Odyssey launches Explorer and welcomes Pixar founder to the Board

The company's first generative world model and Pixar's co-founder, Ed Catmull, joins the Board and invests.

The AI-first Pixar

Six months ago, we announced our Seed investment into Odyssey, followed by our Series A investment a few weeks ago. By creating AI-first technology to generate complex, dynamic and realistic worlds, Odyssey set out on a mission to create the modern day, AI-first Pixar.

Back in the 90's, Pixar revolutionized the animation industry and storytelling in cinema with a blend of technological innovation, emotional depth, and imaginative world-building that felt both mythical and epic. It was in 1995 that they released the first fully computer-generated imagery feature-length film, Toy Story. The film grossed close to $400M on a production budget of around $30M.

The company’s famed co-founder and technical genius, Ed Catmull, has now joined the Board of Odyssey and invested into the company. Ed served as President of both Pixar and Walt Disney Animation Studios, and led computer graphics at Lucasfilm before that. He was awarded the prestigious Turing Award in 2019.

Fast forward to 2024 and we are living through a renaissance of computer graphics in short-form motion picture that’s driven by generative AI. It feels like every other week a new model is released that’s capable of outputting increasingly photorealistic scenes for several seconds that maintain (to a variable degree) the physical fidelity of the worlds they are tasked with recreating. But we can do better.

Explorer: generative world models for film, gaming, and beyond

Explorer is an image-to-world model that transforms any image into a realized, detailed 3D world. Although early, generative world models like Explorer offer the promise to significantly accelerate the creation of film and gaming-compatible worlds, in addition to enabling brand new applications or forms of entertainment.

Instead of writing about Explorer, here are some examples of the rich generative worlds that the model can bring to life:

Importantly, for any world that’s generated with Explorer, a user will be able to load it into their preferred creative tool and, if necessary, hand-edit the generative world to achieve their desired goal.

In modern industry parlance, call this a research preview - Explorer is developing fast and accelerated by Odyssey’s real-world data capture system.

The team is growing, join them!