Jules Urbach

Jules Urbach is a software developer and entrepreneur who founded the Los Angeles graphics company OTOY and is its chief executive officer and chairman. OTOY develops the GPU renderer OctaneRender, which it acquired in 2012, along with cloud rendering and light field tools. In 2017 OTOY sold the Render Token to fund a distributed GPU rendering service, now called the Render Network, of which Urbach is described as the founder.

Urbach has been an advocate of light fields as a delivery format for virtual reality; Road to VR reported in 2016 that he "believes lightfields are the endgame of virtual reality." Under his leadership OTOY ran the Render the Metaverse VR art contest with Oculus VR in 2015, worked with Facebook in 2017 on a cloud rendering and publishing workflow for its Surround 360 x24 and x6 volumetric cameras, brought OctaneRender into the Unity engine, and in 2024 released a Star Trek experience for Apple Vision Pro. As of April 2026 he was billed as "CEO of OTOY & Founder of Render Network" at the RenderCon 2026 conference in Los Angeles.

Reviewed 27 September 2026. Checked every dated fact, figure, role and quote against the cited OTOY, UploadVR, Architosh, TechCrunch, Road to VR, Voices of VR, CG Channel, DEVELOP3D, GfxSpeak, fxguide, UC Berkeley IPIRA, COSM, Game Bytes, PRWeb and RenderCon pages. About review dates.

Early life and education

Urbach told UploadVR that as a child he wanted the 1983 arcade game Dragon's Lair, and when his mother would not buy it for him he recreated the game on a Mac IIfx, first for himself and then for other students to play in the school lunch areas. He said he "got into Harvard and Yale after sending them the source code to the game." In a 2014 profile, Architosh described him as a "Harvard bound kid" who left that path to make video games instead. One of his closest friends since childhood is Rod Roddenberry, the son of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry.

Career

Early games and web 3D

Urbach's first job was for Time Warner on Hell Cab in 1993, which he worked on while still in his teens. Hell Cab was a CD-ROM adventure game produced by Pepe Moreno and published by Time Warner Interactive Group. A 2021 speaker biography published by the COSM Technology Summit says he created it at age 18 and calls it one of the first CD-ROM games; it adds that six years later Urbach founded Groove Alliance, whose Real Pool was "the first 3D game available on Shockwave.com." OTOY's own biography says that before OTOY he developed "the web's first 3D video game platform" and licensed it to companies including Macromedia, Disney and Warner Brothers. Urbach told Architosh that he focused on video games until about 1996 and then turned to streaming games and to improving rendering in game engines.

OTOY and cloud rendering

OTOY gives 2008 as its founding year and names Urbach as founder and CEO and Malcolm Taylor as co-founder and chief technology officer. Alissa Grainger, Urbach's business partner, has also been described as a co-founder. Urbach told Architosh in 2014 that the company "really started to form" around 2009, when it received its first investment. The name OTOY is partly meant to stand for "online toy."

OTOY's early focus was rendering high-end 3D graphics on remote servers and streaming the results to client devices. At CES in January 2009, AMD and OTOY announced the AMD Fusion Render Cloud, a GPU supercomputer being built in Burbank, California, that was designed to exceed one petaFLOPS using more than 1,000 graphics processors. Urbach said then that about 10 percent of it had been built and that beta testing was expected by mid-2009.

Autodesk invested in OTOY in October 2011, with plans to bring OTOY technology into its media and entertainment products. In March 2012 OTOY acquired Refractive Software, the developer of the GPU-based unbiased renderer Octane Render. Urbach said he bought it because Octane was "a very different way of rendering." In November 2013 OTOY named an advisory board that included Eric Schmidt, Ari Emanuel, George Gilder, Sam Palmisano, Brendan Eich (then chief technology officer of Mozilla) and Irving Wladawsky-Berger; TechCrunch reported that Urbach remained the sole member of the company's formal board of directors. By 2017 OTOY employed about 60 people in Los Angeles, and Urbach retained what UploadVR described as a "significantly" greater than 50 percent share of the company.

LightStage

LightStage LLC was founded in 2008, and in 2009 the Light Stage capture technology developed by Paul Debevec and Timothy Hawkins at UC Berkeley and the University of Southern California was licensed to OTOY through the USC Stevens Center for Innovation; UC Berkeley's technology office lists Urbach as the company's founder. OTOY lists LightStage among its products.

Virtual reality and light fields

In April 2015 OTOY launched the Render the Metaverse contest, sponsored by Oculus, for which it offered its OctaneVR renderer free to entrants to create 360-degree VR renders viewable on Samsung Gear VR through Oculus 360 Photos and OTOY's ORBX Media Viewer. Urbach judged the contest alongside John Carmack and comic artist Alex Ross. The contest ran in three 30-day rounds from April 27 to July 26, 2015, and the overall winner could receive US$35,000. Urbach said at the launch: "When I saw our first renders on Gear VR, I was blown away by the amount of detail I was seeing in the scene."

In a 2016 interview with Kent Bye, Urbach described OTOY's cloud compression for streaming volumetric light field video to mobile headsets such as Gear VR and said he expected glTF to "become the industry standard for compact and efficient 3D mesh transmission, much as JPEG has been for images." In October 2016, around the time of the Oculus Connect conference, Road to VR reported that OTOY had demonstrated light field streaming of a single costumed actor at 1.5 Mb/s, shown in augmented reality on a smartphone, and that the ORBX Media Player update for Gear VR would bring light field streaming to consumers.

At Unite Los Angeles in November 2016, Unity Technologies announced that OctaneRender would be included in all Unity licenses, including the free tier, with renders exported as ORBX files that could be played back on Gear VR at up to 18K resolution. OctaneRender for Unity was released in December 2017, free for use on a single GPU, with paid tiers for more GPUs.

At Facebook's F8 conference in April 2017, Facebook announced its Surround 360 x24 and x6 cameras, which capture color and depth for volumetric video with six degrees of freedom, and named OTOY among the partners building its production workflow. Urbach said OTOY had "designed with Facebook an amazing cloud rendering and publishing solution to make x24's interactive volumetric video within reach for all." He told UploadVR, "It's legitimately a light field camera." Speaking to Kent Bye at SIGGRAPH 2017, he discussed 8D reflectance fields, captures that can be relit when placed into an AR scene, and OTOY's conversion of Facebook's 360 volumetric captures into interactive 6DoF experiences.

Render Network

In 2017 OTOY completed an initial coin offering for the Render Token (RNDR), an Ethereum ERC-20 token intended to fund a distributed GPU rendering network; Voices of VR reported that it raised about 4,088.28 ETH. On November 2, 2023, the Render Network completed its move from Ethereum to Solana. In the announcement, Urbach, described as the network's founder, said the move "unlocks major new capabilities like real-time streaming and dynamic NFTs."

Apple and Star Trek

OTOY rebuilt Octane on Apple's Metal graphics API as Octane X. In a 2020 fxguide feature Urbach said, "I started OTOY to democratize content creation, imagining that artists might one day render 3D graphics at the same fidelity as Hollywood blockbusters." OTOY also works on the Roddenberry Archive, a project cataloguing texts and documents from Gene Roddenberry's life and career and building reference 3D models of the Starship Enterprise. On February 2, 2024, OTOY, Paramount Game Studios and Roddenberry Entertainment released The Archive for Apple Vision Pro, with nearly two hours of Star Trek spatial experiences, navigable 3D sets and light field cubes shown at 90 frames per second in 4K per eye. Urbach said the platform let the team "bring audiences back in time as if they were there on set during the making of Star Trek for the first time, with full visual immersion and historical accuracy."

Views

Urbach has linked his work to the Holodeck of Star Trek. He told UploadVR in 2017 that "Star Trek hints at how human ingenuity might one day free us from the fundamental limits of the material universe," and the magazine described his work as a lifelong effort to let anyone turn their ideas into reality. OTOY's company page quotes George Gilder calling him "the most inventive software engineer he has ever met."