 I'm Cameron O'Neill, director for Redal in the Asia Pacific region. I'm here today with Patrick from Tech Sound, which is one of our customers over in China. Tech Sound has previously done a lot of work with corporate customers, with music events, and now is moving into the exciting world of eSports. So Patrick, coming from a corporate AV background, a musical AV background, what are the main differences for an audio company or a technology company moving or thinking about moving into eSports? Well, I would say the number one issue is player latency. And as well as how do we recreate an environment on a stage that is just as good, if not better than the environment that the pro players are used to training under? Yeah, because these games were all made as a solo experience, something to do in your home, not something that's going to be brought up onto a stage or onto a broadcast. And yeah, and I think that adds an additional challenge as we are required to throw the players into a state of isolation from say the audience or the commentators, which we call shoutcasters in the eSports world. And that would be even harder when you've got maybe a sport or an event, a game, where you have a fog of war, something where you can't see the whole field or you're in a first person view where you can't necessarily see everyone else. You don't want to have interference from audience students. Absolutely, and I think that's what makes eSports very interesting because you have so many facets in the player and the audience's reality that do not necessarily exist in our reality. And I think a lot of people are jumping on this as well. I think Google just announced their stadium project. And what Google is trying to do is very similar to what Netflix did for television by implementing interactive online streaming of games. We are essentially creating a path for players that would normally have to spend a lot on gaming rig to get into gaming and anything that increases the number of audiences that are, the number of audiences that's interested in eSports is definitely good for our industry. Yeah, I mean, if you think about soccer, all you need is a ball and some friends that you can play the game, but at the moment you need a really expensive computer if you want to play this at home and get to that pro level. So they're lowering the barrier to entry really. Absolutely. It's like the industry is already disrupting itself only a couple of years in. I mean, you've already got the technologies like AR, VR, XR, augmented virtual and extended reality. Are they impacting your world? Well, what we're seeing is AR is certainly being used in eSports in a very similar way that is being used in traditional sports. In traditional sports you would use augmented reality to draw lines on a field that only the online viewers could see. But taking that a step further, what you can do with AR and eSports is you can actually go as far as to recreate characters from the game in the audience reality. Yeah, so it's going to hit that holy grail of increasing the audience, not just the experience, but also their engagement with the sport and with the players. Yeah, some games are even going as far as allowing players to use their PCs to spectate on the game inside the game. And this opens up the door for virtual reality as well as extended reality. How do you further immerse the player into the sport? You become your own cameraman on the field of play. And with a point of view that you'd never get in a traditional sport. Cool. So, Redal and Tech Sound we've been partners for a couple of years now. We are definitely a more traditional broadcast manufacturer. How do you think those technologies work together and what's the kind of advice for the technology manufacturers out there? Well, I think all the technology manufacturers in Pro Audio really need to be ready to implement this consumer game technology into our pro world. With Redal in particular, although with the broadcast side of things not much has changed other than the ability to use a computer as an in-game camera. However, on the pro player side and on the audience immersion side while we are currently using the equipment, not how it may have intentionally been designed to be used we would certainly be excited to see more products that are specifically designed for this application. Yeah, I mean you said before, you know, we talked about that self-guided camera. I don't think it's flat screen and stereo sound that's going to work there. You're probably going to want something else to enhance that experience. Yeah, to take that even a step further, you know, the real question to ask is what kind of products are going to be able to take say the HRTF audio from a game in a first person shooter and translate that into spatial audio? Yeah, I mean if you have a thousand people watching a game that could be a thousand different points of audio and trying to make a thousand 5.1 mixes isn't going to work. You need to take a spatial audio thing and have that process for each individual user. Pretty exciting, isn't it? Yeah, it's good fun. Looking forward to it. You too. Cool. Patrick, thank you very much for joining us here and hope to see you in the future. Thank you camera.