OTOY Render Network - Critical Rendering Infrastructure of Metaverse

Render Network $RNDR will democratize and scale the rendering infrastructure needed with the proliferation of metaverse in the virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) world.

Blurring of Reality

We are on the cusp of transformation of our views of reality as actual reality and virtual reality gets blurred even more with the advancement, proliferation and adoption of virtual reality and augmented reality technologies.

This is evident with the continuous improvement of videos and graphics rendering technology over the decades (from left to right, top to bottom - Space Invaders (1978), Pole Position (1982), Donkey Kong (1994), Runscape (2001), Half Life 2 (2004), Resident Evil 5 (2009), Assassin’s Creed Unity (2014), God of War (2018) and Metaverse, VR and VR (2021). In fact, Oculus and other VR headsets were one of the best selling 2021 Christmas presents as measured by # of Oculus and other VR apps downloaded +2-3 weeks around the holidays.

With the advent of Metaverse (desktop-powered, VR-headset and AR-handset powered), the need for scalable and efficient rendering process is required.

Rendering is the process of generating a photorealistic or non-photorealistic image from a 2D or 3D model by means of a computer program, which often times requires deep computational power to calculate the “rendering equation” which in essence is the relationship of the 2D and/or 3D object or wireframe in relation to the light surrounding. Below is an example of the “rendering equation.”

Introduction to rendering | Rendering | Computer animation | Khan Academy

Industrial Design Rendering: Lighting & Composition in Keyshot

Tangentially, most “metaverse” is actually focused on the desktop-powered community which is logical given the flat learning curve and the commoditized and proliferated nature of desktops. I do believe there is a place for both desktop and console/headset or handset powered device to power the metaverse of the future, similarly to how there is a place for both the existence of PC and gaming console.

Metaverse in 2021 is high probable in the ‘crazy idea’ to ‘frenzy’ creation part of the S-curve move from creation to deployment. We are experiencing the early infancy of the boom of Metaverse-based content creation. Right now, most of these metaverse content are created by the host system (i.e. Oculus Marketplace, Decentraland, The Sandbox) and to a lesser extent the metaverse infrastructure companies (i.e. Nvidia Omniverse, Unity Software) and as such, the interoperability between these systems are lacking. We will save the interoperability of these metaverse assets between different systems for a future piece.

Creation and Deployment of Metaverse Content

The scale up of metaverse content creation and deployment over the next few years will require a substantial amount of rendering capacity and capability. Imagine the possibilities in a world where physically correct rendering tasks are completed quickly and efficiently in a blockchain based peer-to-peer network with no error or delay and with securely protected property rights - this is where OTOY’s Render Network comes into play. Render Network is in essence a distributed GPU rendering on the blockchain. Such a blockchain based rendering network can facilitate efficient, reliable, and remunerative rendering of time-stamped tasks on a peer-to-peer basis.

History of OTOY and OctaneRender

Jules Urbach founded OTOY in 2009 with the intention to democratize the ease of access to rendering technology to all the entry and professional creators who does not have the capital or means of access to the Hollywood-like visual effects studios.

“Urbach envisioned a future where anyone could have an easy pathway to cloud-based, real time, 5 photorealistic, and physically correct rendering software for just a few hundred dollars.”

In fact, Urbach’s deep passion for his vision was so pronounced that he patented a token-based billing model for server-side rendering service, several years ahead of the proliferation and adoption of blockchain, token and Web3 technologies.

Today, OTOY’s OctaneRender is the world’s first and fastest GPU-accelerated, physically correct renderer. OctaneRender is revolutionary in that it uses the graphics card on your computer to render photorealistic images extremely quickly--images that previously took hours and sometimes days to render. With Octane’s parallel compute capabilities, you can create stunning works in a fraction of the time and at a fraction of the cost. As a result, there are millions of users of OctaneRender today.

OTOY’s advisory board includes Dr. Eric Schmidt (executive chairman of Google’s new parent company, Alphabet), Samuel J. Palmisano (former chairman, CEO and president of IBM), Ariel Emanuel (co-CEO, WME | IMG) and noted economist George Gilder. Major shareholders include Autodesk and Yuri Milner.

Render Network

OTOY team decided to take their mission of “making holographic and immersive content a mass market proposition for consumers, artists and publishers alike” further by providing a peer-to-peer ecosystem for rendering called Render Network. Render Network is build on top of a current blockchain protocol (Ethereum) to help render opportunities with people who have idle GPUs to process the renders.

The distributed P2P rendering model is efficient because the million of users that are using current OctaneRender can readily be ramped onto Render Network given the inefficiencies that currently tolls the system. As a monthly or annual subscriber of OctaneRender today - most do not have 100% utilization of their cloud-based GPU subscription and if the right incentive structure is set in place, there is an opportunity to not only ensure current users are maximizing their financial and GPU resource utilization but it also ensures that the whole ecosystem will become more efficiency.

By utilizing the Render Token network ecosystem, developers could choose to monetize their idle GPUs by performing renders in exchange for Render Tokens, which could then be converted into crypto or fiat currency.

How Render Network Works

Structurally, the concept is highly similar to Helium, in that these utility tokens provides the incentive structure for miners and in this case, GPU contributors, to contribute to the ecosystem.

1. Request User requests rendering task and contributes $RNDR to Render Network.

2. The render task is calculated and they get quoted a price for the task in $RNDR - they “pay” and the tokens and the render details get attached to the smart contract. The task is sent across the network and is matched to a Rendering Processing User.

3. . The Rendering Processing User then process the tasks utilizing their GPU to

   and once complete, sends the completed task back through the Render Network.

4. Once completed and reconciled, the tokens are transferred from Request User

   to the Rendering Processing User via the smart contract.

Mapping the Value of a Render Token

One Render Token $RNDR will be initially mapped to 256 seconds of work at 256 OctaneBench, a benchmarking unit created by OTOY to reflect the processing power of various GPUs in a rig. The Rendering Processing User can adjust the metric of speed and time needed to complete their render task. They could do 32 seconds of work at 2048 OctaneBench or 64 seconds of work at 1024 OctaneBench. These are basically units of measurements of input and output that will be memorialized on the smart contracts and are used to more efficiently match Render task and computational power.

The price of a render and/or rendering request will be based off-chain by analyzing supply of GPUs available and the demand of rendering work, thereby, to more effectively match supply and demand.

There are also mechanisms in place to prevent adverse rendering actors in the system by applying a grading or credit score-like mechanism, starting every Rendering Process Use with the same, fixed score when they join the ecosystem (on a scale of 0-100) and incrementally adding or substracting points based on the the satisfaction and completion of the rendering tasks.

What is a bit unclear today is the lack of clarity on how adversarial actors are defined and the different levels of adversarial actions that will warrant A,B, and C action in the ecosystem. Also, a bit more clarity on how the off-chain analyses of supply and demand of GPUs would be helpful.

Render Network and The Metaverse

Render Network $RNDR has a strong potential to utilize idle GPU’s, one of the most efficient rendering hardware today, sitting in all the artists, developers and rendering professionals computational power, to power the creation and rendering of 2-dimensional and 3-dimenional images and videos.

And with the millions of users and professionals that are already active on OTOY’s OctaneRender technology and ecosystem today, the core community is already there and I believe with the strong introduction of a solid incentive structure will drive a decent level of initial adoption of Render Network. Render Network $RNDR has a strong potential to play a critical role in the scaling of metaverse content creation and distribution process, notwithstanding the fact that Metaverse will get more complicated over the coming years in PC, headsets (i.e. Oculus) and mobile.

Instead of a fixed metaverse of interaction, meaning there is a predefined square footage or areas of interaction, I believe with the advent of AI and subsequently, neural rendering, Metaverse will get exponentially more complicated, maybe to the point where users will spent a considerable amount of time in them because there is no ending or no end-point to the Metaverse world. All in all, there is going to be a substantial growth in demand for rendering capacity as this world, or arguably, the further blurring of the actual reality and virtual reality world will drive incremental demand for decentralized rendering capacity.