Jules Urbach is on the brink.
Rest is rare for the 43-year-old with curly black hair and just a touch of gray in his beard. The long hours put dark circles around his eyes. He often works through the night. He replies quickly when asked how much he slept the night before our interview.
“100 minutes,” he said.
The answer seems rather specific. Alissa Grainger, Urbach’s business partner, motions to his watch.
“He records it,” she said.
Urbach’s words come tumbling out faster than anyone can keep up. There’s an intensity to him. He’s obsessed with something and the circles around his eyes are a byproduct. There’s a future he’s been working toward for most of his life and he’s on a mission to deliver it as the co-founder and CEO of OTOY, a cloud-based 3D graphics rendering company. He’s a “mad scientist” as one investor describes him, with a The game inspired Urbach to try and recreate it.
“I asked my mom to buy me the arcade game; she said no,” Urbach said. “So I actually recreated the game on my Mac IIfx first for myself, then to let people play it in the school lunch areas. I got into Harvard and Yale after sending them the source code to the game (they were skeptical I did it, never having seen digital video on a computer – this was before quicktime and DCT codecs came out). The deep eureka moment I had first seeing Dragon’s Lair as a kid was how beautiful and cinematic the game looked – maybe 30 plus years ahead of its time – yet how simple the concept was that made it work as [a] video game.”
Today, in a Los Angeles high-rise, the cabinet greets visitors to the office as a symbol of his life-long quest to enable anyone to make their thoughts a reality. If that sounds both inspirational and pretty far out, you understand what it’s like to talk to Urbach.
Life-Long Obsession
Back in 2004, a New York Times article described Urbach as a “caffeinated” man just like the one I met recently. At the time he was working from his mother’s house and thinking about how to piggyback interactivity onto an AOL chat window. What’s changed between then and now for Urbach is he gained a business-focused co-founder in Grainger. For the last 10 years his tireless engineering of a technology pipeline built for the future has been balanced by Grainger’s attention to the day-to-day operations of a business.
Together, they’ve built a company which employs around 60 people headquartered in the heart of Los Angeles. OTOY’s revenue doubled each year for the last several, according to Grainger. After all this time, Urbach still retains a “significantly” greater than 50 percent share in the company. This majority position even after a decade hints at the level of long-term trust investors have placed in their pairing. They’ve made connections throughout Hollywood and Silicon Valley with advisors like Google’s Eric Schmidt and investors backing them like Ari Emanuel, the co-CEO of one of Hollywood’s most influential talent companies and the inspiration for blunt-talking super agent Ari on HBO’s Entourage.
Emanuel showed up late one night on Urbach’s doorstep. As Urbach described it, he brought Emanuel over to his computer and showed him “3D objects with live ads and web links injected on the surface moving through portals of other apps and pages.”
“What the fuck did I know,” Emanuel said. “It looked great. I’d never seen anything like that.”
Urbach, though, wasn’t ready at the time for an investment. He supported himself taking work-for-hire jobs, like using his self-coded tools to render the complex scenes in advertisements for movies like Michael Bay’s Transformers. Today, the most recent versions of those tools are used by artists to create breathtaking photorealistic sequences like the haunting opening of HBO’s Westworld.
Urbach garnered support from people like Emanuel despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that his ideas can sound like the ravings of someone who sees reality quite different from most people. When speaking to outsiders, Urbach is advised not to discuss certain subjects because it can seem so far-fetched.
The truth is, even with influential investors and cutting edge technology, very few people understand OTOY’s place in the market or Urbach’s vision. Nevertheless, Urbach’s sleepless nights building his rendering technology, and Grainger’s diligent focusing of the business, have placed the startup at the cusp of a shift in computing that can change everything.
“OTOY is juggling a lot of widely different tech,” Oculus chief technical officer John Carmack wrote in an email to me. “But if you squint at it right, there are a lot of pieces that fit together in a particular vision of the future.”
The Brink Of What?
To understand OTOY’s position it is helpful to grasp some long-term trends.
Recently, VR started to approach consumer quality and pricing levels after years of failed attempts. Smartphones selling in the hundreds of millions made low-cost movement sensors and high resolution displays usable in more affordable VR hardware. In 2014, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg saw enough potential to bet $3 billion on the hope that the technology could form the foundation of the next platform for personal computing.
To kickstart adoption, this technology needed a reason for people to use it. Facebook, Sony, Valve, Samsung and HTC all bet on games. The gamble was that people who love video games and spend much of their free time using flat screens to immerse themselves in virtual worlds would be the first to seek out this technology.
Parallel to this evolution, sandbox video games started to emerge offering large 3D worlds for players to shape and explore. With the arrival of Minecraft around a decade ago, gaming crossed a threshold enabling millions of kids and adults alike to build vast and dynamic worlds using simple tools. For professionals, in recent years world engines gained popularity. Unity empowers skilled creators using the toolset to produce virtual worlds that could work on any personal gadget. Its leading competitor, Unreal, rolled out “Blueprints” allowing people to build worlds without any formal knowledge of coding.
The mouse, keyboard and controller that defined computer interaction in the last few decades of the 20th century are left behind with the rise of VR. In its place, intuitive human behavior becomes the way people shape these virtual worlds. For example, you just reach out and grab a cup with your hands in VR instead of moving a mouse to rotate that same object on a computer screen. It is a transformation still underway but the long-term trend here is that the barriers to creation are lowering. You can increasingly make the virtual world you want and quickly invite others to share it with you. At the same time the fidelity — the photorealistic look of these worlds — is dramatically improving.
“Games want to be cinematic quality and film wants to be interactive. So we see a new category of content that is linear interactive storytelling,” said Sylvio Drouin, vice president at Unity Labs. “Jules wants to make beautiful content accessible to everybody.”
Source: Jules Urbach’s Quest To Realize Star Trek’s Holodeck