The Making of Masterpiece VR with Jonathan Gagne | GduX.me 2020

[Music] my next presenter is with Jonathan gagney he is the CEO of masters piece VR who is also the sponsor for this year's Redux event he will be discussing with us the making a masterpiece VR using VR and machine learning to democratize 3d today less than 0.1% of people who have the technical ability to create 3d models the mission is to enable anyone to be able to take whatever they imagine in their heads and then easily create a digital copy of it in 2015 masterpiece VR the team over there started a company from nothing to make this a reality experts told them it was impossible thankfully they were wrong today we have a strong or they have a strong team of over 25 and greatly simplify creating 3d content they used virtual reality and machine learning to help people create content 10 times

faster and their software is over 200 times faster to learn than traditional tools what was the first in the world war world with real-time co-creation letting remote team workers work together they have over 30,000 people using their tools today and are determined to grow until they have democratized 3d content creation for everybody so Jonathan we see you and we're about to hear you man I'm gonna pipe you in let's do a little Mic Check real quick hey how you doing perfect too hot right I'm always holding my breath making sure right so whenever you're ready to go the the show floor is yours man perfect thank you everybody for being out here and you know thanks for giving the chance to chat about this so I'm here today to talk about you know both the story of the making of masterpiece VR as well as you know how all of you can use this technology to really simplify and

accelerate creating 3d content especially for those of you who don't have any previous experience creating 3d modeling you know here's now an opportunity where you can do so so a little bit about me I'm CEO as I mentioned a masterpiece VR leading a team over 25 I've got over 30 and users in virtual reality using this today and will growing exponentially before that I got a master's in systems engineering University medalist the top of the University and at the highest national research award Canada for the level of machine learning and the technology inside virtual reality brazed millions in venture capital and grants I've got you know over 5x business awards and dozens of tech Awards so now here's what we're about to talk about today you know first part one is the story this is about the lessons of passion and

perseverance and why failure is really absolutely necessary I know you know some of that's sort of hard to take sometimes but it really is very important and that first part comes across as like a story and then the second part is talking about how you can actually use it's very a shift of gears and being less about story more about as much information as we can give you in a short period of time now when I was asked to talk about this they it said that you know we'll just want to hear all the positive things we want to hear of the challenges and obstacles along the way but I don't think they may have known how deep this rabbit hole goes and the truth is is that I've never actually told this story before so you're all about to hear for the first time well actually anybody's about to hear for the first time but to understand it it starts a many years before ever even

creating this company you know at a young age I had to go through a lot of struggles and obstacles and this is what helped me grow and to be able to do what I could do today you know go back to grade 2 and I was misdiagnosed I had a appendix ruptured I was hospitalized for an entire month and I had to fight through that the doctor said I probably wasn't gonna survive and every day I had to fight to you know to make it through that well you know thankfully the doctors are wrong and here I'm here today but you know it continued on in this way shortly after you know my parents broke up and that could be hard for you know a child to be from a broken family but well made horrors that you know we didn't have any money like you know like charity presents money sort of you know

like so well that you know you get gifts from like charities for Christmas sort of thing and my mother's partner was you know after my father was a huge alcoholic so that was sort of every day was a challenge on that way we had a a rough neighborhood and you know he eventually drank himself to death so you know there's been times where you know it's not even sure you know if things are worth living but you know as you get through that it just gets you stronger and stronger and now you know that can make a little story on its own but fast forward a few years and you know I first kept the University this was the first out of any of my family trees to go to university and the truth is from the high school I went to less than 10% of people in the graduating class we're still continued on University even eager later so you know not so surprising I my

grades weren't that great pretty much was failing out and then you know it occurred to me then to start actually you know taking advice and followed my passions so I really got into you know machine learning and specifically how the humans do it and that sort of flipped everything around when I went from you know all F's to basically getting you know really good grades and you know but even with that flip you know I still didn't think I was you know good enough to get any technical scholarships or awards or anything like that but I was encouraged to apply anyways well I didn't get the I didn't think I was gonna get the lowest one and I didn't get that one I end up getting the highest national one in Canada where I'm from and you know next thing I know I'm getting a pluses and everything I graduated University medalist top of university and then had all the universities across Canada every channel

to me if I would come and work with that for grad work so then you know took an offer from University of Waterloo where I got the opportunity to focus on the junction of machine learning computer vision robotics and and the technology motion capture the technology inside of virtual reality so that was really exciting and did really well there was not made for international awards and essentially from from that point then you know I was considering a an outfit from I was a lab at MIT that wanted me to go there said I've been school long enough head back to Ottawa and where I'm from and there's no jobs so so basically you know I started over from scratch again where I had you know I basically

picked up a job as a web developer either specifically no jobs in my area of machine learning and all that stuff's about decade ago before it was popular and started from a junior engineer and then within you know two years I went from a junior engineer to a technical director leading large-scale government projects you know we've been doing the the Prime Minister's Office and a number of others you know at this point you know I decided it was going to do my own thing and this is where the start of masterpiece VR comes so I was at that was the start of masterpiece VR and you know took all the money I had and you know instead of buy a house and a car I used that two-seat start this company and you know I maybe had a little bit of tech but I knew nothing about business and as I know my role is see oh that was the most important part of what I had to do you know but knowing nothing about

business I I couldn't get any funding you're gonna get any grants I couldn't even get any customers because I was really that bad at it and so so I decided you know just just when I felt like I was low and I wasn't good enough to do it I actually got a Bell's palsy and had to have my entire face paralysed now it's hard enough as it is but trying to make relationships where you know this is where you make a smile the doctor said I wasn't going to recover from it and that instead to make a decision you know give up shop or you know just keep finding away so I decided on the ladder just to keep finding away and and that was great so I decided I read as many books in business as I could or right over a hundred I got all the mentors with the smartest people I could find to help me

understand this deeper and then I finally started to understand how everything works but then a downside came and I we were running out of money so with less than a week left of having money we got accepted to the top startup accelerator in the world for virtual reality focused we see in Silicon Valley that gave us the muff money and turned out there was you know a lot of people doing these crazy things you know the start everyone told me I was crazy doing this stuff doing this you know you're trying to democratize for you know hundreds of millions of people the creation of 3d content my quality of using virtual reality and machine learning you know that's just kind of crazy talk around from but now there's a lot of people doing it well so things were looking optimistic but right around that time the arc went through a

downturn and all the investors stopped funding virtual reality so that led to the next challenge you know trying to figure out how to to build something and add real value to the world when no one not even investors believe that it's going to be a thing anymore so we then ended up running out of money another three additional times now it's one thing if it's just to you but now imagine that you have two dozen people and you know yet they're about to be laid off you know and they have families you know that's a whole other level of stress so it continued to work like 80 100 hour weeks and focused all my energy and managed to pull it off you know time after time in these times and these crunches I managed to pull off you know of quarter million or half a million in extension funding each time and I'm sort of pleased to say that you know we're finally you know running well we've got

over 30,000 users on our platform we've got one of the leading VR 3d creation tools worldwide we've got partnerships with mainly the major tech companies and who are on exponential growth now and in one month we'll be able to do the entire production pipeline within virtual reality just you know greatly simplifying the creation of content so things are now looking at you know extremely exciting I I can actually start paying myself now and we're now on an exponential growth and we're not going to stop until now till we get to you know hundreds of millions of users and enable a billion people to do this so I didn't tell you all these things so that you know you feel pity for me I've told you them for you to understand it there you know the more struggle you can go through the more that you will build I mean to to do something great you need to accept the failure and take it as a

challenge and grow from it and that you know the more challenge you can't take the biggest challenge on unless you you know work your sort of your mental ability to overcome obstacles in persevere find your passion and peer severe so you know if you're not taking if you're not failing often enough then you know that failing often is not a sign about losing it's a sign that you're taking on big challenge if you're not failing like 90% of the time then you're probably not shooting high enough so I'd love to encourage any of you people out there who want to create a startup or create a studio of their own you know it can be the one of the most rewarding things that you can ever do and you know and I'd love it if you on your own time maybe you know either right now or later today just think about what are the obstacles holding you back and then don't let that and then smash through those doors so that's that the first part that's the

story that's the first time I've ever told that story behind masterpiece VR now the second part this is this is where you can learn about how to actually use what we've built and use what other people in our space will tell you about the whole ecosystem as well now create today creating 3d is a pain it takes a huge amount of work a huge amount of effort to learn the software but it doesn't need to be this way so let's talk about what's going on right now well right now you're creating 3d using a 2d interface a screen and a mouse and there's a mismatch between the interface and makes it slow it's expensive takes years to learn how to create this software sorry how to use this software to create things to give an analogy on why this was the wrong interface let's you know let's look at something similar if you can want to create 2d with a 1d right it's a sketch

is essentially to 1d knobs that you use to create a 2d picture now this person's create starting nights but I'll tell you you know that's easier easier looking at it than doing it this is extremely challenging to do but instead you just use a 2d interface to do 2d like a Wacom tablet then it becomes easy it becomes natural because there's a one-for-one match between the interface well virtual reality is the first truly native 3d interface and allows you to easily interact and create 3d now we've demonstrated well over 10 times improvement speed and over 200 times quicker where the average person takes only a few seconds to be able to start creating organic 3d modeling you know when you compare that to the traditional tools where that could take you hundreds of hours to learn how to do so what we've

created now is this amazing new platform the masterpiece to do that let's go from all the way from concept to animation I'll show you a quick video of this hopefully it streams okay we'll see so here what you're seeing is a scene that was created using our software now what you can do is you can put on the virtual reality headset and you can start to sculpt with your hands as you see kind of happening quickly here you can create all different kinds of structures as well that's just using your scene you can then break it in and skin it so you can prepare for animation then you can export it and here we have support of the substance painter to get some extra touch and then you can export it and use it in whatever animation that you're looking to do then I'll dive down

a little bit deeper into that in a bit so not only can you create things quick and easily one of the powers that it does is to give co-creation now our original product masterpiece VR allows you to do this but in just one month we're getting an advanced update to that in masterpiece - do you know that allows real-time co-creation enabling you and your team to work and to create content no matter where you're located in you know lockdown anywhere in the world you and your team could come together in virtual reality talk to each other interact and create together as a team so here I wanted to give a contrast in the speed comparison here was the speed a test done with to copy a robot and the one on the left here was done zbrush by Jeremy he's got you know ten

years experience doing 3d modeling and it took him ten hours to do that model to get it to explicit detail on the right using masterpiece vr ian was able to do a similar one in just 45 minutes and he has no 3d modeling experience granted he is also an artist but he has no previous 3d modeling experience so to put other away an untrained professional without 3d modeling experience was able to create comparable content to someone using ZBrush 14 times faster now that's that's incredible increases in speed now when I talk about democratizing 3d content we're talking about the ease of the use right so I'd like to make the analogy with you know making your own engine versus using unity and real you know you know guys are all gamers and you remember back in the day before unity and real people needed to make

their engines from scratch now sure some of a large companies still do it this way but for the most part people will use unreal and unity because it just makes it that much easier well we're looking to do the same thing with creating assets you know today it can be done with you know Maya or 3ds max or blender but you know tomorrow we're looking at democratizing this allowing anybody to use masterpiece studio to do this now sure the large companies might you know if you need something really polished you may still want to put it into the traditional software to to get exactly what you want but you can do everything much faster when you have a product that's that allows it to be democratized our software works with all existing 3d modeling software so if you want to create something click and edit it in a traditional app you know absolutely welcome to do so or pop it right into unity and unreal and start using it in your game it could be used

for creating illustrations it can be used for creating animations you know if you want a 3d print let's say you character in your your game that you'd like to 3d print they can send it right through a printer you can use it for making you know movies of your games and specifically you can make it for you know creating game assets as well now I will mention that if you need the high polish you will probably want to put it into another product a traditional 3d modeling tool in the end to get those extra sharpness but this enables well enable you know your concept artists people that that may not have those 3d modeling skills to quickly create the contact and even to block out your scene so what do you need to actually use this well you need a first universe reality headset it has to be a pc-based 6.1 so any other ones you see here and you have to have at least minimum the minimum VR

specs of a you know 10 60 or higher but you know I do recommend if you're going to be doing this seriously having a you know a 1070 or 1080 or higher will allow you to go more detail so you know there's a lot on this page but I'm just going to quickly summarize it you know our tools virtual reality tools versus the traditional ones we're more targeted a little bit more towards the concept artists creative executives and makers fine artists designers we're going to develop or for example just wants to quickly try things out you know although we are usable through the 3d model and the 3d animator who do this full-time with traditional tools they can they can use our software to accelerate it the biggest value that we have is that ease of use so we're particularly you know useful for the the creatives who are maybe perhaps a little less technical and ours provides a real time worldwide collaboration there's no experience

required and as I mentioned we've got speeds up to 10 times increase so here's a little bit about our platform it comes with two main apps masterpiece creator that's the main sculpting app and then masterpiece motion which prepares it for animation we also will be inviting third-party apps to our platform soon to to integrate in an easy turnkey and as I mentioned before you know this connects to any existing 3d modeling software now here's quickly sort of the VR 3d modeling landscape you've got masterpiece creator medium blocks and a number of other ones in your great verb for painting and I'll dive deeper into this in a second and then you have you know other ones for that animation part or you have masterpiece motion which will allow you to prepare it for animation or you can plug it right into your you know unity or Unreal Engine or if you want to keep it within you know PR you can use flip side Torey or will for showing it you

know quickly kind of illustrating what you want to do so here's the kind of a quick feel free to take a screen snapshot if you want of this but it kind of we've kind of broken down into what each app is can do now the ones that you see this 3d type there's a drawing and modeling you know the drawings good for if you just want to do kind of quick sketches but the modeling is necessary to create solid geometry that's going to be used for your career game and it shows kind of which app can do which feature the site would also show what parts of the pipeline we can do you know there's many stages as you know the secret creating that concept to the 3d model you've got to clean up that mesh you've got a UV unwrap it texture it rig it so that you can animate it skin it so that it bends over the bones you know blend shape so you can do facial animations and things and then some asset animation and then in the scene app animation you can either do that in

VR we'll pop that into unity and unreal finish it there so talking a little bit about the VR space where you know we've been seeing exponential increases in headsets the statements were Vera's dying are completely ridiculous if you look at the steam data it is on an exponential growth and IDC is one of the most respected market research out there they're showing a estimating 86 million headsets by 2023 so this isn't even the highest estimate these are sort of a middle range you know very reasonable estimates then you got the backing of you know people like Mark Zuckerberg who who's you know invested billions of dollars into this and is doing everything he is goal is to put a billion people into a virtual reality and there's just a few of the companies that are supporting this underneath Islam so right now there is a revolution happening here there's an

amazing thing where you could you know there's now an easy and quick way to create 3d content and this is leading to you know the democratization of 3d content where there's today there's just as 0.1 percentage of people of creatives can also do 3d modeling you know this opens up the door for the other 99.9% of creatives to create 3d content so once again I'm John Ghani and CEO of masterpiece VR you're welcome to reach out if you need anything and you know thank you everybody for listening John it was a great talking on how I'm glad to have you on at this time because it's actually a perfect opportunity for me to kind of dig deep into not only masterpiece VR but also talking more and F about you know the landscape of VR itself because you are the most expert person I've had on because you guys are constantly looking at this space and

even with previous guests and who we talk to in our roundtable discussions it's only been speculative because we're we're only looking at it from a game developer but still outside that circle and I think what your your last few slides and and everything that you've been talking about have have Illustrated that the VR space is growing and finally people are realizing the potential and how getting excited right and a lot of that is just a lot of what these other tech companies are kind of driving forward with and making sure that it becomes accessible and a lot of that I I wonder how how much of that is attributed to the quest just finally getting rid of like those 10 cameras set up you know there's there's so many key pieces the question is selling like hotcakes you know people love a quest and it's great because it's just reducing friction right just as you said

it's getting rid of those cameras which is keeping you don't need any external hardware and really that's happening every year you know we're removing roadblocks that are making it easier and easier for people to just pop in and start experiencing it so that's one of the key things but the truth is actually that for the last about six months most of the VR headsets have been sold out in most places it's it's and if you look at the steam data we've got something like you know just over the last few months we've had something like double the number of active monthly active users at the same time this is useful for the developers in hearing at this conference over the last year the demand for VR devs has increased fourteen hundred percent over the year before fourteen hundred percent for you guys out there who are VR deaths other

factors is half-life Alex Wow that's mind-blowing I don't know if you've had a chance to try it yet especially with the index controllers it is you know there's a reason why it's Metacritic stop game of the year so far and one of the top 20 games of all time it is it is so truly the first you know true VR first triple a game that has ever been made yeah I think this is just a mention of you yeah yeah like what one of the long-running joke between me and we have a frequent guests on named Ray is that he's a huge proponent of like have you heard of beat Sabre right I was like come on man beat saber is great but I come from clang Triple A I work in chill Palais I want to see a triple a quality game and I I'm with you with half-life Alex I felt like it was a dawn of a new era for

because game developers I think initially the hardcore it's even the word hardcore is hard to define nowadays it's like what does hardcore me but I feel like at least my hardcore audience that I grew up with the people that love looking at graphical fidelity upgrades and playing on the latest and greatest tech saw half-life Alex as a blossoming of a new market of finally people are gonna take this seriously and see the the realities of the outcome of youth using virtual reality right and I'm sure it sounds like you and your team are super excited because it's finally hitting that point where I felt like when the first oculus was announced through Kickstarter that we've reached that stage where we're like okay now I can see myself living in this world and and and be embraced by fully oh yeah oh

yeah this is you know that was an exciting time with the Kickstarter and then there was you know a couple years after that the hike cycle continued to go and it was just you know presented in the way to to appear it was the wow factor that got it but it wasn't at that point adding real value outside of the just the oh my god wow I'm in another universe it needs to add real value after that Wow wears off and it's taken this many years and it's finally there there are games that are amazing triple-a game you know talks about half-life Alex and you know the the log kits have just been coming out and they're gonna be continued to add to so all these new games are gonna explode from not one game at the same time even outside of the gaming space or you know well like I'm doing for example with creating their house to support gaming you know we've been working there's been

we put 70 developer years so far ahora con on this app and it's taken that long just to crack the surface so you know we've been competing that reality isn't against billion-dollar companies where the bars set so high for non VR accent games but would finally reach that we're finally adding true value today and that's the reason why even like Apple and all these companies are starting to make headsets in the background and what's really exciting actually is with 5g so you know with that what they're making in the background here I can't give names to this because we're you know we've got a lot of MBAs here but the part I can tell you is that there's headsets being built that r5g enabled they will have a cable the phone doesn't plug into it right the phone sorry the phone doesn't go on the headset it just plugs in and it then basically just have

the screen and the sensors on the headset it's lightweight it's really cheap to make the compute happens some of that happens on the phone and the rest happens over 5g on cloud compute on the edge on GPU compute on the edge and that's that's crazy because then you can have a lightweight headset cheap headset low friction that can do rendering that your PC could never do yeah that's huge cloud computing cloud gaming over the last I would say even just a year have made major jumps I think initially when the last Xbox kind of scared a lot of people saying that it always has to be plugged in the world wasn't ready right but but now more than ever people are embracing cloud tech having that availability to move across different devices freely and openly and not be

bogged down by the high prices of entry of a lot of these headsets and at what you're saying sounds like a another step towards of like hey man let's just make these super cheap and let's just have people put glasses on essentially that doesn't cost much for them to kind of embrace because a lot of that a lot of the barriers I felt like before was just getting people to wear the the headsets right because once they put the headset on everyone gets it no one's questioning the technology after the player demo especially we put them on half off Alexei I get it right and it's always just that you know first it was the the corded PC element of it and then you know having the the phone explode on your face potentially and then we move past that move removing all the cameras and then finally having like this very lightweight quest and then now you're

saying well you have your phone ian was just having your pocket just plug it in and just power that's a very lightweight cardboard box not cardboard but like something you know as not as cheap as like the idea of it being very accessible it sounds very very awesome and I always look at pioneers such as yourself and and and like what valve is doing right when I doubt is like a sleeping dragon right they they rarely do anything outside of yeah you know their cash cow of steam and dota and all these counter-strike you know successful formulas that they played with for years and then finally they announced their own headset they're they're dedicating all their future games to VR right that's when the game industry has to take attention because it's like alright something's going on with the space that they know about and what you guys are doing know about because it's completely true like and I'll lead into a question

I won't ramble too long so my question is this so yesterday actually we had a Zack rich on and it was a very interesting conversation to kind of cap off day two where he kind of dropped some knowledge bombs more about the user-generated space or ever talking about roblox minecraft and I feel like there's a lot of similarities to what you guys are doing where we're just removing the barriers for a lot of interested potential game developers and going through school myself I know there's a like a huge influx of people interested in this space but because of the tools in application and the stress that comes with it a lot of people don't make it till the end right to actually get on that yeah so this is something I think now what you and your company is echoing is like hey let's remove all that problem because you user-generated space is a lot of those people who want to be game devs who are doing game dev but without having to learn like the traditional

tools of even unity unreal just skipping that completely and just making something from dreams or or these more accessible programs and you're talking about more VR being that entry way for a lot of people absolutely so you know VR just makes it it's it's that it's the interface problem that I was talking to at the beginning you know when there's a mismatch it just makes it hard it's like using an interest gets to draw a picture well that's the situation we're in with 3d modeling right if you can natively just interact with it then if everything becomes easier whether using the VR headset or actually there's some really amazing AR headsets that are they're just a couple years out from being into production that you know that are incredible like you know the truth is that people you know the gay are speak with their phone no they are on the phone with the the reason that

Apple the reason that Google are getting everybody into this space and because they're building headsets it's a fact that they're building headsets and you know once you have you know a bazillion developers who understand this technology and then you have the headset who which is lightweight you know connects to the cloud it's stylish because they're made by you know some of these design companies I think I think actually the Facebook one what I heard I can't remember if it was low Kasatka or you know one of these other sunglass companies possibly the ones to do great bad there anyways they're designing from my name if the rumors are that they're designing the headset so it looks great you know you look good while you're doing it it's and it's powerful it's a no-brainer at that point yeah and you know top that

all this mm-hmm machine learning is just doing amazing things if you look what it's doing in the 2d world it you can literally just take your pen and draw across the screen and go trees Road you know house and it will automatically adapt everything in the scene and create those as if it's realistic well we're just a couple years off from doing that in 3d but that's where we're headed you know right now we use deep learning already Todd I mean a lot of these complicated functions in our software but you know in a few years from now we're gonna be generating content from scratch in with machine learning yeah a lot of what you're saying is it's definitely what I'm seeing in the underbelly of game development right so machine learning a deep a I especially procedural perceptual world building is because I come from a backroom environment art and yeah games are growing right as with

Unreal Engine 5 and all these expectations the team isn't really growing that much more and so the only way to achieve that fidelity is through procedural or machine learning relying on the computer to kind of assist with the world building to make it accessible to game developers to actually make and kind of like what you're talking about I'd there was a company like procedural AI or I forgot the name but you know as a bunch of X developers from nayak who-who pretty much had this like kind of like a Surrey service that that helps design a bedroom right the idea is to like hey you know here's a bunch of references from the 80s make me a 80s like bedroom for a ten-year-old kid right but it's assets provided into a machine and then it's able to arrange around and this is very early tech but

when I saw that was like oh okay I'm not completely fearful of like these guys are gonna replace my job but it's more like this is exciting because this is where it's gonna be assisting me to display my creativity right and it's the only way that's right because people are gonna expect more the gamers the publisher is anybody that's giving you money is expecting your team to deliver this fantastical world with your very limited amount of team so the only way that actually give in to that is using tools like like what you guys are doing for for a lot of creators out there like masterpiece VR to kind of speed up the flow and not necessarily compound more people and jump up the problem right that's what game developers our Studios like to do they just throw people at it to make it go faster but there's a breaking point as we we all know and in our experience

you're totally right with that for me you know we're not replacing the jobs we're just empowering them to do more right and you know you're always gonna need people that are creative and that have the mind it can see the object you know it's a natural progress that tools get you know better over time and I'm gonna be honest with you even the downsides of our software you know there's reasons there's certain reasons why you shouldn't even use our software like let's say you need to to do something like super detail than what you know Pixar quality or like super detailed triple-a quality and result you know our product is not great for doing that end result yet because it still needs to mature enough but I can't I can't name the name here but there are triple-a companies with you know with some triple-a gaming content that is coming out where the the concept are and the

original 3d models and the concept team are are made with our software so you know if you're making like an indie game you can make it from start to finish with our software today and especially oh wait till a month from now for a big update coming out it's it's a game changer update some really exciting stuff that's going to allow you to do the you know the full pipeline for an indie game inside of here but even if you're out there and you're coming from a triple-a studio and you know your earlier and the pipeline well our software super useful even for that but so I have actually a question here and I remind everybody if you want to talk to John directly filtered through me right it's somewhat indirectly go ahead and ask in the social channels as an aspiring VR dev this from green gift what would your be recommended steps to get food into the door nowaday so this is kind of like jumping off of what you

mentioned before there's an increase of need for VR developers how do you recommend these VR developers where should they look where should they start applying and applying their skills to I mean that's that's a broad question so I'll to make some assumptions and matters you know it depends if you're making your own studio or if you want to be hired from the existing studio is there a follow up with that which restriction to this this is a variable difference going with it maybe an existing studio for now until the asks again okay yeah if you're if you're in an existing studio then you know and yeah I would just continue to develop your skills in that area and you know meet as many people as you can you know don't forget the power of networking you know a lot of jobs come about where people don't even get posts you just meet the right people and showcase their skills and and I can't speak for every

studio but I can tell you what I look for is I like to see that you're not just okay you've done more than just your you know your gaming degree or something small on the side I want to see that you have a passion for I wanna see that you're willing to put those those hours into just really making it something great so so I also look for you know having projects on the side that you're working on outside of your you know your school area means get yourself portfolio something that you can showcase you know in and it doesn't have to be like massive one but if you can show like a few pieces that are super polished you know that's that's really exciting to me and that's those are the kind of qualities that I'm looking for is that you know that's scale and also that path that passion other things now also I can't comment on whether or not how much this game is through your caring about it but I can tell you that's going to greatly improve your quality as a programmer one of the big problems is a lot of these games schools don't actually teach really good

programming skills I hate to say that but like it's the truth I've never met someone that came out of school that knew how to write scalable code so you know learn what a code smell is learn new programming patterns learn you know about the pendency injection and ways that you can write code that's scalable because if you know sometimes companies will give an assignment right they may ask you to do certain tasks and you can make a home and you want to work on it well they might look at you know the quality of what you've done the event will catch your code quality too so I guess to sum it up there I'd say you know showcase some great stuff if you can do some great computer graphics stuff it seems like from you know my experience you know those are very valuable skills and you know get something to showcase learn how to code properly not just the crap that some your teachers told you and and then go

out there and network meet people as many people you can in the industry and learn from them and I say that would be your best bet I guess for the follow-up for me personally if you are a VR developer what companies or what industry should I be looking at right now to do to apply for jobs by industry in like gaming or other like learning is the biggest right aim is the biggest similar to trivia oh yeah Gaming is the biggest that right now that the headset manufactures there they're looking all over the place but they know that like the gamers have the best usually there's some of the best pcs right this is a big opportunity therefore for gaming the majority of the app still made are our games and some of the highest grossing apps right now our are still games so the great thing is is that you're your game development skills

are useful in anything relating to to be our because night like 95 plus more than that more than 95 percent of all the our apps are built off of unity our unreal to some level so I'd say your best bet would be you know look for a gaming company in your area or in the moat that's you know need someone with your skills but the great thing is is that if you want to decide to do something outside of gaming your game development skills are really useful and I want to tell you something else exciting this is a little bit outside the question but it's my personal belief that unity and real are the next generation of not just gaming engines but our computer programming we're all going into a digital visual world so I really think that your your skills there are just going to be you know even outside of gaming give it you know 5 to 10 years and they're gonna be needed everywhere

yeah I definitely sign off on that I'm seeing a lot of these enterprise companies already looking at Unreal developers unity developers to kind of help develop their product and not just programming but every discipline who-who have game knowledge especially in those two ecosystem are very valuable for sure this is a question from nightwolf can masterpiece VR work with AR for those that do not have a VR headset so right now there's sort of only two ways to do they are there's the phone base one and there is the AR headsets now the hey our headsets are really in a primitive state right now and they're not really good for you know direct interaction with the world like you can do things like this stuff like that but it doesn't have a fidelity to create so you can't use it in a or headset to do it and you also

can't use an AR phone yet to do it because you do need that touch that high precision touch interaction so you'll need a VR headset today to use this software in a few years you'll be able to use an AR headset but also just to note later this year we'll this is not public yet but I'll let you guys know we're also going to be building a non VR version later this year now it's a sort of a graceful degradation of capability you've got the best power if you've got a headset but I can't say that that as I said before the price is going down a lot and it'll get easier and easier to to get one of those definitely it's actually a follow-up question for me you know you were mentioning about AR and how the the the the phone is kind of being used as a Trojan horse to kind of get developers feet wet in learning that tech and being used to be developing for

that tech but they are building a our headsets a lot of these tech companies and we saw some of it with Microsoft and magic leave but at least the Microsoft said they're they're militarizing hit within the army and but where do we know for a fact the other tech companies are definitely seeing a future with AR and I in a lot of ways I feel like AR is like the the entryway for a lot of people into this space there's a lot a lot more natural and crazy amount of applications to kind of be a medium or medium mm-hmm between me and interacting the world so I make an extra layer right with that being said I want to hear your take about if you can educate us more about the AR world as well because it's something that been sharp kind of kind of quiet versus VR and I think of anything they're just very they're very

much developing behind the scenes but any insight on that would be great well so how to focus on this isn't a lot so there's levels of development there's a technical amount of complexity that's required to do a are now phone er is one thing but I'm talking when I say talking about AR I'm saying you know that's just a gateway to the headset AR which some people call mr mixed reality so as you said you saw you know magically Microsoft but you know the bigger one some big ones in behind the scene is Google they're they're building one as well Apple they're building one as well there's some other ones that I can't speak about because they're under NDA I'm allowed to say those ones because I happen to know about some things with it's also public rumors but there are

other companies as well making high quality headsets in this space but but there's a delay between it and and I you know to avoid going to the the detailed complexity of like you know basically motion capture technology and basically what they have to do is like an advanced version of something called slam it's where you do a type of complex filtering where you you understand basically you simultaneously have to solve the equation of where the environment is based off of where the headset is and where the headset is based off the environment so it's this this statistical you know equations and often includes on machine learning where it does this really complex process to be able to get it and that's where the the you know the quest and and these things have started to do pretty well but you

know you need to keep doing this better and better and you need to have it in lighter lighter ways to get that for the AR head so that's been a challenge and now that that's starting to get better there's still other huge challenges like that the screens right you know the there was one a few years there's been some headsets where you know it basically has I come nearer on top and you have a screen and it projects it onto onto the glass and uses a like 100 year old technology called Pepper's Ghost but that's really bulky and it's not scalable instead some of the better headsets like the hololens and stuff videos like wave clock guides but there's huge problems in extending the field of view to that so there's a number of technical challenges to get it so we're a couple of years off from getting to AR but the way I kind of see it is we're gonna have sort of three stages first because VR is a little bit

easier to to build VR is gonna be the bigger one all right then once the AR has such a are it's gonna be the bigger one because now they're going to look sleek and can walk around anywhere with them and then so some people think that AR is the bigger one but I actually disagree I say it depends on the time frame I surely believe that in the next stage after that in the long run you know we're talking we might be one or two decades away from that that VR will eventually be even bigger because you know once the virtual world gets better in every way than the real world you know why the hell which would be in the real world you know like and then there's always going to be some people that are that are like Nam and I don't like that like the real world you know cool that's no problem but then what about the next generation what about the kids who grow up in that they don't already have an affinity to any world they're gonna pick whichever worlds better so I think be ours bigger now a ours gonna be bigger in a few years and

then give it a you know one two decades VR is gonna be the biggest of them all I definitely sign off on that message there's a reason why the matrix is in VR not I want to thank you John we are at that hour mark and I want to thank you for coming on and in Swanston for the event I want to actually is a great time to kind of remind everyone to we are raffling off copies for masterpiece VR to go ahead and go to GD X dot and me to to see how to enter people are already thinking and in tweeting at masterpiece VR throughout the last three days talking about which their favorite presenter is and what the presentation means to them so go ahead and do that but before I send you off I'm gonna hand the mic over to you they kind of give the shout out give attention to tell people how to connect to you after judex thank you for

you know having me out today I've got my information up on the app on the screen in the bottom left you can you can follow us we've got our website masterpiece Viacom Twitter and Instagram a series we are you can also reach me if you need something at jo-ann ga-ga at masterpiece VR calm now just like to say one more thing to those those licenses were giving out just for any clarity that's not the original consumer product masterpiece VR that's the subscription you know the better the professional product masterpiece studios that could be give them license up for that so and as I mentioned before you know it's great right now but in one month from now check it out again then on top of that and you're really gonna be impressed by you know all the capability that it has well thanks a lot oh and once again thanks everybody yeah thanks for being having an honest

conversation talking to to a lot of developers out there who are looking to start out and then and then push through and become a success man it was really enlightening to kind of hear your story and now I'm masterpiece er kind of came about and it's a story that I want to amplify as much as possible so thank you for coming on well thank you I'd like to say it simply I didn't scare anybody with that you know maybe didn't put enough emphasis on how effing we rewarding it is so the bigger the challenge the more rewarding and this is the single best decision and then we're a most rewarding thing I've ever done so I encourage anybody else who has any ambitions to do anything in their space to do the same well thank you again and I'll be sure to connect after this perfect take care take care

[Music] [Music]