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DAN THAGARD: Hey, good afternoon.
My name's Dan Thagard.
I'm the director of site reliability and core
engineering at Magic Leap.
My team's mission at Magic Leap is
to provide technology solutions and services
to the rest of the organization, to enable people to do
and perform their best work.
We're a globally distributed team.
We provide 24/7, 365 support to our customers.
And one of the challenges that we face as being a global team
is--
well, apart from daylight savings,
and realizing that New Zealand actually goes
the opposite direction than the US when the time changes--
is to kind of maintain a sense of team
and maintain a sense of community and team building.
So last year, we were casting around for ideas
for how can we do a team building exercise.
And we landed on the idea of, hey,
why don't we build an app for Magic Leap One?
Now, I've got to preface this by saying that none of us
are 3D application developers.
We're not modelers, or graphics artists, or game designers
whatsoever.
But we are SREs, and we know how to build and run
infrastructure, and run it reliably at scale.
So we said, hey, wouldn't it be really cool
if we can take the infrastructure that we
do and work with day to day, and be able to visualize it using
spatial computing, to be able to actually see all the nodes,
and show the dependencies and everything that we're
working on.
So that's what we decided to do.
That was our challenge.
We wanted to, in 24 hours, be able to build and visualize,
using Terraform, our infrastructure
and spatial computing.
And that's what we did.
So 24 hours later-- well, about 30 hours, actually.
But in a day, we were able to--
with no help, no outside help, no documentation--
just using what our customers see,
we were able to build on-device, having no previous Unity
experience and no previous on [INAUDIBLE] or anything
like that.
And it was a really empowering and joyful experience.
I can't describe how happy that was
the first time I saw this sea of Leapers appear on stage in 3D
in front of me.
It was kind of like my first "Hello, world" all over again.
One of the challenges that we faced with this was,
not having any outside help, we had
to kind of dig within the team, and leverage each other,
and really work together as a team.
So I'm going to turn it over to Anthony right now.
He's going to talk through some of the technical challenges
that we faced as a team as we were
trying to build out infrastructure
using mixed reality.
ANTHONY LUCILLO: Thanks, Dan.
My name is Anthony Lucillo.
I'm a site reliability engineer at Magic Leap,
and the technical lead of Nebula.
We built this experience using Unity and C#.
For the multiplayer element, we are
using Photon, which handles the user and room management, as
well as synchronization of object data like position,
rotation, scale, even custom metadata
that we're able to send.
Using Terraform and a CI/CD pipeline,
we deployed the necessary back end components, Google Cloud
Functions and Google Cloud Storage.
This allowed us to pull Terraform state
data, which we then parse and visualize in mixed reality.
There is so much more that you can do than simply
reading a Terraform state file.
Imagine, you could make changes in real time
with Terraform in mixed reality, query near-live metadata
to facilitate tasks like architecture reviews, cost
analysis, and system health monitoring.
You can even customize your war rooms
with dashboards, comms channels, and
whatever other useful information
you could fill the room with.
And because this is collaborative,
you would all see the exact same thing in that war room.
In my opinion, the most important part
of this experience is making sure
that everyone sees the same thing in the same place.
Which brings us to the most complex and interesting problem
that we faced--
how do you make sure that every user in the same experience
sees the same thing?
Each device is independent.
Therefore, how can multiple users in the same experience
know everyone else's position and orientation?
Where is the origin?
There are a few solutions to this problem.
Our experience solves this using image tracking.
The Magic Leap image tracking system
uses the camera to detect two-dimensional planar
images from a custom-defined target set,
and continuously tracks and updates its location
and orientation as users move around in the real world.
This image, therefore, becomes a point of reference,
a way for everyone to agree on an orientation and an origin
for the room.
Now that we're through the technical details,
let's watch a quick video of Nebula.
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And here, we're in the-- oh, it's over.
OK.
OK, we're choosing a room.
We've got a couple Terraform architectures to choose from.
You can drag it out and into the room
and manipulate their position.
The red indicators you see are what
other users in the same experience are looking at.
And as you can see, other users are also
able to move objects at the same time,
and you're able to even try to steal it from them.
And you can also move up to it and interact with it,
because it's out there in the real world.
Thank you.
SPEAKER 1: Great, thanks.
Big round of applause, please, for the team at Magic Leap.
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