Improbable, a much-hyped London startup that has raised $20m (£13m) from Andreesen Horowitz, has unveiled its first product: Spatial OS, an operating system that lets developers build massively complex worlds. It also unveiled Worlds Adrift, the first game built using the platform by developer Bossa Studios.
Founded by Cambridge graduate Herman Narula, Improbable started out as a gaming company aimed at creating more complex online games. "Take something as simple as persistence: you see all these fancy graphics in E3 demos, but why can't I do something as simple as drop an object in a world, go away, come back, and it still be there?" Narula, 27, tells WIRED at the Slush conference in Helsinki. "We realised the gaming industry was not doing this because of creative reasons. The reason was the solutions require a fundamental change in how we build systems in computer science."
Improbable, he says, has created a different kind of distributed infrastructure to allow for the complex computation required by "strong simulation". "The trouble with strong simulation as we imagine it, and scaling that up, it isn't as easy as simply chopping it into pieces. You need to constantly redistribute and reorganise the work, because each piece needs to talk to each other piece for it to work."
While the system is complex, the potential implications are massive. Bossa Studios demonstrated Worlds Adrift, the first title built using the system -- and very much in the early stages -- to demonstrate its capabilities. "Normally when you walk through a game world, you go into an area and some monsters spawn to fight you, right? When you're not there, they're not there. "In Worlds Adrift, the creatures are alive when you're not alive. And the really interesting thing is the beetles and other things which make up the world, they have their own life cycles. An island could end up depopulating itself due to a burning ship that hit it a week ago from something you did a month ago. The reality of that, and the staggering number of implications that come from that, are quite amazing." "We can do gigantic scale battles that haven't been possible before without some kind of trickery. We can do high-fidelity FPS battles in real time in a world that is also alive. We can do massive multiplatform experiences. Nobody else can do this."
But, while Improbable was initially focused on gaming, strong simulation could have an impact on everything from government to healthcare and city planning. On the latter, Narula announced that Improbable is working with two of the UK's Digital Catapults on creating a simulation of a complete UK city.
The model, dubbed Improbable City, will combine systems like traffic patterns, energy consumption, waste management and other elements, to create the most advanced simulation environment of a city ever created. "We quickly realised by integrating things like traffic simulations with other models, we quickly get simulations that nobody else has. Putting it all together you start seeing really crazy things you wouldn't see before," he says.
For example: imagine ordering a package online, but on the way the truck gets a flat tire. How does that impact traffic across an entire city? How about the deliveries for the rest of the day, and the impact on the wider economy? "What happens if we shut down Kings Cross station for an hour? What is the street in London that the police would least like a riot to happen?"
Narula refers to this as "emergent complexity – how simple behaviour that you can understand, leads to behaviour you can't understand. To capture that, you need scale," he says. "Hence the operating system."
Spatial OS will allow developers to combine existing simulation models. An SDK is available now; the platform will also integrate with real-time data, as well as popular game engines such as Unity. "There are people with models of traffic, models of pedestrians, models of pollution, models of viral spread, who have limited views on one area, but have no means to create true worlds that explore the answers to these questions," says Narula. "We'll give you a world in a bottle that you can use to ask questions of the real world."
It's too early to evaluate just what impact Improbable's Spatial OS will have; but there's no doubting the implications for everything from governments to virtual reality.
But for Narula, the end goal is clear: "I want to go to the Matrix", he laughs.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
