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Originally published on 04/01/2002
"I'd much rather kill my friends than an AI," Charles Cohen, Cybernet's VP of R&D, told me at the Game Developers Conference two weeks ago. We were talking about Cybernet's latest product, Open Skies. It's a toolkit that enables the creation of games in which players can participate in virtual worlds overpopulated with thousands of other people simultaneously.
Fast Facts:
Cybernet Systems
www.cybernet.com |
| CEO |
Charles Jacobus. Previous job (1990): Program manager, Environmental Research Institute of Michigan (now Veridian) |
| HQ |
Ann Arbor, MI |
| Employees |
35 |
| Market |
Technology development and licensing |
| Funding |
$50M in grants; $5M from Sparton |
| Profitable |
Yes |
| Raising Funds? |
Yes, about $10M to fund development of medical products |
This is a hard problem to solve. Even the successful MMPGs (massively multiplayer games) Ultima and EverQuest actually segment their online universes into online villages, as it were, to keep the routing of data between users manageable. Cybernet claims that OpenSkies allows larger number of players to join a universe with quick enough data routing that even real-time combat simulations are feasible; an upcoming war simulation from Tesseraction Games will use this product.
It's an out-there product from an interesting company, whose first projects were in robotics, and whose force-feedback patents are a big part of Immersion's technology base. Cybernet also makes a medical data-collection toolkit that shares technologies with OpenSkies, as well as head-tracking and gesture-recognition software and several Linux products. Currently, the company is working on a "universal remote" the military could use to control unmanned vehicles.
Since 1990 Cybernet has taken in $50 million in government and other R&D grants. In 1999 it raised $5 million from Sparton Electronics. The company scuttled a planned IPO in 2000 (it was based on the Linux products). Today, Cybernet is profitable on its $5 million yearly revenues, CEO Chuck Jacobus told me.
The whole mission of the company is to get in very early in a technology cycle, develop patentable technology, then license the intellectual property and move on. The model resembles that of drug development companies, without the pesky FDA delays.
- Rafe Needleman
email: rafe-needleman@catchoday.com
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