recap

Announcer:

Today on Building the Open Metaverse.

Neil Trevett:

Digital twins was one of the use cases. Now what happens? What can you do if you connect the real and virtual worlds? All kinds of insights can happen, not just in real time, but if you have enough processing power to start simulating the real world as to what might happen, and if you can do that quickly enough, fast enough, you can begin to predict the future.

Announcer:

Welcome to Building the Open Metaverse, where technology experts discuss how the community is building the open Metaverse together, hosted by Patrick Cozzi from Cesium and Marc Petit from Epic Games.

Marc Petit:

Hello, everybody, and welcome to our show, Building the Open Metaverse, the podcast where technologists share their insight on how the community is building the open Metaverse together. Hello, I'm Marc Petit from Epic Games. Very excited to kick off Season Three with my cohost, Patrick Cozzi from Cesium. Patrick, how are you?

Patrick Cozzi:

Hey, Marc. I'm doing great and I'm really excited for Season Three.

Marc Petit:

Yeah, we have an amazing lineup of guests. Going to be exciting. We're going to mention some of that today. And to kick off Season Three, we decided to pick it up where we left it at the end of Season Two, which is with Neil Trevett, President of The Khronos Group and the VP Developer of Ecosystems at NVIDIA. Neil, welcome back to the show.

Neil Trevett:

Hey, Marc. Thanks for the invite back. I'm glad you can't get rid of me that easy.

Marc Petit:

No, we can't. And the reason why I wanted to have you back is because over the summer a few things happened. We left with the creation of the Metaverse Standards Forum and then we had SIGGRAPH in between, which I think was one important moment for the interoperative agenda. So that's what we thought we would do today to kick off Season Three is talk about the highlights of the SIGGRAPH Conference and as well talk about the Metaverse Standards Forum.

Marc Petit:

So why don't we start with SIGGRAPH? So Patrick and I hosted a full day course on the open Metaverse. Kudos to Patrick for organizing most of the course. Let's be honest, he did all the jobs. It took a lot of effort to work with the SIGGRAPH organization. It was a fantastic day. You remember, Patrick, we were worried we had such a big room?

Patrick Cozzi:

That we did.

Marc Petit:

And we were not sure we could attract people. But at the end of the day, we had more than 600 people in the room and it was packed and people did not leave. So there was a good feeling. We had a morning session with Neal Stephenson, the author of Snow Crash, Guido Quaroni (Adobe 3D &I) Steve May (Pixar Animation Studios), Rev Lebaredian from NVIDIA. In the afternoon, we had Morgan McGuire (Roblox), Jeff Peterson (Amazon Web Services), Natalya Tatarchuk (Unity), and you, Mr. Trevett. So the reason why we invited Neal Stephenson was because he's the guy who dreamt and named the Metaverse in his book Snow Crash, and he's now the founder and creator of LAMINA1 and new Layer-1 blockchain. So we felt he was a relevant person to have, of course. And the news is that we'll have Neal on the podcast very soon, right, Patrick?

Patrick Cozzi:

Yes, we're recording this week. It'll be out soon.

Marc Petit:

Actually, he said something during his presentation. He imagined all of that before Doom and 3D games were released. I thought it was an interesting data point about his ability to see in the future.

Neil Trevett:

He went right back into his history, right back to using rays from Pixar. It was pretty interesting. I loved his presentation because he didn't have slides. He was reading, but, of course, it's like having a world leading author making some of his books. It's like Cryptonomicon coming to life in front of you. And it was really awesome I thought. I like some of his phraseology. He was going through some of the problems with social media. He's saying social media's got people addicted to harvesting dopamine from the internet, which I thought was a very Neal Stephenson thing to say. But no, he also had a good perspective on how Web 3.0 is going to add value. I think he changed a lot of people's minds, or at least persuaded people to take another look at some of the Web 3.0 technology.

Marc Petit:

He had a very balanced point of view and I think he made the case, and I expect I'm going to talk with him directly about this one when we welcome him on the podcast, but he looks at Web 3.0 as an enablement, an enabler for artists, giving them true artistic freedom, independence from the suits and the people who pay them. And I think, given the amount of content in the Metaverse, it's a very good point. And I think he was a very interesting and eyeopening point of view. Got a lot of good feedback.

Neil Trevett:

Yeah, totally. If we can enable, genuinely enable more collaboration and cooperation, if adding real value, real economic value. He was quite persuasive.

Patrick Cozzi:

Yeah, I spoke to a lot of folks after the course who said that Neal's talk opened up their eyes to Web 3.0 to help incentivize artists.

Marc Petit:

Yeah, well, it'll be interesting to talk about the endeavor of starting a new layer, Layer-1 blockchain in 2023 and how you can do this factoring all the learnings that we had so far. So looking forward to that episode. Stay tuned for Neal Stephenson on the podcast. Our next presenter at SIGGRAPH was Guido Quaroni. He's the father of USD. He led the team who created it and is currently leading 3D engineering in Adobe. So I think it was a very interesting presentation as well rationalizing why we need a standard and a common language to power the Metaverse. And he took the perspective to talk about the open Metaverse and to make it in his words "inclusive, accessible, and producible." I think accessibility is interesting because we always think about high power, leading edge, and he made a very strong case that whatever we do our presentation is to support lower power devices because the vast majority of the planet may not afford the latest hardware. So it was an interesting point on accessibility and inclusivity.

Neil Trevett:

That was a recurring theme. And then, yeah, Guido was very eloquent about it as access, as you say, not everyone has high end hardware. But end user content creation is going to become more and more key, so how do you square that circle and the need for standards so the Metaverse is a consistent place people can relate to? And he used lots of AI generated art in his presentation, which he made himself, which was quite cool. It was quite beautiful.

Patrick Cozzi:

I mean, Guido's talk really set the stage for three big themes that we saw over the course of the day, just the need for open standards in the Metaverse, the delivery versus authoring use cases for 3D assets in the Metaverse, and then AI assisted content creation.

Neil Trevett:

Yeah, AI was a big thing all the way through a whole show. Not just the course, but everywhere.

Marc Petit:

There was a lot of optimism about AI as an assistance to artistry, not as an alternative to artistry, which I think is important to call out.

Neil Trevett:

And the downside too. Are you using other people's work? I mean, that was also being discussed a lot. We need to figure out both sides of that equation.

Marc Petit:

Absolutely. And then we had Steve May, who's the current steward of the USD Open Source Library as the CTO at Pixar. He gave us wonderful insight on the origin of USD and how much work went into making it what it is today and how it's currently being expanded to serve as the core component of building the Metaverse. Of course, he made the case that this is production proven. I think it started back in 2012, so it's been going through a lot of iteration. And Pixar is using it to render thousands of frames per day and insisted on the performance. It is a highly performant and proven technology. And, for him, the reason why he thinks that it could be a good foundation for the Metaverse, it's a proven language for large scale modeling and world building. And I think there was a big consensus around that at SIGGRAPH that USD's a strong base.

Neil Trevett:

Yeah, so much experience and knowledge has gone into building USD. I mean, it's just incredible the work and investment that Pixar have put into it. And, of course, they have the best demo reels too. Ready made.

Patrick Cozzi:

Look, I really like his commitment and interest in engaging the community. And I also just thought, if you step back and look at all the technology that's enabled in the Metaverse, I mean, it's coming from games, it's coming from movies, it's coming from geospatial. So to have Steve and Pixar in the course I thought was very representative of the work that's being done.

Neil Trevett:

And that's another thread. It came up all through the day, was USD is awesome technology. How is it going to find its way into other markets and use cases beyond movie making? It was a very interesting discussion.

Marc Petit:

And then we had Natalya Tatarchuk from Unity. We all know her from her work on the full day course at SIGGRAPH Advancing Real Time Rendering for Games. She's a huge contributor to the community.

Marc Petit:

And she presented her point of view, calling it the "creative verse." She was worried metaverse was too much tinted by VR. But she also made the case that USD could be a valid foundation for real time as well. I mean, Steve was really about movie making and large scale database pipeline. And Natalya took the argument further and say, "Hey, that could work for real time and run time." So, this notion of having a solution that span authoring and run time was interesting. And she gave us a very detailed explanation about scene layering, and compositing, and scene portability. Hopefully... Some of the slides are on the Cesium page of the SIGGRAPH course. Hopefully that her slides are going to be up there pretty soon, as well. But I felt it was really... This optics, or the end goal of scene portability, layering, and compositing, I think was interesting, and it came back throughout the day as well.

Neil Trevett:

Yeah, and I think she was also, as you say, eloquent on if USD is going to reach its full potential, there needs to be some standardization around it. As everyone knows at the moment, it's a great open source project. But if it's going to get out there and this is the recurring theme, how is it going to navigate standardization? It's not a trivial question, and there's so much technology in USD, and parts of it are very complex, and it may not be suitable for standardization, but I'm sure parts are. So, how do we find the right balance? How does USD navigate that? It's going to be probably a topic for the next couple SIGGRAPHs to come.

Patrick Cozzi:

And when we were looking for presenters for this course, we weren't like, "Oh, let's go find a lot of people to talk about USD." We were looking for who are the technical builders? Who are the visionaries? And we said, "What do you want to talk about with respect to the metaverse?" And it turned out that we had a lot of folks, including Natalya, who wanted to talk about the potential for USD. So, I thought that that was insightful. And then her phrase, the "creative verse," I think was another theme throughout the day in terms of empowering creators, having a low barrier to entry for creators.

Marc Petit:

What I liked about Natalya's presentation is she had a very pragmatic argument about what's needed. How can we get to standard for real time 3D. She called out versioning of schema, consistent rendering, having portable behaviors and all those things. So, it was interesting, the depth of the thinking is... And it was the other presenters. I mean, we can foresee a roadmap to get to the standardization, and we kind of know the things we get to knock off to get there. So, I thought it was very positive. And for me, it made me very, very optimistic about the road ahead to standardization. And then, we finished the morning with Rev Lebaredian, from NVIDIA. Your colleague Neil. And Rev is the guy who is taking everything that the other guy said, and he's doing it. Omniverse is actually has USD at its core. So, Rev made a lot of interesting representation about Omniverse. Neil, you want to talk to that?

Neil Trevett:

Yeah, I mean, this is a great example of USD already being deployed in realtime, and use cases and applications not just being used for offline movie rendering. And there's lots of cool technology in Omniverse. I mean, there were a couple of examples that Rev was using. Because he was focused on use case for Metaverse in industrial, rather than consumer and gaming. So, it was an interesting, different perspective. Digital twins was one of the use cases. What happens, what can you do if you connect the real and virtual world? And all kinds of insights can happen, not just in real time, but if you have enough processing power to start simulating the real world as to what might happen. And if you can do that quickly enough, fast enough, you can begin to predict the future. So, that was a very interesting framing of the power of high performance simulation, trying out different future scenarios. Very powerful, interesting idea.

Marc Petit:

He actually called it that. Superpowers, right? If I remember well.

Neil Trevett:

Superpowers. Right. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Patrick Cozzi:

And Rev's a very passionate and inspiring speaker, and I liked that he showed just the scale of the metaverse, which became a theme that we started to see later in the course. And then also looking at all these use cases outside of entertainment. And Marc and I are excited, because we're going to have Rev on the podcast this season as well.

Marc Petit:

Yeah. We're looking forward to talking to Rev. I think he made the case about realtime simulation, and when you can have a digital twin, and simulate the future, and having recorded the past. It's like you have to partition time travel, and then you can explore alternate futures. So, I think it's very powerful. I mean, he talked a lot about AI, and the role of AI, and calling omniverse a place where a robot can learn how to be robot. I think it's also a good summary of what Nvidia is trying to do with Omniverse, right there.

Neil Trevett:

Yeah. And I liked his other example of training a robot inside the virtual metaverse, and having it interact with the environment. And then just lifting that training out into a real robot, and it worked. That was another very cool example.

Marc Petit:

Yeah, we'll see a lot of that in our futures. And so, Rev wrapped up our morning session. At that time, Patrick and I were a bit relieved. Things were going well. I think the depth of the conversation, and the alignment... I mean, we did not line up everybody to say the same things, but at the end of the day there was a big consensus. And the afternoon that we had designed to be more about scale, and talk about the standards was actually pretty good, too. We started off with Morgan McGuire, the chief scientist from Roblox. And he talked about scalability, but it was interesting because he really talked about scalability at a very, very high level. So, not only did he call out the challenges of getting 10,000 people to interact together, but he also reinforced us to think about implication, having so many people together, in terms of behavior, ethics, and civility.

Marc Petit:

And really called out that those things needs to be built. Those rules need to be building system from the ground up. I mean, you just don't build the system and hope that the behaviors are going to be... People are going to be behave. So, we need to lay down the rules and build the rules. It's bit similar to what we heard from Tiffany Wang, about ethics and policy on the podcast. It's really important to take safety, civility, ethics, to build those, and think about them very early in the design of the experience that we build. So, you can do this afterwards. I want to thank Morgan for calling this out, because I think it's very important as we build those virtual spaces. That the civility, privacy, moderation, and safety are all important.

Neil Trevett:

Yeah, Morgan was an awesome speaker. Because he had obviously a real, genuine passion for this aspect, and he's right. It is important, because we've all learned from social media, this all could go horribly wrong for everyone in the metaverse, because there's so much more data being gathered. The potential for downside is pretty huge. So, if people begin to not to trust metaverse for various reasons, then everyone is going to lose in multiple ways. So, I think Morgan's absolutely right, we need to build this. And actually, he's reflecting something that's coming through in the Metaverse (Standards) Forum, too, is that that whole topic is bubbling right up to the top of the topic list. So, it's very interesting. It's good that people care.

Patrick Cozzi:

Yeah, I'm glad to see that trust is such a prominent topic. And just in general, it was such a treat and an honor to have Morgan in the course. I've been a big fan of his work, his teaching, his books, all the open source work that he's done. And I really liked his examples of what young and small teams are creating with Roblox, in just a few months, these incredible 3D experiences. And I think back to when I was doing game programming in high school with Turbo Pascal, and what people are building today at Roblox was just so far beyond my wildest dreams.

Marc Petit:

You're dating yourself, Patrick! (Laughs)

Patrick Cozzi:

Just mid nineties.

Marc Petit:

Let's not get there, Neil. We want to have a little bit of a...

Neil Trevett:

Actually, I did Pascal, too, believe it or not.

Marc Petit:

Me too, that's what I learned at engineering school. And the next presenter we had was Jeff Peterson. Interesting guy, because pioneer of online game at SOE, Sony Online Entertainment, then CTO of Second Life, and now working in AWS, as principal engineer in gaming. So, he has visibility from the early days of MMORPG, all the way to Second Life, to AWS today.

Marc Petit:

So it was fascinating presentation, which is on the website, took a lot of detailed example. A lesson learned from Second Life. The anecdote is... This got me interested in Second Life again hearing from Jeff. So we did invite Phil Rosedale, the founder of Second Life, he will be here this season on the podcast as well. We have a few questions for him and reflect back on what were the metaverse and his vision in 2003, 2004 and what he thinks now. So stay tuned to hear from Philip Rosedale on the podcast.

Marc Petit:

And then the thing is, that was interesting to me because I never thought about this. There are not a lot of open economies right now in the metaverse. But once you have an open economy, you have a whole lot of complexity that builds in they mentioned people having. So in Second Life and the same environment to create, there is no difference between runtime and authoring time. And you're in the world, you create and you trade. And so people can own million of obviously their inventories. So you need to cater to the storage of all those things.

Marc Petit:

It has a cost. You have to figure out when things are not used anymore, referenced by anybody. So you have a garbage collection problem in the Metaverse, right? Nearly a little bit of a surprising and how much compute it takes them to actually garbage collect their environment and making sure that they can dispose of the object that nobody uses anymore. So it was interesting. So a lot of it makes you think about a lot of very pragmatic things you have to think about to create successful open economies in Metaverse.

Neil Trevett:

Yeah, no real garbage collection in the virtual world. I'm looking forward to having virtual clutter to go with my real life clutter. But Second Life was so far ahead of its time in many ways. It's awesome you're having Philip Rosedale on the podcast. But Jeff was saying something else interesting too, and it comes back to this recurring thread we've highlighted several times now and the importance of end user created content. But his perspective was, if you don't have that and you're relying on in-house teams to try and create content in that kind of environment, you run out content in a couple of days. That's what he was saying. So it's not just a nice to have, it's a really vital part of that kind of online ecosystem. So it's interesting.

Marc Petit:

Yeah, that's true. Neither Roblox nor Linden Labs were creating content for their platform. It's all 100% done by the users. And then you had some interesting anecdotes about future proofing yourself and how some minor upgrades can have a lot of unintended consequences in the world. And once you commit yourself to a life platform, it will take a level of software architecture and very, very different to enable to upgrade without breaking anything. And something that you publish today has to live forever in theory in the Metaverse. So a lot of work for us to get there. And then we invited two people from the world of a standard defining organization from SDOs. So the first was Nadine Alameh, she's the CEO of the Open Geospatial Consortium, a former guest of the podcast. And Patrick, I mean this is your field, right? Geospatial, so do you want to summarize what Nadine told us?

Patrick Cozzi:

Yeah, it was super cool to have Nadine at the SIGGRAPH course. We've done so much work bringing computer graphics to geospatial and now we're able to bring some geospatial into the computer graphics community. And Nadine spoke about scale and geospatial. How do you represent the world at super high fidelity and incrementally stream parts of that? How's the geospatial community doing that with open interoperable standards? She also spoke a bit about AI assisted content creation. So if you look at the work of Black Shark as an example, where they take satellite imagery, find building footprints, and then do extrusions of 3D buildings and texture them in a geotypical way. And that work has been used in Microsoft Flight Simulator, which a lot of listeners may be familiar with. So it's just great to see the themes that are being applied within geospatial and how they're also applicable to the bigger metaverse. And then she also stressed the importance for this cross domain collaboration and cross SDO, standards defining organizations, collaborations, such as work between The Khronos Group and OGC.

Marc Petit:

Yeah, I like the Geospatial, the sentence to describe as "the science of where," because we're going to need that in the metaverse. I mean, we are going to have to figure out where things are. And so all the problematics from the geospatial world, I think we can learn from that. It's good to see that collaboration starting to happen thanks to Nadine.

Neil Trevett:

Yeah, she's really, again, another passionate person and passionate around open standards and collaboration. It's awesome to see.

Marc Petit:

And then we had you, Neil, to close the day. We ask you to... Of course you were there as the President of Khronos, but also as the chair of the Metaverse Standards Forum. So can you remind us what you said with that wonderful British accent of yours?

Neil Trevett:

I've forgotten. No, it was an honor to end up the day. So no, we were kind of following on from Nadine, the importance of open standards. They're going to be one of the tools that we have to get the need of technologies out there pervasively that we used to counterbalance some of the USD, we used glTF as a case study, some things we should do and some things we shouldn't do. Some lessons learned from building the glTF ecosystem. So hopefully that was useful for folks to understand how standards actually happen. And then we ended up with an update on the Metaverse Standards Forum, which is bringing together organizations like the Khronos and OGC and many, many others to cooperate on open standards for the Metaverse. So yeah, I thought it was a good session.

Marc Petit:

And then we have to give credit where credit is due. Khronos bought us a beer. There was a networking reception from Khronos. So thank you Neil, we had a good time. Saw a lot of friends. So Patrick, if we reflect on the day, I think this is kind of what we talked about earlier. I mean, I don't think we had predicted it would be like that full on consensus around USD could be the foundation for the creation of a standard for virtual worlds and digital twins and all of those things. So we saw it coming as we prepped the course, but I think throughout the day actually the presenters were worried about the amount of repetition, they had to synchronize among themselves because they intended to say pretty much similar things. So I think it's a very powerful consensus that's happening there.

Patrick Cozzi:

Yeah, it was interesting to see the number of folks who maybe were working independently, and as they started talking to each other were like, "Oh, hey, we have similar ideas."

Marc Petit:

Yeah, because for their day jobs, they're mostly competitors. And it was interesting then when we give them an opportunity to work together and to say, "Hey, why don't you give your point of view?" And they landed on very similar grounds. I mean, there was a lot of nuances. Everybody also has worries. But I think there was some sort of a direction that came out of it. And I think it's up to the Metaverse Standards Forums to pick up the ball and turn that momentum into action and then actually get to propose something. So how are we going to do this, Neil?

Neil Trevett:

Yeah. Well, but you're right. It is a very interesting topic and that's actually where we ended up the very end of the day kind of saying there's this momentum behind USD. There's a strong glTF ecosystem. And it's an interesting observation that they're kind of working towards each other, as we've just been saying. USD looking for higher performance and real time deployment. And glTF has use cases right now today. So we are beginning to do scene composition and behaviors much simpler than USD. So not immediate overlap, but you can see the directions that there is a potential for overlap and confusion in the future. And that's the kind of things we want to avoid.

Neil Trevett:

And hopefully the Metaverse Standards Forum can help us know fragment the industry through better coordination and cooperation. So the update at SIGGRAPH, we're over 1500 companies now participating in the forum. A really wide diversity of different companies bringing lots of cool perspectives. And it's great to have this opportunity to have this attention being paid to open standards in the metaverse, but of course it's also a challenge to get real action and decisions. So what we're doing, we're slicing and dicing and we're in the midst sort of setting up the first wave of working groups to focus on specific areas. And any members can join the groups that are of interest to them. And the one that bubbled to the top, perhaps not surprisingly, was the whole topic...

Neil Trevett:

that we've just been talking about, 3D asset interoperability. So, in the next few weeks, we're going to have that working group set up and we'll start creating data, and trying out in real life what works, what doesn't work for authoring and deployment. A Deming quote, my favorite Deming quote, "In God we trust, but everyone else bring data." And as we try to navigate through what's going to deploy where, what's going to work where, I think if we can bring data to the table through that collaboration, that's going to be a real world tangible value to everyone as we figure out the optimum path forward here.

Marc Petit:

Yeah. So, the governance of the firm, we're going to create domain working groups, and then there will be proposals. And the outcome of those domain working groups is requirements for an SDO to create a standard. I mean, it's reminded, standard forum itself is not a standard defining organization. It's just a place to have the conversation, coordinate between SDOs and industry, and produce requirements.

Neil Trevett:

That's right. So, we've already had the membership. They've contributed 200 different topics and we've bundled those up into domains. And that actually worked out pretty well, as a process. And yes, we'll have the first five or six domain working groups, hopefully in the next few weeks. But yes, it's a good point. The forum is not the place where these standards will be created. We want to accelerate and assist glTF at Khronos, or the work that OGC is doing, USD, and all the great ecosystem work happening there. We want to accelerate and provide useful data to all of those folks.

Marc Petit:

Yeah, actually I got two questions at SIGGRAPH regularly. People said, "How you going to make something concrete with 1500 people at the table?" And I think we covered this. So, the domain working groups. And the other question was, "Why the hell are you trying to standardize something that does not exist?" Like the metaverse. And again, the answer to this question is about setting a shared foundation, so that we can build up from a shared foundation. And, for me, what we heard through the course is USD is proving that there is a senior representation that can work for authoring and for real time.

Marc Petit:

And it would be fantastic that in the early days of the metaverse, we align on that foundation, and not start off with two, or multiple, and having to realign them down the line. So, I think the challenge will be to restrain ourselves and not try to standardize things that are not mature. And isolate the parts that drive the consensus, and are proven to be... The concept is working, and seeing composability, portability, I think as proven by USD, is one of those things. So, I'm pretty hopeful about this.

Neil Trevett:

Yeah. Our statement we've used a number of times, so apologize to people that have heard it already. "We're not trying to build the metaverse cathedral, we're baking the metaverse bricks." Because there's key interoperability problems that are clear and present today. And if we can be helpful in helping the industry work through those, and not go through a long period of fragmentation and confusion, I think we can contribute to that discussion in a positive way. Then we can make real forward progress and have real benefits for people today. Even though we are not quite sure what the Darwinian process is going to be and what the metaverse is going to end up being, there's useful work that we can do right now.

Patrick Cozzi:

So, Neil, do you think there's any lessons learned from the internet? If you look at the internet engineering task force, I guess there was maybe government regulation that was maybe pushing interoperability and open standards. But we don't have that for the metaverse, or not today, but we do have the hindsight of the internet and interoperability, and the economic value that it created.

Neil Trevett:

Yeah. If you look back at the internet history, it is interesting that there was government... Not guidance. Or government impetus, I guess, is the right word, to create something that was open and available to all. And we don't quite have that in the same way, this time around, the wheel of reincarnation. So, as we're creating the metaverse version of the web, I think because we don't have that impetus coming externally, it's up to the industry to really make sure we have, as far as we can, a vision and a shared cooperation, and coordination to make sure we don't make missteps. And perhaps we can avoid some of those snakes with web 2.0 with web 3.0. So, I hope so.

Marc Petit:

Yeah. Well, I mean, we're about to see. I mean, Patrick is leading the charge. A group of great companies, and to create the initial proposal for the 3D asset interoperability working group. So, it's about to get real, and hopefully we'll show some good results. I don't know what the timeline is, but I think we're certainly making sure we're going to have the right people around the table, and create a very inclusive, wide-ranging, yet very competent set of people to talk about this.

Neil Trevett:

Yeah. No, it's pretty cool. As you say, we have the right people around the table, and I think we can be focused. And frankly, this is going to be the make or break of the forum, as a concept. If you can get these working groups to deliver value, and real data that's useful to the industry, it'll have proven its worth. If not, then it will be less valuable as a forum to the industry. So, this is a critical phase, and I think 3D asset interoperability is a great place to start.

Marc Petit:

And so, reminder if people want to contribute, only organizations can be a member of the forum, no individuals. And then, it's pretty much like a Spanish hostel. There is a website, and all the information is there, but you need to go get it. And then if you want to contribute to a domain working group or to conversation, there are forums. And people are welcome to contribute, but it's really on a voluntary basis. We're not going to go get you. But if you go to the forum, you'll find all the information, all the tools, and all the opportunity to contribute and make a difference. We want it to be open.

Marc Petit:

Alright, well, gentlemen, we are officially kicked off with season three. I think it's an interesting time. The past year, many of us were, or many were drunk on the metaverse Koolaid. I think it feels different in September, 2022. People are building it. People have sobered up a little bit. People are more focused on the problems they want to solve. And I think this is a very good moment to make a difference. So, I look forward to season three, we have some amazing guests lined up. We talked about some of them today. We have many more in the coming weeks. And for the Metaverse Standards Forum, we are hard at work.

Marc Petit:

So, Patrick. Any word of wisdom?

Patrick Cozzi:

Marc, that was all very well said. I do just want to add some shoutouts and thank yous for all the folks who helped put together the open metaverse course at SIGGRAPH. Including the folks at Epic, at Cesium, SIGGRAPH themselves were really fantastic, and all the folks from Khronos, as well. So, it's a huge effort to put that together. And then Marc, I think you're exactly right, that there was a lot of hype. And now here we are in September, 2022, and it's getting real, and we're building, and it's going to be a very exciting and insightful time.

Marc Petit:

Well, thank you, Patrick. Neil?

Neil Trevett:

Well, I can't wait for the episodes. I'm going to be an avid listener to all the episodes as they appear. But my takeaway thought from SIGGRAPH, it was so awesome to see people in real life. And it was the first time I've met you, Marc, in real life, so that was really cool. And I discovered, to my surprise, it was the first time that you two have met in real life, as well, so that was even more awesome.

Marc Petit:

Patrick and I were so busy even the first day of SIGGRAPH, we met the morning of the course. We met in front of the... Oh, are you Patrick Cozzi? And so... Yeah, yeah, forgot about this. We spent so much time together, Patrick and I, virtually that... I actually had completely forgotten that I had never met him. Yeah, we had a good time. It was good to see you, Patrick.

Patrick Cozzi:

Yeah, it was really cool to see you, Marc. Hopefully we'll see each other at another conference soon.

Marc Petit:

Yeah, definitely. Alright. I want to thank our audience, as usual. Hit us on social. Let us know what you think. Give us ideas and theme. Give us feedback, even the things we don't like to hear. Let us know how we can make this podcast better. And once again, Neil, thank you for being back with us. And Patrick, looking forward to season three.