I’ve talked about Improbable before, Improbable is an exciting looking technology, still shrouded in a degree of mystery that could offer a solution for virtual worlds and MMORPG’s as well as much more.
When I blogged before I mentioned that one of their employees was Dave Hillier, once worked for Second Life. However now I’ve discovered another link with Second Life, albeit from a merchant angle.
Pammy Olson has published an article on Improbable over at Forbes : Meet Improbable, The Startup Building The World’s Most Powerful Simulations. This article expands more on the progress Improbable are making. Improbable’s founders, Herman Narula and Rob Whitehead feature in the article, they met at the University of Cambridge and the article provides some interesting background on the pair :
Narula wanted to code, teaching himself to write in C++ at 12. While studying computer science at Cambridge he met Rob Whitehead, a Liverpudlian who had paid his way through college by selling weapons on the virtual-world site Second Life.
I’ll be honest, I didn’t realise there was that much of a market for weapons in Second Life! There’s also the fact that both of them, initially at least, were very interested in creating a virtual world :
They began working on an ambitious virtual-world videogame in which you could drop an object, then log back in the next day and find it still there. When they couldn’t find software to help them scale up, they built the tools themselves.
“Eventually we realized the tech we were working on was bigger than the game,” says Whitehead.
This is not an unusual development, quite a few products have started life aiming to be one thing and ending up being another. However it’s interesting that the technology they’ve created is being welcomed by those who want to build MMORPG’s and it also appears, on the face of it at least, that it’s a technology that could be used for virtual worlds.
Improbable is attracting attention beyond MMORPG’s. The article explains :
Samsung has talked to the company about running simulations for its Internet of Things devices, and economists from Oxford are using it to run models of the U.K. housing market.
Improbable is also “talking heavily” to Britain’s Ministry of Defense, says Narula, the startup’s high-octane CEO. He’s tight-lipped about most projects because of contractual obligations but says Improbable has booked revenue in the single-digit millions of pounds since launching.
Improbable received $20m of funding from Andreessen Horowitz in March, which in itself is quite impressive as it’s rare for Andreessen Horowitz funding to go to a London startup, but the article does give an insight into why this has happened :
“It was such a new and original idea,” says Chris Dixon, who led Andreessen’s investment. ”We see a lot of stuff, and we’d never seen anything like this.”
I like the look and sound of Improbable, but the details regarding exactly how it works and a proof of concept are still very vague. However when it comes to the latter, we should not have to wait too long. Bossa Studios Worlds Adrift is set for an Autumn release and will be the first public application of Improbable technology.
The reasons Improbable was attractive to Bossa are partially explained in the article, cost being a glaring one as using Improbable allowed them to do things that would have cost a hell of a lot more without the technology :
A project on the scale of Worlds Adrift would typically take years and millions of dollars for a studio of Bossa’s size to build, but they did it in roughly a year and with just a core team of front-end developers.
I’ll be interested to see how this turns out, although the technology is very much in its early stages still, the potential looks massive.