Meet David Littlewood, Rethinkly's Tech Lead

- David, as a Tech Lead in Rethinkly you are starting your nineth year… what gives you energy doing it?

- I guess the challenges keep changing – the market changes, the client change and the technology’s changing so it’s always a moving target. Keeping up with those moving targets is part of that challenge. You know, it’s also not like typical business software – It’s not just dealing with databases and networks – we’ve got visual output software which is interesting and it’s different to a lot of other things. It’s based on gaming technology…

- What’s unique about Rethinkly comparing to gaming software?

- In terms of games, you typically have player characters and players play a game against each other and score points, win requests or fight each other. There is none of that in Rethinkly… The thing that crosses into the gaming field is the visuals, the avatars and the moving around in that 3D world side and the use of cameras. And the other thing is that the avatars we use are not always other players in the game. Sometimes they will be non-player characters. They’re just a representation of an organisation or another person or a thing. And that’s kind of unusual.

Usually if you are in a game, you are in control of your character and you’ve got some influence around the world you are in. In Rethinkly it’s your world… or whoever you’re sharing it with. You are building this 3D world quickly with some basics… the 3D landscape and you adding objects to set the scene – with no surprises, nothing pops up and challenges you in the middle of the exercise. It’s a creative, imaginative environment for you and other people to help represent how you experience the situation.

- You mentioned the avatars. Recently you’ve been involved doing some updates to avatar’s skeleton and postures. Why and what has changed?

- The main part of this is the user input. Users had said that they wanted to improve the balance between masculine and feminine animations that we used and add additional ones. They didn’t feel they could represent them – some animations were more masculine. You know, the background of animations in gaming tends to be about fighting – it tends to be masculine. It was good exercise and opportunity for us to refresh animations, bring them up to date a little bit more androgynous and I think they’re a slightly more professional.Our avatars are really important because if you are following an avatar the idea is that it represents something and you want it to be a good representation. This was a good improvement for Rethinkly.

- What was the most challenging in this process of making them better?

- One challenge with animations was making them blend into each other so that when you switch from one animation to another, it looks okay like a fairly natural movement. Another challenge was to select which animations we want to keep. I think when we had a very large selection of very good animations, limiting it to a sensible size list is tricky, because it would be nice to just have everything there, but then you’ve got users spending far too long trying to make a choice between them.

- How the animations has been created? You bought them from the shelf, or there was a particular specification and you get somebody to help you with it?

- We had an existing, bank of animations, which we’d been using for several years before, which we’d done ourselves. This time we defined what we wanted in terms of the animations, and we went to a third party who produced very, very good quality animations. They’re based in Canada. They were excellent and could take what we wanted and build the animations that we wanted to do. They employed the actors that carried out those animations. They also come up with some of their own ideas and their own way of doing things, which improved the overall result. I think it was a good thing to go outside to experts.

- A little bit about the history David, it’s your ninth year in Rethinkly – how the software evolves? How the versions changed through those years?

- Uh, we started with 2.8 and 2.9, which were the earliest versions that were based on, a kind of plugin that would work on internet browsers, like Internet Explorer in those days. And it moved over to being an application with version 3.1, which was all about improved visuals… We had opportunity for a much richer landscape and better quality animation, better quality visuals. Then, as we moved forward, it became more about the platform that we were deploying to rather than just making it work on IE… we were building it for Mac and Windows as dedicated application. Then we came kind of full circle after that, went to producing it for the web, which made it more accessible, without needing installation, things like that.But the shift to the web has been a very positive one for us. I think that it’s made it a lot easier to get people using the software without needing to run an install.

- What’s on your deck these days?

- This year we are starting to deploy mobile apps and we’ve not really done that before. We’ve traditionally used desktops, laptops and sometimes tablets. We’re now starting to do more with mobile phones, and that’s been received reasonably well so far. So that’s a lot about user interface and making things work, again, on low end devices. Lots of gaming technology tents to have an expectation of powerful graphics, lots of memory, and also the expectation that that will be the only application really on the machine. So all of the hardware becomes dedicated to a game and the quality, the performance of that game. Whereas we know that our software is being used alongside office applications, alongside things like Zoom and Teams and it needs to be as performance as possible for that. The same applies to mobile which has got a limited amount of capability for gaming, so we’ve got to shrink things to fit.

- Everyone in the industry is kind of the waving a big flag of AI. How do you see AI being part of what Rethinkly is doing?

- There are a couple of directions I think AI might take. So currently quite a lot of what we do is customizing that environment or changing that environment so the 3D world representing something – a situation or a relationship or whatever. There’s an opportunity to use AI to customize that further so that you can get a better representation of your inner world. That’s quite an exciting prospect. There’s also the possibility that we can use AI to prompt users using software in ways that they don’t need lots and lots of instruction. They don’t just instruct an AI to build or to make changes – that could give the right sort of prompts to the user to make good use of the software.

- How to you store and how do you use the user data?

- Typically, we store the data for shared worlds. So whatever’s built in the software is stored on our server. We don’t read it, we don’t use it ourselves, we don’t sell it or share it. The user privacy is the most important thing for us. But it’s available for those people who invite others to share their world. But it is also completely possible to store that data on your own device. And that satisfies some users who’ve got privacy concerns. The kind of things that you put into Rethinkly software will be private. You may not want to share how you think and feel about something and it’s important for us to protect that where we can.

- What are you excited about for next months?

- That’s one of the thing that we are doing now is the prospect of increasing the use of Rethinkly Team – the version where you invites a small team into one online world at the same time. That brings its own challenges, but I think there’s a really good opportunity there to get teams working together better.

- That’s exciting! Can’t wait to play with it. Thank you for the conversation today!

- Thank you.