In this Developer Circles Skills Connection webinar,
DevC program manager Chimdi Aneke speaks with Yash Sahay, an Engineering Manager for Spark AR.
Find out how the Spark AR team crafts developer experiences that make it simple to start creating effects, and how they plan to make AR more accessible for developers and audiences worldwide.
-- We started the Developer Circles Skills Connection series as a way to learn about and solve challenges by connecting Developer Circles members to a range of experts from Facebook. Together, we can all learn more about Facebook products & technologies, gain new skills, and ask questions on a range of topics including React, Spark AR, PyTorch, and Messenger.
Click to learn more about Developer Circles: https://bit.ly/3irZacb
Everyone, depending on where you are joining us from across the world today. Good morning. Good afternoon and good evening. Welcome to our second webinar session on the Classical Skills Connection. We are excited to have you join us today. Who works on the spot? Would my Facebook page Petchem? Good to have you join us today. Yeah, I mean. You're welcome. And just to set some context here, the audience that we have today are members of the Facebook community and like we all know, it's a community led program designed to create physical and online forums led by local amazing developer influencers for them to collaborate and also share knowledge about our Facebook technologies and products. So they are missing. Committee members show they are looking forward to having you share all the amazing stuff we have in this our ecosystem and have you answer some of your questions. Awesome. Let's let's let's get started. Awesome. So before we get started, some logistics. Everyone, you can listen in to your computer with you or select phone call to see the number to call us at school and also Pean, and if you have any questions, feel free to type them into the chat session. Once again, my name is Tim Duncan and I supported the school's program on Facebook, and today, like I mentioned earlier, Ron will be chatting to us about some of the questions that you have submitted and have him share an overview of what is going on in this of our world. Thanks once again for joining us today. Yeah, awesome, with, again, so nice to connect with all the people, even though I can't see some of you, I met a lot of dirt about the circle members and leaders. And it's it's it's it's amazing your passion for the for the community and for for, you know, exploring all the technologies that Facebook has to offer. Amazing. So, yes, before we go into your life, I'm sure that will happen in the next few minutes before we go into that, I'm sure the audience would like to know maybe your response to do something. You want to start with that? Yeah, start with that. So at Facebook, I'm an engineer manager on the spot team. Essentially, Facebook is making a lot of investment in the augmented reality space. And our team essentially is is a team that sort of builds the set of tools that is required to to create experiences on our family of apps. And so we deal with everything from the creation experience or the developer experience to the publishing experience and or. Yeah, publishing of those of those books and then the consumer experience, which is, you know, how do people consume your content right now? And as we're talking about all of these things of our appetite, the road map, I'm sure some of you have already seen these things. You might have seen it. There are some some themes that have already been talked about in different talks earlier. But I'll just do a brief capture of that as well as I as I got through my slides. Amazing and also difficult question that our members always ask us, since they are in close connection with us, I suppose, because sometimes they'll want to know how we get to job. Facebook is a popular place and I'm sure they are looking forward to that. Yeah, I think Facebook, you know, like all all things that it kind of just happened in a way it wasn't for me at least it wasn't super intentional when it did happen. But I do remember when I was early in my career, I was I was very fascinated by the developer culture and so the culture at Facebook and sort of the hacker mentality. And I was in India at the time, I, I thought about applying. I always I used to think it's going to be so hard to get into a company like that, which is such a few people and some of the best engineers in the world. And I actually never, never I don't think I ever got the courage to actually apply early in my early in my career. But what happened is that over a period of time, I had a lot of startups in India, in Southeast Asia, in the Bay Area. So I wasn't successful. I'm not successful then. And as a kind of I worked at a big company before before Facebook. And at some point when in my last startup, which was more than three years ago, which didn't work out, which is sort of a business traveller, I, I remember wanting to move to London to be close to my wife, and I applied to Facebook and I found it an amazing opportunity with working with the engineering team and and. Yeah, and then that's how I started my my career here. And I think that Facebook really was very surprising for me in the sense that even though it's a huge company, it has. And it still does feel like given our work streams and given what we do, it still feels a lot like a startup in a lot of ways. And so that's kind of been something that's kept me going as Paul. And thanks for sharing that, I mean, what I love about this is that most developers are software engineers think that they can just come in in one way, but there are different rules and opportunities within them. So, like you mentioned, Pattni, engineering is a whole different and sometimes the of the engineering and also like language that people work here. So there are different ways join different opportunities. And so that's No. One way, different way. So thanks for sharing on that. And at this point, that's where I'm going to let you dive straight into the presentation that you have before we go into the questions. So you take it from here. Awesome. Thanks. Thanks, Randi. Thanks for the questions. I'll get started. I actually thought a lot about what more we can talk about today, given the time. I mean, if we can, we can spend all day talking about or I can spend all day talking about it. But I thought that today I could just do a brief overview of like, oh, why we're investing so much in, like, what is our vision where we try to go from here and really sort of jump into this part of our platform and and what it offers to two developers now and as a way as a window into like what what you can see into the future and what it might offer you. So, yeah, so that's it's kind of like it's embedded in the title of my slide. So let's get started. So at Facebook, we believe that know. Augmented reality is fundamentally going to change the way we rebuild our computing platforms. I think that what we've done in the past is that we have like this thing, which is like a two dimensional computing platform. So that's screen. We've kind of gotten to a pretty good level that the next step in the in that evolution is definitely getting to a point where people are able to interact and have like a computing environment in three dimension. And from that perspective, we have both iOS, which is augmented reality, which is essentially superimposing on top of your three dimensional memory. And then there is a virtual reality which is essentially creating this sort of virtual or completely immersive environment. And for virtual reality, we have Oculus and for ERP spikier. And so today I'm going to talk about spikier and what we're trying to do here. So I think Mark Me made this announcement and a few years ago now, I think 2017. And he he talked about, I think that that picture and it kind of explains a lot. And it's really like what I was talking about earlier, which is like taking your reality, augmenting it, superimposing this sort of you kind of like interactions or things that that you didn't think was possible before. So you could play chess. But but that's not where it stops. You know, we feel that air is increasingly going to give people the ability to have almost like superpowers. Right. So because you now are enhancing your senses or augmenting your senses with the full support of, like, what's available digitally and as a computing platform. So whether it's audio, whether it's whether it's vision, and then there's a lot of that is powering all of this machine learning. And so we have all of that as part of the Facebook roadmap that we're trying to push these technologies forward. So even though that's kind of like a digital chess thing, it's kind of like the broad vision we've decided to make the camera the first augmented reality platform. So we're not we're not there yet. There's still some ways away from it. The valuable sort of er device, like a glass. So what we've decided is that we can we can start with this so we can start essentially with your with your camera, phone camera. And so we're making the camera the first augmented reality platform. Billions of people have this in their pocket at the improvements in camera technologies is making it easier for us to to integrate our software and our platform into our apps. And so the power it experiences to the kind of like cameras that we see in the future coming out with sort of better, that perception is only going to improve all of that. Right. And so camera is the important part. But then also platform is another important part. And our platform is really what it's about. We want to build a platform. I think one of the interesting things about Facebook is that we've always, you know, we're building things for people all over the world, but we believe that for any thing to be successful, like the content has to be created by the same people who are kind of consuming it. Right. That's where the diversity of the content is. That's where the diversity of of of creation is. And and so that's been lacking. Creating the Facebook we like we don't want to create the things that a small set of people creating things that everybody will consume. So hence our focus on Sparkhill as a platform and as a tool to help our developers all over the world and creators all over the world create these sort of experiences. And I'll go a little bit into how with thinking about it. So, again, like I said, I think we're at the very beginning of this journey. I would say that this is a little bit more towards the right, but it's still kind of in the early stages. Right. You know, we're close to, you know, obviously every little born sort of er technology at this point or something that is at least, you know, easy for people to walk around with. But we're making our way there and it's kind of like the zigzaggy road is not really a straight line. And we all try to draw straight lines, but we can on this exact bottom. And it's a very interesting journey for for us at Facebook. We're developing it and also for for for our creators and consumers. So, yeah, so I'm going to jump into like, what is the process, how are we building the platform? So and also sort of highlight which Pacific team I sort of support here. So we have the building experience. So you have a studio, you can build it, you can test it on your mobile phone. It's Kapner, but you've created in effect, you can publish it on Hub. Hub is the team that that I'm supporting and then we can deploy it on on our family of apps and essentially the Facebook Instagram messenger. We also have Quartel. We also are going to add more and more services. Some of these are available to publicly to a third party messenger. Right now is its first party only. But we are looking into how to make this open as well. And essentially, like then taking back all the metrics and then bringing it back to hope for for for for people to see how their effects are performing, for them to improve the quality of their effects or how they're building these things. So that's really what the platform is about. Like it's essentially building this whole ecosystem of apps, of apps in the future. And right now we're starting with that, with these effects and with the camera on your phone. So for now, the platform growth is very impressive. We've seen some very humbling numbers we believe is a very big number to comprehend. If you were to think about it in a sort of real sense, but we've seen effects which have billions of impressions, which means that because of the reach of our apps, people all over the world are experiencing these things and things are going viral all the time. And and they're like tons of talk about, you know, sort of some tips and tricks on like how to how to pay for that as well. What Instagram? So the way we think about our platform and what it what it hopes to what we hope to provide is its application, so essentially offering tools that make it accessible to all people who want to move to capabilities like enhancing the capabilities, capabilities. It's a it's a word that we consistently use. Essentially, what we mean by that is to empower relevant and context of our experiences for people and really looking into the the the tracking aspect of of of er, which is more about how you're the the the general understanding of your environment and how we can translate that for, for your application or your effect to, to look into it. And then there is distribution. I can be more open up more channels where people can express these things, like I mentioned before, Portofino now has its power by this fall for story time. We have this on Messenger. We have this one on Facebook and Instagram. So people are using this video because people are using this everywhere, including for four games and four face facemasks. Indoctrination is just going to talk about a high level couple of things, the way I see our platform artists are dueling platform as podcasts to do is that it's it's like layered complexity, right. So there is a there's a way to, like, build a tool which works for both only users or people who are new to the platform or don't have that much experience and also works for people who are more advanced users. So in a way, what we're doing is taking the complexity and letting it. And we're saying that you can start with at the first level, you can start with the tree and inspector and you can drop in an object, a tracker to be Hendrika. So essentially the capability part, taking that in and adding it to your thing, it's just a couple of minutes. The second layer is its patch editor. So Batchelder's is essentially like our. Daughtry's, where you can create like sort of visual programming sequences, and again, this is like. Kind of driven to the point that we want to not not everybody is a developer, right? Not everybody knows scripting. And so for people who are less familiar with that, they can they can use this to get started. And we've seen people create some really complicated, like sort of sequence of patches for animation, four four four four four shading for all sorts of things. And and it's it's really nice to see that being the case and then talk about sort of how you can abstract these things out further through photography and through blogs. And then we have scripting, which is like more advanced uses. So essentially we have JavaScript for people who are familiar with that, they can add additional layers of complexity. They can build a library. They can have sort of you know, if you wanted to protect, you could do that the scripting. So those are the three layers of complexity. Like I mentioned before, Ed, we have a new way forward with the host of new features. I highly recommend using it. Connecting the nodes is really easy. It's like dragging and dropping the pointer blocks, essentially something that that are also really excited about. The way we see blocks playing out is essentially, you know, as people create more long form of content, you know, like like bigger, bigger and bigger artifacts, it becomes incredibly complicated to manage every portion of the effect, just like you build the software and then you try to modularize your software. Right. So what we've done here is that we've created blocks, which is essentially sort of a small effect in its own way, and you can include it and it's better traceable in your effect and you can share it and it improves collaboration and usability of components. Right. So. That's how we thought about it. I just have a quick video to show you what it is. So here you see like that. It's a game block if you see on the top, right inside our block. And essentially what we've done is somebody created this block that they shared with me or, I don't know, amongst friends or something. And then essentially I've just like added like there are two parametrized things here. One is the character Sprite and one is the building Sprite. Right. And I just replace one with the Cattan one with the building and it's done. So essentially all of the complexity is abstracted away from you. Whoever built the block in the first place, the one building it. And we do see that turning into an entire ecosystem in itself where people are building blocks and and sharing them or, you know, or figuring out how to monetize it. And then there is like you can see the bachelor thing. So to be able to connect to different blocks. So there's the game and then there's the score. And essentially the score itself is, you know, again, parametrized, so. That's just a high level overview of how you're looking at of appreciation for capabilities. Again, we're looking at in the context of our experiences. So we think about it in two ways. We think about it from an easy way to do this is like front facing, which is my current camera. If you get and then there is augmenting your reward, which is your sort of rear facing camera and where we see like glasses standing as well, because everything will be it'll be your perspective or your point of view. So from those perspectives, we've figured out some of the early tracking technologies we have available for our developers, face tracking and tracking, body tracking, background segmentation. And then this recognition, semantic understanding location are truly both in camera and essentially face tracking. It's like enables more precision accuracy around the eyes and the mouth. You really good tracking speed because we also have a high fidelity face mesh essentially tracking our points on the face and that that makes it easier for you to attach things in different places. And tracking hand detection and sort of bounding box tracking, you can see an effect of The Avengers. This is right now available on Facebook, but it's not a group of Instagram and. Catholic supports single enforce this background segmentation. I'm sure this is a very popular use case these days with very appalling, you know, like everybody wants to be at the beach when they're on a video call. I am not expert, but I could be. And so essentially, you're transporting people to destinations and and then the Instagram also has this and they focus more. So that's how we use it. In fact, if you if you ever use the upload effect on a vertical that's also using background segmentation, you have target recognition and tracking this from a tweeted at Tate Modern and Tapert and actually sorry. And and this is like finding a to not do the two dimensional targeting, especially using that to activate any other experience. So you can you can see the tracking is really good, like you can move your camera down and it keeps it in the context of your experience. So posters are a great example of that, you can show air at specific locations, we're working on this sort of location and making it locations relevant. Again, not all of these things are available because we try to make them available for public use distribution. So for distribution, we have we have Facebook and Instagram right now, but we're trying to open up more channels. I'm going to skip through I skip through a bunch of things here. I'm just wanted to jump straight into Instagram and specifically sort of talk to you guys about how what is the best way to to think about creating your experiences for Instagram. And we know that Instagram for for us even right now. And most people have that special connection with with like a lot of young people. And and so it's it has like sort of really interesting, sort of sorry, my waiting to I in the charger. But the Instagram platform is it's one of our most popular ones. And so I thought that would be interesting for you. So, yeah, so we've done some research on this and we've boiled it down to two these things, right. So really what we're looking at is like when you're thinking about creating an effect, think about is it serving a real need? You know, our mission is is to bring people closer together and and understanding the need or the cultural context or, you know, some of these things. Right. It's really important. So I express my aesthetic. You know, that these funds have been really popular. Capture what I'm feeling, thinking or doing great and getting inspired and having fun. This could also be like games actually could also bring games and then make my friends laugh, which is like more like funny stuff. We could all use some humor at a time like this and then be part of something bigger than than myself, which I which I find really important for you as a as a team for like when you're thinking about building something that is relevant, a cultural moment like that, those mortars or the or the Vallentine one, it's like it's like really special. Right. Because that allows us to celebrate those kind of moments with our friends and family. The other thing is getting out of the way, I think, in a good year on Instagram specifically, it's something where it should be kind of like such. I'm reminded of this poem, which I don't remember the author, but he talked about how a poem should be possible. But today I feel the same way about Instagram experiences, which are very popular. If you want it to be something which is palpable, like something which people can experience, but it's not too heavy or too overt because then the people are not, then it occupies the whole space. Right. You want people to be able to express themselves in and get more out of like. Themselves into the into the experience, so that's one of the gifts, not as I think this one is mostly like I know some of you might might at some point, you know, if you're building these skills, you can think about monetizing them on working with businesses or creating stuff for other partners. And, you know, these are really good examples of the first two are examples of really good experiences, which are very subtle. And it's also like kind of your guidance when you're working with the business partner on the Game of Thrones. One and the yellow one are not overtly blinded, but they kind of get the message across and they the best thing about them is that people will share this and it will be it has the potential to be to go down further in the network amongst friends and families and their friends and families. But the one on the right, the most dislike of any I think it's a poor example of that, which is it's overt. It's like has this sort of like, you know, Craigslist kind of feel to it like this, you know, call this number or is the brand. And I feel that that's fine, but people don't end up sharing those. So it's informative, but you don't really leverage the power of the community of consumers. Take it easy and fun again, just how for people to use the effect for Instagram specifically think about this is the general guidance for any kind of user experience, for printing any app, if you want it to be. A few steps need to be simple. You want to be easy for people to do to to start using. It shouldn't have been steps. And then lastly, like I would say, just like think think outside the box. Right. So like think of other things you've seen like tons of effects, which I'll have none of the things that we previously talked about but are extremely popular, like the ones you can see. And just because they're they're just really out of the box. So yeah. So I'm going to end this now. I'm just going to say that and the world would not be possible with with it all the with the support of all the developers in the community. And there's something in it for all of us and also the people who are going to experience these things. And yeah. Thank you. Thank you for taking the time to work through this presentation and for following me to talk to you guys about your platform. If you would like to know more, we have you can find us on our community website, which is Bachelder. Come give newsletters. We have local events, which I'm guessing we don't have for now. We don't have as many. And but we do have some tools that see a community. And then on community, you can you can find the community groups. I'm just going to leave there for a second and that's it. Over to you, Jimmy. Oh, thanks. Thanks so much for this overview. A few weeks ago, someone ran into a masterclass on Spikier just for one or one, and I participated. So I tried my best. I could get my fist effect and it was using the glass, the glass filter and then try again, like my my country flag when I look up. And when I looked down, it was really good just trying that out. And I got lots of inspiration off of what I can do with. It's just one of those interested enthusiast or did I stop even at the beginning intermediate level. So massive opportunity to to do great things. So this is really exciting. Thank you for sharing this overview. Definitely, definitely, I mean, the the reaches the platform is there the ecosystem and the, you know, in terms of support, even, you know, there's a whole community of creators who are so nice and happy to help you out. And I've seen so many connections being made across the world. You know, some somebody in London working with somebody in Singapore, somebody in Nigeria with somebody in the US, like all of those things that happen on the platform. And I think that this is the best time to to to do it. Yeah, yeah, great. I think we can jump to the questions so before now summit, a couple of questions and I'm sure you like to answer a few of them, maybe not all, but a few of them. So the first one. How long have you been working on Spikier? What is its importance to the tech industry? So I've been at Facebook for three years. I joined in the engineering team supporting that team, but I've basically been working with here since the beginning. So it's been almost three years working with this team. Now, it is a relatively new team in that sense. So when I started working with them, the platform was not public. That year we had announced it, announced it at it, and we still had Facebook was in a closed beta sort of mode where we would test it out with the partners and try to get the kinks out of the platform. And we launched our studio back then. It wasn't quite a spark. It was quiet studio and we we released it. So I've been working with them beginning now, obviously. I've switched roles inside Facebook, and I've been since this year have been focused primarily on on spikier full time from a software engineer perspective and and helping the team grow and then support them from for publishing and for insights. So far, I haven't answered the second part, so what is its importance to the technology industry? I think, yes, I kind of answered that in the beginning, but I'll just repeat that. I think that we've kind of mastered a two dimensional computing platform. I keep pointing to my phone for reference, but it is it is the best thing that we have available right now. And and moving from there, I think the industry is definitely moving to a three dimensional computing platform. Everybody's in the same game right now. And I think that that definitely is going to define the future of, like, how we build things, how we experience things. Yeah. So next question. So this question is, what are the benefits of spikier over all that? I know you mentioned like a couple of them in your line suddenly if you want to add any Nosseir, right. So I think other airplane engines are like there's tons of different platforms out there. I have to say without a doubt that from what I know about our platform, it's definitely it's very interesting. So it's definitely one of the easiest platforms that we know out there that exists for for people to get started building things and testing things out. But it has like it it can go up in complexity of things that you want to build. So you can you can ramp up really quickly. And like you said, you know, you can take classes and you can you can put a flag and you can create all these experiences in a couple of minutes. But then you can also end up spending hours and building like really complex games and experiences. So I feel that the the the benefit really is, is I would say two things. One is that each of our apps, which is the service by people consuming these things. And the other thing is the ease of creation that really sets us apart. Next shall see. Where's the best place to get royalty free assets? This is a huge you know, I, I think that that I get that question all the time. So actually, in our studio, we have integration with Sketchpad right now. SketchUp, if you go to SketchUp separately, look online, the proprietor or DP assets, you can download the assets. I think this is like there's so many, but that's not the only one. There's so many different providers out there. Like if you just Google, you can get through the assets, you can get audio files, you can get images, textures. I think that I just want to put a little caveat here, is that the true sort of building or the true like innovation here really comes from building the assets yourself, if you can manage that? Right. And I think that's also another skill set that that is really good for for for developers to have. But if they can manage, they always have the library of software assets. Right. So but if they want to learn something new, then you have all these cinema for all these softwares for for for sculpting and for creating the assets. And it's really, really fun and it's really interesting. Yeah, I think it's also a good opportunity for us to also like what we create as our designers. I know there is this all designers versus the developers, so important for them to collaborate even more. So we are trying to learn everything. They collaborate with designers or creators that focus on design the ecosystem like get a more and more. This would spark. Definitely, yeah. Next question is, when will it be possible to add one's own assets to the library? Yeah, we're working on that one. We don't have an exact timeline on that yet, so so we we do have the ability to sort of download patch assets that are available in Liberia. Right. But I think the question is more around when will it be open to third party? And for that we have. It's on the road map, so we're working on it. So one of the other things that we're also. Trying to do is, as part of that, make it easier for people to add other kinds of assets to the library, including blogs and audio. And other things. Really remodeled. Next question says, what about playing audio during video recording without this happening to Mike? Yeah, so it's if you wanted to do this, it's this has been a very popular request, actually, that's one of the reasons why I I think that I've seen this from a number of different people. There's a number of different experiences that would be that would be possible if this were possible. However, it's it's on the roadmap. It's not out yet. I do expect for us to make some progress on this. Later this year or early next year, but probably probably earlier than that, and it's it's a two part problem. So we have two issues here. One is like having audio through your headphones, because then the sort of speaker or audio in your head like, oh, the audio output doesn't interfere with the audio input, but then there's the more challenging issue around sort of just having it available without without any without any headset. So, again, it's an interesting challenge for for the team. And they're looking into this. But I don't have any any your timeline on it. But it's not we we we know about this one, so the for that and I think questions like this really help us because a lot of feedback comes from the community because they're really the ones who are challenging us to make these things. Less so when should we expect a finger tracking? So we have had something like I mentioned, it's a bounding box that's not a number of different points on your hand. It's available for Facebook. You can try it out on on on this file cabinet and build it on your on your computer finger tracking. It's not out yet. Again, these have been popular requests, but I don't have I don't have a clear timeline that I can I can provide for. And it's also dependent on on which average comes out on. So typically we would release these kind of features app by app. So. So I think. And if there were finger. Oh, no, no, not anytime soon. What are you doing? So this is what I would say, not not I don't think it's going to come up this year. Yeah, I think it's interesting that people are asking a lot of, well, kind of questions, is it like a public chukka feature where people can see, like the road map or what's coming? Yes, so if you're on if you're on this particular community group or if we have announcements, though, so every time something new comes out, you make an announcement there. And if you subscribe to, then you might even get an email. But again, it doesn't we at Facebook, we don't we generally don't stand up for things that are going to come out because, you know, it's hard to say when exactly it's going to come out. So we do make announcements for things that are already out. Or just so so that people can get up to date with the latest on. That's nice. I also like from the live chat, I also see someone asking about the recent shop's Facebook shows that was lunch. So someone's asking around. We can they see our shopping experiences? I this might be a feature, but it's interesting that people are asking that question. That is that is super interesting, actually, that's that's part of our sort of air commerce banner. It's something that is not right now currently available to the third party. But we are actively developing and testing it out with the partners globally. And we have some really good traction on that side by side to be dependent on countries. And it's not available to third party developers, but we are working on making it available. So that is definitely something that we're looking at, because I think this is a this is a very interesting space, especially because sort of air commerce makes it possible for you to buy things online, especially under these circumstances where people are not able to go to to their shops and stuff if they're in lockdown. And and I feel that you're able to do that without you're able to try things before you buy them, which which would be more of a retail kind of store experience. Right. Not to say online experience, but that's why it's I think it's relevant. OK, next question, when will you add what substance can we have? One, specific exports. There's no plans for WhatsApp yet, so nothing, nothing for I haven't seen anything for this year. And what's up, you know, it's also it's a it's very efficient and it's one of the fastest that's out there. And so we have to it's more constrained environment for for us to to build on. And yeah. So it's not it's not there yet. But but again, we have this feedback. We know that this is something we have to get out at some point. And in terms of specific exports, there are currently no plans for this because one of the issues is we're building our platform is tied to the distribution platform for development and supporting and publishing, and then distribution is all tied together. So I'm getting somebody saying, like, how can we build things for like where we are or something like that that requires. You know, we still don't have a standard in the industry for, like, how to run in your experience. So so for that reason, it's it's not currently possible. Who can I use background image like 360 View? Yeah, so there is we have recently launched this feature, it's very new, but it's not it's not giving you the ability to add your own background image like a 360 video. It's called it's actually called a gallery picture. So essentially what you can do is you can add it to your effect and it gives the ability to the person who's using the effect to add something so you can essentially change your texture to a calorie texture. And then what that does is that somebody so you can say every for background, let's say let's say background segmentation thing. Right. And then person who's using the experience can just swap out the texture. The same for for a video. So but but for a developer to do it, B, we haven't made that available yet, but pretty specifically. Yeah. Mammography, which is possible, but not what we do in that sense. So it's a it's a happy and a science and I guess my guys check out the gallery. That's a good step forward. Cool. Next question. Cool. So, yeah, that's. Yeah, is there is there a quicker way to eliminate the other controls right now it's only through codine. Yes, so we are planning on releasing this soon. We are working on it, on adding this to to editors, but right now it's only recording. But but we we have had this feedback for a while. And and you should see something soon, very, very soon. And as part of the patch, everything. But for now, you can do it to jouster, which is which is what the question says if you want to gain from the live chat. So I want to access those cameras. I know you might know what that technology means. Does Aleida are coming your way? Your voices, your voice is breaking out. Chimpy, is he better now? Yeah, yeah, sorry I lost you there for a second. What are you what are you saying? Yes, I'd say the question from the live chat, so does our camera leader come out of that coming Akamai Technologies, our development process? Have our cameras and other kind of sensing cameras. I imagine the question is around representing cameras and what was the thing? Yes, they affect the development process, if one is beautiful without affecting development process in any way, shape or effect. So, yes, the thing is, because that's a really good question. So I think it really depends on the on the on the hardware that is attached to it has to be on Facebook or Instagram or Spotify app. So it has to be on one of these apps. Right. So if they're if they have this sort of camera, I don't see why not like why it wouldn't work. But I also don't know if any like I don't like mobile phone cameras, which are really high end up sensing cameras, but definitely it's going to improve the performance of these people's. Nice. Next question, and it will almost all these things will come out soon like that, that is really like the cutting edge of like how people are building in experiences. Percoco. OK, next question. I know we must get into the AMA, but. So the next question. See? It even work even while we wait for the even while we wait for asking this question, do you want to also maybe share any insights for any designer or creator if they want to ease the learning process or if they want to grow in how to learn how to create new assets? Is there any link or resource beyond this park community that they can maybe go to just to learn how to view assets as a designer or to India as entity are good? Yeah, so I think there is a bunch of tutorials on YouTube, and if they go to spark dot com, they'll find a lot of educational content and also in the community. But the best thing to do right now is like the way I would put it, it's like there's two parts to this, right? One, it's like creating the accents, like you mentioned, all the city assets and and, you know, whatever goes into a thing. Second part, I think it's like composition, which is really like you're like a project manager or a product manager. You're thinking about like what? What does your experience look like? And then it's execution and development and sort of combining it in air studio. I think that for people. There are things that you can also build inside of the studio, but visual traders and a lot of other other tools that we have, so mastering them will help you sort of speed up the process with which you you create these building blocks of your experience. And I would say that all of those combined skill sets of like varying levels of expertise will definitely help you become really good at this and become really skilled at this. But in the end, it's a combination of all of these, really. So in terms of where they can find the stuff, yeah, those are the places that I mentioned the community online and on YouTube. And for for software, they can they can look at a ton of different software for 3-D modeling if they just search for it. My and I'm afraid this there's a bunch of different softwares out there. Oh, great. I know we're almost out of time here, so we'll just skip through to the last few questions that we have for you. So the first one is what interesting trends have you observed within this ecosystem? I'm sure people will want to look up to those trends and see if it was possible to help them. Imagine if you get into the concrete, what else do you see? Right. So I think that that's a great question. I think I might have partly answered that in my sights, but I just I just referred to it quickly, I think. The ones that are very interesting are the ones which are good on cultural moments, so essentially, you know, if you have like a famous holiday or, you know, there's a special kind of thing that's going on that that's relevant to everyone, then then or popular cultural moment, then that really resonates really well. Again, it doesn't have to be that. It can always be like a fun quick game. It can be like an interesting sort of out-of-the-box thinking kind of experience for for looking at trends. I would I would look at the community thread and I would look at some of the popular creators and what they're doing. And you'll definitely see, like, you know, the kind of stuff that they're pointing to the tunes by you and then all kinds of people out there. I mean, we have hundreds of thousands of creators still. Awesome. So in terms of next steps, what we recommend for these are amazing participants, they have been here for almost an hour, so I'm sure they'll want to hear from you. What would the next step for them, having had all these having answered your questions, what else should they be doing? All right. Well, if you've survived the last hour, then must congratulate you. And then and if they have done so, then I'd say that truly, like the best thing to do would be you can always I'm guessing this video will be available. You can watch it. Yeah, it should definitely go through. I mentioned a couple of things in my sights and I would like resources. I think the best way to learn is to build life. And that's kind of like the way forward. And I know am talking to a lot of developers right now. So at least for me in my development career or my and my engineer career, I've always found it best to start getting my hands dirty with the tools and then and then referring back to sort of Dodo's maybe going really deep into the education side and coming back out and then building again. Right. But it's always good to keep up the momentum of prototyping, of building things to sort of motivate you. So that would be my advice is that if you want to keep up the momentum motivation, I don't know what your style is, but my style is that that's what I would recommend. I'm amazing. Thanks for that time. Yes, if you can move to the last slide where we have the hackathon. That would be great. Awesome. So Dex's we actually have the second hackathon online hackathon. So is running at the moment and we encourage you to apply for that. We have three amazing areas of categories that you can apply to the category which you have had and you have had from all that is possible within the real world, the ice and the ice them also. So we encourage you to actively participate, try to test, try to hack out things, try to test what you've learned today and see if you can win and just give you some context. The first online hurdle that we had, two devices, we came out on top. So they won and they got great prizes and recognition. So we encourage you as well to participate. Go to Def Post.com, Facebook, and you will find more details about the hackathon. So once again, thank you so much for joining us. We really appreciate your your commitment to to this session and just being here with us for an hour. So thank you so much. We appreciate. And you also mentioned a couple of websites, the community, the website, where you can learn more about Sparkhill. And we can't wait to see all you, but we know it could be seen by the same time we know you are. So I can try to keep building, keep creating, keep innovating, and we don't show. You might be the one the next big thing. Yes. Thank you once again for joining us. Much appreciated. Thank you, Jim. And thanks everyone for for for dialing in and for all the people who are watching this and including with us. Thank you. Amazing, and lastly, as we close, we want your feedback. Please take a minute to complete a survey that will be shown at you right at the end of this webinar or via email. Stay safe. I'll see you next time on the skills connection. Do you have an amazing day?