The new age Generative AI startup : MetaBrix Founders Interview

Great Companies: How did you get your idea or concept for the business?

Prabhat : Being a photography enthusiast, I’ve always been interested in the way visual content is perceived across various devices. We went from text to images and now to videos (short form recently) to make it more engaging. Upon seeing the attempts made to improve the visual content in the last 3 years, it was clear that future visual content is going to be immersive. We identified the problems involved with creating immersive 3D content and started looking around for research or attempts made to solve this. We could not find any convincing solution, so we decided to build one. 

Pratik : I’ve been into autonomous vehicle research for more than 4 years and actively involved in Generative AI , which deals with creating a simulated environment for the vehicle. Also, when Facebook relaunched itself to Meta, their virtual environment was created through a traditional way. After seeing the potential of upcoming metaverse, gaming and digital fashion, we thought this is the right time to solve this bigger problem and democratise the entire 3D content like the way TikTok democratised 2D. And that’s when we started MetaBrix with a vision to simplify and create user generated 3D content. 

Great Companies: What are the various services provided by MetaBrix ?

Prabhat : MetaBrix is an AI based creation tool which simplifies 3D content creation. The various product features aim to aid 3D artists to reduce the time, cost and effort required to build such models. Typical 3D assets include objects (car, table, bag, gun), environments (hall, driveway, factories) and avatars (players & NPCs). The services are divided into 4 categories based on the problem they solve : 

1. VISION : Create high-quality virtual walkthrough renderings directly from a mobile scan without the need of creating 3D models.

2. MAVERICK : Create an immersive and interactive digital twin of an environment with a set of images/video.

3. ULTRON : Create realistic 3D models of everyday objects through a quick scan.

4. JARVIS : Create virtual worlds from imagination through text or speech prompts.

Great Companies: What makes MetaBrix different from hundreds of other similar service providers?

Pratik : MetaBrix is one of a kind platform for virtual experience creation. Here’re the key differentiators : 

1. Fast and Scalable : The typical service providers in this space are dependent on 3D artists and developers who can typically take days to weeks to create assets and hence it’s not at all scalable. Our platform can generate assets in minutes reducing the time and effort by more than 80%. 

2. No-code capability : Creating renders requires using computer graphics pipeline and a bit of scripting. This makes it hard for everyone to learn and use it for their own purpose. Think of it as presets which simplified the entire image editing.

3. Customisable : The assets produced from our platform are easily editable to suit the use case requirements. The entire remodelling, retexturing can be done with any choice of modelling software. Assets follow BRDF standards.

4. Interoperable : The platform has the capability to create assets in both forms of rendering styles i.e., Polygonal (ex. Decenterland, Spatial) and Voxel (ex. SandBox, Roblox). The output can be exported to any kind of Metaverse for further usage.

5. Simplified workflow : The platform has a simple to use workflow, which involves importing an image set, letting the engine process, customise the output and export it to further use. Unlike other tools, it doesn’t need LiDAR sensors, sophisticated and expensive cameras, and huge dataset to create the outputs.

6. Generative AI Capability : Assets created are AI generated whereas most of the platform has traditional workflow which is costly and undergone manual process.

Great Companies: What were the struggles and challenges you faced and how did you overcome them?

Prabhat :

1. Market Awareness : Getting into the market earlier might give a first mover advantage, but it also comes with a responsibility of creating awareness in the market. These AI capabilities are so new that it is still unknown to most artists and developers.

2. Hardware Challenges : High quality renders typically run-on high-end GPU machines. To run it on mobile and laptops, it requires high compute capabilities. But we’re seeing a good trend in recent devices with respect to chips and batteries.

3. Software Challenges : Rendering 3D models on Mobile and Web needs model viewer plugins (WebGL & WebXR) which is still not mainstream due to high rendering time which slows down the entire webpage.

4. Talent Hunt : Working at MetaBrix requires a good experience and interest in the areas of Machine Learning, Computer Vision, 3D Modelling, Rendering Engines. As these subjects and trends are quite new, finding such talent is a little hard at times. 

Great Companies: How do you plan to grow in the future? What does 5 years down the line look like for MetaBrix?

Pratik & Prabhat : Our plan is to enhance our existing set of services in terms of time and quality and add few more features to our platform in future. Following the technology adoption curve, we first aim to get the product validated through innovators and early adopters and then move to early and late majorities. We aim to utilise the already popular platforms like Unity, Nvidia Omniverse and other modelling tools to reach a wider audience. 

After 5 years, we want to be the one stop solution for creating any kind of virtual experiences catering to different industries like Metaverse, commerce, hospitality, gaming etc. to help the future digital artists create and monetise their creations. Brands can use our platform to enhance their product experience for better customer engagement, marketing, and storytelling.

Great Companies: If you had one piece of advice to someone just starting out, what would it be?

Pratik & Prabhat : Entrepreneurship in our opinion is a cyclic process of failing and finding a way until you get it right. With the right team, you can do this process faster and reach a product market fit sooner. Most of the time, ideas aren’t perfect, but your execution and perseverance make all the difference. As founders, we’ve to envision the solved problem by living in the future and then work backwards to build what’s missing in the process.

Website : https://metabrixlab.com/

LinkedIn : https://www.linkedin.com/company/metabrix-labs/