Originally launched in 2012, Sketchfab has grown to be the largest social media website for sharing 3D objects and scenes with over 500,000 members and close to 1 million experiences. At SIGGRAPH, Sketchfab launched their VR browser to be able to navigate between many different 3D objects without having to leave virtual reality. Once inside an Sketchfab experience, then you can teleport around and change the scale. Sketchfab can import over 30 different types of 3D file formats, and is currently working with the Tiltbrush team to be able to have direct support for exporting and sharing your 3D creations on the web.
I had a chance to catch up with Sketchfab co-founder Alban Denoyel at SIGGRAPH to talk about the evolution of Sketchfab over the years, and their two big bets that there are going to be more and more 3D content creators and consumers as virtual and augmented reality technologies become more mainstream.
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.412] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. My name is Kent Bye and welcome to the Voices of VR podcast. So it was probably about a year ago or so when I first started seeing people sharing 3D objects within Twitter using Sketchfab. So Sketchfab is aiming to be the YouTube for 3D objects. So 3D content creators can upload and share their creations and be able to have them embedded into other social media sites like Twitter and Facebook. just to make it easier to share 3D objects and scenes on the web using WebGL. And so today I have the co-founder of Sketchfab, Albin Denoniel, and he talks a bit about how this site came about and the role that he sees it's playing in being able to allow people to share their creations more easily on the web. And Sketchfab just also recently added a lot of new virtual reality navigation features. And so That's what we'll be covering on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. But first, a quick word from our sponsor. This is a paid sponsored ad by the Intel Core i7 processor. VR really forced me to buy my first high-end gaming PC, and so Intel asked me to come talk about my process. So my philosophy was to get the absolute best parts on everything, because I really don't want to have to worry about replacing components once the second gen headsets come out, and the VR min specs will inevitably go up at some point. So I did rigorous research online, looked at all the benchmarks, online reviews, and what I found was that the best CPU was the Intel Core i7 processor. But don't take my word for it. Go do your own research and I think what you'll find is that the i7 really is the best option that's out there. So this interview with Albin happened at the SIGGRAPH conference happening in Anaheim, California from July 24th to 28th. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:02:01.557] Alban Denoyel: Hi, so I'm Alban, co-founder and CEO of Sketchfab. Sketchfab is a platform to publish and embed 3D files on the internet. And we just released a VR mode letting you explore any of those 3D files in VR. And so Sketchfab is essentially a volumetric scene that you can host on the web and that you can explore either on the web, on mobile or in VR with any headset. And we are the largest community of 3D content creators with half a million creators, and the largest library of user-generated volumetric content with one million 3D scenes on the site.
[00:02:36.844] Kent Bye: Great. So what are the licensing options for people who are uploading a model to Sketchfab? I mean, are people able to use either public domain or Creative Commons types of materials to be able to download models and then use them in their own experiences?
[00:02:51.067] Alban Denoyel: So our goal is really to be the experience, and not just to provide assets, but to be the player where the experience is consumed. So most of the content, like more than 95% of the content is only viewable, and we want to be a destination platform to view VR experiences. Anyone who uploads content can make the content downloadable under Creative Commons, and typically some museums do that, but more like for 3D printing and stuff like that. So we do have a big number of downloadable models, but it's a small section of the site.
[00:03:21.386] Kent Bye: I see, so it's mostly for people to share their models and to allow people an immersive experience of that, whether they're in a mobile or desktop PC VR, they can pop into like a immersive view of it and then be able to get an up-and-close view of somebody's 3D model.
[00:03:37.293] Alban Denoyel: I guess there are two aspects of it, a bit like YouTube. There is the utility aspect, so a very easy tool for any content creator to share their creations on the internet and to make their content available for VR without having to go through Unity. And then there is the content aspect of it, that we're a huge library of content for people who have headsets. And once they've gone through the 50 games available on the Oculus Store or Steam, we offer so many things to explore. And some of it is really like entertainment. We have many stories and places you want to teleport yourself to, to just hang out in a VR scene. And some of it is really more about learning things, how things work, like how beating art looks like in VR, how can you assemble again, like we have crazy stuff like that.
[00:04:25.606] Kent Bye: So right now, when you upload a model, it may be just kind of like an equivalent of taking a snapshot of a scene where it's kind of a volumetric snapshot, but it's still pretty static. Is there any plans to allow people to add more dynamic motion or movement within a model that's uploaded that then you could go into VR and have a little bit more of an interactive experience or an experience of looking at something that's actually moving or changing over time?
[00:04:52.105] Alban Denoyel: So we do support animated content actually, so we do have people uploading mini stories and so like the teaser of the next Pixar VR movie could be uploaded to Sketchfab and we have scenes of like one or two minutes long that are animated stories you can walk through. We also support 4D capture, so like things that have been captured with motion. And then we have a 3D annotation system that lets you save different viewpoints of the model. And this adds a bit of dynamism in the sense that you can visit a scene in autopilot mode that will automatically take you from one place to another in the model.
[00:05:25.352] Kent Bye: And what do you find that, like, why are the users using the site? What is the use case for why people are using the site?
[00:05:31.578] Alban Denoyel: Well, when we started it was really the utility aspect of, I need to share this to someone, how do I do it? Like, I'm a free artist, I need to share a 3D asset to my marketing team or to a client, or I'm an architect, and we were the easiest way to do it, and just on the internet, you don't need a free program to open a file. But now that we're reaching critical mass, we are reaching a point where we are able to bring an audience to a creator. And we are seeing more and more of our creators who have a bigger following base on Sketchfab than on Twitter, for example. So we're bringing, just like SoundCloud brings an audience for music creators, we bring an audience to 3D creators.
[00:06:13.187] Kent Bye: I see. So if somebody has just taught themselves how to do 3D modeling in either Maya or Blender and then they want a platform, it's sort of like the social media site to allow people to embed it into different websites and then they can build a following and then start their career in 3D modeling, it sounds like.
[00:06:29.870] Alban Denoyel: Yeah, exactly. Initially, we were still betting a lot on our embedding approach. We are natively supported on Facebook, so we can display our 3D player right in the newsfeed and then on many other sites like LinkedIn, Kickstarter, Reddit, our station Behance. But as we grow, even like Sketchfab itself has its own audience and community and follower base, and we're also pushing for people to grow their audience there and not only leverage their outside audience, basically.
[00:06:55.146] Kent Bye: And so why did you originally start Sketchfab? What was the thing that really catalyzed this project for you?
[00:07:00.948] Alban Denoyel: Well, the idea when we started was that whenever you create something, you have a profound need to be able to share it on the internet. And if it's a video, you're going to share it on YouTube. If it's a sound, you're going to share it on SoundCloud. And there was no such platform for the 3D file format. And before we started, it wasn't really possible to display a 3D file on the internet. And then in 2011, Mozilla initiated WebGL, which was the first web standard to display 3D graphics in a browser. And my co-founder and CTO, Cedric, was one of the very first programmers to work on WebGL, was hired by Mozilla to make the first demo of WebGL for the launch of Firefox 4. And then this was the base of our technology. That's what gave us the hope that we were able to do this online platform to share 3D files. And making sure that it's as easy as possible, like super seamless. You upload a 3D file and boom, we display it in the browser within 10 seconds. And now becoming a huge community and library of content.
[00:07:57.415] Kent Bye: Since you have over a million files uploaded, I'm curious if you've been able to do some analytics in terms of like the most popular file formats that people are using and then kind of get a sense of the ecosystem from that perspective.
[00:08:10.380] Alban Denoyel: So the most popular file formats are the most standard ones. Typically it's OBJ and FBX. We are integrated with most of the creation tools and so you can publish to Sketchfab straight from Blender or Maya or Max or Modo. And so we're going to rely on how those software export into a standard format. And so typically, 3ds Max best standard export is going to be FBX. And we have a lot of uploads from Max. It directly impacts the type of file format that are going to be the most used on the platform.
[00:08:42.009] Kent Bye: I see. So people directly from the Blender or Maya or some of these other 3D modeling programs can directly upload straight from their application onto their website and just sort of put it out there.
[00:08:53.909] Alban Denoyel: Yeah, that's really been the core of our strategy to get users that we've spent a lot of time integrating with the creation tools to have a workflow as seamless as possible. Just like, you know, you're an iMovie, you can publish a video to YouTube and we want to do the same thing for the 3D world. We initially started with Blender and it was actually one of our users who made an add-on for Blender that would add a share to Sketchfab button in the Blender interface. And we started with add-ons, and as we grew, we managed to get some of the tools to natively integrate us. So we're native in Photoshop, for example. So whoever has Photoshop in the sharing features, there is a share to Sketchfab, which gives us access to the Photoshop user base. And we're native in Blender and Modo. And when we're not native, we have add-ons. So we have an add-on for Max Maya, even for Unity, for Minecraft. You can publish a Minecraft world straight from Minecraft to Sketchfab without leaving Minecraft.
[00:09:43.875] Kent Bye: And I've seen people exporting .tilt files and converting them and being able to actually upload their Tilt Brush drawings as well to SkepsFab. And I imagine that that's something I would hope that eventually there'll be a little bit more seamless integration just to publish it directly.
[00:09:58.428] Alban Denoyel: Yeah, so we are working directly with the Tilt Brush team to ease this process. The step one for us is to better support the Tilt Brush files, so part of the work is on their side and they have a lot of crazy effects that we want to support and part of the work is on our side. The next step would be to have a more seamless integration, that's something we're discussing. We're betting on the fact that everybody is becoming a 3D creator, and for me the two ways this is happening is either creation tools like Tilt Brush or SculptVR, or 3D capture that is coming to our smartphones.
[00:10:35.185] Kent Bye: And imagine as well as Oculus Medium is another one I'm starting to see a lot more of with people who have access to the touch controllers but also getting early beta releases of the Oculus Medium. It seems like that's another program where people are going to be moving perhaps more beyond in some ways. Maybe the more amateur users are starting to use the 3D tools to create these 3D models. I was talking to the founder of Blender and he was a little skeptical as to the overall efficiency and utility of being able to create 3D models within 3D, especially if you're doing it for eight hours a day, just issues around efficiency as well as fatigue that may be coming up. So I don't know if you have any thoughts about what you see the trends are in terms of whether or not you think that people will start to create these 3D models within a 3D medium, or if they'll still kind of use these standard 2D interfaces that they've got all the hotkeys and efficiencies worked out.
[00:11:27.552] Alban Denoyel: I think that anyone who has tried Tilt Brush or Medium, and I've tried both, can't argue with the fact that it's going to dramatically impact the way we create free content. We have on Sketchfab uploads from users who are like four years old. I'm not joking. A kid that has only drawn on paper and has just learned how to draw on a sheet of paper, give him a tool brush, it's even more natural than on a sheet of paper because we live in a 3D world and we're used to moving motion with those dimensions. And so I'm not sure what that means for professional 3D tools. I can totally understand that professional users think that to make professional assets, you'd want to stick with professional tools. But for me, the question is not only for professional use cases, like just the fact that Tilt Brush and Medium are providing a new way of expression that is in 3D and VR is massive. And yeah, that's going to be one of the big drivers of growth for us.
[00:12:27.246] Kent Bye: Now, the Kronos Group within the last couple of weeks have announced this new format of GLTF, which is kind of like, as JPEG is to image, they want the GLTF to be kind of as to VR scene that could be potentially even like room scale to walk around in. So kind of a standardized format to be able to contain all the information that you need to be able to see a VR experience. So from your perspective, how does GLTF kind of fit into the ecosystem of Sketchfab? Is that more of a container to withhold other OBJ and FBX files, or is it something that on its own that Sketchfab might be able to support and eventually start to host these VR scenes?
[00:13:06.921] Alban Denoyel: So GLTF is definitely an interesting project. It's great to have people working on a more standard format. As far as the question is, we always make sure that we are supporting any format that is widely adopted and so the day 3ds Max outputs to GLTF and the day this is a default way to output from Max, Of course, we want to support that, so right now we're just looking at how this format is adopted by the industry and who is going to use this format as an output. For us, the question is beyond the standard, any standard... I wouldn't use a JPEG comparison, but if you take the video format, yes, there are standard formats like MP4, but you still need a player to display them, and YouTube is the player for videos. independently of what is the standard format for video and so that's where we want to play a role.
[00:13:58.986] Kent Bye: So what are some of the big next features of functionality that is going to be coming to Sketchfab then?
[00:14:04.517] Alban Denoyel: So we just released today a major update related to VR, and I'm super excited about that. I think it's the most exciting thing we've released over the past year. So the main thing we've released is a VR browser. So until now, we had a VR button for each model, and you could open it in VR and then view it in VR, and then you had to remove your headset, close the VR setup, and move to another model, which meant our VR experience was mostly standalone to one scene. And with the VR browser, we are moving this VR button from one model to the entire site. And we just released a VR interface to browse Sketchfab, which means you can just swipe through a million things in VR without leaving your headset. And I personally love the experience, and I think it's going to dramatically impact the engagement and the use of that feature. And so that's the first thing we've released. We've released teleportation, so you can move freely into any scene in VR, either using the controller and pointing at any place in the scene, or with cardboard or gear, just tapping on the button to move where you're looking, and also dramatically eases navigation in VR. And the third thing we've released is a VR scene editor, so doubling down on the tools set for VR, letting you set up the scale, which is massively important in VR, and define the initial viewpoint you want a VR scene to start with.
[00:15:23.320] Kent Bye: Great. And the thing that I think is really interesting about Sketchfab is that you started to do all this 3D things before 3D was really as big as it was. And so you're really a little bit ahead of the curve in terms of being at the right place at the right time for VR. So I'm just curious to hear your perspective of to see how everything's just grown over the last couple of years since you've started in 2012. And if you think that something like Sketchfab is about to hit this inflection point to really go to the next level.
[00:15:51.350] Alban Denoyel: Yeah, definitely. I think I really get a sense now that we've been too early for the past four years and now the entire ecosystem is lining up towards our vision and it's really awesome to see. I think what's never changed is that from when we started, we started Sketchfab so that 3D content could go beyond the small 3D world and the 3D niche and could reach millions of people through the internet. And for us, VR is a way to make this value proposition even more compelling because we think VR is the most awesome way to consume this content. And yeah, for us, we're betting on two things. One is that everybody is becoming a 3D creator. And the other one is that everybody is going to become a 3D consumer and will start consuming virtual version of things because of the proliferation of VR and AR headsets. Yeah, 2016 definitely marks the year where everything that's needed to have those two trends become a reality is happening now, and we're right in the middle, and it's great for us.
[00:16:48.562] Kent Bye: And finally, what do you see as kind of the ultimate potential of virtual reality and what it might be able to enable?
[00:16:56.330] Alban Denoyel: For us, what's interesting is that most of what you see in VR today is about gaming and we are really something very different. We're really about exploring and it's more of almost like a meditating experience. We're not about shooting zombies in space, but when you think about it, a lot of normal people are not necessarily into shooting zombies in space. When I explain VR to my parents, they'll never shoot zombies in space, but exploring a collection from the British Museum in VR, or teleporting themselves into a painting or a part in Rome. I think this has unlimited potential, it seems silly to say, but if you think of the fact that, yeah, with Sketchfab you can teleport yourself in so many places. We have thousands of 3D maps taken with drones, and so we have ancient temples in Syria and things like that. And, yeah, I live in New York, and we all live in, like, tiny, tiny apartments because the rent is crazy there. And, yeah, I just see the use case where you come back from work, and you put your headsets in, and you just browse through amazing places you would only dream about before VR. And I don't know where it's going to take us, but it's fascinating.
[00:18:07.036] Kent Bye: So you imagine things like photogrammetry or digital light fields as something that you can see in the future of Sketchfab for people to go in and see, like, a fully rendered scene.
[00:18:16.390] Alban Denoyel: Yeah, 3D capture is the fastest growing category of content for us, just because with 3D capture, and to a certain extent, Tilt Brush and VR creation tools, but let's stick to 3D capture. 3D capture means our target base in terms of creators is moving from 50 million people who are professional 3D designers to like 3 billion people who have a smartphone. And FreeCapture is reaching a level where it's becoming better and faster and more affordable. So the next phase is really to have this come into our smartphones and every phone manufacturer from Apple to Google to Sony to Intel, they're all working on bringing FreeCapture to our smartphones. the day the iPhone has a 3D camera, you're just gonna shoot the world around you in 3D. If you look at how we've captured the world, it's a saying from Aristote, that art imitates nature, and we've always tried to replicate the world, and we started with painting in caves. and then we got photography, went to photography and then video, and every time we got closer to where the world is. But since we live in a 3D world, today we get free capture, we're just going to start using it because it makes sense. So I have an 18-month-old son and I make 3D portraits of him every month. and now I have a virtual version of him, I have a 3D portrait of my grandma. We have users shooting their meals or their shoes in 3D, like the same trends you would see on Instagram, like just normal everyday stuff that people capture in 3D, because he is in 3D.
[00:19:47.223] Kent Bye: Awesome. Was there anything else that's left unsaid that you'd like to say?
[00:19:50.744] Alban Denoyel: Just super excited where this ecosystem is going. And I think we've still been pretty much under the radar until now in the VR world, just because we're still a small startup. And so yeah, anyone should try Sketchfab VR. If they have a headset, you can go to Sketchfab.com slash VR. And we'd love to hear your feedback about the experience. Awesome.
[00:20:12.953] Kent Bye: Well, thank you so much.
[00:20:14.354] Alban Denoyel: Thanks.
[00:20:15.550] Kent Bye: So that was Albin Denignel. He's the co-founder of Sketchfab, which is a social media site for you to be able to share your 3D objects on the web. So I have a number of different takeaways about this interview is that, first of all, it really feels like Sketchfab and Albin are really at the right place at the right time. I mean, I think that they're really serving a strong need to be able to more widely share a lot of these different 3D objects. And now that it's easier to be able to go into VR and to be able to explore lots of different objects, I think that they're kind of becoming a destination site within their own right. So there's a little over 70 cultural artifacts that the British Museum uploaded back in 2014 onto Sketchfab. But I think that the big growth area that Sketchfab sees in the future is going to be both in 3D capture, so doing kind of like photogrammetry type of scenes, but also with people creating content within the sculpting program of Oculus Medium, as well as within Tilt Brush. And so right now, it seems like the site is really geared towards just sharing and showing. Like Albin said, there's about 95% of the content that It's just mostly there to be seen by other people. There is a 5% of the content that is available for Creative Commons download, either for commercial or non-commercial use. But it's really geared towards being able to view the content rather than to have a place to be able to get assets to include within your VR experiences. But that said, I think that what Albin said is that there's some people that are really interested in playing these interactive games. But this is really tuned towards people who want to do more exploration within VR, whether it's through objects and cultural artifacts and these photogrammetry scenes and different environments that people are creating, but also like characters and objects and kind of animated scenes in short films. So because it supports animation, you can actually have these dynamic scenes that are playing out. So it's a little bit more of like a small snippet of an experience that may be just a minute or two long. It's kind of like YouTube where you don't necessarily want to download the entire video and save it either on your phone or desktop computer forever. It's just a quick experience that you want to watch and then it's done. You don't need to keep it. And I think Sketchfab is kind of setting itself to be like that in a lot of ways, kind of this experiential age social media website for 3D objects. So as I was editing this and listening to the question that I had about the GLTF format, I kind of realized that in some ways GLTF is trying to bring 3D web content to the entire web. And so in some ways, Sketchfab is kind of like the YouTube of 3D objects where you're having a destination website to be able to upload it to a specific site and kind of build a following and comments. kind of more like a social media site. I think GLTF, what that format kind of represents is to be able to have 3D objects to be able to be shown anywhere on the web. I think the thing that Alvin said in his answer is that there are kind of like standard formats for video, but you still go to YouTube to watch and find and discover a lot of the best video content that's out there. And so just the same, there's going to be the capability for perhaps the web browser to be able to display GLTF format natively. And so the embeddable widgets for Sketchfab, in some ways, GLTF could be seen as a competitor to Sketchfab. But at this point, Sketchfab is kind of like the leading destination site to be able to share some of this 3D content. Artists and content creators are going to be able to actually kind of build up an audience of having a single site to be able to share and create a following as well as get feedback on some of the content that they're creating. So I feel like that, even though GLTF is kind of representing an open standard to be able to make it easier to share 3d content anywhere on the web, I feel like Sketchfab is still going to have a unique role to play in terms of. cultivating audiences and be able to have a single site to be able to track some of your creative output and to get more audience looking at it because they're kind of creating a site that's interesting for people to go to and to look at. So they just launched at SIGGRAPH some of their new VR navigational capabilities before you were able to kind of go to a very singular URL and to view a single object within VR. Now, with this more navigable VR interface, you're able to do a little bit more of jumping in and out of many different types of both 3D objects and experiences that are uploaded to Sketchfab. So doing lots of really interesting things, and I think it's definitely worth checking out if you haven't seen it already, and to see what type of content people are creating and putting out there. I know that Dipdet Shavastin has been uploading some of his Tilt Brush creations onto Sketchfab, and that once the pipeline for being able to export and upload some of your creations onto Tilt Brush becomes a little bit more standardized and kind of have a built-in native integration, then I expect to see a lot more 3D content creators, content being uploaded. I think the thing that really stuck out for me when Alvin was talking was that they're really making two bets. The first bet is that more and more people are going to becoming 3D content creators with these 3D tools that are made available. And the other bet is that more and more people are going to becoming 3D content consumers. And so with those two trends of more and more 3D content being created and more consumers, then Sketchfab's in a really great place. The one thing that I should throw in there, too, is I talked to one of the creators of Blender at SIGGRAPH. His comment was that he was a little bit skeptical of the efficiency and efficacy of using a 3D interface to be able to create 3D content. Now, I think from his perspective, what he's thinking is that while you may get some creative inspiration and to be able to do things that you may have never really even thought of doing within the standard 2D interface of using a mouse and keyboard, The KISS perspective was that they're still going to be wanting for some use cases to be able to create content within that 2D interface, either because you're so used to the hotkeys and being able to just do it a lot more efficiently or faster and for doing it for longer, like for six to eight hours a day. Doing something with your full body is just going to be more fatiguing. But I think in my perspective, it's going to just open it up to a lot more people. Because frankly, this 2D interface into the 3D world is not really all that intuitive for most people. It just takes a lot of training to be able to think in that way. Like Alvin was saying, there's four-year-olds who are able to just go into Tilt Brush and start creating in 3D, even before they really know how to draw fully. Because they're just more familiar with what a 3D environment is like. And so that, to me, I think was a really interesting thought. What are the next generation of youth going to be able to create and be able to do if they're kind of thinking dimensionally in a way that we've never had the opportunity to be able to cultivate those parts of our brains. So that's all that I have for today. I just wanted to thank you for listening. And if you enjoy the Voices of VR podcast, then tell your friends, spread the word and become a donor at patreon.com slash Voices of VR.
