OTOY
| Manufacturer | OTOY |
|---|---|
| Retail availability | 8 January 2009 |
OTOY is a Los Angeles-based cloud rendering company,[1] OTOY's aim is to deliver real-time, cinema-quality 3D graphics to filmmakers, 3D designers, animators, game developers, and end users by using the rendering power of the cloud, consisting of clusters of multiple GPUs, and streaming it to the client through a web browser. OTOY also commercializes the LightStage technology, a facial- and motion-capture device that can capture an actors' performance in photorealistic detail, and has been used in several motion pictures including The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Spider-Man 3, The Social Network and Fantastic Four.
History
OTOY first showed its real-time rendering technology at the "Cinema 2.0" launch event for the ATI Radeon HD 4000 family of GPUs in June 2008. The technology demonstration, featuring ATI's mascot Ruby fleeing from a giant robot in a photorealistic New York City street, used ray tracing and voxel rendering and ran in realtime on 2 HD 4870 GPUs. An extended demo was shown at SIGGRAPH 2008.[2] On July 9, 2008, OTOY's CEO Jules Urbach announced that his company had acquired the LightStage technology and unveiled the company's plans to stream videogames using server-side rendering.[3] The Academy Award-winning LightStage technology is developed by Tim Hawkins and Paul Debevec at the University of Southern California and consists of a dome-shaped capturing environment with several hundreds of cameras and LEDs that can capture different lighting conditions of an actor's performance in real time. The lighting data is processed with OTOY's technology and can be used in a relighting post-process to accurately match the lighting of the environment and characters, both real and virtual. LightStage was used to create digital doubles of actors in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and The Social Network.
In March 2012, OTOY announced that it had acquired the New Zealand-based company Refractive Software, the developers of Octane Render, one of the first unbiased GPU-based renderers. It is also planning to release Brigade, a technology that uses path tracing to render photorealistic, animated scenes in real-time and is aimed at game developers.[4] On October 20, 2011, OTOY announced a partnership with Autodesk to create a cloud rendering platform which integrates OTOY's cloud rendering technology (including Octane Render and Brigade) to deliver real-time photorealistic 3D graphics in the web browser.[5]
Nolan Bushnell, the founder of Atari, Inc., stated that nowadays game developers experience an intense pressure from publishers, because the costs of game development are constantly rising. According to him, if OTOY is successful, it could vastly simplify the publishing process as well as reduce costs.[6]
References
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