 And speaking of games, we have Gabriel Yanagihara. He's the game guy at Eolani School, Sullivan Center. Welcome to our show. Oh, thanks for having me on this big tech. Yeah, well, we want to do it multiple times. I'm going to check in with you every now and then, see what you're doing. Oh, yeah. And what the kids are doing, actually. Oh, that's the best part. I can just show off what they've been up to. So give us an update on life in gaming and 3D reality. Yeah, so we've been expanding our computer scientist program over at Eolani School. We recently made some purchases into virtual reality. And having the students try it out, just explore with it, try it out in a bunch of our different classes, and just let the teachers kind of explore and play with it and see what they come up with. But you don't just play with it. You program it. Yeah, so for the first phase, we just want the kids to kind of get an idea of virtual reality. Right now, we're working with the Oculus Rift. Get them in there, see what the world feels like when they can't. It's not the physical table in front of them. They're in this virtual world. So letting them get their VR legs so you don't get motion sickness. You kind of get used to it. Yeah, right, right, right. So let them play around with it. And then we're going to be launching, or we're currently launching, that class right now where the students are going to be programming their own apps for virtual reality. That's fabulous. Oh, I'm so excited. Yeah, wow, wow, wow. So I mean, I tried one. We had somebody in the studio. I don't think it was you. It might have been. Maybe a year ago, and you can remember things. Oh, here's a picture. There it is. That's what there it is. And she's touching things. And they stay out there in space in certain coordinates, like forever. Yeah, this is really interesting. You build a whole universe, don't you? You can. I think when I was originally, we're starting with before VR, right? One of our most popular workshops for the students was Minecraft, right? Letting them build with, essentially, virtual Legos, right? And all the curriculum and all the lessons that you could run if you had an unlimited amount of Legos in your classroom, right? You can come up with some pretty cool classes that way. So what we were taking from there is now you're in a world where you can build and modify the entire world around you. Minecraft just launched their virtual reality version of the Minecraft for Windows 10. And with that, we're having students, so instead of just being on their iPads kind of hunched over there, they're actually up and building and moving trying out all their little creations in there. Fabulous. You know, just a footnote, I need your help on something about Microsoft 10 after you show it. Definitely. I'll take it and show you what I'm talking about. Anyway, so think about programming. So how do you program Oculus? How do you do that on a regular PC? So right now, what we're working on is we're using, so we have a Mac lab, but we're working with a free game engine called Unity. They recently released their educational licenses. So any school can apply to get free licenses as well. Indie developers, if you're on your own, if you're just to start up on your own, it's also free. There's free personal editions. And it's basically an environment that lets you start arranging and setting up your game. So in the easiest terms, it's a program that you run, and you can build games in it. And then it's very easy to publish those games on pretty much any of the platforms, Windows, OSX, iPad, Android. So you can pretty much launch it out. There's one program. There's one program. That's pretty great. And so I mean, I know we don't have it with us. We're not going to be able to show it on the screen. But conceptually, how does it work for you to program that? I mean, if you worked with any other 3D environment, I've come from a 3D modeling and animation background, so it's a 3D space or 2D if you want. And then you can just drag and drop game objects in there. Like you can drag your little Mario character. You can drag your other character and then you assign a programming script to each of those characters and have them start interacting with each other in the game. This is like animation, but on steroids or something. Yeah, and it's getting even bigger too, because a lot of the indie games that you'll see as either Steam Greenlight Projects, which is kind of like a not Kickstarter per se, but kind of a crowdsourced select which games you want to see come out option. So there's that as one option for what they can do. They can play with it. And then the other one is kind of letting them, so taking Unity, right, and then publishing their games as they want to go with it. So these kids come in, do they have game experience? So they, you know, I mean, one of my partners, his kid used to stay up till 2, 3 o'clock in the morning. He was like in the seventh grade and dad didn't know what to do because he was consuming him. They come in to you with that kind of experience? It's pretty cool. I mean, imagine coming into like a math class and then the students are the experts at math and you're kind of just like, okay, so now that you guys already know everything, they know, like they say the huge math bands, right? They know, they played all the math games. They've done every math problem. They can get their hands on, but now you're going to show them, all right, here's academically what you can do with that skill set, right? So we get a lot of kids coming in. They've played lots of video games. They're very familiar. They're digital natives, right? They're very familiar with that entire space, but they haven't quite gone to the program. Oh, here's some virtual reality. Yeah. That's the rock band. That's going to be really cool. I haven't gotten one myself, but we're going for it. How does that work? He's wearing the goggles, so you're still still playing? I think for the VR, I think the new rock band they're releasing is you put the goggles on and imagine, like you're on the front stage in front of an entire crowd of people and you can walk out, right? Because with the last rock band, like I love that game, but it'd be just my friends and I kind of just sitting in our room, right? You see, like, all our laundry on the side and all our books and computer stuff everywhere, but you put the goggles on and suddenly you're right there next to, you know, whichever celebrity will sign with that brand, right? You turn to them and see them? Yeah. You turn your face forward and you see 10,000 people? Whatever. I think it'd be really cool if they could, I mean, if they get the licensing and everything for it, reviving old bands, right? So you could play next to the Beatles or next to whichever one, whoever they sign up for it, right? That'd be super cool. I mean, my students won't really get that, right? They might be like, all right. They don't know the Beatles. We want to see, you know, chain smokers. We want to play with Daft Punk or something like that. The old guys like me, I don't care if your students understand it. You want to try it out, yeah. Blocking with the Beatles. That would be cool. Let me see if that brand, that IP, has revitalization with VR. Yeah. Well, you know, I mean, so many questions float into my mind about this, but this is moving so fast. It's amazing. When I saw you last, it wasn't like this. It's changed and it's changing too. And you got to stay up with it. Now, to stay up with it and to be relevant for them in their expectation that you're going to take them right to the edge of the envelope, yeah? How do you do that? You just go with the flow? Do you read up and study up? Well, a lot of it is. There's a lot of really great communities online. There's actually a Facebook group for educators, run by one of my colleagues, Mike Furcano. And it's a virtuality in education. So basically, it's a crowd, not just like crowdsource information feed, but basically all the teachers in the world who are kind of dabbling with virtuality. They share the content with each other, right? So he set that up. He pioneered it out here from Hawaii, right? And now all the other teachers are hopping on board and they're like, hey, I tried Google Expeditions, right? I tried this Google Street View. I tried Coast Spaces. I tried Thing Link. There's all these different startups happening. There's so much information. There's no way one person could run through it all, right? But as an education community, everyone can kind of share that a little bit. Yeah, you got to do that. So what are your favorite sources? What are your connection points? Definitely that Facebook group run by Mike Furcano. The other one is just kind of keeping up to speed. There's a bunch of YouTube channels that I just like to watch from here and there. And of course, the students, right? The students are definitely watching a lot of YouTube videos talking about Let's Plays, which is where the YouTube hosts will have his variety talk show, but he'll try on a bunch of different games that people send them. And then they'll see the good ones and they'll come to me like, oh, Mr. Y, did you hear about this game? Did you hear about this game? And then I'll be like, yeah, I totally heard about the game. Write it down in the research editor, right? I pretend like I'm kind of getting an idea for how it's going. But it's even expanding to the mobile market too, right? You can get your small phone, right? And even any phone, any Android or Windows phone or even Apple phone, right, or the iPhone, can run a virtual reality headset, right? Google is launching their DreamVR, which is their mobile headset. Oh, is that right? We work with Google a lot. So we have the Google Cardboard, which is like a foldable piece of cardboard that when you fold it up and put it together, it becomes a headset, right? $1.95, yeah. Like $1.95. If you remember back to those old days where it's the red, what is that, ViewMaster or something, where you just click the thing and then it cycles through the disk, right? It's like they rebuilt one of those digitally now. So you can like click the button and instead of being inside, just looking at one view, you can look all the way around you and you'll see whatever you're doing there. And then that same idea, right? Imagine you could get a classroom set of those, right? Give them to all your students and you can take them on a field trip in the classroom anywhere in the world. And that's been the, we've been doing a bunch of projects with that. Mike Fricano, who's also a colleague of mine, has been doing a lot of Google Cardboard expeditions with the students. I think the last big one that we did was doing the Memorial for the Pearl Harbor attacks. We had the students take virtual tours of the Arizona, of the Missouri in the classroom so they could run along. So what is it about these virtual tour, virtual reality? You know, not, I hate to tell you this, Gabriel, but not everybody out there has actually tried it yet. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So what is the experience that makes it so magical? So as opposed to that kind of looking at it on a TV monitor, right? So when you're looking at the monitor, it's kind of still looking at it through a picture frame. But once you put the goggles on and with the higher quality ones, like with the Oculus Rift or the Vive, where you have the audio as well, the 360 audio. When you put it on, everywhere you turn, you get the sensory input of whatever you're looking at in that position, right? So you can see here the people are kind of looking around and each of them are seeing a whole different world. So they could be one could be in China, one could be in Shanghai, one could be, you know, or in Shanghai, China, the other one could be here and in the middle of Diamond Head checking it out. And it's been launching like some really cool student projects as well, where they wanna share their spaces, right? So when they sit at the table like this, they're talking to each other. They compare notes about their own reactions to these various places. Now, where's the data coming from? Is it coming from the device itself or from a computer or a wireless? Where's it coming from? Yeah, so I mean, depending on which quality of device you're using, right? I think the best one, the Oculus Rift. So for the Oculus Rift, it's using the computer to feed a separately rendered image into each eye. So what's that doing? It's creating- Separate images for each eye. Separate images for each eye because it's like the screen inside the device is split and then it's feeding a different one into each eye. So what that allows us to see is the 3D parallaxing that happens. So like when you move your finger across your eye, your two eyes are seeing slightly different images. But now we can simulate that on the computer. So as opposed to just looking through a screen and seeing what's right there, where you can move your head around, you can walk around the room, and then you'll see all the objects from different angles. And it looks 3D to you. And somehow the machine is able to give you that 3D experience. You're among the objects, you're in the world, which is the big sell for it right now. But this is all a matter of data. Somebody has built it probably with gaming technology and all this drag and drop animation kind of graphical interface is really fabulous. But I have a question for you. My question is, well, preference to the question. We have, we just got this thing called live view. Live view is a little backpack you wear and you connect it to your video camera. And it has what they call bonding technology. And the bonding technology bonds up half a dozen cell phone accounts, modems, okay? And now it has very fast broadband. So my camera is gonna report back to my studio here, okay, with the best broadband that you can get anywhere. There are any cell phone towers. And the result is we can go live, okay? From anywhere, yeah. From anywhere, anywhere in the world, right? Yeah, that's awesome. In fact, just curious that I saw the first time I saw this was at the commemoration of the Pearl Harbor attack. Yeah. Pearl Harbor. It was a guy who had one of these things and he was sending it back live to New York, standing right next to me with a little thing. So you talked about these people who can be anywhere in the world. Yes. And see all these things on virtual reality and compare notes and have this kind of joint experience at the table with all this really fabulous input coming in. Yeah. Why can't that input be coming in from all over the world? You say, oh, they can be here, they can be there, they can be anywhere. Why can't it be live with my little backpack? So here's gonna be a camera that I'm gonna tell you about that you might be a little excited about. It's called the Theta S. So it's a small, it looks like the old Flip HD. It's a small rectangle like this and it launched like, I think they're on their second iteration now. The video quality isn't amazing yet. They're still working out the kinks and I think they're doing like a release stages to get better and better at it. But it also lets you live stream in 360. So what that software does and what the current workflow, I'm not super familiar with it, but the current workflow that I know of is that you can live stream from that to a Twitch account or to a live stream account and then on the opposite side, on the receiving side, well again, if we have good enough internet, you can have the goggles set up, you can have the virtual reality headset and then you can see whatever that camera is live streaming immediately. There it is. So there's some really cool tech going on with that. A regular one-dimensional camera is not gonna do it for the Oculus Rift. But one of these cameras would and if you put my live view backpack, might be called a baby, baby in the middle, then you can go to anywhere in the world and deliver Oculus Rift quality of visual experience. Wow. Yeah, the thing that's really, the one thing that's holding that back right now though is the resolution on the live streams. A lot of them are kind of standard 1920 by 1080 resolution, which is standard monitor resolution. But when you take a 360 photo, what it's doing is wrapping all the data around you and then compressing it into a flat 1920 by 1080. It's like unwrapping it onto a flat screen. So when you unwrap it, you lose a lot of resolution. So when you see the really high quality 360 videos and stuff on YouTube and stuff, there are a lot of times they're playing at 4K. So we don't, like our mobile networks and everything aren't quite ready for 4K streaming just yet. But I can definitely see that. I mean, VR has been exploding so much in the last couple of years. I can very easily see that in the pipeline. Well, I can tell you that baby could do 4K telling you that now. Yeah, 4K streaming, that would be amazing. Yeah, we take a short break so we can integrate all this because the sides of my head are hurting. We'll be right back with Gaby and Agihara. I'm Ethan Allen, host of likeable science here on Think Tech Hawaii. Every Friday afternoon at 2 p.m., you'll have a chance to come and listen and learn from scientists around the world. Scientists who talk about their work in meaningful, easy to understand ways. They'll come to appreciate science as a wonderful way of thinking, way of knowing about the world. You'll learn interesting facts, interesting ideas. You'll be stimulated to think more. Please come join us every Friday afternoon at 2 p.m. here on Think Tech Hawaii for likeable science with me, your host Ethan Allen. Hello, my name is Crystal. Let me tell you, my talk show, I'm all about health. It's healthy to talk about sex. It's healthy to talk about things that people don't talk about. It's healthy to discuss things that you think are unhealthy because you need to talk about it. So I welcome you to watch Quok Talk and engage in some provocative discussions on things that do relate to healthy issues and have a well-balanced attitude in life. Join me. I want to be there. He's already there. I've already downloaded that entire thing. It's Gabriel Vinogihara Vilani School. So you start out with gaming and you learn how to game and then you go to, it's a natural progression to visual reality, 3D, an Oculus Rift and nobody knows where that's gonna go. Yeah, it's an exciting field to be in. But you're gonna follow it. Oh, yeah, yeah. You could not follow it. At this point, I'm kind of like, I'm along for the ride. It's ups and downs and whatever happens, we're gonna be really excited to see what happens. So tell me about the Ignite program that you're doing or you're involved. Yeah, so we've been doing a lot with the robotics programs at Yolani with the app class, which is gonna be making VR projects. And we wanted to have a venue for our students and faculty who we're allowing to kind of explore with all this new cutting edge tech, see what they did, what they found is best practices and just share it out for everyone to see. So a lot of our teachers and a lot of our students are gonna be doing presentations at the Ignite Innovation Conference, which is gonna be at the Sullivan Center at Yolani School. The world begins and ends at the Sullivan Center. Yeah, it's- Everybody's a center of the university. And I get to live on the third floor. It's amazing. Wow. But no, I set up camp there and then we're gonna have the conference. I think the conference is gonna be February 18th. I wanna come. There'll be definitely, we'll love to have you. Yeah, yeah, okay. So I'm talking about the kids for a minute, okay? Kids respond to this. I mean, they come with a certain amount of experience at home and all that. And then they light up when they get into a classroom setting where you can show them things they didn't know, where you can understand things they tell you, which is important. And where you can structure their perception of these things so that now it becomes more real. It's no longer just a hobby. It has real life impact. Life and educational economic impact directly on them. If they create the next Flappy Bird game, right? They can go to any college they want and they're out of pocket, right? It's true, but not in games though because this gaming technology often leads to real technology, I shouldn't say that, but technology that is used in the marketplace for other things. Yeah, simulations. There's a lot of talk now in the medical field. How else can you use virtual reality? How else can you use gaming for either betterment of patient care, old folks' homes, right? How can you improve the lives of the people who maybe may not be as mobile, right? One of the projects that our group of students are doing now is they're doing 3D scans of the hikes here in Hawaii. And they hope, you know, hopefully once they can create their program in unity with that and create like virtual tours of Hawaii. No one is sorry for hike. There's so many side projects you can do with that. You can throw that on the Google Cardboard and give that to grandma, grandpa, people who are given to the hospital and let people explore the outside world and why they don't need to, right? Without standing out, yeah. So these kids come to you. Is it every kid comes to you or just the kids in the one? It's an elected class, the kids who want to. So I think the easiest example would be letting students, so the reason we have the intro video game design class which is seventh and eighth grade is to let students kind of get under the hood of the games that they're already excited about, right? So it's kind of like back in the day when you'd have auto shop, right? Everyone's super into cars, we love cars. All right, let's make it academic. Let's people, you know, instead of you just buying a car and then paying a couple hundred bucks every time it breaks down, let's teach you what the inside of the car is like so you can build your own version of it, right? And especially now with gaming, the gaming tools are all, you know, they're free, right? Anyone can pick up and make a game with showing them don't just be consumers of digital technology. Don't be just a consumer of the iPad where you just put the money in and then, you know, you use it. Engage with it. Get underneath it, right? Understand how it works. It's such a big part of your life. We redesigned it, the whole thing. Making yourself happy. Make the next Apple. And remember me when it's time to retire. They said you would check, yeah. What that, I wanted to ask you about that game. So you take these kids who elect it because they really like this kind of information technology that's a broad term to define and you excite them and you show them things they didn't know before and you bring them into a conversation about it. You bring them into a community thought process about it. Now it sort of changes their lives and they really, they begin to see the possibilities as you do. They catch it's viral. They catch what you have. Whatever you have, they catch it. Okay. And they graduate. Yes. I thought they go to the mainland. Well, that's what's great is it's just to start, right? They've got a head start over all their peers. They're kind of, you know, one thing that I think Eulani and Dr. Cattrall has been really successful in with Eulani is pushing it, not just, you know, you don't just graduate with, well, I've memorized all the chemical formulas. I've studied for the test. I can get through that. But now it's, well, I did good on my academics, but guess what? I also have two games published. I also built my own drone. You know, I built a drone that flew over to the Allo. I put up a water sample, did bacteria testing on it. That's true. Yeah. Our robotics program has been phenomenal. Martin MD is leading our robotics program. And the kind of robotics projects that they have, seventh, eighth grade kids starting on, has been, you know, it's blown my mind. I don't know how he's been doing it. Oh, he's blowing my mind. I wasn't even there. OK, so they go to the mainland. Not only are they talented, smart, motivated, but they also have experience in the class for you with you. And the robotics, too, and all the stuff, they are poised for success in the IT world. The Lord knows where that'll take them, but it doesn't take them back to Hawaii, does it? There are no jobs here for this. Well, what's really interesting? We accept your job. Well, I work for the job. I was very lucky with getting set up where I am. But one thing that's really interested with the indie game industry and with mobile markets, right, that, right, you can be set up anywhere. On the beach. You can literally, like, I have two or three friends here. They hang out on the beach. They have their laptop. They go to Starbucks. They work on their app. And their app brings in a couple grand a month, and they just hang out in Hawaii, right? Not a bad deal. Not a bad deal. And then what's good is we're building up a lot of that local community here, right? There's another group, Dev League Hawaii, who are creating a lot of developers here. And there's a growing community of game designers here in Hawaii. And there's also a lot of opportunities, you know, pretty much if you decide that you want to live in Hawaii and you want to be your own boss, there's not a lot of things holding you back. Well, the thing is, if you were on a beach alone in another time, in another time, say, 20 years ago, trying to do something like this, you would be alone. You wouldn't be connected. You wouldn't be able to sell your stuff, find anybody who'd pay you for it, or, you know, help you with it, do collaborations and partnerships and the like to make yourself, to make some money. But now, on the beach, it's not necessarily the case. You can find people who will help you and mentor you and connect you and pay money to you, right? Am I right? Yes. So it's a growing community here, right? And I think that would be one of the really cool initiatives because digital IP, so digital intellectual property, digital projects like that, where you can work with people anywhere in the world, you don't need an office space. You don't need real estate, right? You don't need a whole lot of energy, right? So a lot of things that limit business here in Hawaii, you know, your IP, you have an idea that has an intellectual property based in Hawaii, right? You don't have to worry about making the kind of higher rent and stuff that you have to deal with here. Do they take older gentlemen in your class? And I sign up. We do have open nights. We do have open nights where I have open to other educators and we just share all the curriculum and all the stuff that we've been working on with anyone who's interested in growing the community. So where is it going, Gabriel? I mean, one of the things you mentioned that was touching to me before we started was the notion that one day something would happen and all of a sudden you would realize that you're not their big brother anymore, you're their uncle or your father, your grandfather, and you would not occupy the same role anymore. I know. I've been riding the cool older brother teacher for a long time. And I think I've still got a couple years left before I start getting like two gray hairs for now until I start getting a bit older. But I think for the now, I don't think I'll ever stop being engaged with the tech community. It's my final frontier. It's we've mapped the world. We've been everywhere. Technology is the last bastion of real exploration that I see that is accessible to the average person. So where is Hawaii going on this? Granted, there are some people who understand they can go to the beach, make a buck, participate in a kind of virtual community. Where is the industry going to go? Do we have it? Will we have it? Can we get together on this and make something happen? I think the biggest thing that we can do is form our closely knit and keep growing our closely knit community of game developers. We have the Global Game Jam, which is an annual event. We have a couple other meetups where all the different programmers, 3D artists, game designers, virtual reality people all get together and talk story about our industry here. It'll be really cool to see more students get involved, more educators come involved, reach out to some more of the business side of things here, and see what services can we offer here in Hawaii that are not real estate and energy based? That we can just expand and can scale anywhere. Because we can have the idea here and just pay for Amazon to have the servers in the main line in some warehouse somewhere and run the entire situation that way. So really with the internet with all that stuff, there's really not a set location that we need to be. And you can show them how. Oh, I hope so. You can give them the leverage, the understanding, the way to find a career in this at any level they want. Yes, I'm hoping so. Yeah. We got to close the show now, Gabriel. It's been really wonderful. Yeah, it's always great to come and visit. Maybe even better. I'm so excited. And one of the reasons we're closing the show is because I'm having this problem with my PC. And I need to hold on to him for a few minutes so he can help me understand what's going on. OK. Oh, I'll be glad to help you. Gabriel Yanagihara, Ilani School. Wow. I'm going to go back to school again.