 Hi. Hi everybody. My name is Nick Justitian. I am Program Director of Immersive Media at Drexel University in Philadelphia, PA and today Charbax has graciously invited me to talk a little bit and I figure we'll talk about virtual production on real engine Of course, you know these days everyone is streaming from home But my home setups a little different because I'm always inside on real engine so I have like a nice big space and so we can talk about how these things are made and how they work and Thanks for having me Charbax. This is this you have the coolest corona setup I've ever seen But it's it's pretty fun. Yeah, I mean We we've been working with virtual production for quite a long time. It's it's an actually a rather old technology by digital standards, but When things got driven home, we kind of lost access to our main studios where we do a lot of Our our virtual production worked and just kind of was an experiment for me to start with the idea of like Okay, well, I have a green screen at home. I have a camera at home Maybe I can use virtual production at home and just always use it when I'm on zoom meetings or whatever And it's been really handy. I mean especially with all of the Distancing that we've had to do with covid we've been able to actually, you know, as I added Educational institution academic institution, you know the end of year and end of different quarters We usually have big shows to show off the students work and a lot of times They would normally be in theaters with audiences and we haven't been able to do that for the last year And so we've been able to use virtual production as a means for facilitating those kinds of events digitally Muted right here. Yeah, I'm getting some little little sound. I'm not sure if it's a I was trying to mute myself Some little thing going on. I'm not sure if there's like some kind of loop. I'm not sure how to define it. So so so I I saw you speak on the the open hours show actually this one right here where you introduced that you will have Here your yes office hours. Yeah So the office hours actually awesome and You've been appearing on that once in a while once in a while. Yeah, so Alex Lindsay, there's Alex Runs a daily panelist Stream it is every single day seven days a week. It's been running for about a year now Where he brings together panelists from all over the world with a variety of different expertise areas of focus and such and a lot of Alex's background has been in Production visual effects and motion graphics virtual production 360 production streaming And so a lot of the folks that he's worked with in the past come in and you know The topics of discussion usually center around things like video production and not just the technologies But the logistics and you know the dealing you know working with clients and strategies for for operations Alex also has a very strong passion for education in general And so every Saturday is actually carved out as a focus on education And of course, you know, we gravitate towards talking about how education Institutions teachers educators can leverage these technologies and in their work. So Yeah, that those office hours sessions start every single morning. It's that I think it's 10 a.m. Eastern and 7 a.m. Pacific time that that stream starts each day and Coming up in April on Saturdays. I'll be doing a series on Using Unreal Engine and getting started with it for virtual production So those sessions will be the there's four Saturdays in April. So it'll be each of those Saturdays at 1 p.m. Eastern and 10 a.m. Pacific and so that'll be geared towards beginners So again since Saturdays for office hours tend to be geared towards education hoping that some of the audience will be Educators and students that are interested in getting started The virtual production is a pretty big topic there's a lot of different versions of it and one of the primary tools is Unreal Engine and Unreal Engine is a very big tool And there's a lot of different places to get started and sometimes it can just be confusing when you first look at it And not even knowing where to start So the focus of the Saturday sessions in April is all about how did you get started with it? How do you make your own setup like this and how do you connect? How do you bring video into it? How do you key out the green screen? How do you build a set using you know all kinds of free assets that are available and so it's all about getting started So it's gonna be the first one on Saturday Which which April is that it'll be the first Saturday in April honestly I don't remember the date off the top of my head, but it's so every Saturday in April. Is that true? Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yes every Saturday in April awesome So anybody can join the this zoom calls that they have over there, right? Mm-hmm, and And learn how to have this awesome setup. Do you want to do a little demo? I guess I could yeah, is there a way I can share my screen here. I'm just hit the share screen button. Yeah, right so No, you can you can also like demonstrate the output right from your camera with like all the different things that you can do sure so Let me know is my screen being shared now. Yeah, you can see my mixer. Okay, great. I'm gonna get this is it so so this screen that you're looking at is Unreal Engine so Unreal Engine is a 3d graphics tool and We further call it a real-time 3d graphics tool meaning that everything that's happening happens in real time We don't have to wait for a render. I know that's a big distinction with virtual production from Traditional CG animation traditional CG visual effects usually those types of renders can take minutes or hours or even days per frame Whereas with a real-time engine every frame is being generated in real time. So a lot of the perimeter here is the controls and tools that Unreal Engine uses to add things to the scene in the middle here is our viewport and you know outside of this virtual scene, I have a real camera of course in front of my real desk and That camera is you know sending a video feed into the computer and Unreal Engine is reading that video feed Live and you can kind of see an icon of it that video feeds here and that's it's my wrinkly green screen behind me I've gotten criticisms on how wrinkly my green screen is but there it is and Then that video you could see here if I click on this I'm just coming in and I'm being put on you know this two-dimensional Plane panel here and it's situated in a 3d scene behind this desk So that it looks like I'm actually sitting at this desk I guess the other interesting thing is that I have to my my left over here I guess it's screen right for you is an iMac and That is streaming. It's a video over a technology called NDI On my network and so Unreal Engine is reading the the Macintosh screen live So if I start using that to demonstrate something or you know open up a video Over there on that screen then all of that is being updated live in Unreal Engine So you're just seeing all of that happen as it happens on that Mac Another thing that I like to do when I'm in these zoom meetings, you know my physical screens are to my left and to my right and When I'm on a call, you know It looks kind of silly if I look to the screen on my right to look at what's going on and there's nothing there So I've added these holographic representations of my two actual desktop screens So so I have a genuine computer to my left a genuine computer to my right and I'm just streaming the video of their displays into these, you know, just translucent Panels so I can be behind it. Hello And then when I'm looking at it then others can see oh, I'm actually looking at something there So so that's what's going on The the other interesting thing for Unreal Engine is that you can you can place these different cameras in here as I Click on a camera. You can see well, this camera sees this and Over here. There's another camera that sees this and these are virtual cameras in a virtual scene, but Unreal Engine has a toolset that basically connects these to a physical video output on the computer So I have what's called a black magic deck link board. So it's Intended for video production. That's how the video from the camera is getting into the computer But I can direct video from any of these virtual cameras out that SDI output So SDI is just kind of like HDMI. It's just a kind of a professional grade video output signal So right here in Unreal Engine is the connection between these virtual cameras Cine camera actor one two three. So here's I've got Cine actor one selected. Here's Cine actor three And I can switch between those and so if you know, you were seeing my camera feed I could switch to camera three and then camera three goes out and then switch back to camera one So these virtual cameras actually have physical video outputs and then how I handle that the rest of that for For streaming like we are now or for zoom is I'm feeding the video outputs from these cameras into Just a standard USB video device and in my case, it's an ATEM Mini from black magic design, but you know, you could use any type of video capture device USB or otherwise And then it just looks like a webcam. So effectively what's happening is, you know, this camera right here in Unreal Engine is being treated by my computer as a web camera and and used for streaming So that's kind of an overview. Nice. I got that. There's this comment I bet it takes three years of experience just to do this I'll I mean, I've been at it for a while, but you know, honestly the The office hours lab sessions that we'll be doing in April are designed to basically get people up to speed in four weeks or less There'll be really simple exercises with provided tools Honestly, once once you get over the shock and awe of just how many controls and buttons and windows there are here It actually makes sense very quickly. I mean, it's not entirely different than Photoshop It's you know, I could show you right now like if I wanted to add something to this scene Let's say I just wanted to add some kind of a wall. I could go into a folder here Where like different things called meshes. There's that's geometry Let's see here doors facades. Let's take a facade here If I wanted to add this wall to the scene, it's really a drag-and-drop affair So I could just drag this out here and now that wall is in that scene And if I wanted this wall to look differently like right now I can look over here and there's two materials and so there's a Material that's wood and there's a material that's silver And if I wanted to change those well, then I can just go into a library of materials Maybe instead of silver, I want these to be glowing squares So I could go into something that glows And say, all right. Yeah, I want to take this glow and I'm just going to replace the aluminum with that And now they're glowing and maybe I want to replace the wood with concrete So I'll select some concrete drag that on top of the wood and so That's how quick and easy it is to use And that's really the value of what virtual production is is because you can Alter what's in the scene very quickly. You know, I'm just tapping the e-keys and now I can rotate You know, if I wanted, you know, if this was a physical set This wall would have had to have been built by carpenters plasterers It would have been painted And so there's an entire team that would have needed to build that wall And then if the director saw the scene like this and said, hey It's really lopsided. Can we build another wall over here? Then this would have to be, you know, you have to bring that entire crew in again to build yet another wall But in an on real engine with virtual production If I already have this wall one, so I just hold the alt key and drag And now I've got another one and an e-key and I can rotate it into position And so just like that Now I've got and you can position it behind you also a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I mean if I wanted to W lets me move this around So I could bring this in right behind me and and now you can see it in my camera view as well as Right behind me there in the scene You know, the other thing is this there are tools that allow you to Use nothing more than a standard camera And photograph objects over and over and over again and then create a 3d model from it So I'm just going to delete these walls. I don't need these But just another example is um, this tyrannosaurus rex Head is I'm just going to tap f to kind of focus on that This is an actual, uh Cast of of an actual tyrannosaurus rex skull We have this at my university. We have a academy natural sciences natural history museum and so You know, I just went there and shot around 100 photos of it and those photos process through a tool called capturing reality, which is Also owned by the same company that makes Unreal Engine And and really by doing nothing more than taking those photos and running them through a piece of software Now I have a copy a three-dimensional copy of that Artifact and now that's in my scene and if I wanted to bring that closer to me I could right so I can just bring that up here You know in the real world this would need a cart and a team It'll be really heavy But there it is next to me now. So Yeah, there's some of the things that you can do with virtual production. Is that Unreal Engine very expensive? Uh, it's actually 100 free So that's awesome the company that makes Unreal Engine is the you know, they built it for themselves as tool for building video games, right? So Fortnite is an example of a really popular video game that comes from that company and so Originally this was built as a tool for creating video games and so it's often called a game engine Obviously it does quite a lot more than just creating games, but As a result this doesn't seem to be a primary revenue stream source for the company Epic So it's available completely for free download. You can go on to the epic You know, you could look for unreal engine.com. I think is the website And on there you can set up a free account with any email address And then you can download the tool and it's cross-platform again The sessions in april are going to work for for a mac as well as for pc So you can download for either of those platforms Uh, some of the functionality Is definitely best on a pc. So this live video this ability to capture live video stream stream it out live That really works best on a pc. So it's not going to work on my m1 macbook Uh, an m1 macbook. I believe you can use um, you could still use unreal engine But you wouldn't be able to process live video So you could bring in a video file and do the green screen keying. So If instead of being live video, I had recorded something if I wanted to create a youtube a movie if I wanted to create a A demonstration or an educational piece that I'm going to pre-record I'm going to edit and post it to youtube you could do all of that with virtual production in unreal engine on a mac Really the only thing that you would Genuinely need a pc for is the um is live video input output and it's really just because the The plugins that enable that the software that really allows all that to happen Have have been developed on the windows platform and I haven't seen them released yet on on the mac platform Can you show a little bit the the like the functional the plugin? How do you click to make it live? How do you click to make it your webcam source? So Uh, what's happening here is that right here this this panel called media capture Is what connects my Virtual cameras here, right? So this is this is listing actor one two and three This is the actor one camera um There's a really simple setup, you know the hardware that i'm using is black magic And so right here, there's just a little icon if I double click it here I configure and I can say all right. Yeah, I'm going out This particular deck link board at this resolution, etc. So this is actually my input So that's all it is. I just you know click these drop downs and and and then it it works and then here I am um, then the output is going into a atem mini unfortunately, I don't have a Uh handy picture of one of those right now, but if I guess I could go to the web here and say atem mini And black magic design atem mini. Okay So all in atem mini is is a little box. Actually, they have big ones now too that are like really big Right. So there's a whole product line of these that They plug into a computer over usb and and once you do that then That any video source plugged into this Just looks like a usb webcam to your computer. So whether you're using zoom or what, you know, this melanap that we're using right now or Skype or any teams It all sees this as if it was a webcam and now each one of these buttons allows for In this case, these models have four video inputs And so you could switch between them and do crossfades and things like that. So My my personal setup is set up in such a way that the video output Plugs into this and then this usb input appears as a webcam There is another set of tools that you can do this without that hardware And uh, that is called uh, ndi tools And this isn't a free software solution So, uh, ndi tools is just a a set of video processing tools that Basically virtualize video connections um, basically that any video source using this software can be um, either recognized as a a webcam or created as a A network based an ethernet based or uh video stream And so this is this is actually how i'm bringing my monitors onto Uh, the unreal engine is that this ndi screen capture Is running both on my macintosh as well as this pc And then inside unreal engine. I have um You know some ndi inputs set up right here ndi video input And so these right here are basically pointed at those two computers And uh, and that's how those videos Feeds are coming into unreal engine. So it can be done with software. It lags a little bit more than the hardware. So i'm i'm I have the hardware. So i'm using that so it's a little bit faster Do you have a beast of a computer to Do the unreal stuff? Um, do you need a nice gpu? Kind of yes and no, um You know back in the day, this was a beast of a computer. This computer is a good five six years old um, and it has a nvidia gtx era Graphics board. So today the the modern graphic boards are the rtx boards the 30 series rtx board. So The graphics board i have in there. It's it's very capable for for its age I think the graphics board is like three years old. It's a quadro 6000. So It definitely has a lot of processors. It has a lot of Memory on it, but it is not the latest greatest Rtx technology. It is not the the fastest Boards today. In fact, I think that like if someone were able to buy a $500 rtx 30 60 board um They would have every bit as much functionality as as I have probably more because I can't there's a technology called ray tracing that actually Moral authentically handles light and shadows and um, That doesn't work on the graphics board that I have And and you know I'm just using simulations, right? So another thing we could do an unreal engine by the way is I can change the path of the sun. So let's let's make it. It's a sunny day out. I'll bring a sun. I'll bring out the sun um, so long story short is really a A gaming capable like if you were to get a a typical Game capable Computer for home. It could be a laptop. It could be a desktop You know, maybe $1,500 price range for the whole computer Um, you'd be you'd be able to do everything that I'm doing here if you already had a decent desktop and and you didn't have a A good gpu then, you know, the tough thing is inventory these days You can't find anyone that has a rtx 30 60 board in stock but if you uh If you could and you bought that and it's like four or five hundred dollars for to buy one of those boards You'd be able to do all of this very easily and then uh Maybe what's it called? Uh, you I mean right now For some reason you're not able to get the 1080p in my streaming system here, but you can do this in 1080p quality Absolutely, your source could be like high quality, right? Yeah, so i'm actually out putting in 1080 resolution and the a10 mini is bringing it in as at a 1080p, but yes, unfortunately, I guess with this software it's not recognizing my 1080 feed right now and so what we're seeing is Uh, a 720 feed, but I couldn't my camera. I could output an I could output an ultra hd as well so if we you know if we had You know a Full ultra hd or 4k. I mean as far as unreal engine is concerned, you know The higher the resolution you'll need more gpu processing capability, but um, it's all very doable because I'm not the Very uh, what's called uh, do you zoom a lot every day a lot for all kinds of stuff? I don't use it that much But in my experience zoom is not very very high quality, right? Or do you connect on that in higher than 720p? or barely same thing, I mean I can I can feed You know, I'm configured to feed 1080p to anything um, my my experience with zoom is that they generally throttle the video So that you know hd for them is usually 1280 by 720 and um you know, they're just under such a high traffic load these days That uh, you know that helps keep their their pipes open, right? So um, I do know that there are enterprise accounts available through zoom where you can actually do 1080 video uh with that but uh, but I think that's like even My university has an enterprise account with zoom, uh, but the academic Accounts don't get that 1080p, but I believe there is a uh There's a price level at which enterprise zoom allows for full 1080p all right That that's awesome. I want to see more a 4k video conferencing going on and then you all set up actually your atem can really output a 4k to the the atem itself cannot but black the Unreal engine using the deck link board can so the deck link board that i'm using supports ultra hd so The atem mini is hd Let's see if I go back to a 10 mini here So so these are all hd devices, but there is another um version of this which is uh Where's a tim live production? So they have professional grade um Switchers that do support full ultra hd. So I have one of these in my studio. It works great So, you know, if I if I was if I had this in my home office um, I could stream in uh, ultra hd All right, because i'm i'm connected on you know this cam link 4k. I don't know what the quality is right now, but Uh, I just selected a 1080p on that one. I don't know if that's um Something that could be considered in your setup. Do you really need to have the switcher multi? Are you just getting one source through the atem right now? um The switcher does add a little bit of flexibility because then I can switch my stream To be directly the camera source The nice thing about the atem mini is it works Uh, you know independent of any software. So, you know, if uh If it's early in the morning and I have a meeting and I Haven't really fired up all of the hamster wheels and unreal engines not running yet I can still do a meeting with just the atem mini directly from the camera plugged into it I can also screen share. I could hook up my laptop to it really quick and uh and share a screen from there. So Um, so that's why I keep one of those on my desk. It's just really really handy and for the work that I generally do and for conferencing, um, I don't really have a high demand for Needing to stream out in ultra hd. So again, if if I were in that situation, I would actually Use there's a particular deck link board called a duo that actually has four Input outputs in all of them support Ultra hd. So I could actually have multiple inputs and multiple outputs Through that and and that would also allow for that streaming in ultra hd. So I'd probably go that route because uh, I think it was uh Something like more than a decade ago Maybe 12 13 14 years ago that I saw the first 4k video conferencing systems I think they were from cisco or something like that. Um at trade shows, you know, and I was always thinking yeah I really want to have that, you know, like uh, and I would think that this should be like the corona time should be the time when Everybody has a 4k or many like, I don't know more than 50 of old tv's in the world of 4k Maybe there's some kind of somebody should do something to just get that done and make it work and like have people Kind of like do stuff in 4k a little bit more because I tried to save a zoom call on my youtube channel And I could only export 360p. It was crazy. I was like, what's and I guess I've never gotten so many comments of people asking If this was filmed in 1997 It was yeah, it was funny A lot of times I agree. I agree. Um, so a lot of times I will record locally at full resolution and then Run, you know, a proper filing coding locally using the, you know, computer and then post that result to whatever Uh, you know, whether it's youtube or internal to a university, we have a video sharing solution um, and I'll You know export to there. Um, so that downloads would be using the full resolution Um, so that the streaming so I I agree when when I have a recorded zoom meeting Because I don't have a full 1080p HD account access Um, you know, the video windows are very small. They're actually standard definition like 640 by 480 or something like that and so, um It's it's good to be able to have those locally recorded high resolution files I kind of think that the the reason that there's the so compressed and stuff is that zoom is so popular right now and They just want to save money on bandwidth and they they put everybody down on three as low as they can To save uh because it's crazy how many people are using zoom right now Yeah, I mean, yeah, it's gonna strike a balance between saving money and just, you know, keeping the pipeline open, right? So if everyone was streaming ultra hd That would be, you know, many times More traffic for the same number of people So, you know, the infrastructure itself would have to support that the The my neighborhood internet access around my house would have to be able to support that on a sustained level From all the houses in the neighborhood in order for that to become particularly widespread That this this is so awesome. You are you're set up. Do you So do you do do you get on all these? calls with the students, um And so can you explain a bit? What do you do with the Drexel University? Sure, uh, so I run a program that's called vr and immersive media Um, I had run the animation of visual effects program for about half a dozen years before launching the immersive media program And we're in a department really that focuses on 3d graphics and using computers for Creating imagery and so we have a number of programs. There's a game design program that focuses on game design There's animation. There's visual effects and what we recognized as vr started to Take hold because of this, you know, it suddenly had really low prices and you could buy a vr headset from amazon or That the implementation of immersive media, which is not necessarily constrained by a rectangular screen Uh is something that's going to be growing and in demand and not just in the entertainment industry, but also in medicine health care engineering Uh, there's a variety of industries automotive aerospace are just are using it as a means of communication as a means of training and teaching So we created a program dedicated to that because the challenges are a little bit different than create just creating a game or Just creating a visual effect. We use a lot of the same tools. And so we built on the strengths of this 20 year Going, you know, our digital media department had been founded back in 1998. Yeah back in the 1900s So we had all this experience in teaching 3d modeling 3d texturing lighting We had experience in working with real-time game engines We had an infrastructure in place where we have a full, you know, vicon vantage motion capture stage We have a second motion capture stage. That's that's from opti track And all of these technologies were in place They had just up to that point been really focused on rectangular format screens And so the immersive media program was formed to kind of open that up to vr augmented reality You know immersive media could also be on large projection walls. It could be LED immersive domes where, you know, nobody wears a headset. You're just everyone is in one space and they're completely immersed um, you know virtual production is kind of a blend of all of those things because I'm I'm physically sitting in in a room and I'm I'm a flat video But my flat video is being put into this immersive complete space um as I as I sit here, so Um, this isn't a video game. It's kind of like a visual effect, but it's different than using nuke and you know shooting green screen and using, you know, a set of xr's and Doing a multi-layer compositor than waiting a couple hours for the render So the immersive media program really focuses on leveraging these real-time technologies in immersive formats And this is what we teach our students. So, um, you know, it's it's kind of a point of pride for me to share that This this, uh, environment that I mean was actually built by a sophomore from our program so One of the things that my university does Drexel has something called a co-op program where students are Basically said told, you know for six months no classes If you really want to take a class you can take a class But for six months you should focus on a full-time job Go out into industry do a full-time job for six months and then come back and take some more classes and then go do that again so Our students have the option of doing that three times over the course of their academic career And so this this sophomore I actually worked with our engineering college Hired the student, uh, and in a few weeks he basically had built this and and this is a sophomore student Not a graduate not an alumni Um, but just you know what he had learned from Coming into our program out of high school having not done much digital before Um within two years he was able to build, you know an environment like this um In Unreal Engine and and so that's kind of like the midpoint Of our program and then going from here students Basically work towards different specializations some of the most specialized in animation Character modeling rigging some will go into motion capture virtual production compositing and so that's kind of the overarching, uh structure of Our program and what we teach Do you have some alumni who who are doing some awesome stuff, um Out in the world like I saw something about the medallorian. Is it an alumni or? Yeah, I mean You know, of course with a program that's been around for 20 years that we have a lot of alumni that are out in industry today Um, that are quite successful. So there are several off the top I'm not really at liberty to name names, right, but um, there are several major motion capture stages, uh that for video game companies that Our alumni like run those stages And it's it's great seeing when an alumni gets into a position like that and then they're hiring You know a newer alumni So we've got a few different places in industry at this point where We've we've got alumni that are on the supervisory level and they're hiring our graduates as they pop out um Honestly, I have to I came out of the feature film industry And uh, I had done some motion motion capture based virtual production back in the the earlier mid 2000s Um, but this whole concept of using a game engine was really new to me when I started teaching at Drexel And it was like 2012 2013 when I was really first introduced to this Actually using a game engine and it was a student who introduced that to me and so the student actually um Was like a senior and then he became a graduate student while I Was was first starting at Drexel and his graduate thesis was to create a virtual camera system Using a ipad And a sony playstation and a pc and so he built you know What is kind of a precursor to what a lot of today's virtual production is Um using those consumer products and he used the unity game engine And that was really an eye-opener for me. So one of the most exciting things for me as an instructor is when I get to learn From my students. So, I mean he is an alumni. I mean he went on to work um at at disney so he worked with fevro on uh Jungle book and lion king. He worked on ready player one with spielberg and now um Now he's he's an executive uh in charge of virtual production at A very large major streaming service pretty much everybody has so um So yeah, I mean we have a lot of very very successful alumni that they take a variety of paths And for every single student that I could tell a story about like that We also have students that take Different paths into other industries. So we've had students get hired into aerospace and to defense Uh students that go into interiors and architecture And it's really exciting to see You know because we we really try to stay ahead of the technologies When we're teaching them and so we have students that you know because their full-time job is to learn And our full-time job is to teach them. So they spend four or five years learning these technologies often they will learn More than people that are already employed full-time in industry. So an architectural firm You know, they're great architects and they they have all their CAD systems and their bims and all the things that But they might not really know how to author virtual reality Uh or use a unreal engine game engine But our students do and so a lot of times our students will be hired as co-ops or uh into full-time jobs on on graduation And end up teaching their employers how to do these things because they learned how to do all these technologies that Those employers hadn't had the time to dig into yet So yeah, it's pretty good. It's it's kind of like uh Being an artist no to work in this field. Uh, it's like a good good way to get inspiration of like even if you let's say work in VR and uh You get all these ideas and you could be going out and doing all kinds of other jobs and you know, like a different person, right? Even if even if you're not making VR stuff day to day after because maybe it opens your mind to all kinds of Uh different ways of doing things, I guess Yeah, absolutely. And actually, um One of my mentors Alex Lindsay who runs the uh office hours sessions Uh coin, you know, basically equated it to Artists sins, you know, so you think back into the Renaissance and If you want a um mural painted on your ceiling or on your wall You know, you're you're hiring an artisan and there's definitely artistic aesthetics at play you have to understand design and anatomy and composition and all storytelling all these artistic nuances But at the same time you need to have a little bit of a scientific bent and and understand how How you know colors and paints interact with plaster interact with structure interact with stone and how to how to build something with structural integrity and and such and and so You know, it's definitely a blend of artistic as well as technological skill sets and so it definitely requires a a special kind of person That is, you know, not intimidated or bored by technical topics but also very creative and You know has that attention to detail to artistic design and and really how all of this interacts with Human perception. It's all about how we connect to one another as humans I mean, I think I've been to so many trade shows with you been talking about vr for many years And I thought it was a good Thing when the vr became arm part I do a lot of stuff that's about the arm chipsets, you know When it gets really affordable and you get to have a little thing And but but and also ar I do videos about ar companies that have smart glasses and all this stuff but it's often the question of Giants, you know, like google and apple or somebody Like maybe facebook I mean, of course facebook is actually kind of like doing more than the other two But it's up to them to put the billions of dollars on the table and say let's make it a huge thing that kind of like, you know Because in in this corona time, I would have loved to see Vr zoom calls, you know It would have been so cool if you could be in the room with a family member Who's in the other side of the country or the other side of the the world And you know, like feel like you're in the same room, you know, like there's all these things that I think are like They're not far like maybe one of the students could actually make it real But still it's not enough kind of to make it real. You also need to have Somebody manufacture a whole bunch of them so everybody can afford them and it should be cheap You know when it makes sense somehow And we're getting there. I mean, I think the thing that people most people don't realize is that this Journey, I mean if you just look at vr by itself This has been going on for half a century. The first vr system, you know is 1969 I mean that was before I was born. Was that an immediate lab? Uh, actually, I think it was a department of defense project, honestly So it wasn't it wasn't with Drexel. Um, but the You know, the technology itself has been around for a very long time. Um, it is generally, you know back Then it was it was a multimillion dollar project prices, you know got down into the, you know Less than 10 million dollars probably over the course of the 70s and augmented reality was being used again by the military for Things like the Apache helicopter Targeting things. I mean that's a lot of these technologies are born out of these Very high demanding. Um, and again the the advantage is the reason that these technologies were be were being used Was for training and for information transfer, right? So when a pilot gets a heads up display or a monocle display, they're getting computer information Into their eye for their brain to interpret and it's easier and better for that to be coming in Through their field of view as visual information that it is to look down Out of way, you know, it'll look at a dial or something like that And so that's really where the origin of all of this was and the same thing with vr You know, all of these immersive technologies were used for creating simulators because particularly when you get into, you know, the business of defense in the business of being first responders and safety officers, you know A mistake is a life and death mistake And you know, it's also a very very costly mistake Um, you know monetarily the equipment is very expensive If you crash an airplane, even if you're the only one in the airplane, that was a very, you know, there's There's the there's the human cost as well as the the fiscal cost So vr you can crash a plane and you don't die and um, you know, you hit reboot and you've got another plane So these are long proven technologies the economies of scale for consumer use Really came about because the tools needed for Effective vr Happened to be built into cell phones, you know, so cell phones You know are a billions of units product and when you're creating, you know A product that's selling at the tune of billions of units Then the cost of making one gets really inexpensive And so the sensors that detect motion the cameras the the screen Those are the pieces that enable virtual reality And so once those got down to a price point that was less than a thousand dollars Oh, well we can make vr headsets for less than a thousand dollars And then when you make, you know purpose built bespoke vr headsets now that you know, I think currently oculus Facebook has one that's like 300 bucks and it's a fully self-contained. You don't need to connect it to a computer It's full, you know, what we call six degrees of freedom. You can move as well as turn your head So and that's where we're at at a 50 year evolution So we still have a ways to go Absolutely. I think vr ar chat is is coming. I think microsoft just a few weeks ago released a vision video It's about two minutes long if you search youtube for microsoft mesh I think they they have a really good vision video showing how They see the direction of this going in and you know, there's other technologies that tie into this such as volumetric video cameras that Not only see, you know individual colors two-dimensionally in pixels but also perceive depth Because now that's kind of the basis for capturing holograms and things. So All of these things are coming together It's going to increment year by year and we're going to see more and more of it Yeah, because because these uh, I would say I'm i'm european, right? But uh, it's american Trillion dollar tech companies, you know, like microsoft, um, I would I would kind of like think what else would they be doing with all their money? Then I think this is perfect. They should they need to at least You know put one or two billion into trying to get these amazing awesome things out there And maybe uh, your alumnus would be part of the teams that actually make that like a mass production thing that changes the world Uh, it's not like you have to wear the vr headset on the street or ar like all 24 seven But i'm thinking it's more like a thing you take it out of the pocket you you might wear in the supermarket I want to see an augmented supermarket where I can like get Recommendation what things I should pick up in the supermarket that may be more healthy or more affordable or Like so because it's important to eat different things, but you know, uh, we need support a little bit and and I think there is The potential for all these amazing things and when when these smartphones are shipping billions and billions it's just One thing I was just wondering right now is This crazy amazing setup and there's a comment here The top-down view of your desk is so great. Neat work. Uh, how? Did you think there's any chance that this might run off hardware that's kind of like foam? So basically could it be like a little uh, smart webcam that has a built-in 3d accelerated gpu on arm chip They could kind of like render all this stuff or I would imagine it could scale to that. I mean Truthfully on real engine, you know, I if I you know Set this up correctly. I could literally package the project for tv os ios android, so It is possible with this tool to build for those platforms Again, as you mentioned the the big limitation is the graphics capabilities Which are not terrible. I mean, they're they're pretty good So Is it possible? Probably. Uh, I I haven't tried it yet. That would be great. It would be really, you know Again, some of it is physical, right? I have a camera that's sitting in front of me in the real world and it's like Five feet in front of me So, you know with a phone How would I capture myself again? I definitely would suggest taking a look at the Microsoft mesh vision video Because they do show what it might look like for a person to step into the field of view of a Volumetric camera and be seen by another person as a hologram So so the tools are coming Yes in theory and all of this could run on a cell phone sized device I think that um, there's There's a lot of integration still to be done One of the big things that we're waiting for in terms of enabling all of this is even just like a full 5g networks, you know full deployment and common accessibility to 5g cellular networks So that the bandwidth of that device's communications can support this, you know, i'm running multiple You know video feeds here over a network, but everything is on a gigabit ethernet I probably couldn't run with this kind of performance over even my home wi-fi Let alone over a You know a 3g cell phone connection So there's some incremental technologies in the meantime Um at the industrial level this stuff is already being used this way, right? So there are already wearables of you know augmented reality headsets or you know screens that they come out kind of like a little microphone in front of someone um and again anywhere that The cost of equipment or the you know the importance of safety when you've got you know injury life and death involved with a particular job The more information the more safety checks that you can do the more practice you can do The the safer everyone is and the more successful actual operations are Would you mind that tweaking a little bit your camera like your camera view and moving the the screen for example a little bit closer to you Or some different things you might want to do Like i'm looking at your webcam view, right? Yeah Okay, uh, so if I do the webcam view I can grab this camera And so yeah, I mean I have this camera currently programmed to always look at me So wherever I move it in the scene it'll always Look at me. So I mean that's possible. Um, but I could release that Lock and then um, and then I could move up and Show the whole room and now it's not locked onto me like a target tracker and I could Relock it and move around. So yeah, I mean again, all of this is happening live in real time Uh, do you think it will help if you somehow there was a 3d camera on you that could kind of like capture around you a little bit Uh, those technologies do exist. That's called uh volumetric capture definitely because you know as I go around to the side here You know, you could start to see that I'm flat a little bit You know and eventually I completely disappear. I've never been so thin in my entire life. I'm I'm way for thin um, so Uh, there are volumetric cameras that allow for that. Um, another thing that is possible is that A uh, that's routine part of virtual production is to have a physical camera that has a A spatial tracker on in fact, I have um a real sense camera here. Whoops. I should just get a close up here So this this little device is from intel. It's a real sense Uh camera. It's like 200 bucks And it is able to track its own position because there's it's got stereoscopic cameras as well as a inertial sensor And so if I mount this to A physical camera then I can move that physical camera through space and that physical movement could then be translated to The movement of the virtual camera and so the Real world is completely connected to the virtual world and it would actually look more Volumetric without the need for additional cameras so that as as the physical camera moved around me This virtual one would follow and so this is a core aspect of Virtual production particularly in the entertainment industry and that's what enables things like Fox sports has a show That they make for a nas car. It's called race hub. It's completely filmed on a green screen stage But they use unreal engine to fill out that stage with a full environment And they'll they'll you know have a race car Appear in the middle of the stage and they can explode that car out down to each individual bolt So they can explain and really High fidelity detail, you know exactly how each part of the car works and how that factored into a particular race and Also in production of shows like the Mandalorian You know a lot of the shots are produced by having these large led wall projection screens behind the talent So that instead of a green screen reflecting off of you know, this chrome armor You know this the armor is actually reflecting the environment from the actual scene So the the unreal engine scene is projected onto those walls or displayed on those walls and then And that's used so yeah all of these technologies work together and for those types of scenarios like the fox sports You know, they're using a camera tracking technology Um The motion capture stages that we have here the viton vantage and the opti track Are similar to what's used for uh, you know Things like Mandalorian Could you like just as an example just put the camera you have right now put like 50 centimeters or a meter back like virtually Just so we can see how that looks So I just have to click on that camera and Nice and a little bit higher Sure Awesome It's so cool to have all these these options there. I just wish my little video chatting solution had you in 1080p Yeah, sorry about that. Um, one of the other things that uh that this does fully simulate is the optics, right? So this camera is set, you know with a what's considered a wide aperture, right? So in photography if you have a wide aperture, let's light in But it also means that the focusing of the glass components of the lens is really important So with a wide aperture It's set to focus on me And then things that are behind me are a little bit out of focus And that I do that deliberately because you know, my physical camera might be a little bit out of focus And um, and it does have like a cinematic look to it But if I close that aperture the background behind me, uh gets sharper And so that's like just you would you would experience I could set this to f22 for example That's everything behind me should be really really sharp. And if I go back to my f1.5, it'll blur that background so Um, yeah, it simulates all those things all those camera things That's so awesome. So all your students in your class right now. They know how to do this You you chat with them every day like this Oh, yeah, I chat with them every day like this every every day, you know that we're we're in session I'm teaching courses in virtual production and and it's interesting um Some of them are not even entertainment industry. So the course I taught this past quarter and there's another one I'm teaching to next quarter. Um, but there's one that's focused on retail using virtual production In retail, how do you take the design the merchandising the brand story of a retail operation? And leverage immersive media virtual production for that like what what could you do if What could you do to the home shopping experience if this was the technology that that someone could use to shop with? Or what could you do to make a? uh location-based a brick-and-mortar store into a destination experience through the use of virtual production. So Um, so yeah, this is what I teach and I teach it under a lot of different settings, yeah My sister was uh, oh my camera is out of juice. I'll split the the battery My sister was a graphic designer on the the Ikea catalogue for three years And she actually told me that that a bunch of the furniture is just 3d, but it's so realistic And I'm thinking it'd be so awesome if people could Uh, like jump into a virtual Ikea, especially in this strange time I kind of like get a feeling what bed they want what sofa they want and like, uh, maybe put on a headset Uh, I don't know if you know, they might have something but probably not right as advanced as one would want them to have in in theory There would be little to no obstacle for them to bring their furniture into something like Unreal Engine My I have never worked with Ikea other than going and buying, you know, home tabletops and things like that from them, but um My understanding is that the vast majority of what's shown in the catalogue is actually computer rendered, you know So that you know artists took the CAD Files that of the actual furniture designs into a rendering tool and and create those scenes in the computer So since those things exist in the computer as models There would you know as long as they could be exported in the right file format They could be brought into Unreal Engine and Would support augmented reality and virtual reality experiences immersive experiences I seem to remember vaguely that there might be a AR app maybe for Android or iOS that allows you to kind of Preview, you know, you could hold your camera and like put furniture in place and in the room in front of you Yeah, yeah, they have a they have some kind of thing where you can just shake it on the phone and stuff But uh, sorry, I got this weird thing going on with my oh, that's interesting. Yeah Uh is um, what's called? Uh, yeah, but I mean there's so much potential out there and I would think that this corona time should just put everything on the next level And uh, have you seen any youtubers? You know all these youtubers who do live streams and shows and stuff do this cool You're like only Only at you at your university and yourself and your students know this trick yet Uh, no, I mean there's quite a few people that that understand these technologies and are putting them to use um There is I mean, there's a whole category of e-sports streaming e-casting right so that uh, since video games competitive video games have become a spectator sport Um, that there are folks that are you know at home calling the game doing the play by plays And they'll use tools like this to to create virtual settings for themselves um There there's actually a a really famous, uh, you know, internet famous, uh person who is uh she's I think her her digital persona is called code Miko and uh, the the human person who operates the digital persona is she goes by the name of the technician um, and there was a really great article written up about, uh, this really accomplished technical artist My understanding is all I know of her is from from the articles But that uh during covet that she she was you know, someone who had uh been you know working at a video game company and you know was Downsized basically as a part of covet and so she purchased a a motion capture suit and she streams on twitch as a digital character code Miko And uh, she's a you know, very popular because her in her stream. She is a hundred percent digital Her character is digital the room. She's in is digital and she'll interview real-world uh twitch and youtube personalities and you know, yeah, she you know her claim to fame is that uh, you know, if you Buy points with her, you know, you're you could get you know You could customize the shirt that she's wearing or I think one of her claims to fame Is that you could actually kill her if you pay for the right, you know enough you could kill her in the middle of her interview um But she's really pushing this technology and she's doing it all from home. So she's wearing a motion capture suit She's using a cell phone facing her face to capture her Facial movements and those are translated onto the digital character And so she has an entire, you know twitch stream of shows Uh based around that character and you know, so she an incredibly now granted I mean she was a coder, you know, she was in I believe in the game industry before this So she all of that knowledge she had so she's in a very accomplished artist and and uh coder You know the yes, absolutely The students that are in our programs learn these technologies And I expect to see more and more people using them soon and and that's part of again the idea behind this, um You know office hours labs in april is to Really help people get over that initial learning curve Because I think there's a lot of benefits for folks that we're able to leverage this To be able to you know use this for zoom or they're internet streaming So you should you should participate And and uh so that all of your streams come may Are in your own virtual environment and so then you can use that going forward Oh your microphone is muted. I see you. I see you. Yeah, sorry. Sorry. I keep forgetting to unmute myself I'm very much like an arm part Uh fanboy. So I I hope all this stuff can run on this m1 macbook error Uh, like the whole thing that'd be awesome. If somehow I could figure out how to do that That might be that might be the bottom end of what could run it, but there are performance tuning Maybe let's see. I'll need to try. Otherwise, uh, I'll tweet, uh, Tim Sweeney and ask him to update something Or what's it called, right? I'm joking a little bit But uh, but I can't imagine how awesome the zoom calls must be in your in your classes Like everybody is a 3d character or joining in like you're at your studio No, maybe I'm just joking. No, I mean it would be awesome if it was actually, I think personally I think the power is in the fact that Everyone else on the zoom call does not need any of the special knowledge or technology, right? So you and everyone on the stream kind of get to see this environment experience it Without needing any kind of special technology whatsoever. Uh, you're not using a VR headset So my students, you know, they join a zoom meeting with me just like they join any other zoom meeting They all look just like they normally do Uh, but my hope is that when They're in my class that they're getting a little bit of a different experience Then, you know, just seeing me sitting in front of a bookcase and um, you know, I think one of the things that we lost in the Uh progression of this pandemic is our access to our sense of place, right? So our pre pre-covid You know, we had auditoriums and gymnasiums and lecture halls and classrooms and labs and studios That we all worked at together and these Places were purpose built You know, a lecture hall is purpose built for a professor to perform and and for the students to To absorb and learn Um, and we lost access to that and so then every class looked like every other class every class For the student was in whatever room they were sitting in whether it was their bedroom or their dining room or kitchen Living room every class looked like it was the same and it was in the same room and every teacher that was presenting to them Is presenting from their home So I was really hoping to be able to Use the technologies like practice what I teach And uh and give a different experience When when we were connecting in in these classes and we also translated that to Events, um, you know every year We do a large screening for our animation Projects and and we usually have you know have a theater and we screen the shows and the students get to present And uh in june of 2020, you know, we couldn't do a physical event So, you know in the in the time between When things started shutting down for us it was march of 2020 um really in about eight weeks put together a uh a virtual award show animation festival stage And we actually conducted the entire animation festival over youtube on a virtual stage And so the students got to have a special experience Uh got to be on stage so to speak through a zoom meeting and uh, and so that was a lot of fun So there's a lot of value to these tools So is it right now on youtube? Uh, yeah, I think if you were to search Drexel animation festival 2020 Uh, and it would come up and it starts like I don't know 11 It's like I forget how yeah, I see it there. It's pretty deep in it's pretty deep into the video before it actually starts Um Yeah, it's like a nice a minute minute or so hour So you start to live in minutes in yeah, the students do these uh 3d animations Yes, yep. Yeah, so you could see last year's Uh capstone senior animation projects there Um, there was a visual effects project and um, yeah And so, you know, we put together the stage and the students were able to have a really special event without the need to To to bring everybody into one room, which we couldn't do nice Uh, that's that's awesome Uh, yeah, there's there's there's so much demand for this kind of stuff, right the whole world once Once you're students, right? That's my hope. Yeah Yeah Yeah, it's just uh, the the limit is the imagination and the billions from the the big companies when it's about something that has to be mass market But otherwise there's so much 3d content, 3d animations I don't know if they get more people watching the The pixar movies than the regular movies, but at least video games is big much bigger than hollywood Right. I mean as I saw in billions in money They're they're in billions. Yeah, and the the whole hollywood model is in flux right now. I mean the game The game revenue model, you know, didn't Change at all. In fact, you know With the pandemic was was probably good for the game industry because more people are at home people were Like, all right, I guess I'll buy a good game system and buy more games. Um I know my daughter is on fortnight pretty much every day and I need more v bucks Um, but you know, hollywood, you know the whole model of targeting In-place theaters with large audiences, you know is has to be transformed and and they're they're working their way through that so It's definitely going to be interesting to see how things develop Nice, so thanks a lot. Thanks for showing your your awesome awesome setup Um, uh, thanks so much for having me and I hope you inspire with your I'll link to the open hours down there It's really amazing that um As far as I understand Alex Lindsay. I was watching a little bit on a twit, um mac book show once in a while But then I heard that the open hours kind of started a year ago and I guess it's every single day Kind of like six in the morning on the pacific time or something like that Or nine nine in the morning. Yeah, I guess not six So for for me. Well, no, no, it's for me on the east coast new york time It um, you know the the door is open at 9 a.m. So yes on pacific coast It's it's 6 a.m. And that's that for there's basically the way Alex runs it is if if you are interested on being on the panel You need to be there By you know before 6 40 because that's when we do mic checks and video checks and things like that um, and then the actual official show starts 10 a.m east coast time 7 a.m pacific and That's where it's it's q&a. I mean it's this panelist panel group of uh Different experts from all over the world and it's live streamed on youtube It's live streamed on youtube. It's it's uh open, you know, there's a registration link In the office hours youtube stream to you could connect to it via zoom um, one of the things that alex really has mastered is a He has a custom built system that handles the q&a so that um, rather than just flying by questions in a chat stream Once a question is entered into this q&a system mukana. I think they call it, right? Yeah, they call it mukana and uh It allows audience members to vote up vote questions in real time so that questions that the audience is interested in get voted up and Then uh the folks that are on the panel see that oh well, there's a lot of audience members that would like to know about this question So let's answer that one and and so that goes on every single day and then usually they'll focus there'll be a A focused topic after the q&a session and so that might be bringing in Uh expert, you know a targeted expert on a particular subject a software solution or even a technique I mean they they delve into photography and to audio Streaming, you know the logistics of doing a video production, you know, how do we get everything On an airplane. How do we get everything, you know loaded in and loaded out? How do you work with? Clients, how do you handle communications? These are just some of the topics that have been explored And so um, yeah, it's it's a really great dynamic group All right, that's that's awesome. Uh, so so thanks a lot for For for showing off and so i'll put the link to the open hours right down there and uh, it'll be recorded I guess isn't it is going to be the second hour of each of those saturdays So those saturdays the unreal engine virtual production is going to be aimed at uh one p.m Eastern time. It'll be 10 a.m. Pacific time. That's when those sessions will start and they'll run like an hour and a half Two hours each one of those saturdays Nice and so people can join those or they can uh, they can they can try to become a student at your university, right? Oh, yeah Yeah, I mean if anyone knows folks that are in high school that they think oh, yeah, these You know these kids need to learn this stuff Uh, they should definitely be looking into Drexel University And uh our immersive media program And I mean a lot of people are interested in the game design program or the animation visual effects I mean we have I'm the university is a large research university But I'm in the westfall college of media art and design and so we really focus On you know, we're this kind of wildly creative design community And then we interface with the rest of the research university So I I love getting to go to the natural history museum or working with the engineering college or our We have a nursing college health care. So it's a lot of fun. It's a great place to be It'd be nice if if your setup could run off a playstation Because you know, you have all these these college guys, uh, you know, there might be like, uh, let's say, um addicted to playing video games and then Maybe somebody could suggest and say hey Why don't you go and take your passion and to and actually do it like make make these games and make like And and run this thing off a place or an xbox I think I got how to do that That's definitely a thought that occurred to me that it would be great to I mean on real engine You can build for a playstation. You can build for xbox So wouldn't it be great if this was built into a device like that? So it's like a home appliance and you could have a camera over your tv And you know, maybe a piece of green screen behind you and be able to do all of this With your game controller, you know in your living room Um Technologically it should be doable I don't I don't know what the hurdles are to get there Awesome. All right. Thanks a lot. So I hope this video brings a couple or three people over To to uh, or maybe more, um to join Uh, but there's maybe a limit. I guess how many join with the camera But you don't have to join with the camera You just you can join in the background and just listen right people can do that if they want Absolutely. Mm-hmm. Oh, they can just watch it on youtube On demand forever. Yeah It's definitely best to connect via zoom and mukana because then you can ask questions and The power of these lab sessions is the fact that For this brief little bit of time You're sitting in a space with Other people who are learning all at once And so other people might ask questions that you might not have thought of or you might think of a question that other people haven't thought of and It's it's incredibly useful. Uh, you know, there's sessions running right now office hours are working on building out raspberry pi projects And so everyone's just you know working on raspberry pies together and when someone says like I can't get this thing to fit You know someone else says Oh, you need to turn it around this way and the person's there like, you know That might have been another five ten minutes worth of internet searching to figure out that. Oh, I just need to turn it this way But someone else just spotted it So, um really looking forward to it. I think it's going to be a really unique opportunity Yeah, I was trying to say that actually the The open hours, um are It's an interesting concept as far as I understand Alex linsley has been like running the whole Like when uh, uh, president obama was on the google hangouts and all these kind of things, you know, like as far as I understand I'm not sure if it's exactly that project, but a whole bunch of live streaming things over the past decade And for some reason they thought hey, let's just share all our knowledge and there's all these great like amazing experts on the show Like from around the world and sharing their expertise and how to live stream how to connect all these things And it's every single day forever Two hours is crazy. Yeah. Yeah, I mean Alex has been doing this for a long time. I mean he uh, I met him before you know High bandwidth internet was a common thing at home Uh today, you know, we've got broadband coming in via cable or even fiber optic to the house And when I remember that when I first met him, I was just getting into visual effects for future films And he was talking about you know In a few years, this is coming. There's going to be everyone's home. It's going to have broadband internet There's you know, companies are going to have fiber optic It goes right to the house and when that happens Anyone has access to these tools, you know, he saw I was I was lucky in that I was getting into the film industry at a time that it was actually moving away from film and so If I was learning digital tools I could learn every bit as much about those digital tools as someone who had been in the industry for two decades because It was new to everybody And so um, it worked out really well for me to get in and then to have that the insights that alex was sharing about You know this broadband internet thing means that you could work on Films and you could stay in philadelphia. It's like I want to do that. That sounds good And uh, and that's exactly where things have moved and now, you know There's film production being done all over the world and a single film will be worked on in India and up and down the pacific coastlines as well as Uh, you know in canada and the us and england, you know one film will be a global enterprise and um You know, he saw the value of this as not only a production tool for entertainment, but also just as a communication tool and as a way of Being able to empower Um communities that that are that we're struggling. So you know in Throughout africa, for example, there are nations who have tremendous human capital, you know skilled artisans incredibly smart folks Where the only natural resource they needed was internet and that was coming and that is coming, you know And that is there now today now that's there And so I heard that the nigeria is is producing more movies in hollywood And they're putting all on youtube Yeah, yeah, and so there are uh, you know There are operations there that and and it's not like it's competitive with the you know the hollywood operations it's just like okay now they can produce local content and um and be part of the global conversation and so um He's always been Educationally bent that's you know, I was fortunate enough to to meet him when I was you know relatively new to the industry and so I was able to to learn a lot from him um, and uh, you know, he's always been open because The other thing about these industries is that one of the constraining factors Often is having enough skilled people So, you know being able to Share that information and get more and more people involved and more and more people Uh versed in the tool set just gives more and more headroom for growth of the uh, You know industry as a whole There's just one comment if I if you don't mind, uh Rory is writing web gl web vr is making steady progress too Like I think right now we're using web rtc to do this video chat and it's all web web browser based and i'm i'm super Amazed by these it's like stream yard. This is melon app and uh, it's really impressive what's possible to be done But uh, maybe more and more stuff is going to happen in the web browser and become this industry standard And it'd be awesome if we could like Uh with some kind of green screen or maybe you know like kind of like look like we're sitting next to each other instead of having these you know like, uh these boxes Where it's like Like bringing people together and uh, you know, I used to go to up to 15 trade shows in the year around the world and they're all virtual only and I think it's been uh, not really working out for For them, let's say let's say it honestly like it's not really they're not really like the ones that I usually attend like CES mobile world congress ifa The embedded world all these kind of trade shows they are supposedly trying to do online virtual events, but Like they're totally missing the boat. They're missing the like, I don't know like I don't know what they're waiting for but somebody needs to go and teach them what what to do and I think what? Oh, I'm disconnected. Oh, maybe I'm still here. I can somebody like you know, virtual events They're just right there. Let's let's do it the right way. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, so uh, you know, one of the big values of Working with something like Unreal Engine is that it can deploy and once you've built something in um one Once once you've built something once you can use it over and over again different ways, right? So we were talking about deploying on a playstation or xbox or mac or pc One of the modes of deployment is via web gl and we've actually For you know, a lot of the work that we've been doing with our engineering college has been to create, you know, virtual learning environments for the Engineering school and so we've been able to build Experiences in Unreal Engine And then deploy those as web pages so that students can just open in a browser and and look at a lab setup Full disclosure. We actually exported what we built in Unreal over to unity and then use unity to deploy over web gl But you know, all of these tool sets work together and once we built something one time We can use it in a lot of different modes Yeah, I think the definitely the the trade show conference industry is Trying to find their way. I mean, obviously this has been an industry that's well entrenched for Like a hundred years, you know There have been over a hundred years There have been conventions going on that are always about traveling to one location and being all together and Talking to one another in a room today. If you have, you know plural tens of thousands of people going to a conference um You know that would involve all the jet fuel of all those tens of thousands of people to get to one city being burned in the atmosphere and and so there's already A little bit of a motivation to move away from that and then when you get something like a pandemic that says Yeah, we can't put that many people in one room at the same time. Um, there's this technology that's here but I think a lot of the initial like Instinctive reaction is to well, let's just we could recreate what it looked like to be in the conference hall digitally and that really doesn't work. It's You need to take a blend of what was the real environment like and then what can we do Digitally that goes beyond that, you know, so when when I'm looking at building Teaching and learning environments through virtual production. It's not simply how do I recreate what we did in person It's more about how can I create something that's better? than we did in person And so it's very hard to take a large established, you know centuries Centuries old industry and say oh in the next year you need to do that completely differently So they're working their way through it and um, I'm sure there are a lot of great ideas out there Um, there's one solution that I came across just while I was working on the idea of getting, um, You know, unreal live video working on a mac, but there's a I know nothing about this company beyond I've landed on their website and it's called agora IO But they offer basically kind of a zoom like video audio communication service But as an sdk so You know their servers facilitate the the video audio transfer, but They have a plug-in for unreal engine, right? So we could we could conduct this very much like you Described where if you had your camera in a green screen and I have my camera in a green screen Both those videos could go into an unreal engine environment and um And we could be keyed out and we could look like we're sitting at two desks across from one another Um, so again other than landing on the website. I don't know anything about this company That's the full disclosure, but I'm really intrigued by it It's definitely one of those things that I have on my list like oh I need to look into this I think the the tools are here right and the the cameras are here the computers are there the playstations the phones But sometimes is the killer app is missing And maybe it's like a little bit like the phones were there for a decade and suddenly uber arrived and was like Oh my god, this is awesome an airbnb arrived and just like you know But maybe the killer apps just need to be made and even though I'm really looking forward to go back to real trade shows Of course in the society opening I do think the internet needs to be like a central piece of networking I mean it is of course, but uh, you know like the like the events could be hybrid or Like a bunch of other stuff that are potentially just about to be there. Or maybe they are there, but I just don't know Uh, yeah It's it's going to take some time. You know, I mean it It doesn't get built in a day And and we're still trying to get folks skilled up in the tools of of the building part. So, uh It's definitely going to be a really interesting, you know, upcoming decade of of progress All right. So thanks. Thanks. Thanks a lot for Doing a feature film on my youtube channel. It's like one hour and 26 minutes. Thanks for having me That's a lot of fun and you had great questions. Thanks. Thanks for having me Thanks a lot and thanks everybody for watching and everybody can go check out how to do this Uh, so everybody can upgrade and and look awesome on the interwebs Look awesome on their youtube's Sounds all right. Thanks a lot. All right. Thanks for having me