Hello. I would like to welcome Professor William Latham from Goldsmith's University of London. William is many things. He has been a pioneering computational artist, veteran game developer, an educator, a researcher and a VR developer and I've invited him here to tell us a little bit about the games in VR industry. So, William, could you tell us a little bit about your your career, in general when you came here and games. I got into the games industry around 1993 when I was preferably working at IBM. Initially did a little work in the music industry working with bands like the Shaman and Rave Culture for several years. Then gradually, we got approached to develop games. By that point, I was running a studio in Soho with about five or six people. Initially, we developed an interactive product called organic card but then we started to get involved with more complex games. This is really the year of console development and so we ended up finally working on big products like things sequel, some John Carpenter film for PlayStation and Xbox. So my background is really console, high-end console development and then later on mobile game development really took off. Could you tell our learners a little bit about how the game industry works and its structure? The games industry is a huge huge business now and there are a range of different business models. As many people know you have no top end games like Call of Duty, Assassin's Creed where a box product really and you know you're buying an experience and you kind of know what you're getting and projects like that will have teams of maybe up to two hundred people working on those. Maybe programmers, artist, script writers, etc., and so at the other end of the extreme we have what I call like a cottage industry. We have very very small development teams working on mobile games, which often use a free to play model. People start playing and then gradually they're encouraged to spend money. So you have this big variety in terms of the size of teams working on products and you know the whole range of different jobs now in the games industry. For example, data analytics where people analyze in player behavior and then restructuring again based on the way players are forming is a really new development and it's what is resulting in huge profits for companies like Rovio and others. Okay. What's the relationship between the games industry and the VR industry? The relationship is very interesting so everyone is still waiting at this point in time for the killer VR game app and so everyone thought that would be probably be a zombie movie converted into a VR experience, which would probably be the killer game literally and there hasn't been a big game here. In fact, they pilot a lot of things. You're making a VR horror type of scary size a creature about the size of a cat. The cat jumps on your shoulder in VR, that it's really really scary. Everyone thought this twelve foot monster chasing you would be much more scary so there's been lots of things that challenge developers into coming up with new ideas. The moment I would say a lot of the skills of people in the games industry is directly applicable to VR but so far, there hasn't been that killer VR game experience. Do you have any advice for people about what sort of platform hardware platforms to choose or software platform to choose to develop for? My advice is going to be a bit biased. I'm only interested in kind of 3D experiences. I would say Oculus or HTC viber. The device is worth going for. You know the mobile kind of experience in VR is from my point of view a bit pixeley and is not a true experience. The install base for something like Samsung VR about five million and the top end machines are much much less so it's still the kind of high end VR market is still fairly small. Could you tell us a little bit about sort of the distribution channels? How again gets to market and gets to the player? For example, the Steam VR for the HTC Vive, which is a fairly good platform if you're a developer to release products. Particularly if you release a demo, first of all, you know that's a viable method. You know there are a number of good products. There are things like Google Tilt Brush and things that are really rich experiences so I would say it's not a mature market yet in terms if you're a developer, if you're making a console game. You're looking at you know tens of millions of buyers versus in the VR space, that install base means that the number of people that could buy your VR experience is still quite small, and that's one of the reasons why a lot of people in VR work for where VR means advertising or IKEA-type interior design. There's lots of areas where VR as being applied outside games and I think the weakness in the games history that just isn't this installed base. Have you got any advice about promoting your VR game? If you're a small developer or an individual making your own VR experience in your living room, what I would say is that there are a number of conferences like that Develop VR Conference in UK and the many conferences in the US where there's real opportunity to network, show your game to people and really get out there. I would say meeting people, going to these conferences off and there are publishers there. The leading figures from industry and it's a really good opportunity to network and pitch your product. Obviously, there's a whole skill to pitching, but even my experience is always just to get out thing, get on a train and go to a conference, get chatting to people. Most of the expos are free or very very cheap so you don't have to go to expensive conferences. You can go to the expo and still meet people but from my experience, networking and meeting people is the key. Do you have any general advice for somebody who is new to VR and wants to get into the VR industry and get a job and getting published? I would say someone who's wants to get into the VR industry probably the most likely route to employment is companies that are in VR but working with the advertising agency. For example, companies like Rewind in UK. They will work with a car manufacturer or someone who's got a product that they want to demonstrate in VR. I'd say that's probably the most likely source of work within VR at the moment. Obviously, there are developers. I'm sure there's number of developers working with Sony just developing products for the Sony VR experience, which has got this larger installed base of five million. That is a possible route but I would say the advertising agency route is probably the most likely route to finding a good job in VR. Okay. Well, Thank you very much, William. That's some great advice. I'm sure our learners learned a lot more about the industry and cracking to get involved in it so thank you very much. Thank you.
