About me
From a young age, my passion for technology and video games ignited a journey of exploration and creation. Initially, I delved into building game mods and creating gameplay guides, eventually progressing to learning the intricacies of developing games from scratch using popular engines like Game Maker Studio and Unity3D.
In 2011, I got accepted into the engineering program at the University of Waterloo. Throughout my undergraduate studies, I had the incredible opportunity to immerse myself in the startup scene and embrace the university's vibrant culture of entrepreneurship. Taking advantage of this unique environment, I ventured into launching my own business within this ecosystem. Thus, Babylon VR was born.
Babylon VR was a visionary undertaking aimed at assisting individuals in remote home purchasing and enabling them to visualize their prospective investments through the power of virtual reality. Though despite our utmost efforts, the business faced many challenges and we had to shut it down in 2018.
Undeterred by the setbacks, I embarked on my next entrepreneurial venture in 2019, founding Orbiseed. Leveraging the capabilities of artificial intelligence technology, Orbiseed set out to revolutionize the construction and insurance industries by streamlining document processing and analysis. Our mission was to enhance work efficiency and accuracy through AI-driven solutions.
Building on the lessons and experiences gathered from previous endeavors, I now start my third business venture in 2022: Atelier Sekai. This new venture is driven by my unwavering desire to solve the challenge I've always been passionate about—creating immersive and captivating virtual worlds that captivate and engage users. With Atelier Sekai, I am committed to pushing the boundaries of virtual world development and delivering extraordinary experiences to users.
You can read more about projects I've worked on below:
Why i started atelier sekai
As a kid, I was hooked on video games, especially MMORPGs. I loved the idea of escaping into an immersive world where I could role-play, interact with NPCs, and join forces with other players. It was like having a second life in a digital world.
But as much as I enjoyed these games, I often found myself getting bored due to these game often require lots of grinding for levels. The repetitive content, like fetch quests and monster elimination, felt like a chore and took up too much time, and the game feels stale after a while.
That's why I'm always on the lookout for games that are truly immersive and don't feel grindy. I want a game that feels like a living, breathing world, where I can get lost in the storyline and not worry about time-consuming tasks.
In 2012, a newly released anime series called Sword Art Online gained mainstream popularity. The plot involves characters trapped inside an MMO where they must live out their lives inside a huge video game, where everything is emulated to near perfection. This idea really resonated with me, as it was always wanted MMOs to be like. Furthermore, as the anime was airing, Oculus VR released their Kickstarter campaign, promising a VR headset that could place you inside video games. This made me wonder if it would be possible to build a game like Sword Art Online in real life. So in 2015, I began my journey to figure out what it would take to make a truly immersive game world.
Oculus Headset was one of the most successful kickstarter campaign back then, raising almost 10x the amount it asked for
I began my entrepreneurship journey by creating a virtual reality start up called Babylon VR. Our goal was to build virtual showrooms that would allow users to view homes in VR before renting or purchasing. However, we quickly discovered that creating high-quality digital content is a lot of work! To create a single room, we had to create concept art, model the 3D objects in modeling software, apply textures, place lights, and bake lightmaps. It took weeks of work just to create one room!
This realization led me to understand that creating truly immersive game worlds like the one presented in Sword Art Online would require an insanely high budget (according to this video from Game Theory, that number is $485 million). For comparison, Genshin Impact has costed around $500 million to develop so far, making it one of the most expensive games ever developed. However, it still only contains a fraction of the content compared to what is presented in the concept of Sword Art Online. Making a virtual world isn’t going to be viable using traditional method, and this was why I started to look into artificial intelligence.
As early as 2015, there was already promising work being done on deep learning. However, it wasn't until the release of AlphaGo that showed the world the potential of AI in performing tasks above and beyond humans ever could. It became clear that to take immersive virtual worlds to another level, AI was a must-have, but the technology wasn't quite ready at that point. While generative AI was being developed, it was only being used for style transfers or creating very simple chatbots. To get ready for the day when AI is mature enough for game development, I started to work on AI projects to understand more about this technology.
Fast forward to 2022, after seven years of exploring use cases in AI and digital creation (which you can read about in the projects page), AI has finally reached a stage where it can revolutionize how we develop video games. As a result, I started Atelier Sekai to help game creators build the next generation of video games, where worlds are truly immersive, engaging and feel less repetitive. Hopefully, one of these days, we'll be able to make a real-life version of Sword Art Online.