
UK virtual reality firm Improbable raises $500M - T-A
http://www.bbc.com/news/business-39892251
======
mfav
Improbable's SpatialOS is actually a really, really neat piece of tech. For
the first time it's becoming easy for an independent developer to build an MMO
type application.

With the impending growth of VR (and virtual worlds in general), this is a
great candidate for being the foundation of a new generation of apps.

Unity has done this for game development. It's the de facto engine of many
research projects, video games, and some applications.

Unity lacks the ability to scale to large projects, however, which is where
SpatialOS comes in. It's for projects that are large in scope
(encourages/requires better programming practices) and is literally made for
scale. The nice thing is that the SpatialOS tech uses Unity, but doesn't
require it. It can be used with any engine if desired.

~~~
UK-AL
SpatialOS is nice tech, and can help people who don't have distributed systems
engineering experience.

However a couple distributed systems engineers, dev ops, and games engineers
could build something similar.

It's not that hard for a team like that to replicate it from what I've seen of
the documentation on how to use it.

It's defiantly worth something, but for 500 million? You could literally phone
up game industry legends and get them build something amazing for that.

~~~
andrewingram
If it were just games, I think you'd be right in there being a relatively low
value cap. Gaming is a huge industry, but the issue with persistent words is
that to provide value, they need to have addicted users. If i'm not going to
keep logging into a game, do I really care that it's supporting a huge number
of users or that a tree I felled a year ago is still decaying on the floor
somewhere?

There's a low upper limit to how many such games an individual would be
willing to invest in (a number not far off 1?). Some MMORPG players will play
a few of them, but I suspect most will focus on just one.

I think the real value of this tech lies in its applications outside of
gaming, namely huge-scale simulations. There's plenty of opportunity for
lucrative contracts with governments, academia, and R&D departments.

~~~
UK-AL
Why do simulations have to be real time online systems?

Most simulations don't work like that at all.

~~~
andrewingram
No idea to be honest, but i'll speculate about an application of this:

Let's say you're simulating an ant colony, there's going to be a lot of empty
space, there'll be choke points with a high number of interactions, and quiet
areas with not much going on. You could do a totally offline simulation, and
it'll take an unpredictable amount of time to do some number of ticks -
because the complexity of each tick is unknowable ahead of time. But if you
want reasonable guarantees about how long a simulation will take to run (and
assuming there's an upper bound to the complexity), being able to easily and
automatically scale up the computing power would be very valuable.

So the utility isn't restricted to real-time, but more generally about having
a predictable execution time per tick regardless of simulation complexity.

Of course, this is all speculation, I'd love to hear some real world
applications of this.

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corysama
I poked my nose into the Improbable's public API docs. What I saw looked like
an OK Entity-Component-System straight out of /r/gamedev + some C#
serialization so that you could have Systems (aka "functions") run on
different nodes on a network.

What did I not notice that's worth half a bil?

~~~
bane
My understanding is that their twist on the problem is some kind of dynamic
sharding of game entities across a cluster of servers. Different games seem to
try to deal with this in different ways:

\- WoW - Several servers hosting copies of the main game world, dedicated
party servers for instances

\- Second Life - A server maps to a specific volumetric "box" that is
estimated to be able to handle whatever activity and whatever entities end up
in that box

\- Eve - A server maps to a star system, local game time can slow down to
accommodate more activity

My understanding is that these guys do something else, where they determine
sets of entities (players, NPCs and non-player entities) that are likely to
interact and shard off the controlling logic to a server. As the world-state
changes, the clustering and mapping of entity groups to servers changes and
they have some kind of way to move likely interacting clusters of entities
seamlessly within the infrastructure.

This has the possibility of supporting huge persistent game worlds with tens
of thousands of players at a time without the kinds of ill effects we see with
the other approaches.

~~~
jcfrei
Interesting, so I guess this still limits the number of entities that can
interact with each other on one server but allows for much more non-
interacting entities spread out over a large world. But couldn't then lots of
players (maybe by accident) meet in one spot and then slow that server down?

~~~
dvanamst
Hey! Improbable dev here.

We deal with such a situation through the fact that SpatialOS dynamically
scales the zones that each game engine is responsible for. So if you have many
players gathering in the same reduced area then there will actually be
multiple game engines allocated to that specific zone and extra engines might
even be started if the load requires it. This also works in reverse so that if
your player density falls drastically and a single game engine would suffice
for your entire world you will only have one running, so you always have the
right amount of resources at your disposal.

Such game engines are what is referred to as workers in SpatialOS
([https://spatialos.improbable.io/docs/reference/10.3/getting-...](https://spatialos.improbable.io/docs/reference/10.3/getting-
started/concepts/spatialos)) and workers can be of many types: game engines
like Unreal or Unity to manage the physics of the simulation, custom workers
based on one of the language SDKs that implement AI-like functions, or any
other behaviour you want to put in your world: it's entirely up to you to take
this as far as you like.

~~~
eximius
How does this handle a load too large for a single server in an extremely
small area? Say, the Halloween War in Eve or just a bunch of morons - say 10k
people - gather within a single small valley in a game?

Sure, you can subdivide it as small as you want, but that just increases the
overhead by requiring the servers to communicate more. But even if the servers
can figure it out, what the client sees seems like a hard problem too.

~~~
troymc
I think you're worrying about a problem that most users don't care about.

Improbable could cap the density if they need to, and over time they can do
optimizations to increase the maximum.

~~~
dvanamst
To answer eximius. In your valley battle example there would be multiple game
engines handling the valley.

Whereas it is entirely true that you can always find a counter-example that
would break a given technology, troymc is absolutely right in the fact that
those counter-examples still leave an overwhelming majority of use-cases that
we can handle perfectly well with our approach.

~~~
eximius
I don't mean to disparage the technology, but I disagree with that my examples
are unrealistic. I think people would love large scale battles like that.

~~~
dvanamst
No problem. You should definitely ask such questions. If you want to dive into
the technicalities, see what people are already doing with SpatialOS and ask
your own questions I really recommend having a look at the forums
([https://forums.improbable.io](https://forums.improbable.io)).

That said, my previous response was actually targeting your example as being a
use-case that falls into the 'realistic' category that we want to address with
SpatialOS.

Again, I am not suggesting that you can and should pile-up 1000 players onto
10 square meters, but if you take care when defining your world's
characteristics (SpatialOS's entity & components) you will be able to scale up
your player density in your battle scenario to a level that significantly
exceeds anything that you could achieve with any existing monolithic game
server and for a fraction of the trouble as you do not really have to deal
with any of the usual networking issues because SpatialOS takes care of that.

------
objectivistbrit
I knew one of the founders when they were starting out... one of the other
founders is the son of an Indian multi-billionaire, which probably opens a few
doors.

The founder I knew told me excitedly their vision for a dynamic interactive
world - I thought this sounded like pure nerd crack though wasn't sure if it
would actually work as a game. (I built a much more basic dynamic world MMO in
university and it ended up with huge drama amongst the player base). I think
they pivoted to building a platform rather than a game about a year later.

Wish I'd stayed in touch now, though that seems to happen a lot in the start-
up world.

------
curiousleo
More coverage from other news sites:

\- Wired: [http://www.wired.co.uk/article/improbable-quest-to-build-
the...](http://www.wired.co.uk/article/improbable-quest-to-build-the-matrix)

\- Bloomberg:
[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-05-11/softbank-...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-05-11/softbank-
leads-502-million-investment-in-u-k-tech-startup)

\- TechCrunch: [https://techcrunch.com/2017/05/11/improbable-
grabs-502m-led-...](https://techcrunch.com/2017/05/11/improbable-
grabs-502m-led-by-softbank-at-a-1b-valuation-for-its-virtual-world-spatial-
os/)

\- Financial Times:
[https://www.ft.com/content/76529d16-3669-11e7-bce4-9023f8c0f...](https://www.ft.com/content/76529d16-3669-11e7-bce4-9023f8c0fd2e)

\- Improbable's own announcement: [https://improbable.io/2017/05/11/our-ceo-
herman-narula-on-ou...](https://improbable.io/2017/05/11/our-ceo-herman-
narula-on-our-series-b-funding)

(Disclosure: I work at Improbable.)

------
drenvuk
I honestly could not help but laugh at the Softbank for burning their money
like this. But what do I know, I haven't raised that kind of funding before,
maybe running boxes on aws with persistent storage is too difficult for most
game developers.

$500MM though? The skeptic in me is saying they're going to write the majority
of this down in 5 years.

~~~
denizen_kane
Yup, and they recently wrote down half a billion in Ola and Snapdeal in India.

Basically, this investment gives Improbable a 5-10 year time horizon to
basically do whatever they want. But they can't just work with every game dev
studio under the sun -- they actually have to grow the entire MMO market in
order to actually turn a profit for investors.

------
lacker
Wow, that's a big jump from their last round a couple years ago with a16z that
valued them probably somewhere around 60m-70m. I'm surprised since they don't
seem to have real customers yet, just some demo games they partially funded.
But it's quite possible the investors know something I don't.

~~~
UK-AL
Venture capitalists make silly investments all of the time.

Countless times its been proven that connections + chrasmatic founder means
investers will invest in silly things.

Something seriously good + no connections and no charisma means your going to
have a bad time.

The hardest part is getting noticed.

------
jamii
Their previous partnership with the DayZ folks seemed to end with neither side
willing/able to explain what killed it -
[http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2017-03-07-ion-the-
space-s...](http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2017-03-07-ion-the-space-
survival-game-by-dean-hall-and-improbable-is-dead)

------
faragon
If a Telecom like SoftBank has piles of money to spent gambling buying and
selling international companies (ARM, Improbable, Supercell, and others), may
be there is not enough competition in Japan. Do they have huge profits because
of not having enough competition, or because they don't they have to return
profits to the investors?

~~~
peterjlee
SoftBank is actually not the largest telecom company in Japan. Though SoftBank
does a lot more than just telecom. Telecom just happens to be the more
consumer facing business. Also, SoftBank made $50 billion by investing $20M in
Alibaba 17 years ago.

~~~
ekianjo
>Also, SoftBank made $50 billion by investing $20M in Alibaba 17 years ago

That's a pretty solid ROI.

------
rezashirazian
I wonder how much of deals like this that don't make sense on its surface is
based on behind the scene agreements.

"If you invest 100 million in this company we backed two years ago, we'll give
you a good deal on this other thing we know you're interested"

"If you back our cloud computing company, we'll get our other unicorns to use
your CRM technologies"

------
blazespin
Maybe it's a big bet to create Oasis. 500M is about what it would take, that's
for sure.

I have to say, linden labs and high fidelity must be pretty excited by all
this enthusiasm.

------
Chris2048
Just to clarify - Improbable are a _simulation_ company, right? As in, VR
would just be _one_ application/interface to their software, but the point is
simulating things at scale?

~~~
ggambetta
Yes, that's correct.

------
stuart78
Am I the only one who read that as "UK virtual reality firm improbably raises
$500m"?

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elvirs
basically softbank just purchased almost half of this company. nice payday for
Andreesen Horowitz though

~~~
blazespin
Yeah, it feels like Softbank is paying out someone and channeling it through
this company. Either that or someone with too much money and no sense just
finished bingeing RPO.

------
nmca
Not a virtual reality company. Cool tech though.

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Banderly
Can anyone from improbable explain why your technology is suitable for
simulations?

I'm talking about the non real time simulations of cities, traffic etc in your
promotional material.

If a simulation does not have a real time requirement then what's the
advantage of improbable?

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mattfrommars
Wow, are the founders around 26 year old? They managed to build something like
this a virtual reality technology from ground up? Or am I missing something.

------
yomly
From reading the article, it seems like the best case scenario (aside from
unforeseen tech advances or alternative usecases) is that online gaming will
become easier through cloud platforms and a lot more indie MMOs will start
popping up. A bit like mobile games did ~10 years ago.

Anyone able to correct me?

------
nivertech
They probably pitched SoftBank some Sci-Fi inspired "Simulated World."

------
avaer
> The company believes it has developed revolutionary technology with its
> Spatial OS operating system ... allowing small developers to create massive
> simulations without much infrastructure of their own.

If that's the case I can't help but feel this is a gross misuse of the VR
buzzword in the headline. This is cool stuff, but we call that cloud
computing, not VR.

~~~
SomeStupidPoint
I think they mean VR in the sense of Second Life, not in the sense of Oculus.

~~~
stale2002
Octopus?

~~~
alexilliamson
Octopus - it's a water animal

------
Animats
The big question is, what do you do in a big virtual world? There's a "build
it and they will come" assumption here. There's Second Life, which peaked
years ago. There's "There". There's High Fidelity, which is a higher-
resolution Second Life with few users. Most of those can be used with a VR
headset. But nobody cares.

It's not a technology problem. The current technology is marginally adequate.
It's lack of market interest.

~~~
gchadwick
I don't know much about Improbable but from what I've read they shouldn't be
viewed as VR firm, simply you could use their technology to create a massive
virtual world that you could then explore using VR. I think the media (and
maybe Improbable's PR) just likes to go with the VR angle as it's a
recognised, understood term

The product is 'Spatial OS'. Want to build a massive simulation of various
agents interacting in different ways than cannot possibly fit on a single
server? That's where 'Spatial OS' comes in.

Interesting blog post here: [https://improbable.io/2016/03/24/what-we-found-
when-we-simul...](https://improbable.io/2016/03/24/what-we-found-when-we-
simulated-the-backbone-of-the-entire-internet-on-spatialos) a couple of people
from the UK government visit improbable for 3 days, successfully build a
detailed simulation of the internet (at the routing level, so simulating all
routers involved in BGP). Looks pretty impressive.

~~~
Animats
That's more of an ad for something like AWS, where you need compute power and
network connections, but not VR.

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flashman
This company has to be satirical. "Improbable"? When it crashes and burns it
will all be revealed as art, like that time the KLF burned a million pounds.

~~~
avaer
That reduces to the absurd conclusion that otherwise smart people doing $500m
investments do zero due diligence and don't care about being legally bound by
fiduciary duty.

~~~
moron4hire
I mean, Theranos is only a recent example.

------
quocble
That's a fitting name. "Improbable"

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quirkot
Holy moly that's a lot of money

