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Lighting the Torch for In-App AR Development, with TORCH's Paul Reynolds
Game engines
like the versatile Unity have long been the go-to for AR development,
and for good reason. But its reputation as a video game engine can
also be intimidating -- especially to those who want to create AR
software for enterprise. That's why Paul Reynolds lit his TORCH; an
app he co-founded that lets you design your own AR platform, right in
the palm of your hand. He chats with Alan about his claim to flame.
Alan: Hey, everyone, my name's
Alan Smithson, the host of the XR for Business Podcast. Today's guest
is Paul Reynolds, the CEO of Torch, a really exciting augmented
reality platform. It's a mobile augmented reality development and
deployment platform for enterprise. Paul has been a software
developer and technology consultant since 1997 - since before the
interwebs! In 2013, after 10 years of creating video games, he joined
Magic Leap where he was promoted to senior director, overseeing
content and SDK teams. At Magic Leap, Paul recognized the lack of
accessible tools for non-game developers that was hindering
widespread adoption of immersive and spatial computing technologies.
In 2016, Paul moved to Portland, Oregon, where he founded Torch to
address this very problem. To learn more about Torch, you can visit
torch.app. Paul, welcome to the show.
Paul: Thanks for having me.
Alan: It's such a pleasure. I've
been looking forward to this episode. Torch is such a cool platform
and I keep seeing your posts on LinkedIn of putting stuff around your
office and stuff. So tell us, what is Torch, and how did you come up
with this crazy idea?
Paul: The easiest way to think
about it is, it's a mobile application -- currently for iOS -- that
lets anyone build interactive spatial scenes. So, you create a
project and you're building it in the camera of your device, which
means you're also walking around the space, or moving around the
space and you're building up interactive experiences visually,
without writing any code. We call that the design environment, and
that's the freely available [option] -- anyone can jump into it and
just start building. What makes it a platform is the capability of
taking what you've created in Torch, and exporting it and publishing
it and integrating it into your existing app, or pushing it out to
another platform or tool. What we really wanted to focus on was
allowing people to iterate in augmented reality -- directly within
augmented reality -- as opposed to sitting on a desktop computer and
trying to figure out how to work a game editor, and get more people
able to work productively in 3D. That's really the heart of it.
Alan: That's so cool, because if
you're sitting at your office, you're like, "wow, this AR stuff
is hot. It's amazing." You know what, go learn Unity and coding
and figure out how to actually make it. Six months later, you're
like, "oh, look, I made a portal."
Paul: [laughs] Right.
Alan: What you guys have built
is a simple way to just do it visually.
Paul: Yeah. So, my background
was in video games, back in the day where everyone was building their
own engine. You really didn't even have time to build a really nice
editor on top of that. So when Unity came out -- we'll pick on Unity
in particular, because it's just such a well-known product -- when it
came out, it was the game engine that most of these game studios I've
worked for wanted to build. And that was really unique; they had
basically taken what would normally mean millions and millions of
internal R&D dollars, and turned it into this tool that pretty
much anyone can download for free. But what happened over the past
few years is, it's become kind of the de facto interactive 3D tool.
And it was for me as well; I've been a Unity user forever. What we
learned when we started building a p
View all episodes
By Alan Smithson from MetaVRse
4.5
1212 ratings
Game engines
like the versatile Unity have long been the go-to for AR development,
and for good reason. But its reputation as a video game engine can
also be intimidating -- especially to those who want to create AR
software for enterprise. That's why Paul Reynolds lit his TORCH; an
app he co-founded that lets you design your own AR platform, right in
the palm of your hand. He chats with Alan about his claim to flame.
Alan: Hey, everyone, my name's
Alan Smithson, the host of the XR for Business Podcast. Today's guest
is Paul Reynolds, the CEO of Torch, a really exciting augmented
reality platform. It's a mobile augmented reality development and
deployment platform for enterprise. Paul has been a software
developer and technology consultant since 1997 - since before the
interwebs! In 2013, after 10 years of creating video games, he joined
Magic Leap where he was promoted to senior director, overseeing
content and SDK teams. At Magic Leap, Paul recognized the lack of
accessible tools for non-game developers that was hindering
widespread adoption of immersive and spatial computing technologies.
In 2016, Paul moved to Portland, Oregon, where he founded Torch to
address this very problem. To learn more about Torch, you can visit
torch.app. Paul, welcome to the show.
Paul: Thanks for having me.
Alan: It's such a pleasure. I've
been looking forward to this episode. Torch is such a cool platform
and I keep seeing your posts on LinkedIn of putting stuff around your
office and stuff. So tell us, what is Torch, and how did you come up
with this crazy idea?
Paul: The easiest way to think
about it is, it's a mobile application -- currently for iOS -- that
lets anyone build interactive spatial scenes. So, you create a
project and you're building it in the camera of your device, which
means you're also walking around the space, or moving around the
space and you're building up interactive experiences visually,
without writing any code. We call that the design environment, and
that's the freely available [option] -- anyone can jump into it and
just start building. What makes it a platform is the capability of
taking what you've created in Torch, and exporting it and publishing
it and integrating it into your existing app, or pushing it out to
another platform or tool. What we really wanted to focus on was
allowing people to iterate in augmented reality -- directly within
augmented reality -- as opposed to sitting on a desktop computer and
trying to figure out how to work a game editor, and get more people
able to work productively in 3D. That's really the heart of it.
Alan: That's so cool, because if
you're sitting at your office, you're like, "wow, this AR stuff
is hot. It's amazing." You know what, go learn Unity and coding
and figure out how to actually make it. Six months later, you're
like, "oh, look, I made a portal."
Paul: [laughs] Right.
Alan: What you guys have built
is a simple way to just do it visually.
Paul: Yeah. So, my background
was in video games, back in the day where everyone was building their
own engine. You really didn't even have time to build a really nice
editor on top of that. So when Unity came out -- we'll pick on Unity
in particular, because it's just such a well-known product -- when it
came out, it was the game engine that most of these game studios I've
worked for wanted to build. And that was really unique; they had
basically taken what would normally mean millions and millions of
internal R&D dollars, and turned it into this tool that pretty
much anyone can download for free. But what happened over the past
few years is, it's become kind of the de facto interactive 3D tool.
And it was for me as well; I've been a Unity user forever. What we
learned when we started building a p