The following interview is a conversation we had with Devin Horsman, CTO & Co-Founder at Arcturus, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: Over $22 Million Raised to to Power the Future of Volumetric Video
Devin Horsman
Hey, how’s it going?
Brett
Good. So tell us, what does the name mean? I briefly looked it up online. I’m not sure if I’m saying it correctly, but tell us, what does that name mean?
Devin Horsman
Yeah, so Arcturus is the brightest apparent star in the Northern Hemisphere. It’s kind of a reference to sort of the forward looking and rising star aspect of what we’re up to. We’re kind of looking at what lies beyond in terms of media and trying to inspire people in the same way that you might look to the stars.
Brett
Nice. I love that. Now, a couple of questions that we like to ask just to better understand what makes you tick as a Founder and entrepreneur. First one, is there a specific Founder that you really admire? And if so, who is it and what do you admire about them?
Devin Horsman
Yeah, it’s interesting. There’s a couple that come to mind as a technical Founder in the graphics and 3D world. John Carmack is somebody that I’ve always really appreciated. In particular, I really like the trust that he inspires by his dedication to an honest and public assessment of the things that he works on and a discourse that deals with reality. I love that he’s got this willingness to reflect on what is going well and what is not, and the dedication that really focuses on the needle moving elements of whatever he’s been working on. You might know him from running the gaming company ID software. They were responsible for things like Quake and numerous other 3D gaming titles. He later went on to work as the CTO at Oculus, which was acquired by Meta.
Brett
Nice. That’s an interesting call out. I’ve not heard of him before, but I’ll be looking into him now.
Devin Horsman
Yeah. And the other one that really sticks out to me is Tim Sweeney at Epic Games. So he’s done an amazing job leading his company through what is a very long path to becoming one of the most important companies to the future of media. And I think he’s done that by making some really hard choices benefiting the long run instead of short term gain. He’s kept the company private, and that must have taken some soul searching. He’s also kept laser focused on making incredible quality software and doing things the right way, even if it’s a long way. So now that his company, Epic, have invested in us, I’m very proud to be working in partnership. Yeah.
Brett
One of my most popular articles that I’ve written was called Why Your Company Needs an Enemy. And it was telling the story about what Epic Games did with Apple. So this was years ago when that all started, but it was a master class in how to declare war on an enemy and then rally that make it a mission, and then essentially drag it into the public eye and get the public and everyone watching it. But it was fascinating to see him maneuver against Apple. And did you see their commercial and everything they were doing around that?
Devin Horsman
Yeah, I followed it a little bit, but I try to be a little bit above the fray, so to speak.
Brett
Makes sense. Yeah, they just did a video comparison, kind of mocking that famous Apple ad about 1984, maybe if their own version. It was so good.
Devin Horsman
Yeah. What a cool decision to make there.
Brett
Yeah, absolutely. I think that takes guts to try to take on Apple.
Devin Horsman
Right?
Brett
What about books? Is there a specific book that’s had a major impact on you? And this can be a business book or it can just be a personal book that influenced how you view the world?
Devin Horsman
Well, yeah, there’s a few interesting choices there, but if I had to pick just one as it relates to growing and building a company, I would say the book crucial conversations was really important for me. The limiting factor, I think, in my growth was sort of understanding how conflict arises even in cohesive and great teams. And that book helps you understand why a certain comment will come out from under someone’s breath, or you might start noticing some kind of behaviors in your organization that are hidden from you, and they’re really coming from a place of a lack of safety to come forward with the truth. Things like if you hear somebody provide feedback or critical feedback to you and then start dismissing it immediately, or holding that over someone’s head or something of that nature, it’s really just realizing that feedback will come to you one way or the other.
Devin Horsman
And if you want it to be shared thoughtfully and effectively, you need to make sure that it’s safe for everyone in your organization to do that. So I found that book to be incredibly illuminating, and the lessons I learned from that, I use every day.
Brett
I think you’re the third person to come on now and reference that book, so that’s enough for me. I’ll add it to the Amazon list now.
Devin Horsman
Amazing.
Brett
Now let’s talk about origin story. So take us to day one and the days leading up to that. What is the origin story behind the company?
Devin Horsman
Yeah, I guess it’s kind of split into two pieces. One is why we’re doing what we’re doing. And another one is who with? So maybe it’s easier to start with who with. So I met my co founders, you andy, in a really high pressure situation, an environment were all consulting in. And we saw how each other behaved in that sort of crucible and knew that was the right team to build a company with the right combination of empathy, strategy, and execution. And why do we exist? What’s the problem that we’re looking to solve? We sort of started with the core pain point that were ourselves experiencing. So there’s all these new spatial display devices, things like holographic screens, virtual reality headsets, augmented reality headsets, and so on. And with these new spatial devices, you can see sort of into and around content. What I mean by that is, like, you can move your point of view.
Devin Horsman
So if you had like, an actor or a character standing in front of another character, if you moved your head to the side, you would see the part that was previously blocked by the first one, and you’d be able to see further into the background and these sorts of things on these devices. But there is no way to capture live action for these devices. Existing technology was way too costly to do this with or far too inflexible. And we’d been following some recent work and some research groups that was called Free Viewpoint video volumetric video, and that looked really promising. Now, for some previous work I’d been doing due diligence for like, a venture capitalist. It was clear that there were interesting folks that were working on the camera capture systems to record this kind of data, and that there were folks working on the display hardware, but nobody was addressing the sort of core pain point of compressing this really large data and transporting that data from the capture solution to the display devices.
Devin Horsman
And nobody was addressing post production. So when you want to edit, combine, or in any way modify this captured data, it was something like having a camera or a digital camera without the JPEG or without Photoshop. And that’s really the problem that we set out to solve. So were taking what was essentially a collection of early research findings, adding our own research findings, and trying to understand how this would impact production of content at scale, knowing that initially the people using this stuff would be professional production groups.
Brett
And what types of companies and what industries are experiencing these types of problems that you’re aiming to solve.
Devin Horsman
Yeah, it’s a really interesting question. Thinking about it as where do we fit into the market? We’re basically looking to replace video virtually everywhere it exists today. So anywhere now that you see a flat recording from real life, we’re aiming for that to be a holographic recording. And so it’s hard to say which market exactly this applies to because it’s kind of every market but we are seeing places where there’s clear leverage of this new kind of data that adds tremendous benefit over what used to exist. So right now, that’s in marketing activations, that’s in online retail, like fashion retail primarily, and in the production of film and entertainment.
Brett
Just so we can understand the definitions here. Can you define what volumetric video is? Does that encompass? AR, VR. XR, all these other terms. Or what is it really, and how do you explain it in simple terms?
Devin Horsman
Yeah, it’s a great question. So what would be nice is that if volumetric video was called 3D video, but it’s sort of an unfortunate case of marketing history. So we’ve all seen like, 3D movies where you put on the 3D glasses and because you’ve got the 3D glasses on, the picture sort of pops out at you. It looks like the picture has depth. And that’s more accurately called stereoscopic video. That is, there’s two videos, one for your left eye and one for your right eye. And by seeing each of those videos in each of your eyes, your respective eyes, it appears that the video is a 3D image with depth, and it can move out of the screen towards you. But the actual video recording itself is just two standard videos, one for each eye. So it’s from a fixed position you’re seeing from a fixed point.
Devin Horsman
And so it still has sort of the director determining what it is in the scene that you’re looking at. What volumetric video is instead of having an image for each frame of the content, you’ve got a full three dimensional scene and you can move your viewpoint anywhere in that scene you want. So that’s really the distinction. It’s more like being in a piece of interactive theater where you can move around theater set and watch what’s happening from any vantage point.
Brett
So is it kind of like Google Maps, then, where you can click around and have different viewpoints?
Devin Horsman
Yeah, it’s kind of like Google Maps, except instead of there being like these particular points, you can see from it’s every point in between.
Brett
Got it. Okay, that makes a lot of sense.
Devin Horsman
Yeah. And so when it comes to how this fits into the world of XR, AR, VR and so on, those are one way that you can encounter this kind of content. You could also flatten this content, have it be elements, a 3D VFX scene that’s used to make a standard film, or it could be displayed on new types of displays that we call Holographic displays which allow you to share viewing of this stuff with other people and without the need for a headset.
Brett
And I also see that you have Holograms listed there. What’s going on with Holograms? I feel like that they got a lot of buzz. It was probably like ten years ago, I don’t know if you remember that, but they had like a Tupac concert and he was a hologram. It was cool, everyone was talking about it, but I’m not sure if I’ve seen any really practical use cases yet with holograms or any technology there that really seems to be taking that to the next level. Am I wrong there? Because I’m obviously not tracking this space. So if we look at just holograms, what is going on in that market today?
Devin Horsman
Yeah, it’s really interesting and get into a lot of the semantics of language really quickly. So what does the word hologram mean? It means whole picture, really. That’s what it means. And so you’ve got a hologram is basically a 3D video. So hologram is another name for any type of content which is played back linearly like a video, but has a full three dimensional image. And so volumetric video is one kind of hologram and there are other kinds of holograms out there and various technologies for capturing them. What we saw in the popular consciousness of things like Tupac’s hologram and what have you was really just a projection trick that allowed you to play back a two dimensional video in a way that appeared like it was floating on a stage in midair. And popularly, people decided to call those holograms, but they’re not really holograms.
Devin Horsman
A projection trick that’s been around for 100 years or more. So what we call holograms and what’s changing in the industry and in popular consciousness is kind of any linear or video like content which you can see from all sides. Got it.
Brett
That makes a lot of sense. And thanks for clarifying some of these terms. It seems like a very confusing space.
Devin Horsman
Yeah, it can be a little hard to dive into, and that’s, I think, why you’re seeing various attempts at redefining the name for this stuff and making it clear to consumers what it is that they’re getting.
Brett
Yeah, makes sense. And it sounds like there’s just a lot of different ways your tech is being used and there’s many different use cases. Is there a specific one that you want to maybe call out and just talk the audience through?
Devin Horsman
Yeah, I’ll call out the case of a virtual production. So the way that film used to be made is you build a large film set and maybe some portion of that set is a green screen for the background, and some portion of that set is actually built environment. And then the actors and the extras and so on all act in the foreground sort of built environment part of the set. And the cameras in real life move through that set and record the action. So the directing and the acting is determined at the same time, you’ve got to capture the shot as the actor is taking the best take. And you have to know ahead of time what the path the camera moves is. More recently, for example, with television shows like The Mandalorian and films like The Jungle Book, directors have been virtualizing the production.
Devin Horsman
What I mean by that is that they basically build the sets in 3D software ahead of time. And the place where the action is recorded is this stage, which has these large Led walls and can show any three dimensional image on that Led wall that you’d like. And so what happens is they get the actor to just stand on this Led stage, and the camera is moving through that Led stage while they capture just one or a few actors in the foreground. And then the background is drawing this large 3D scene. And so what that helps them do is create these places and these environments for much cheaper than it would take to build out the whole thing with real materials. But the problem is that you can’t put actors into that three dimensional background without a technology like ours. You could, but it would be very expensive and or it would look a little too fake.
Devin Horsman
It would look something like video game characters in the background. And so our technology helps solve this problem, and by doing that, it makes the film production much more cost effective.
Brett
Fascinating. And in terms of the adoption that you’re seeing with your technology, are there any numbers or metrics that you can share or what’s that North Star number that you’re really looking at to monitor growth? Anything you can share there?
Devin Horsman
Yeah, there’s really two big variable costs that we monitor here. One of them is the amount of volumetric video that’s being processed through our processing cloud. And so we saw an increase of 150% in processing last year. And the other one is distributing this data to end viewers, where we saw 575% increase over the year before. So a lot of uptake in streaming this kind of data to end viewers.
Brett
Wow. And another thing I want touch on, and you had mentioned this, I think, in our pre interview, is the idea of category creation. So for you, is this a category creation play? Are you creating a totally new category?
Devin Horsman
Yeah, that’s a really hard question to answer. You could say we’re creating a brand new category because we’re creating a brand new type of media, or at least making a brand new type of media feasible to be used in the real world. So it’s functionally everywhere and applies to sort of all market categories in some sense. Is that a new category? Is it just a transformation of an old one? I don’t know. What do you think?
Brett
I think it’s tough to say, and I think it depends on how the buyers buy at the end of the day.
Devin Horsman
Right.
Brett
I think in some industries, buyers really do buy based on category, especially when you’re looking at the enterprise space where they just go to Gartner and say, hey, who’s the leader of this category? How do I buy? But I think it just depends on how buyers make their decisions. How do you see buyers making decisions in your market?
Devin Horsman
Yeah, that’s really interesting. So there’s really two main types of customer that we have. We’ve got the big brands, folks like the McDonald’s or the unique clothes or other large brands of this sort. And they’re basically delivering this data to their customers or the folks that they’re advertising to. And then we’ve also got the content producers. These are the production companies that would be hired either by the brand themselves or by a marketing agency or as part of a piece of live entertainment to produce this media in the first place. So from the brand’s viewpoint, they’re making choices with marketing budgets, with project budgets, and as part of their own product planning and product development. And that’s where we’re meeting them and that’s how we’re accessing them. And then through the production companies, we’re accessing them through things like industry events, things like the production technology, media and so on.
Brett
Makes a lot of sense. We tend to think about category creation and I think this goes against how a lot of people talk about it and think about it. A lot of them just try to come up with a catchy name and then their goal is just to get people to use that name to talk about platforms like theirs. We see that not work that often. Buyers are typically allergic to just new terms invented by the marketing department. Where we see category creation efforts really work is when it’s not just creating a category term, it’s creating a movement and a totally new and different way of doing something. So it sounds like to me that’s your opportunity, right? It sounds like the movement is volumetric video and the power of volumetric video and getting people to embrace that because once they embrace that, then they would understand the need for a platform to execute within that discipline, if that makes sense.
Devin Horsman
You got it.
Brett
Fascinating. Very cool. Now, I’m sure you’ve encountered a number of challenges in your journey so far. If we had to pick just one of those challenges that you experienced and then overcame, what is it and how do you overcome it?
Devin Horsman
Yeah, there’s an interesting kind of story in the sort of go to market strategy. So to capture this kind of data, you go to these capture stages where you’ve got all these cameras and they’re pointed inwards on the volume and then your actors or performers go into that volume, do their performance, and then you’re able to reproduce that in three dimensions. We initially hoped to go to market through all of these capture stages where this data was being captured, selling through the stages to the customer with partnerships with the stages. And we had a couple of these partnerships early on that worked really well for us. And we planned on our go to market strategy based around those early successes. Two things kind of came out of that. One of them is that these early capture stages had much more technical know how and much more understanding of what our value prop was than the later stages to kind of be stood up as this technology gained more popularity.
Devin Horsman
And they didn’t necessarily have these new stages, didn’t quite understand what the incentives were to promote our solution to their customers and sort of saw it as a sort of add on or a gold plating expense. So that made the go to market strategy initially turn out a little bit different than we expected. So we worked to overcome this in a couple of ways. One is to sort of sit on top of the capture stage so folks would come to us instead as a complete solution and we’d bundle the capture as sort of a subcontract to the overall project. And the other is to make our value prop quite a bit more clear to those capture stages and properly incentivize the equation for them.
Brett
Now, one thing I also want to ask you, because it’s really interesting, you’re CTO and you’re talking about go to market and that’s not something that I feel is very common in an organization. Normally the CTO is obviously focused on the other side of the business. So for you, what’s that journey been like to really learn and understand the go to market process and how do you end up being so active in it?
Devin Horsman
Yeah, it’s interesting. I would say that with a company like ours, where the technology is so bleeding edge, there almost necessarily has to be more of a mind meld happening between the units of the company that are more business oriented and the ones which are more technology oriented. That is like the CEO and the chief of product and marketing department need to understand the constraints and the possibilities and the particulars of the technology and how it’s used in a lot of detail. And in doing so, they’re kind of asking the questions about the things they need to know, like how do I sell this? Who do I sell it to? And so on and so forth. So we as a company enjoy a lot of overlap and cross pollination between sort of technical know how and business know how. And I also think that at least in my own personal philosophy, you kind of want to have a mini product manager in everybody in the company, right?
Devin Horsman
You want them to understand what is it that our customer needs, what is it that we’re offering as a value prop and how can what I do in my day to day contribute most effectively to that? It’s kind of like a Holistic take on business. As someone that’s learned some from Carol Sanford, who does a lot of this sort of look at holistic business practice. I’ve learned a lot through that path, and it sort of let me step more into the other sorts of roles in the company as needed and have a little mini marketing person on my shoulder with all of the decisions I make. And I think that makes me more effective even at my job in a technical aspect.
Brett
Makes a lot of sense. And that really resonates. And I can just see the logical case for why technical team members need to have at least an understanding of marketing the go to market process, because I think if that gap is too big, then obviously they end up in isolation. And then I’m guessing that’s where you see product failure sometimes is when the gap was just too big between what people actually wanted and what the market was looking for with what the technical team was actually building.
Devin Horsman
Oh, yeah, and I’ve been there before. I’ve made my share of missteps in the past, and I learned the hard way that you can’t just stick your head in the sand and make the thing that you think is cool, hoping that everybody else wants to use it. You really have to be generating collating and monitoring insights from all these different places. The market, your customers, the things that your team is saying internally as the core experts and so on makes a lot of sense.
Brett
Now, last question. I know we’re up on time here. Let’s zoom out into the future. What’s the three year vision for the company?
Devin Horsman
Yeah, maybe it’s better rather than say, what’s the three year vision for the company to kind of imagine what this media might look like in the future and that kind of dictates what the company will be. You can imagine that right now, people go and capture volumetric video or holograms on these large, expensive stages where you’ve got like, somewhere between 20 and 150 sensors or cameras pointed inward. And you can imagine setting up one of these stages is a big expense. But the future is going to look like people capturing these holograms or this volumetric video on their cell phone or with wearable headsets like AR glasses or other types of computing or pervasive computing devices you have around your house, like Google Home or Alexa and whatever sensors are available in the room. You, your friends, who you have. These devices are going to be used to capture this kind of volumetric video or holographic data as naturally as you’d capture video on your cell phone today.
Devin Horsman
So we need to be building towards a world where everyone can capture this kind of data and putting in place the different tools and infrastructure that can support that world. So that’s really what the future looks like as far as user generated content. And then in terms of broadcast content, we want to be looking at things like broadcasting an entire sports stadium as a hologram. And maybe you watch that on your coffee table where everyone in your family or your family and friends can see. Sort of like a one to one mapping of the stadium onto a holographic display that’s sitting on your coffee table and move their own view around when they want to get a look at one point or another of action. And maybe your television is also showing sort of the broadcaster’s view of the action at the same time. So we’re building the technologies to kind of permit that world to exist.
Devin Horsman
And it’s super exciting.
Brett
I mean, it certainly sounds super exciting and I can see why you’re so excited about everything that’s happening here, Devin. I want to keep you on and ask you another 20 or 30 questions, but I know we are up on time here, so let’s wrap before we do that. If people want to follow along with your journey, where’s the best place for them to go?
Devin Horsman
Yeah, so they can find me on Twitter at horseman. H-O-R-S-M-A-N. Or they can find the company at Arcturus Studio.
Brett
Awesome. Well, thank you so much for coming on, sharing your story, teaching us what some of these terms mean and really share this vision. This is all super exciting and we wish you the best of luck in executing on this vision.
Devin Horsman
Yeah. Thanks, Brett. This is really fun.
Brett
All right, keep in touch.
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