WHO WORKS HERE

People Staff Interview

• Took an interest in file formats and extensions from the PlayStation®️Portable

  I was born in the Hitachi city of Ibaraki prefecture, and grew up in the Hitachi Naka city. I was a kind of a problem child during my youth, throwing acorns at each other with friends and getting injured, trying to jump over irrigation canals while holding something heavy and falling in, doing all sorts of antics. Looking back, I think I just enjoyed doing things that would provide a source of talk with my friends.

  Once in Jr. High, I took an interest in carrying around movies and music that I liked on the PlayStation®️Portable. I started to think more about not just the content but the technical part of it like the file formats and file extensions, and I remember enjoying sharing that kind of knowledge with my friends.

  In high school I started to actively attend tutoring school, but again thinking about it now, I probably just wanted a place to communicate with friends through the topic of study.

  I hadn't seriously put thought into studying or the future, so I decided to apply for various fields for the University and just go in the path that I was accepted for. So I tested and applied for physics, engineering, biology, and architecture etc. But just before the 2nd phase of the exams, the great east Japan earthquake hit while I was on the Oedo subway line on my way to where I was staying in the city. Fortunately I was not injured or anything, but through this unprecedented major disaster, I started looking more seriously at my own future.

• From 'Faces of people' to 'Cars'.

  In the end I got into the faculty of advanced science and engineering in the Waseda University. I took a major in applied physics, and studied mainly science, but feeling doubt for my future without programming experience I selected a lab that specialized in image information processing. The early research theme was recreating the shape of people's faces from images. However while continuing the research, I started to strongly feel the high level of advancement in international conferences, and my lack of ability. At the time there were very few databases or source code for reference, and I was very inexperienced in programming, so I started to lose interest in the research, especially of faces.

  My turning point was when I went to the US to participate in an international conference. An older student colleague told me about a Japanese person working at Pixar, who are of course renowned for their refined animations. After contacting him, he gave me a tour of the studio. After returning to Japan I had an opportunity to meet him again, and when I mentioned out of the blue that I was having doubts about my research, he kind of 'dragged' me to Polyphony Digital (PDI) on the following day (lol). He was the engineering director at PDI.

  At PDI, they proposed to me, 'how about cars?'. I happened to be searching for a theme for my Master's thesis, and there was mention of curiosity regarding whether academic knowledge can be applied to a car game, so it nudged me forward. After thinking about it, I changed my research theme to cars, and did research regarding car shapes and editing.

  Thereafter I got more advice from him at the time when I was advancing to my doctoral course, and with the coming of the deep learning age, I challenged machine learning. But discovering how high the hurdle is for submitting thesis's, and my own level, I started to think that I would rather work in the business field rather than academia. This was a different field altogether, and I went to him for advice again, but after receiving a suggestion to 'try working part time to experience it', I started to work part time at PDI for about half a year. While developing actual tools for the development environment, I investigated and explained deep learning, and in the following year officially joined the company.

• Made responsible for supporting a Racing AI agent

  After joining the company, I was involved in a variety of different work such as maintenancing the asset pipeline, resolving compatibility issues of existing plug ins, developing tools for automatically sorting color data and material classifications, developing add-ins for supporting data entry and so on. There was a lot of development for tools to support artists, so there was a lot of opportunity to talk with them and that was great. While doing that, the project of developing a Racing AI agent (*Later named Gran Turismo Sophy) that Sony AI and PDI had been working on for some time really started to take off, and I was made responsible to provide the bridge between Sony AI and PDI.

  Thereafter I put my effort into balancing the work between research, development and racing game development, while at the same time working on some of the operations in executing events. There was a project manager responsible for the business side of the work already, but it started to become necessary to have support and management from an engineering viewpoint as the project progressed, so I focused my attention on support. I can say proudly that bringing about the success of the 'Race Together' event in 2021 and the experience gained from it has become one big foundation in my life.

  

• Making tools to make the Artist's jobs easier

  I think one great strength of PDI is that there are many programming professionals. Of course being able to consult regarding programming is one thing, but the environment where technical issues can be resolved in a timely manner is optimal for an engineer, and there is a lot that I learned just from working. I could easily see and feel that my skills were improving. Not only that, because there are many artists in PDI, there is feedback immediately when tools are made. I can hear out the strengths and weaknesses of my own development at each step, which allows me to determine the direction of development with confidence, and it helps to maintain motivation. It makes me happy to see people using what I created. I also started to feel that in making a product, having an environment where something new is born from conversation regardless of the work types of those involved is very important.

  Personally, I want to make more tools that will make the work of the artists easier. Because the work of the artists tend to be tedious manual labor, and because the amount of their reference data is massive, the theme for the future is how use the knowledge accumulated until now to reduce the workload as much as possible.

• Would like to see more people who want to add new features

  At PDI you can challenge new things. I would like to see more people join us that have a subjective intention, wanting to add new features to Gran Turismo. I would like to work with people who have their own answer to that question, and those who have worked to make achieving that goal possible. I think that effort is probably connected to that person's strength.

  If you have a strong point, the other skills can be honed after you join the company. It's easier to tell each other what you are each good at, and support each other. And thinking about what you can do with your new found skills I think will lead to more motivation. Those of you with unique thoughts, that want to integrate that into the product-why don't you try working with us?