Umbra

Umbra Software Oy, a company headquartered in Helsinki, Finland, specialized in graphics optimization technology, primarily for the video game industry. The firm was established in 2005 as a spin-off from Hybrid Graphics by Otso Mäkinen, who served as CEO. Its core business revolved around providing middleware that enhances the performance of 3D applications by rendering only what is visible to the user at any given moment.

The company's flagship technology, occlusion culling, addresses a fundamental challenge in real-time graphics: preventing the GPU and CPU from wasting resources on objects that are hidden from the viewer's perspective. This is achieved by building a highly optimized spatial database from a 3D scene's geometry. At runtime, this database is used to efficiently query which objects are visible, significantly reducing the processing load and enabling higher frame rates, which is especially critical for virtual reality applications. Umbra's system performs these calculations on the CPU, which helps to avoid visual artifacts sometimes associated with GPU-based solutions. The technology was utilized in numerous high-profile video games, including "Call of Duty: Ghosts," "The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt," and "Destiny."

Umbra's business model was based on licensing its middleware to game developers. The software was available as a plug-in for major game engines like Unity and Unreal Engine. Over the years, the company expanded its offerings, developing solutions for streaming large 3D datasets and cloud-based processing. In October 2015, Umbra secured $3.4 million in a Series A funding round from investors including Inventure, Lifeline Ventures, and Initial Capital to further this development. The company's mission evolved to enable the real-time display of any 3D content on any hardware, targeting industries beyond gaming such as architecture, engineering, and construction. In January 2021, Umbra was acquired by Amazon, and its team continued to work for Amazon in Finland.

Keywords: graphics middleware, occlusion culling, rendering optimization, 3D visualization, game development, visibility solutions, real-time graphics, virtual reality, spatial database, Amazon