Otoy’s Jules Urbach believes the blockchain can produce a crowdsourced rendering engine

Once upon a time, you had to submit a program to the computer department. They would run it, and send the results back to you in the form of a printout. That worked well in the days when there was one big computing resource that everybody had to share.

In a way, Jules Urbach, CEO of Otoy (maker of the Octane graphics renderer), believes those days could come back, except the computer we are sharing is all of the computers on the Internet. He applies that computer history to the idea of cloud rendering. Rendering images or games is what happens when you submit your graphics or animation project, and the big computer, in this case a data center, goes to work on it. If you’re like Pixar, you might wait a whole day for your next animated movie scene to come back as a full rendering. Pixar can afford to pay for that, but smaller game makers and animators can’t.