Gateway to Success for International-Minded Students; An Exclusive Interview with Pretia’s Development-Side Interns
Hello! I’m Naomi Numata, an intern at Pretia.
Today we’ll be interviewing Pretia’s development-side interns.
So far we’ve published anecdotes about development, Pretia’s history, the AR cloud story, details of Pretia’s working styles. This time, we’re going to deliver the voices of our members for you to further understand our company.
In Part 1, I’m going to introduce the 5 interns in Pretia’s development side.
(Note: The two members on either ends of the thumbnail are full-time engineers.)
When recruiting interns for our development side, we conduct coding tests in addition to the interviews to select the best members.
Asahi
First year Master’s student at Graduate School for Interdisciplinary Information Studies, the University of Tokyo
Has been an intern for 11 months
Role: Unity engineer/ Web engineer
Works about once a week
Yuri
Second year Master’s student at Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, the University of Tokyo (Information Physics & Computing major)
Has been an intern for: 7 months
Role: Research on AR Cloud services
Works 10 hours per 2 weeks
Kentaro
First year Master’s student at Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, the University of Tokyo (Information Physics & Computing major)
Has been an intern for 3 months
Role: Unity engineer, mainly creating prototypes for AR scenes
Works twice a week
Richard
Master Student at Graduate School of Interdisciplinary Information Studies, The University of Tokyo
Has been an intern for 5 months
Role: Computer vision research engineer
Works 10 hours a week
Zexuan
Master student at Department of Systems Innovation, School of Engineering, The University of Tokyo
Has been an intern for 2 weeks (Joined after the Golden Week vacation)
Role: Web engineer
Works 2 or 3 times a week
We interviewed the 5 people above about what it’s like to be an intern at Pretia Inc.
-Why did you become an intern at Pretia?
Asahi: A friend of mine who used to be an intern at Pretia introduced me. I’ve always been interested in VR/AR technology. In fact, I put VR applications on display at the University of Tokyo’s May Festival. So when he told me there was a company that develops services using AR technology, I decided to apply for an internship there.
Yuri: The CEO’s friend introduced me. I also wanted to put my skills to use, like image processing and C++.
Kentaro: I was interested in creating AR games.
Richard: Because I am interested in what Pretia is doing, and the intern matches my research field.
Zexuan: First, Pretia runs an interesting as well as promising business with AR tech, I feel there will be lots of new things to achieve in this field;
Second, Pretia has a perfect environment of utilizing the most advanced and practical technology in the web engineering field, which is very attractive and beneficial for an engineer;
At last, Pretia holds a very diverse, flat and flexible working environment, team members are very kind and brilliant, it would be great to work here.
Obviously, since Pretia is an AR entertainment company, many of the members are students interested in xRtech. Some say that things like the diversity of the members, the development environment, and opportunities for coding were what encouraged them to join Pretia.
-What’s unique about being an intern at Pretia?
Asahi: The best thing is that the engineer staffs will teach you a lot of things. They’re super friendly, and I sometimes get carried away in conversations with them. Of course, having to communicate in English is a good practice for me.
Yuri: As Asahi mentioned, your English skills will definitely improve.
Kentaro: You’ll be able to do practical implementations on Unity. You also get to experience things you normally wouldn’t, e.g. Oculus and Firebase. On top of that, like Asahi and Yuri said, communicating with engineer staffs is a good opportunity to practice your English.
Richard: Flexible working time and place. I also work with professional researchers, which is something rare.
Zexuan: First, as Pretia is a diverse team, we could meet friends from different background and have a great time;
Then, utilizing SCRUM and related tools makes the whole development process quick and professional, it is good for students to get to know such process and knowledge of teamwork earlier;
At last, Pretia uses the most advanced and practical web development techs, students who aims to become a professional engineer could learn a lot through the internship.
Seems like the all-English office environment was a big plus for the Japanese members. It’s also a unique experience to work with attentive professional engineers from all over the world. They’re very friendly, and they’ll listen to you patiently even if you’re not the best at English. (They’ll sometimes reply in Japanese for you; you’re not the only one learning a new language) Aside from that, Pretia offers opportunities for practical implementations, a good development environment, flexible working styles and so on. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
Next, we asked Asahi, Yuri, and Kentaro about their history and their attitudes toward their career.
Tell us about what you were doing before you joined Pretia.
Asahi: I became interested in software development when I was a freshman in college. I had no experience until then. The first programming language I learned was Processing, which was made for electronic arts and visual design. I thought it was pretty cool to create visually appealing artworks through coding. After that, I came across Unity, a software I saw a massive potential in. I was especially into developing games using VR technology, and I actually made some for my own interest. When I was a junior/senior, I put on a display at the May Festival and the Komaba Festival (the University of Tokyo’s school festivals), and competed at IVRC (International collegiate Virtual Reality Contest).
Yuri: i mainly used C++, C#, Unity, OpenCV, OpenMP, and OpenGL for image processing and parallel processing. I also have experience on a bit of deep learning, TCP/UDP, web development, and HoloLens development.
Kentaro: Before joining Pretia, I created games in class (where people can generate Kamehame-ha attacks by measuring their myoelectricity) and displayed AR co-op town building games at the May Festival. This is the first time I work on development in a company, but I feel like I’m making good use of the experiences I had in college.
Even though it’s their first internship, they’ve been working hard on development from before. That’s so cool!
-Tell us about your attitudes toward your career.
Asahi: I’ve always been interested in creating, and that’s what I look forward to doing in the future. To be specific, manufacturing companies and IT companies (Web, SI). At Pretia, I get a lot more experience as a Unity engineer and a Web engineer than before, and I’m really enjoying that.
Yuri: I want to contribute to the society using measurement control skills. In this context, measurement means getting information from the input data (such as image or signal processing), and control means operating based on that information for a certain purpose. It’s like measuring the temperature to change the air conditioner’s amount of air flow. At Pretia I focus on the former, and at the lab I focus on the latter skill. I’m working on applying both of them to AR, though. Since I’m still young, I narrow down the target to engineering and informatics and put effort into mastering the basics.There’s a wide range of things I can apply measurement control to in the future. Though I’m still deciding, I want use engineering/informatics to create technology that will meet the needs for women. I hope to become a pioneer in that field. It’d be wonderful if the outcomes affect people worldwide, not only those in the country.
Kentaro: For now, I want to work in game-development or AR related jobs. I’m dreaming of working on development of stadia at GoogleJapan, then moving to the U.S. and creating AR devices at major companies like Google, Facebook, Microsoft or Apple. We’ll see how that goes…
-Did you all come to Pretia because you were interested in working globally?
Asahi: I do want to work internationally. In fact, I think it’ll be absolutely necessary to do that in the future. The reason is because if you can only communicate in Japanese, you’ll have much less opportunities of working on products and services you’re interested in. For example, if you wanted to create products at Microsoft you’d have to go to MSD, the subsidiary company, not Microsoft Japan.
Working at Pretia, (though my English still has a long way to go), communication became much easier for me. I realized that if one is willing to convey and the other is willing to listen, it’s going to work out even if takes a bit of time. Being able to enhance my English communication skills is one of the reasons I continue working at Pretia.
To be honest, I thought of these reasons after I joined. I guess they didn’t really matter when I was deciding where to start my internship. I chose Pretia because there were few companies that worked on VR/AR product development.
Pretia might be known as a global startup, but it’s also a pioneer in AR platformers.
Thanks to the five engineer interns that shared their experiences with us today!
In addition to these five, we’re going to accept CV(Computer vision) engineers from top schools overseas in the summer. It’s definitely correct to say that Pretia is a place you can work with excellent staffs and have valuable experiences.
This article is originally posted by Naomi Numata, Pretia,inc. Translated from Japanese by Yui Arita. Available May23th,2019, from Wantedly.
