[David Huppert] 12:01:35 Here we are. Welcome, everybody, to the third [David Huppert] 12:01:40 Thursday, our favorite time of the month. [David Huppert] 12:01:43 When we gather to talk about technology, emerging platforms. [David Huppert] 12:01:48 public media [David Huppert] 12:01:50 projects that have [David Huppert] 12:01:53 seeing the light of day, projects that are emerging, projects that have [David Huppert] 12:01:58 died quietly on the vine and help each other out by brainstorming and talking about things that are going on at all of our shops. [David Huppert] 12:02:06 As always, much appreciation to public media innovators [David Huppert] 12:02:12 co- [David Huppert] 12:02:14 I guess, I don't know. What do we call ourselves co-founders um [David Huppert] 12:02:18 Co-chairs, Chad Davis from Nebraska, Amber Samdahl from [David Huppert] 12:02:23 Wisconsin, and I am David Huppert from North Carolina. So it's a pleasure to be here on the screen joining us right now, and I'll do an intro later, but this is Jason Cooper, also in the state of North Carolina. [David Huppert] 12:02:36 He's head of digital at Horizon, and we'll get to him in just a quick minute. So I just wanted you to know who's on the screen. [Jason Cooper] 12:02:37 Have it? [David Huppert] 12:02:43 Thank you, everyone, for being here. We're excited today to talk about [David Huppert] 12:02:49 games to talk about education use cases for games, to talk about specific applications in Fortnite versus Unity, where those live. [David Huppert] 12:02:58 We're going to try to cover a lot of ground. We're going to talk about why games, and then we're going to talk about how games. [David Huppert] 12:03:04 And this is a continuation of last week's webinar, or sorry, last month's webinar where we had Zoe Bell from the New York Times talk about their approach to games. [David Huppert] 12:03:14 And which is on the heels of Amber's session at NIDA, [David Huppert] 12:03:18 Which was also about games. So the theme here is [David Huppert] 12:03:23 We think that games are important. [David Huppert] 12:03:25 We think that is a large part of our future in public media hinges on being in the game space. [David Huppert] 12:03:32 look at PBS Kids. They are invested very heavily in games. They see the light and they're doing awesome work. [David Huppert] 12:03:38 We think there's also potential for other audiences, more adult audiences, more teen audiences to engage with our content and services via games. [David Huppert] 12:03:47 But it's really hard to think about where to start and how to do that since it's so far from a lot of our domain expertise of things that we've been doing at stations all these years. [David Huppert] 12:03:56 So with that in mind, we thought we would dedicate a few sessions to games starting at Nita, going with the New York Times, and then talking to Jason. [David Huppert] 12:04:03 who's got expertise coming from production and education world and now applying that into [David Huppert] 12:04:10 the game space as well. [David Huppert] 12:04:14 As always, if you've got questions, please hit that up in the chat. Let us know. We'll be monitoring the chat throughout. [David Huppert] 12:04:22 Amber is going to put some resources in there about this PLC. [David Huppert] 12:04:25 Thank you to Nita for hosting this again. [David Huppert] 12:04:29 And so we'll have resources there, questions there. We'll try to get to throughout the chat. Please feel free to use that. [David Huppert] 12:04:35 And just as a preview, a little bit later on in this webinar, we're going to hand it over to some of our colleagues [David Huppert] 12:04:43 at Nebraska. [David Huppert] 12:04:45 public media who are going to talk about their project called Expedition Nebraska [David Huppert] 12:04:50 Which I think was built in Unity and now they're exploring how to take that into Unreal and what that means from a mechanic standpoint, an audience standpoint, a technical standpoint. [David Huppert] 12:05:00 And we're going to open it up so you'll get to see a little bit of that. And then we'll get Jason to weigh in on some things that they might want to consider. [David Huppert] 12:05:08 And hopefully that'll inspire you to feel like you can play in this space as well. [David Huppert] 12:05:13 So chat is open. [David Huppert] 12:05:15 Nebraska on standby. [David Huppert] 12:05:18 Which brings us to Jason. So Jason, I'm going to just [David Huppert] 12:05:22 let you introduce yourself if you don't mind and just tee you up by saying also with full disclosure that I've known Jason for several years and had the pleasure of working with him on a project that we did at PBS North Carolina, which was to launch our first AR app called Explore North Carolina, which was really cool. And in that process, I've gotten to learn a little bit more about Jason and what he does with his shop, Horizon, here in Durham. [Jason Cooper] 12:05:25 Sure. [David Huppert] 12:05:45 And they do great work for education and commercial sectors. [David Huppert] 12:05:49 And just really inspired by the work that they do in their shop and really look forward to learning more today and growing [David Huppert] 12:05:56 to do doing even more games in the future. So Jason, would you mind taking a minute just to sort of introduce yourself, tell folks a little bit about [David Huppert] 12:06:03 your background and where you are today with uh [David Huppert] 12:06:08 production and gaming. [Jason Cooper] 12:06:10 Sure, yeah. Jason Cooper, the Chief Digital Officer at Horizon Production. Horizon's been around a very long time, over 40 years. [Jason Cooper] 12:06:21 started out as traditional video production [Jason Cooper] 12:06:24 Donna Mitchell, who started it, was a UNC grad, and I got introduced to her and I was working and teaching at UNC at the time in interactive education. [Jason Cooper] 12:06:35 We built one of the first [Jason Cooper] 12:06:39 ebooks, I guess. It was a fully animated and interactive course [Jason Cooper] 12:06:44 on genomics in the early 2000s in flash which i still miss dearly. I love flash for anybody out there who is a [Jason Cooper] 12:06:52 come up in that time. But yeah, coming from the [Jason Cooper] 12:06:55 journalism side and working at the News Observer here in Raleigh was my first gig outside of college, redesigned the online site and [Jason Cooper] 12:07:06 build a bunch of interactive and educational stuff there. [Jason Cooper] 12:07:10 and just [Jason Cooper] 12:07:12 have constantly evolved in whatever new technology has come out, tried to apply that. [Jason Cooper] 12:07:20 to serious applications or education or storytelling. [Jason Cooper] 12:07:25 Whatever the case may be. And so always looking for whatever the new magic is and then finding a cool way to apply that to great problems. [Jason Cooper] 12:07:33 It has led and opened some interesting doors. Most recently, I think why [Jason Cooper] 12:07:39 David asked me to kind of chime in here. We got into building experience on top of the Fortnite platform. So glad to be here, happy to share whatever insight and to be a resource. If you're on here. [Jason Cooper] 12:07:53 And, you know, you need to reach out and have questions after this, please feel free because that's probably my favorite thing about all this. It's like. [Jason Cooper] 12:08:01 Even David, I think when we started [Jason Cooper] 12:08:04 building stuff on top of Fortnite and making these kind of experiences i was like hey [Jason Cooper] 12:08:09 You know, look at this Wright Brothers thing we can make like and bring the airplane in. You can talk to them, make a game. So here we are. [David Huppert] 12:08:12 Mm-hmm. [David Huppert] 12:08:17 Yeah, it's really cool and um [David Huppert] 12:08:19 I also want to just add that [David Huppert] 12:08:22 Jason, he mentioned getting his start when he was working at UNC and in this space. [David Huppert] 12:08:30 And that spirit of working in education nonprofit has definitely stayed true to the mission of Horizon, even though they're [David Huppert] 12:08:41 sort of outside production company, they still do a ton of work with education agencies and nonprofits and state agencies [David Huppert] 12:08:48 And so I just love the fact that one day Jason could be working on a project for [David Huppert] 12:08:54 a Fortune 500 client. And then the next day working on a project like for us and bringing all of that knowledge and workflow and experience that goes into the Fortune 500 world back into the education world. So it's like a great benefit for us to work with a partner like Horizon, who's not just working on university and public media projects, but also working in the private sector. [Jason Cooper] 12:09:17 Yep. [David Huppert] 12:09:17 So they tend to also cut us a little bit of a break, I think, on prices because they love the work. [David Huppert] 12:09:22 I don't know why they're mission driven something. I don't know. They love it. So don't tell them I said that, but I'm sure you could work. [Jason Cooper] 12:09:26 Okay. [Jason Cooper] 12:09:28 Well, I think a lot of it too is, you know, we love public television, right? Like Coming Horizon has been around a long time, documentary film is still a big part of what we do and the partnerships [David Huppert] 12:09:37 Yeah. [Jason Cooper] 12:09:41 You know, with folks what used to be UNC TV and the PBS NC and all those things [David Huppert] 12:09:45 Yeah. [Jason Cooper] 12:09:48 It's just about liking the story piece, but then finding fun ways to get people to actually interact or consume [David Huppert] 12:09:57 Oh, cool. [Jason Cooper] 12:09:57 those stories as well. Yeah. [David Huppert] 12:10:00 Well, let's start off, by the way, a little breaking news. I think we got the green light on Fort Macon, which I'll come back to you offline about how to sync those projects together for later. But yeah, let's just start real, like start at the beginning. So we're talking about games. [Jason Cooper] 12:10:07 All right. [Jason Cooper] 12:10:15 Sure. [David Huppert] 12:10:16 In your opinion. [David Huppert] 12:10:18 Game-based learning [David Huppert] 12:10:20 what's a good use case for that and why? [Jason Cooper] 12:10:27 Man. [Jason Cooper] 12:10:29 Where is there not a good one? I guess let me start here then okay so um [David Huppert] 12:10:34 Okay. [Jason Cooper] 12:10:38 We use the Unreal Engine Epic headquarters is down the street. We're very heavy in uh building [Jason Cooper] 12:10:45 for immersive VR and AR and that kind of thing and when [Jason Cooper] 12:10:48 They came out with their product last year, Unreal Editor for Fortnite, which is what lets you build on top of [Jason Cooper] 12:10:57 of the Fortnite platform. [Jason Cooper] 12:11:00 Our conversation at lunch one day at the office is, man, everyone comes in here and says. [Jason Cooper] 12:11:07 make my training more fun, make our educational content more interesting. That is the problem a lot of people are trying to solve, like engagement, those kind of things. And it was like, well, what if we could tell people [Jason Cooper] 12:11:20 we can build on top of the most popular gaming platform in the world. And that has just turned into [Jason Cooper] 12:11:28 so many different things, right? It's not even just education and training. It's like social engagement, like HR is very interested in it from getting large groups of people together and interacting and not having to be in the same space and just all these other [Jason Cooper] 12:11:44 things that games [Jason Cooper] 12:11:48 open up the opportunity for. [Jason Cooper] 12:11:51 And so that's really i think [Jason Cooper] 12:11:54 the core of how we even tried to adapt something like Fortnite. And we'd already been doing that, you know, making things more interesting which is [Jason Cooper] 12:12:03 interactives like we mentioned we mentioned flash which i thought was a great [David Huppert] 12:12:08 Yeah. [Jason Cooper] 12:12:09 This was kind of the evolution of that yeah [David Huppert] 12:12:12 For those of us on the call, myself included, who are still trying to learn the environment about what you're talking about, can you speak to just the walled off nature and how to access these things [Jason Cooper] 12:12:16 Okay. [Jason Cooper] 12:12:20 Sure. [David Huppert] 12:12:27 In Fortnite uh these [David Huppert] 12:12:29 what Fortnite is, maybe just start like that. People know games are built by different game engines. Certain games are available where and how and what that means when you're saying [Jason Cooper] 12:12:32 Sure. [David Huppert] 12:12:41 built in Fortnite, what that means, if you don't mind. [Jason Cooper] 12:12:44 Yeah, sure. [Jason Cooper] 12:12:46 So traditionally, when we would build a gaming experience or something like what we're describing, like Fortnite, right? We would use a game engine [Jason Cooper] 12:12:58 probably two of the more popular ones that folks on here have heard of are Unity and the Unreal Engine. [Jason Cooper] 12:13:06 There are certainly many others, but those are kind of the two dominant ones in the market. [Jason Cooper] 12:13:13 And, uh. [Jason Cooper] 12:13:15 We got into using game engines. [Jason Cooper] 12:13:19 to build interactive 3D product demos for the web, right? It's like [Jason Cooper] 12:13:24 the game piece is almost becoming a confusing term, right? Because it's [David Huppert] 12:13:29 Mm-hmm. [Jason Cooper] 12:13:30 you can just build so many things with the real-time technology. [Jason Cooper] 12:13:34 And then obviously there are mobile games, right? Just for traditional phone, which you also build from the game engines [Jason Cooper] 12:13:42 But Fortnite in particular, you know, started out as a traditional game and then the Battle Royale kind of genre took off. [Jason Cooper] 12:13:52 They hit gold, Epic Games did by applying that genre to fortnite. [David Huppert] 12:13:55 Yeah. [Jason Cooper] 12:13:59 And it took off from there. But the back end infrastructure of that is the real magic so [Jason Cooper] 12:14:05 hundreds and thousands, millions even sometimes, right, of people [Jason Cooper] 12:14:10 in these virtual worlds. [Jason Cooper] 12:14:12 at the same time that can be accessed [Jason Cooper] 12:14:17 through the browser, through consoles, through phones. [Jason Cooper] 12:14:23 Tim Sweeney, who is the founder of Epic Games, his vision is that Fortnite really is the platform for the big N-word metaverse that everybody uses all the time. [Jason Cooper] 12:14:34 I think he's… [Jason Cooper] 12:14:35 technically trying to solve some of the underlying issues to actually make that a reality through their Fortnite platform. [Jason Cooper] 12:14:43 And so accessing games, they have essentially a storefront [David Huppert] 12:14:43 Mm-hmm. [Jason Cooper] 12:14:48 if you will, where you can build experiences that can be accessed directly through [Jason Cooper] 12:14:54 the Fortnite storefront and then you just click into different experiences and you can link those together. [Jason Cooper] 12:15:01 digital ecosystems of ecosystems [Jason Cooper] 12:15:03 skins and games and you can get paid for the experiences based on views uh [David Huppert] 12:15:09 Okay. [Jason Cooper] 12:15:10 kind of keep going on down the list of all the things on the back end but [Jason Cooper] 12:15:15 That's just one feature of Fortnite, I guess. [David Huppert] 12:15:19 Yeah, it seems like you, like, I think you hit the nail on the head by saying that [David Huppert] 12:15:23 the word games is people [David Huppert] 12:15:26 have a lot of different sort of definitions or meanings attached to that or, you know, when they hear that word [David Huppert] 12:15:34 it sort of connotes a lot of different things, but it does mean a lot of things these days. It's not just single player shoot them or quest or something. It's also a demo and an experience. [Jason Cooper] 12:15:43 Right. [David Huppert] 12:15:46 I don't know if there's an answer to this, but the more I learn about [David Huppert] 12:15:51 games, not just Fortnite and Unreal or, you know, and Unity, but just even the New York Times games like there's [David Huppert] 12:15:59 If you're in it, you can sort of maybe get a sense of scale about how widespread it is, not just in this country, but around the world. [David Huppert] 12:16:09 But even then it's like daunting and you don't fully see the full scope of it. But if you're a gamer. [David Huppert] 12:16:14 Or maybe if you play Wordle and that's it or something like that. [Jason Cooper] 12:16:18 Yeah. [David Huppert] 12:16:18 It is mad. I mean, it's massive. Amber gave some stats last week. I can't forget what they were, Amber, about like how many billions and times bigger than the movie industry it is. It's like. [Jason Cooper] 12:16:26 oh yeah like so it dwarfs the movie industry yeah yeah [David Huppert] 12:16:29 Yeah, it's just massive. Okay. Anyway, so it's clearly a thing. [Jason Cooper] 12:16:34 Sure. [David Huppert] 12:16:34 It's clearly a thing that you all are working on pretty extensively and doing really cool work. [David Huppert] 12:16:40 I have some other things. [David Huppert] 12:16:43 to talk about, but I think really, oh yeah thank you. 190 million Americans. Yeah, amazing. I mean. [David Huppert] 12:16:51 I hope they all get out to vote. If those that are over 18. [David Huppert] 12:16:56 So if you have… [David Huppert] 12:16:58 Ken, why don't you spin up a couple examples first, and then we'll sort of talk through it as we're looking at examples, because you've been working on a few cool things, also integrating a little bit of AI into these games. And I think instead of just talking about it for the next 20 minutes and then showing, let's just maybe skip ahead and you can pull up some examples and then we'll talk as you're demoing them. [Jason Cooper] 12:17:19 Okay, let's see. [Jason Cooper] 12:17:23 Share. [Jason Cooper] 12:17:30 Let's see if that works. [David Huppert] 12:17:32 Cool. Yeah, we're in. [Jason Cooper] 12:17:35 Okay, great. [Jason Cooper] 12:17:39 Hopefully I've got volume, but this just going to show this just because it was one of the early examples that we just threw together to try and get folks to [Jason Cooper] 12:17:49 wrap their head around [Jason Cooper] 12:17:51 using something like Fortnite, but for educational purposes so [Jason Cooper] 12:17:59 Wright Brothers prototype was one of the things i think we were [Jason Cooper] 12:18:02 working on a project at the time, see if I can get some volume. [Jason Cooper] 12:18:08 working on this. Can folks hear that? [Jason Cooper] 12:18:11 together with my brother Wilbur [Jason Cooper] 12:18:13 I have just finished working on this new motorized airplane prototype. [Jason Cooper] 12:18:17 Could you help us test it? [David Huppert] 12:18:19 It's a little low, but I could hear it. If there's any way to boost it on your end, I'm not sure. [Jason Cooper] 12:18:24 I don't see a way, actually, but that's okay. Just the thing is like once you have any of these assets in 3D, right? The plane, that kind of thing, just that [Jason Cooper] 12:18:37 ability to almost like drag and drop it in, pull in some characters um [Jason Cooper] 12:18:44 They've got some automated lip syncing stuff, right? So you're dropping in audio and just [Jason Cooper] 12:18:50 The real thing that we were kind of even trying to pitch as we were talking to some of our existing clients about it was. [Jason Cooper] 12:18:57 Look, the amount of budget it would take for us to build [Jason Cooper] 12:19:03 a truly interactive thing where people could be in these experiences multiplayer. We could do question and answer all these things it's like [Jason Cooper] 12:19:11 Yeah, this would be a six figure up [Jason Cooper] 12:19:14 kind of investment to make this thing [Jason Cooper] 12:19:17 if we're building it on top of UEFN or the Fortnite platform. [Jason Cooper] 12:19:22 you know we're talking about one fifth of the budget, right? I mean, just significant efficiencies on being able to throw little demos or something like this together. [David Huppert] 12:19:26 Okay. [David Huppert] 12:19:32 Because you can use the existing artifacts that are in the library. [Jason Cooper] 12:19:37 Yeah, worlds there's so many things to pull from and the ability to just drag and drop in all the tough stuff about [Jason Cooper] 12:19:44 you know control or player control [Jason Cooper] 12:19:47 Live syncing across [Jason Cooper] 12:19:50 different kinds of all the things just to solve so many of the problems you would be dealing with on trying to stand something like this up. [Jason Cooper] 12:20:01 throw another one on here and just kind of let it run in the background [Jason Cooper] 12:20:05 So the ability to kind of create these [Jason Cooper] 12:20:09 really complex worlds. This is actually something we built. And see, I don't think many people would consider this but [Jason Cooper] 12:20:18 This is an island that we built for Fidelity Investments. And the neat thing about this [Jason Cooper] 12:20:27 particular experience is that [Jason Cooper] 12:20:30 We recreated [Jason Cooper] 12:20:32 real offices like their one in Durham and texas [Jason Cooper] 12:20:36 rebuilt those, but we got [Jason Cooper] 12:20:40 architecture files, CAD files from their folks that are building a new headquarters [Jason Cooper] 12:20:46 In Boston, we actually were able to pull that in. This space doesn't exist yet, but it exists on this island. And then had some, you know, attempts at metaverse [David Huppert] 12:20:54 Wow. [Jason Cooper] 12:20:59 Again, that big M word, environments that they had built in 3D and we could pull those in. And so all those things exist [Jason Cooper] 12:21:07 own this [Jason Cooper] 12:21:08 same UEFN island. And when I say UEFN, I'll probably reference it a couple times. That's the unreal editor for fortnite. [Jason Cooper] 12:21:17 experience, the platform that I mentioned. And that is probably important to note that is different [Jason Cooper] 12:21:24 than traditional Unreal Engine. [Jason Cooper] 12:21:28 They are two separate products right now, although just being out for the partner meetings and stuff for Epic. [Jason Cooper] 12:21:36 at their conference recently, Unreal Fest. [Jason Cooper] 12:21:38 the goal is that those two things kind of come together. [Jason Cooper] 12:21:42 And they are finally building the actual Fortnite game with [David Huppert] 12:21:43 Hmm. [Jason Cooper] 12:21:48 UEFN. [Jason Cooper] 12:21:50 And then you've seen the investments likely from like Lego and Disney and all those things that are investing on building their own [Jason Cooper] 12:21:58 game experiences and bringing their IP into the same [Jason Cooper] 12:22:02 worlds, essentially. [David Huppert] 12:22:05 Was it able to just… [David Huppert] 12:22:08 absorb and read those, were they CAD files? Or I don't even know what those architectural files were and then [David Huppert] 12:22:15 What was the process like for trying to get that [David Huppert] 12:22:18 data set to turn into, let's say that building or something [Jason Cooper] 12:22:20 Sure. [Jason Cooper] 12:22:22 So, you know, we were definitely able to lean on some of our experience there on the optimization piece and some of that kind of stuff but [Jason Cooper] 12:22:32 They have a product on the Unreal side called datasmith [Jason Cooper] 12:22:37 that is built for the AEC industry, the architecture, engineering, and construction that [Jason Cooper] 12:22:42 helps with that kind of import. [David Huppert] 12:22:42 Oh, cool. [Jason Cooper] 12:22:46 And so that's a super useful tool [Jason Cooper] 12:22:51 I'll go ahead and they put together the next generation of user experiences [David Huppert] 12:22:51 Yeah. [Jason Cooper] 12:22:56 FCAT has created an experimental virtual island [Jason Cooper] 12:22:59 Using the Epic Games Unreal editor for Fortnite. [Jason Cooper] 12:23:02 A video game with 350 million worldwide users. [Jason Cooper] 12:23:06 The purpose of this initiative was to test social gaming technology as an option where we could interact collectively as a community of fidelity associates. [Jason Cooper] 12:23:15 This custom highlight represents a combination of Fidelity's physical locations. [Jason Cooper] 12:23:19 like our new Commonwealth Peer headquarters. [Jason Cooper] 12:23:22 Westlake and Durham campuses, along with our virtual 3D worlds like FCAT 360. [Jason Cooper] 12:23:28 And the Fidelity workplace community [Jason Cooper] 12:23:31 Players start embodied as an avatar [Jason Cooper] 12:23:33 which are then placed on our custom island where they can drop in and explore, speak to other associates. [Jason Cooper] 12:23:39 or participate in Team Quests, scavenger hunts, and a trivia game. [Jason Cooper] 12:23:42 We aim to leverage social gaming technology [Jason Cooper] 12:23:45 to recreate the essence of the informal and spontaneous water cooler moment for associates through our digital experience. You get the idea. [Jason Cooper] 12:23:55 It's their little piece that they put together. [David Huppert] 12:23:55 Yeah. [Jason Cooper] 12:23:59 And then, uh. [Jason Cooper] 12:24:00 the amount of, again, problem solving you can do, they really tasked us with, well, we really want a social experience. And so we built this whole [Jason Cooper] 12:24:08 like trivia night game inside of fortnite [Jason Cooper] 12:24:13 where teams could get in there and run around and answer and like try and score and keep all these things just like [David Huppert] 12:24:14 Cool. [Jason Cooper] 12:24:20 you know and we're really getting to this crazy spot where [Jason Cooper] 12:24:24 we can almost say yes to anything. I feel like it's uh [Jason Cooper] 12:24:29 It's a really neat time. You mentioned AI at the beginning of this. That's obviously opening up some other unique doors but um [Jason Cooper] 12:24:38 Yeah, Fortnite is definitely not the end all be all, right? There are some roadblocks there. I think you kind of even alluded to it, like, how do I get into it, right? [David Huppert] 12:24:46 Mm-hmm. [Jason Cooper] 12:24:46 As a gamer and we have made a number of these enterprise kind of experiences, right, for somebody like a Fidelity, certainly folks even in the healthcare space where security and some of that kind of stuff is paramount. [Jason Cooper] 12:25:00 And so there are some considerations audience wise with uh [Jason Cooper] 12:25:05 they've got to go to the Fortnite front door to get into these things [David Huppert] 12:25:10 Right. [Jason Cooper] 12:25:11 That is definitely legit but [Jason Cooper] 12:25:15 What is interesting, just because you asked about the CAD files. [Jason Cooper] 12:25:19 is these things can also, once you do that optimization, can be used to make [Jason Cooper] 12:25:25 something serious. This is obviously not a game, but this is taking those same [Jason Cooper] 12:25:32 files to build a real-time tour [Jason Cooper] 12:25:37 of this experience. And again, this is built with a game engine, but not a game. This is all about pre-visualization. [Jason Cooper] 12:25:44 And what's amazing here is [Jason Cooper] 12:25:47 In Unreal, there are really two [Jason Cooper] 12:25:50 core new advances in technology. [Jason Cooper] 12:25:53 in Unreal Engine 5, Nanite and Lumen. [Jason Cooper] 12:25:56 So now… [David Huppert] 12:25:57 Yeah, definitely, definitely excited for you to talk about these two things. They're so cool. [Jason Cooper] 12:26:00 Yeah, yeah. So nanite solves one of the hardest problems for somebody like us that makes things for these like kind of high-end computer graphics. [Jason Cooper] 12:26:11 is poly count. [Jason Cooper] 12:26:15 having to deal with that optimization piece and like what can a processor handle [Jason Cooper] 12:26:20 And polycount lets you kind of or nanite lets you kind of ignore [Jason Cooper] 12:26:25 that polygon count under three assets. [Jason Cooper] 12:26:28 just through magic. I mean, it really is. It's magic. And then lumen [Jason Cooper] 12:26:33 is kind of the salt for lighting, real time lighting in that same way. And so it definitely feels like a bit of a cheat code right now. [Jason Cooper] 12:26:43 As far as high-end graphics, the fact that we could take something stylized like these Fortnite assets, but then [Jason Cooper] 12:26:50 make something that also looks real kind of out of the same [Jason Cooper] 12:26:55 things, if that makes sense. [David Huppert] 12:26:57 Jason, can you go back to the pier for a second? [Jason Cooper] 12:27:00 Sure. [David Huppert] 12:27:01 So when I was at your shop. [David Huppert] 12:27:03 You know, last month you were just showing me some of this stuff [David Huppert] 12:27:07 Maybe I heard it wrong, but I thought I heard you say that like [David Huppert] 12:27:10 either with Lumen or with some other functionality, you are able to [David Huppert] 12:27:16 like as you're going through this peer and [David Huppert] 12:27:20 touring it. It's getting later in the day. And so the light changes as you're going through the space, not just like while you're in one room, but it's assuming [David Huppert] 12:27:30 20 minutes have passed since you've been in this auditorium and then you come outside and then the lighting is a little bit like the sun's a little bit lower like [David Huppert] 12:27:36 How dynamic is that? I mean, it's crazy. [Jason Cooper] 12:27:36 Oh, certainly. [Jason Cooper] 12:27:39 No, I mean, yeah, we can run day-night cycles in advance or we can tie it to the real world time. [Jason Cooper] 12:27:47 And, you know, what's interesting is we've been building VR experiences that have done that since like 2016, 2017. [David Huppert] 12:27:55 Oh, wow. Cool. [Jason Cooper] 12:27:57 Yeah, it's uh [Jason Cooper] 12:27:59 NVIDIA had us make something to show off RTX GI, which was a technology that actually lets you do that, right? Like that real time day, night cycles in these high-end graphics applications. [David Huppert] 12:28:13 Wow. [David Huppert] 12:28:15 Well, that's… [Jason Cooper] 12:28:15 And that was one of our first use cases was showing something like that [Jason Cooper] 12:28:20 In Amsterdam, of all places, for this group that made the world's first 3D printed bridge. [Jason Cooper] 12:28:27 And we made a VR experience that let you uh [David Huppert] 12:28:28 Huh. [Jason Cooper] 12:28:31 walk across that [Jason Cooper] 12:28:33 in VR and VR [Jason Cooper] 12:28:36 You could turn one of your arms into the 3D printing robot arm and 3D print your own stuff in VR. It's crazy. [David Huppert] 12:28:45 So are you basically… [David Huppert] 12:28:47 taking credit for nvidia's [David Huppert] 12:28:50 meteoric rise in stock. [Jason Cooper] 12:28:51 Thank you. [David Huppert] 12:28:52 Basically, you put them on the map. Is that what you're saying? [Jason Cooper] 12:28:55 Oh, no, no, no. Although we did give a talk about it. [Jason Cooper] 12:29:00 maybe a year or two before that. I don't think we had much to do with it yet [David Huppert] 12:29:05 Okay, we've got two questions, chat. The first one is what license are the two engines? So yeah, that's a good question. [Jason Cooper] 12:29:08 Okay. [David Huppert] 12:29:14 And then the second one, maybe you can talk about this within the license question, is what's the learning curve to be able to design in [Jason Cooper] 12:29:19 Sure. [David Huppert] 12:29:22 any gaming engine, not just Unreal, I guess. [David Huppert] 12:29:27 or I guess you can answer unreal since that's the question, but I'm also curious just to any game like, you know, Unity or Unreal. And then from zero to functional, not necessarily all the way to your level. [Jason Cooper] 12:29:33 Yeah. [Jason Cooper] 12:29:37 Sure. Let me start there. So we actually, we started out using Unity. [Jason Cooper] 12:29:43 When we first got started in working with game engines. [Jason Cooper] 12:29:47 And even our first VR work was in Unity. [Jason Cooper] 12:29:51 but have an epics headquarters down the street. [Jason Cooper] 12:29:54 And as our relationship grew there, when we'd run into the different things. [Jason Cooper] 12:30:00 They, uh. [Jason Cooper] 12:30:02 They basically talked us into becoming an unreal shop. And what is interesting, especially for a group like this, right? [Jason Cooper] 12:30:09 is [Jason Cooper] 12:30:12 how much i'll say how much more approachable Unreal is for non-developers okay [David Huppert] 12:30:19 Hmm. [Jason Cooper] 12:30:22 Not that there's not a steep learning curve. [Jason Cooper] 12:30:25 with any of the game engines, but I think for artists especially [Jason Cooper] 12:30:30 they have a visual programming [Jason Cooper] 12:30:34 node-based system in Unreal called Blueprints. And so you never have to if you don't want, write any code. It's like linking things together, right? Nodes or different if then statements. [Jason Cooper] 12:30:48 So it's like visual programming. [Jason Cooper] 12:30:52 They also have a considerable amount of like starter templates, right? [Jason Cooper] 12:30:57 If you want to build a certain type of game. [Jason Cooper] 12:31:00 there's likely a [Jason Cooper] 12:31:02 even if you want to make something in VR, there's a VR first player template that you drop into and then you drop your asset and that kind of thing. [David Huppert] 12:31:11 Yeah. [Jason Cooper] 12:31:12 So again, it used to be Unity, we transitioned Unreal and then [Jason Cooper] 12:31:17 The really cool thing about Unreal is [Jason Cooper] 12:31:20 with all the money they have made in Fortnite, they really just continued to [Jason Cooper] 12:31:25 invest in dogfooding their own stuff. They create all this tech for themselves that they then just [Jason Cooper] 12:31:32 giveaway, right? [David Huppert] 12:31:35 And they also give away money. There's the mega grants. We have not gotten one yet. We've applied twice, but I know other people [Jason Cooper] 12:31:41 Okay. [David Huppert] 12:31:43 have. And the last time I checked, it was like a Google form to fill out. It was like not a major [David Huppert] 12:31:49 huge public media type of [David Huppert] 12:31:52 RFP or grant process. I don't know if they've changed that, but the mega grants are extremely generous [David Huppert] 12:31:57 And they have a ton of money, as Jason said, that they're looking to [David Huppert] 12:32:02 get other folks, give them some seed money to experiment. So like Patrick's asking, what's a small [David Huppert] 12:32:07 low level or low lift project that someone might be able to start with, I would say [David Huppert] 12:32:12 If you come up with that idea, but you don't necessarily have the funding to do it, that's where the mega grant might be able to come in and help you execute that. But Jason, what would you say to that question? Like where to start? I have an idea. I want to get involved. What should we do? Thank you, Amber. [Jason Cooper] 12:32:26 Yeah, they have some really great, they have the Unreal Engine Online Academy. [Jason Cooper] 12:32:33 right so there's [Jason Cooper] 12:32:35 a slew of just like training resources and those kinds of things [Jason Cooper] 12:32:39 They also just launched [Jason Cooper] 12:32:43 Excuse me, a platform called FAB. [Jason Cooper] 12:32:46 Which brings all of their [Jason Cooper] 12:32:49 like 3D assets, real world scans of like rocks, trees, all these 3D asset like even if you're not a modeler of any kind, right, there's a whole marketplace of [Jason Cooper] 12:33:02 what are right now free assets. You just go grab and drop these things and put your scenes together. [David Huppert] 12:33:09 and they're cleared, like there's no worry about copyright infringement or anything like that. [Jason Cooper] 12:33:13 Correct. Yeah. [Jason Cooper] 12:33:15 They're frequent or frequent [Jason Cooper] 12:33:17 people that are opening up a storefront or like a group like ours, we could go in, say we spent a ton of time building a Wright Brothers model, right? You could go and you could purchase that asset for some [David Huppert] 12:33:25 Yeah. [Jason Cooper] 12:33:28 you know insignificant amount compared to what it would take you to do it yourself kind of thing so [David Huppert] 12:33:33 Right. You can get like a generic airplane or that if you wanted the specific model or yeah, that's a cool marketplace. [Jason Cooper] 12:33:38 Yeah, exactly. So they're bringing all these things together. They purchased a company called Sketchpad that had been very focused on that. [Jason Cooper] 12:33:46 And they kind of integrated it all in together there. [Jason Cooper] 12:33:50 I mean, I'm not the, you know, I feel like they're doing a lot of good things for [Jason Cooper] 12:33:56 all of us who are interested in creating this kind of content and trying to make it easy and approachable. [Jason Cooper] 12:34:02 you know we're not quite at like the PowerPoint level of this thing yet, but it like gets closer and closer to being able to drag and drop. [David Huppert] 12:34:03 Yeah. [David Huppert] 12:34:11 Well, this is great. And it's certainly fun to see some of these examples. I'm wondering if you could [David Huppert] 12:34:18 share that other example that leverages AI and voice that you had shown me, and then we'll kick it to our friends in Nebraska so they can show a little bit of theirs afterwards. [Jason Cooper] 12:34:27 Oh, sure. [David Huppert] 12:34:27 you're able to share that one, Jason? [Jason Cooper] 12:34:29 Yeah, let me give a little bit, I guess, context. [David Huppert] 12:34:33 Yeah. Cool. [Jason Cooper] 12:34:34 Yeah, we're working. Again, the neat thing, I think you mentioned about Verizon is, you know, we're not just building things for like Fidelity and Lenovo and like Fortune 500 folks, but a lot of folks on education. So one of our big projects right now is with the North Carolina Department of Natural Cultural Resources here. [Jason Cooper] 12:34:53 And like updating these historic sites across North Carolina and getting in these missing perspectives. [Jason Cooper] 12:35:01 that are at a lot of these places that are [Jason Cooper] 12:35:04 focused on really a singular thread about history, right? Missing a lot of voices and so [Jason Cooper] 12:35:12 We basically hosted like a science fair, honestly, where all these proof of concept of how we could apply all these different kinds of technology to [Jason Cooper] 12:35:22 integrate these things into these existing spaces. Obviously, artificial intelligence one [Jason Cooper] 12:35:27 a whole lot of augmented reality and web AR where you don't have to download something to interact with AR. [Jason Cooper] 12:35:36 And so one of them, I'm sure there's been conversations in these groups around AI, especially synthetic video [Jason Cooper] 12:35:44 I think one of the, I'll mention right now, one of the biggest changes from a production standpoint for us has been [Jason Cooper] 12:35:51 what AI can do for voice now, for sure. If you're 11 Labs is our favorite platform, I would definitely check it out if you haven't already but [Jason Cooper] 12:36:03 what we can do for voice and translation and all those things but [Jason Cooper] 12:36:06 One of the things is we had the head historian for the state of North Carolina came into the office. We shot him on green screen for about [Jason Cooper] 12:36:14 I don't know, two minutes and then [David Huppert] 12:36:16 I can't believe that. Okay. Two minutes. [Jason Cooper] 12:36:19 And then we made the synthetic version of Dr. Waters. And this thing is actually, this is old now, right? To this. [Jason Cooper] 12:36:26 This piece of tech has gotten way better even in the [David Huppert] 12:36:29 Right, right. [Jason Cooper] 12:36:30 two months, but we showed this little demo. I'm Dr. Darren Waters here at Bennett Place, a significant historical site nestled in Durham, North Carolina. [Jason Cooper] 12:36:40 This humble farmhouse was the site of the largest surrender of Confederate troops in which General Joseph E. Johnston met with Union General William T. Sherman to negotiate terms leading to the end of hostilities in the Carroll County. [David Huppert] 12:36:52 Pause it for one sec. So you [Jason Cooper] 12:36:54 Sure. At its place. [David Huppert] 12:36:56 You told me, and I think it's worth mentioning, or maybe you tell about his voice [Jason Cooper] 12:37:00 Yeah. [Jason Cooper] 12:37:02 Oh, yeah. His cadence and like this is his real voice. It literally does sound [Jason Cooper] 12:37:09 sort of robotic, I mean, or like, yeah, it was kind of funny um [David Huppert] 12:37:11 Yeah. [David Huppert] 12:37:14 When I heard it, I was like, oh, that sounds like every filter or like TikTok sort of fake voice, you know, a generated voice, but like you're like, no, that's actually what it's like through to his voice. So you have to suspend that while you're watching this and [Jason Cooper] 12:37:19 Thank you. [Jason Cooper] 12:37:22 Yeah. [Jason Cooper] 12:37:26 Yeah. [Jason Cooper] 12:37:28 But again, the voice piece is perfect. It preserves this pivotal moment in American history. [David Huppert] 12:37:28 know that. [Jason Cooper] 12:37:34 providing an immersive experience for visitors, transporting them back to that critical moment in history. [Jason Cooper] 12:37:41 So, so, so I'm not actually Darren Waters. [Jason Cooper] 12:37:44 I'm his AI avatar. [Jason Cooper] 12:37:47 As an AI historian on demand, I can talk about anything. [Jason Cooper] 12:37:50 I could talk about the history of bubble gum or something more relevant, like comparing interpretations by… So anyway, that was all. I mean, I think I'll assume most of this group's aware of something, but this is all just [Jason Cooper] 12:38:04 text to video [Jason Cooper] 12:38:06 Based off of his synthetic version of Dr. Water. So the idea here is that with his approval and consent. [Jason Cooper] 12:38:17 all of the sites could have these kind of AR in context, historian on demand, like deeper dives that we could produce [Jason Cooper] 12:38:28 you know in infinity just in [Jason Cooper] 12:38:30 nailing down the scripts and turning that into video. And honestly, again. [Jason Cooper] 12:38:35 the advances in this even in the last two months have been pretty wild to see. [David Huppert] 12:38:38 Yeah. [David Huppert] 12:38:39 And then is the vision to create some sort of [Jason Cooper] 12:38:44 Thank you. [David Huppert] 12:38:44 LLM or something that has all of this information that people can ask him questions. [Jason Cooper] 12:38:50 So yeah, that's kind of the next step, which we're doing with things like soft skill training uh [Jason Cooper] 12:38:59 I mean, metahumans [Jason Cooper] 12:39:02 Another Unreal Engine. [Jason Cooper] 12:39:05 kind of product, if you will, or Epic Games product [Jason Cooper] 12:39:08 is a nice solve for digital humans. They're really great and like gives you a head start but [Jason Cooper] 12:39:14 that uncanny valley piece is still [Jason Cooper] 12:39:17 pretty heavy there with all of these kind of things but from a voice and interactive standpoint and then um [Jason Cooper] 12:39:26 Yeah, certainly with some of the recent large language model improvements. [Jason Cooper] 12:39:32 the back and forth is amazing. We just did a thing at the dental school at UNC. [Jason Cooper] 12:39:38 where some of the faculty and the students there were trying to break a model we had trained as a periodontist. And it was just [Jason Cooper] 12:39:48 I couldn't even I was blown away at how it was handling some of their tough questions and this is [Jason Cooper] 12:39:53 you know voice and a response and that kind of thing yeah [David Huppert] 12:39:57 Very cool. All right, Jason. [Jason Cooper] 12:39:59 Yeah. [David Huppert] 12:40:00 Hang around, if you will, because we're going to pivot real quick and come back to you on the flip side of this. We're going to welcome some of our colleagues from Nebraska Public Media. [Jason Cooper] 12:40:01 Hmm. [David Huppert] 12:40:12 So Amber, if you can help pull up uh [David Huppert] 12:40:16 Mike Fields and Patrick Bate from Nebraska Public Media, who are working on or have done a project with Chad and a bunch of others called Expedition Nebraska, which is a virtual natural history experience, which [David Huppert] 12:40:33 was awesome and very cool webby award honoree has been out in the world and done really well. And as part of this public media innovators [David Huppert] 12:40:44 series, what we have always hoped for is that we offer some time for different stations to showcase what they're working on and have folks on the chat chime in with questions or suggestions or did you thinkabouts or like inspiration, wherever it takes you and whatever phase of development it is. And so we have a subject matter expert here, Jason, who's also going to be a participant in that process. [David Huppert] 12:41:09 And thanks, Chad, for putting the link in the chat to Expedition Nebraska. [David Huppert] 12:41:14 And Patrick and Mike are going to talk a little bit about their process of [David Huppert] 12:41:18 I don't want to steal your thunder, but just to set it up, I think you created this in Unity and now you're trying to create an Unreal version of it and just some questions and things that you're thinking about from a technical perspective, a user perspective. [David Huppert] 12:41:33 Yeah, so I'd love to hand it over to Mike and Patrick. If you all want to introduce yourself real quick and set up the project and talk about it. [David Huppert] 12:41:41 And then show a little bit and ask some questions you have for Jason or the group. Happy to [David Huppert] 12:41:46 jump in and excited to see your work. So thanks, Michael, Mike, and Patrick. [Mike Fields] 12:41:52 Yeah, thank you for having us. I'm Mike Fields, Director of Software Development in the labs department at Nebraska Public Media. [Mike Fields] 12:42:02 And… [Patrick Bate] 12:42:03 I'm Patrick Bate. I am a producer. [Patrick Bate] 12:42:07 And the best public media in the labs department. I am producer on Expedition Nebraska specifically. [Mike Fields] 12:42:13 So yeah, we're [Patrick Bate] 12:42:13 And… [Mike Fields] 12:42:14 Starting to focus on games, having just released our first game, Civic Scripple. [Mike Fields] 12:42:21 We do have… [Mike Fields] 12:42:22 3D experience with Expedition Nebraska, other projects [Mike Fields] 12:42:26 Modeling. [Mike Fields] 12:42:30 And particularly experience in unity. [Mike Fields] 12:42:32 So now we're looking to use that in building experience for Fortnite. [Mike Fields] 12:42:37 looking to take advantage of the huge player base. [Mike Fields] 12:42:41 And also looking forward to a time when [Mike Fields] 12:42:44 people are in Fortnite for reasons other than [Mike Fields] 12:42:47 the battle royale because [Jason Cooper] 12:42:48 Yeah, absolutely. [Mike Fields] 12:42:50 with UEFN, what they're opening things to. [Mike Fields] 12:42:54 there's a diverse wide range of experiences. [Mike Fields] 12:42:58 So with that, I'll let Patrick show [Mike Fields] 12:43:02 A little bit about what we built for Expedition Nebraska and some of what we've [Mike Fields] 12:43:06 we're starting to play with in Fortnite. [Patrick Bate] 12:43:09 Yeah, let me set this up here. [Patrick Bate] 12:43:14 It's interesting. [Patrick Bate] 12:43:16 There we go okay [Patrick Bate] 12:43:18 So the first thing [Patrick Bate] 12:43:21 to kind of demonstrate here, and let me go into full screen on this [Patrick Bate] 12:43:24 This is the… [Patrick Bate] 12:43:26 The original version that we did of Expedition Nebraska [Patrick Bate] 12:43:30 This is in. [Patrick Bate] 12:43:35 Sorry. [Patrick Bate] 12:43:37 Yeah, this is the WebGL version that we did. And the reason we kind of landed on this platform is accessibility. That's kind of the first thing we think about when we start doing these things is [Patrick Bate] 12:43:47 trying to make sure that as many people as possible can actually see it can [Patrick Bate] 12:43:53 play through it. So this is all running in a web browser. [Patrick Bate] 12:43:58 And it was built in Unity. [Patrick Bate] 12:44:01 Based on some assets that we got from the local museum, the University of Nebraska State Museum. [Patrick Bate] 12:44:09 And a lot of that is these uh [Patrick Bate] 12:44:12 these fossil scans, these are photogrammetry scans of different animals. We have about 40 different animals. [Patrick Bate] 12:44:18 in the game. And the way this is structured is that you travel to [Patrick Bate] 12:44:23 one of seven of these spaces that are representative of different North American land mammal ages. And it kind of tells the story of how [Patrick Bate] 12:44:32 the ecology of Nebraska changed over time. [Patrick Bate] 12:44:35 And how the animals changed over time and how those two things [Patrick Bate] 12:44:40 kind of [Patrick Bate] 12:44:42 influence each other and how you can make inferences about one based on information you find. [Patrick Bate] 12:44:46 About the others so [Patrick Bate] 12:44:48 You can see that it's pretty low fidelity, low poly. It looks bigger than it is. This is a very limited space in terms of how much travel you can do. [Patrick Bate] 12:44:56 You can see we've got a path on the ground here. [Patrick Bate] 12:45:00 that sort of tells people where they are allowed to go. But at a certain point, you will hit a wall. [David Huppert] 12:45:06 Okay. [Patrick Bate] 12:45:06 These models out in the distance are very lo-fi. They do not hold up to scrutiny, and they are primarily there for kind of just the ambiance and the atmosphere of the space. [Patrick Bate] 12:45:20 So one of the things we were kind of excited about trying to do [Patrick Bate] 12:45:24 when we moved over to doing this in Fortnite. [Patrick Bate] 12:45:28 And through Unreal is the level of detail we were able to get to is substantially higher [Jason Cooper] 12:45:36 Instantly, right? I mean, you just… [Patrick Bate] 12:45:39 Yeah, it was kind of like [Jason Cooper] 12:45:40 Yes. [Patrick Bate] 12:45:40 thrown off the shackles of those limitations. [Jason Cooper] 12:45:43 Yeah. [Patrick Bate] 12:45:45 So, yeah, so I may have been a little carried away with the level of detail in this space, but [Patrick Bate] 12:45:51 We've run into a couple different uh [Patrick Bate] 12:45:55 struggles, but so you can kind of see that this is set up in a somewhat different way. [Patrick Bate] 12:46:00 Not if you can see that map there, but if you look at this environment. [Patrick Bate] 12:46:05 We're kind of in a forest. [Patrick Bate] 12:46:07 Which is different from that grassland space that I was demonstrating earlier in Unity. [Patrick Bate] 12:46:12 And if you look at the animals that we've got placed here, they are substantially different in shape and size. This is a small rhinoceros called Manoceros. You can see that it's got some unusual features, has these two horns side by side. [Patrick Bate] 12:46:28 And, uh. [Patrick Bate] 12:46:30 So what we've kind of done in this environment is rather than splitting it up into seven different North American landmill ages. [Patrick Bate] 12:46:38 The idea that I had, at least for this kind of experiment, was to put them in one space. [Patrick Bate] 12:46:43 And allow people to [Patrick Bate] 12:46:46 travel between them, not by portals, but just by kind of walking around. [Patrick Bate] 12:46:52 And you can see that I've got this river built here. [Patrick Bate] 12:46:56 And you can kind of cross over that. [Patrick Bate] 12:46:58 And on the other side, the space opens up. And in terms of actual space and time. [Patrick Bate] 12:47:05 This is not borne out by what happened in prehistoric Nebraska or anywhere in the world. These animals did not share space. [Patrick Bate] 12:47:13 And these environments didn't necessarily share space either but [Patrick Bate] 12:47:17 By doing this, we can explore the key story that we're trying to tell in Expedition Nebraska, which is how the grasslands and prairies [Patrick Bate] 12:47:25 of Nebraska came to be. [Patrick Bate] 12:47:28 And the types of animals that originally inhabited those spaces. As I say, we have 40 different animals that our team are working through. And you can see that these models are much more detailed. [Patrick Bate] 12:47:39 than what we had in Unity. Our team have been working really hard on getting these built. [Patrick Bate] 12:47:44 They are not rigged for animation yet, which is why some of these are in very unusual [Patrick Bate] 12:47:50 Elephants do not generally hold their trunks out like that. [David Huppert] 12:47:50 Yeah. [Patrick Bate] 12:47:55 But, uh. [Patrick Bate] 12:47:56 Yeah, it's been a lot of fun to just kind of see how we can kind of push these materials and build these spaces up. [Patrick Bate] 12:48:05 These are camels. [Patrick Bate] 12:48:07 This is hemiotenia. That over there is Giganto Camillus. [Patrick Bate] 12:48:11 And you can see that these are animals that are adapted to eating grass, which is a very specialized thing. We think of it as very normal now. [Patrick Bate] 12:48:19 But throughout the history of life on Earth, eating grass is not a normal thing to do. It's a very difficult thing to do, and it's something that an animal has to be highly specialized [Patrick Bate] 12:48:28 In order to actually get anything from because grass does not have a lot of nutrition in it. So you can look at those fossils [Patrick Bate] 12:48:34 And see that those adaptations are present. And by seeing that, you can see what the space looked like, what kind of [Patrick Bate] 12:48:42 fauna or rather flora you might find in a space [Patrick Bate] 12:48:45 Because you can tell where the animal lived by looking at what its teeth look like or how big it is. [Patrick Bate] 12:48:50 The animals that are in this forest space are generally smaller and not as fast because they don't have to be fast. They don't have to run across the prairie. They don't have to evade predators by fleeing. They can hide. So they're smaller. They are browsers. [Patrick Bate] 12:49:05 So anyway, I'm kind of getting into the weeds on the content here, which is something that I often do. So by all means, please step in and stop me. [Mike Fields] 12:49:14 I did want to point out that people had asked if other stations can do this. Patrick has not been [Mike Fields] 12:49:21 one of our Unity developers. So he's not coming into this with [Mike Fields] 12:49:25 in-depth unity experience [Mike Fields] 12:49:28 but has learned all of this in a [Patrick Bate] 12:49:28 Yeah. [Mike Fields] 12:49:30 fairly short amount of time uh [Mike Fields] 12:49:33 the terraforming. I think you can stop your scare. [Mike Fields] 12:49:36 You're sharing. Thank you very much, Patrick. [Patrick Bate] 12:49:37 Yeah, you can do that here. [Mike Fields] 12:49:40 um but [Patrick Bate] 12:49:41 Thank you. [Mike Fields] 12:49:42 there is we're starting to get enough documentation and training and UAFN [Mike Fields] 12:49:47 Which is something we ran into [Mike Fields] 12:49:50 last early last year when it was released [Mike Fields] 12:49:52 that it was a very new product. [Mike Fields] 12:49:54 So the document [Jason Cooper] 12:49:55 Yeah, definitely a beta. We were pushing a little harder than they were ready for even but [David Huppert] 12:50:00 Mm-hmm. [Jason Cooper] 12:50:01 Well, I think the magic of what you just showed right of [Jason Cooper] 12:50:05 those environments, the lighting, all the graphics, right? You didn't have to have an army [Jason Cooper] 12:50:12 of modelers and folks that were good at rigging and doing all this thing. I mean, even a term folks may not be familiar with, LOD, so level of detail, that thing where you can see far off into the distance in a game, if you don't do that well. [Jason Cooper] 12:50:28 outside of something like this where they're actually handling all that for you [Jason Cooper] 12:50:32 you know you can only build a very small environment before things bog down processor wise and that kind of thing. So it's just a [Jason Cooper] 12:50:40 It really is. [Jason Cooper] 12:50:42 a big shortcut for creating a fully interactive [Jason Cooper] 12:50:46 thing like this. [Patrick Bate] 12:50:47 And you mentioned earlier working on a trivia game. [Patrick Bate] 12:50:51 And one of the experiments that I tried a little bit earlier through Expedition Nebraska was to build a similar kind of thing, a trivia experience to just kind of try and work in some of that educational content that we developed. [Jason Cooper] 12:50:51 Yeah. [Patrick Bate] 12:51:03 And again, not a lot of programming knowledge under my belt, but it was something I was able to kind of knock out pretty quickly because [Patrick Bate] 12:51:10 Yeah, it is very, very much just kind of assembling nodes and plugging things in and kind of figuring out how the devices [Patrick Bate] 12:51:18 work with each other and it's [Patrick Bate] 12:51:20 fast. It's extremely fast. [David Huppert] 12:51:22 One of the things I was hoping, we have about, let's say maybe five or six minutes left of this before we wrap and just do some housekeeping at the end to [David Huppert] 12:51:32 promote next month's webinar, which will uh [David Huppert] 12:51:36 feature colleagues from across the system again to talk about AI use cases across the spectrum at different levels of your organization. So Amber will put a registration to that hopefully in the chat soon. Make sure to sign up for that because that's going to be a lot of fun. You'll hear from a lot of different stations about AI. [David Huppert] 12:51:52 But one thing I was hoping to do here was [David Huppert] 12:51:55 You know, I come to Jason sometimes and I'm like, hey, I got an idea for a thing. [David Huppert] 12:52:01 And he'll be like. [David Huppert] 12:52:03 Oh, great. I love brainstorming. Why do you want to do it? Who's your audience? What are you trying to accomplish? [David Huppert] 12:52:08 let's just suspend for a second that Mike and Patrick want to just learn [David Huppert] 12:52:14 unreal. And just because for the sake of learning it because it's [David Huppert] 12:52:17 a cool endeavor because who knows what, you know, and you might just want to pick up a new skill. [David Huppert] 12:52:21 But maybe role play a little bit, like, you know, take us back to the beginning. Why are you transporting it from Unity to Unreal? And Jason, if you were like. [David Huppert] 12:52:30 you know potentially going to collaborate with them on helping them to develop it or build it out. What questions would you have at this point in it since they already have an existing game? [David Huppert] 12:52:39 what's going through your head? Maybe just start there, Jason. Having seen what they've [David Huppert] 12:52:45 done in Unity a little bit. And then having seen a little bit about their vision for it. [David Huppert] 12:52:49 poke some holes in here like tell us like opportunities that they may be able to explore or if you think that this is a good use case for that. [Jason Cooper] 12:52:57 Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, when I saw your WebGL version, which… [Jason Cooper] 12:53:02 that i mean i love that because that's how we got started. I owned the domain, the browserwins.com. Like I'm a big believer in [Jason Cooper] 12:53:12 you know, eliminating friction [Jason Cooper] 12:53:16 is the number one thing for kind of any experience like this right like [Jason Cooper] 12:53:20 making it easy for people to get into it, all that kind of stuff. So anytime there's an opportunity to make something that doesn't require an app download and that kind of thing. [Jason Cooper] 12:53:30 Love that. [Jason Cooper] 12:53:33 For Fortnite in particular, obviously there's a huge opportunity for [Jason Cooper] 12:53:38 a younger demographic, younger target audience, educational stuff, fully believe in that. But I love seeing those portals because portals [Jason Cooper] 12:53:49 are a concept that just translate very well to all this stuff and [Jason Cooper] 12:53:53 So there is an opportunity there. We built, you mentioned devices, Patrick. [Jason Cooper] 12:53:58 We built a device that lets you [Jason Cooper] 12:54:01 teleport. So lets you teleport to different spots of the island, lets you teleport to different spots in time, right? All those kinds of things and a little menu system [Jason Cooper] 12:54:13 It may require getting into, there is a new programming language if you want to do some of those fancier things called verse that Epic is like literally writing for this stuff. [Jason Cooper] 12:54:23 um but [Jason Cooper] 12:54:25 I love what David mentioned. I love starting at the end on things like this of, okay. [Jason Cooper] 12:54:32 If everything went perfect, what was our goal, right? What is the takeaway we want people to have? What do we want to [Jason Cooper] 12:54:39 In an ideal solution that we've come up with, what do we want people to walk away with? I love starting there on a lot of our traditional projects. [Jason Cooper] 12:54:47 I love the whole, all right, what is our demo reel that we're making at the end of this project? What are all the things that we want to go into that [David Huppert] 12:54:53 Hmm. [Jason Cooper] 12:54:56 And that is honestly what leads a lot of times to us building some new tech or new capability or new thing is like [Jason Cooper] 12:55:04 thinking about the end demo reel we would make of this project. And so even like the feature lists like [Jason Cooper] 12:55:13 you know people are going to learn about prehistoric era animals. What are all those things and then working backwards from there [Jason Cooper] 12:55:22 to make the experience that does those things. [Mike Fields] 12:55:26 So Jason, a big question that I've [Mike Fields] 12:55:28 wrestled with is, you know, considering building for Fortnite, how much do we need to take into account the existing Fortnite player base and the expectations that they come into this with [Mike Fields] 12:55:40 Versus with UEFN opening this up to [Mike Fields] 12:55:44 a diverse range of experiences and even completely different looks than native Fortnite. [Mike Fields] 12:55:50 Looking forward to a time where [Mike Fields] 12:55:53 everything exists in fortnite and [Mike Fields] 12:55:54 people are coming in [Mike Fields] 12:55:57 for reasons other than battle royale so we [Mike Fields] 12:56:00 I mean, there are some base expectations like with the Fortnite movement, that sort of thing. [Mike Fields] 12:56:06 Patrick talked about how limited are [Mike Fields] 12:56:09 WebGL version was. [Mike Fields] 12:56:10 People move around a lot more freely in Fortnite. So maybe… [Mike Fields] 12:56:14 a bigger area or a bigger area [Mike Fields] 12:56:16 How much do we need to adapt for Fortnite itself? [Jason Cooper] 12:56:23 I think you definitely want to be taking advantage of all that they're kind of giving you for free that would be hard, right? Honestly, that's the big reason to build something on top of UEFN is [Jason Cooper] 12:56:36 you're getting all of this investment in infrastructure and technology [Jason Cooper] 12:56:41 essentially for free. They'll even pay you if you get a lot of eyeballs on it, right? [Jason Cooper] 12:56:47 This is a potential money-making opportunity, literally, right? Engagement gets paid out. The other really neat thing that's happening right now is [David Huppert] 12:56:47 Mm-hmm. [Jason Cooper] 12:57:00 you know you don't have to build that realistic landscape. You can build the Lego version of that thing, right? And Disney, oh, by the way, is now letting you use their IP. [Jason Cooper] 12:57:11 as part of these experiences like [Jason Cooper] 12:57:14 The fact that you can build an educational thing that uses [Jason Cooper] 12:57:19 Star Wars and Marvel characters [David Huppert] 12:57:22 Crazy. It's wild. [Jason Cooper] 12:57:23 And you can like [Jason Cooper] 12:57:25 It's not a get away with it thing now it's like an encouraged thing that you can use, you know, this ip is [Jason Cooper] 12:57:33 of tremendous opportunity, right? I mean, to draw eyeballs to [Jason Cooper] 12:57:38 content that might not have [Jason Cooper] 12:57:41 gotten it, you know, otherwise. [Jason Cooper] 12:57:44 There's a lot of, I mean, there's a lot of benefits and then [Jason Cooper] 12:57:48 I think that budgetary thing is another one. Like we literally had a host center for health education. We were building an AR experience with filters and some of these other things. [Jason Cooper] 12:57:58 And when we got this opportunity came along, it's like, hey, for that same budget, we can literally build an educational game [Jason Cooper] 12:58:06 around neural fortification and like kids making healthy choices [Jason Cooper] 12:58:11 But on top of Fortnite. [Jason Cooper] 12:58:14 And the budget's the same and so the same [Jason Cooper] 12:58:17 That efficiency, that kind of [Jason Cooper] 12:58:20 bang for buck uh [Jason Cooper] 12:58:23 Especially for the right audience is a really unique opportunity right now. [Mike Fields] 12:58:28 That's a great point. Thank you. [David Huppert] 12:58:31 Yeah, I think that's a really good point. And I think, Mike, you also are asking a really great question about expectations and assumptions for audience behavior. [David Huppert] 12:58:43 Which is not only true for Fortnite and [David Huppert] 12:58:48 It's just it's platform specific. It's age or experience specific and it's [David Huppert] 12:58:54 It's impossible to do one thing for all sizes, but I think you're totally right. You need to lean into [David Huppert] 12:58:59 Whenever you're putting a product out there, like what are the expectations of that user base? [David Huppert] 12:59:03 Now, sometimes a product will come in that will [David Huppert] 12:59:07 disrupt all of that and ignore it because it's just too good to ignore. And the world adapts to that game. But I think as we're starting to just dip our toe into it to be aware of, okay, this is how other games operate. This is how other games and characters move through space. These are the expectations that players have when they're starting something new. I think that's really helpful. You got to know your market a little bit. [David Huppert] 12:59:29 I don't know it that well, but I think you're asking the right question to sort of explore that. [Mike Fields] 12:59:35 The other huge question I have with [Mike Fields] 12:59:38 everybody building stuff for Fortnite. You talked about [David Huppert] 12:59:40 with our last minute. So drop a huge question. Go for it. [Mike Fields] 12:59:44 is discovery. How do you get people? How do people find it i mean [David Huppert] 12:59:48 Yeah. [Mike Fields] 12:59:48 Do people find it? I mean, are you directing there from [Mike Fields] 12:59:50 like a station's other or presences on other platforms? [Jason Cooper] 12:59:54 Yeah, I mean, I would treat it like you're promoting any other kind of asset or piece of collateral that you've invested in, right? There's the being able to link right into it. Obviously, there's a lot of competition because you can earn money. [Mike Fields] 12:59:54 I mean, is that what you have to do? [Jason Cooper] 13:00:09 There's a lot of competition on the Epic storefront, but I think they're working on categorization and some of those kinds of things. But yeah, our thing has been to just [Jason Cooper] 13:00:20 do the traditional promotional things, your landing pages, you know, including it in your other [Jason Cooper] 13:00:26 advertising materials, that kind of thing. Yep. [Mike Fields] 13:00:29 Thank you. [David Huppert] 13:00:30 All right, we are at time, everybody. Jason, you volunteered to let people reach out to you. If you want to hit up [Jason Cooper] 13:00:36 Please do. Please. [David Huppert] 13:00:38 Put your contact info in the chat if you can. [Jason Cooper] 13:00:40 Okay, talking about this, like… [Jason Cooper] 13:00:42 Small, nimble, you know, I've come from the journalism side, the newsroom side, that kind of thing. That is the opportunity and the advantage here, but also the sharing piece of please feel free to [David Huppert] 13:00:47 Yeah. [David Huppert] 13:00:53 didn't we? Can you put their info in the chat for everyone? [Jason Cooper] 13:00:53 Reach out, anything. [Jason Cooper] 13:00:57 Yeah, absolutely. [David Huppert] 13:00:58 Yeah, well, thank you, Jason. Thank you, Patrick. Thank you, Mike. Thank you, Chad and Amber. This has been a really invigorating discussion about potential. I know there were some questions about how to get started and easy lifts and excited to continue this conversation offline with all you folks about that. [David Huppert] 13:01:18 And encourage you all to attend next month's, which is about AI across different PLCs in the NIDA environment with marketing, communications, engineering, IT, I think is in there. A whole bunch of folks. [David Huppert] 13:01:31 So you can hit up the resources that [David Huppert] 13:01:34 Amber mentioned earlier in the chat to figure out how to register for the next webinar. [David Huppert] 13:01:39 As well as previous webinars that we've done. Thank you, Amber, for putting that in there. [David Huppert] 13:01:44 You all rock. I hope you have a great day. Subscribe to Chad's newsletter. Read all that. Stay up to date on what's happening across the system. [David Huppert] 13:01:51 And appreciate you all for joining us today and hope you have a great day. [David Huppert] 13:01:54 Thanks, everyone.