My third day in Vietnam began with two classes, an overview of the Mekong delta, and a Vietnamese language class. I am learning very quickly that the Vietnamese language is a very difficult one. The main source of my struggles is the five basic Vietnamese tones. Each word can be spoken using a different tone which changes the words meaning drastically. It’s usually quite humorous. Often I will be saying something and the Vietnamese students will start laughing as the word I said has a completely different meaning than my intended word. Maybe some day I will be able to say all of the tones, but today is not that day.
After finishing the language lessons, we then went to tour Glass Egg. Glass Egg is company that specializes in 3D computer design and graphic arts. They are one of the leaders in their field and work for companies such as: Ubisoft, Treyarch, Microsoft, EA, Sony. For these companies, Glass Egg has worked on video games such as Forza, Black Ops III, Need for Speed, and Fifa. Thus, it can be seen that Glass Egg works with a lot of titans in the gaming industry. Glass Egg’s specialty is car design. This can be seen as Glass Egg works on every single major racing game except for the Gran Turismo racing games. One of the interesting feature of Glass Egg was that it was located in Vietnam and had no other branches in other countries. Their employees were also predominantly Vietnamese as their policy is to only hire Vietnamese people at all costs. Glass Egg gains some very distinct advantages because they are based in Vietnam. These advantages are, decreased wage cost, scenic values, almost no competition. The decreased salary allows Glass Egg to service all of these companies as they can offer their graphic designs at lower costs than the parent company could. The scenic value comes from the beauty of the Vietnamese country. Most of the graphic design companies are located in places such as India and Shanghai. While both offer interesting place to visit, the Glass Egg COO explained that a lot of their customers prefer to come to Vietnam instead. Finally, Glass Egg had no real competition in Vietnam as well. Overall, the Glass Egg visit was extremely fascinating and I learned a lot of about how the graphic arts industry works.
