Anthony Doesburg: Massive leap into the real world

The winner of the software prize at this year's PricewaterhouseCoopers Hi-Tech Awards is probably better known in Los Angeles than in Auckland, where the company is based.

But as most of its customers are Hollywood moguls, perhaps that's not surprising. For five years Massive Software has been providing tools that movie-makers use to populate their pictures with thousands of animated extras.

Even before that, the software developed by company founder Stephen Regelous had a starring role in The Lord of the Rings. Next, Massive wants to make its mark in the realms of architecture, engineering and life sciences.

Those real-world activities may not appear to have much in common with the stuff Tinseltown trades in. But the same fundamentals apply, whether it's creating independently-acting Orc warriors, or autonomous agents that an architect can let loose within a set of building plans to see how they navigate their way around.

The difference, says Massive finance director Israel Cooper, is that "it doesn't just have to look good, it actually has to simulate realistically - there's a deeper level of testing required and you have to have a lot more market buy-in."

That's what Massive is busy garnering now, as it gets Massive Insight, its modelling product, ready for sale. It is inviting users to join a beta testing programme, which Cooper says is drawing praise. "We've got some incredible responses from probably some of the world's pre-eminent architecture and engineering firms."

Their names aren't for public disclosure. But a leading engineering outfit, Arup, has been using the software for modelling the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which is being renovated according to architect Renzo Piano's plans.

Nate Wittasek, who heads Arup's LA fire engineering group, told the Economist he was impressed by Massive's Lord of the Rings efforts and figured the software could also be used to understand the behaviour of people in a burning building.

"Their actions aren't choreographed," Wittasek told the Economist. So each time the model is run, the results are different, making it possible to see how building design affects people's ease of exiting.

Massive chief executive Diane Holland says it was always Regelous' intention to take his software out into the real world. "When he originally thought of it, it was for robotics," she says.

But Massive first made its mark in the movies. Regelous was a technical director on The Frighteners, a 1996 production of Peter Jackson's Weta Workshop, and Holland says Jackson saw a role for him working on battle scenes for a project he couldn't name at the time, which was The Lord of the Rings.

The only method in use for assembling huge crowds on screen was to film hundreds of figures multiple times and make a composite picture. But Holland says Regelous had for a decade been nurturing an idea for artificial intelligence-driven animation, and seized on the opportunity Jackson was offering.

"His whole concept was to create these artificial life forms that had their own brains, vision, hearing, touch and, recently, we've added memory."

In 2004 it won Regelous an Academy Award for scientific and engineering achievement. About the same time he persuaded Holland, who has a 20-year career in the visual effects business, to leave California and help get Massive Software off the ground.

It was to be done in a style unlike anything Holland had experienced before. For a start, there was to be no borrowing.

"Okay, so I'm the CEO of this company, we can't take capital, what am I going to do?" Holland says.

"I basically asked for a lot of favours - like working for free." That was to continue for a couple of years, until eventually there were nine staff occupying a house in Takapuna.

Lillian Baker, who joined Massive four years ago as Holland's assistant, doesn't seem to bear any scars from the hand-to-mouth early years. The company, which today has about 20 staff, continues to have a very egalitarian culture, she says.

"Everyone has a say, we all sit around and brainstorm - it's an amazing atmosphere."

Holland credits New Zealand Trade and Enterprise, which enabled Massive to exhibit at trade shows in the United States and Germany, for a good deal of the company's success.

"With the help of NZTE ... we were able to look like a big player on the world scene." Coming from the US, she wasn't used to a government agency acting as quickly and creatively.

Massive still hasn't resorted to borrowing. Cooper, who spent five years at PricewaterhouseCoopers before joining the company, says that partly reflects the shallowness of the local venture capital pool, but also a reluctance to relinquish control. Regelous, who lives in Bangkok where he heads the firm's development team, owns 51 per cent of the business and Holland the rest.

Cooper won't say how much sales amount to, except that they're in line with similar sized export businesses. Massive Prime, the movie crowd simulation software, costs US$18,000 ($28,000) per seat, and US$4000 a year for support.

"The growth prospects for Massive are incredibly bright and, as the Hi-Tech Awards judges said to us, that was the key thing that separated us out."

Having conquered the virtual world, the real world is now in the company's sights.

"You have hundreds of thousands of architects as opposed to a couple of hundred movie studios. The price they can bear may not be as high but you're talking about a much larger market. The real opportunity for Massive has always been in that space, not film and entertainment."

JOIN THE CROWD

* Massive Software: Makes software that generates realistic crowd behaviour.

* Initial applications: Movies, TV, games.

* Next steps: Modelling real-world crowds, to test things such as architectural design, fire safety, pedestrian flow, shoppers' behaviour.