Mike Jurka (left) and Anand Agarawala (right) demo Apple Vision Pro VR glasses at the 2024 DICE conference in Las Vegas. Photo credit: All photos supplied.
Anand Agarawala and Mike Jurka can thank a chance encounter in the Department of Computer Science’s Dynamic Graphics Project Lab (DGP) for a lifelong friendship and business partnership.
Jurka, who is American, and Agarawala, originally from Calgary, instantly clicked. They’ve been working together since, most recently for Spatial, the VR-gaming company Agarawala founded eight years ago.
“Anand was the first person I met on my demo tour of the Dynamic Graphics Project lab. I was a year after him,” says Jurka, who earned his master’s in computer science in 2008. They became fast friends, soaking up the exciting, cutting-edge academic environment in the Department of Computer Science in the early 2000s.
“Ravin’s lab was amazing,” says Agarawala, referencing the DGP’s director, Professor Ravin Balakrishnan of the Department of Computer Science. “He had all these massive screens and volumetric displays. I felt like I was in this whole new world.”
The feeling was magical, Jurka adds.
Anand Agarawala, founder of Spatial.
It wasn’t just the DGP lab that excited them. Agarawala remembers Professor Emeritus and Nobel Prize winner Geoffrey Hinton’s lab across the street adding to the overall excitement of the U of T community. “I think we met him once or twice, cooking up the future of computing with AI. The atmosphere was great,” says Agarawala.
The collaborative environment inside the lab was a windfall for innovation.
“I was already naturally into graphics, but getting to be right in the mix with, literally in our little pod of seats, the guy next to me who was working on AI for robots and robotic system controllers helped make what we were doing even stronger,” says Agarawala.
Mike Jurka, VP of Engineering at Spatial.
That proximity to a wide spectrum of students immersed in disciplines beyond computer science, as well as visits from companies such as Pixar, inspired the tech behind Agarawala’s first company, BumpTop, which became part of his master’s thesis at U of T. (Think of it as a 3D desktop that uses physics and multi-touch gestures.) Jurka later joined as a software engineer, and the company was acquired by Google in 2010.
Balakrishnan was blown away by the first demo of BumpTop. It wasn’t until he was able to work the controls himself that he believed it was real, and not just a video.
Spatial, a VR-gaming company headquartered in New York that Agarawala founded after selling BumpTop, is his latest venture. Jurka has been there since day one and is now vice-president of engineering, continuing the two U of T grads long-standing collaboration.
Spatial’s latest offering, Animal Company, has quickly risen through the ranks to become the top-earning VR game on Meta Quest. It’s made the small, 25-person company wildly profitable after some very lean early years, says Agarawala, who earned his master’s in computer science from U of T in 2006.
Winson Chung, Justin Ho, Anand Agarawala, Aidan Findlater and Michael Jurka at BumpTop HQ in Toronto, April 2009, to celebrate the launch of BumpTop Windows.
“It's hugely rewarding and gratifying to finally hit profitability,” says Agarawala. “Games are such a hit-driven business, and once you get the hit, the numbers can be mind-boggling — at any given point we have 10,000 users in our Discord. We have an incredibly talented team, and luckily, people who love working with each other.”
Jurka lauds U of T for being so integral in shaping their futures in the VR-gaming space.
“In an American grad school, you get shoved under your professor's grant and you have to follow whatever they're interested in. U of T gives you so much autonomy,” says Jurka.
He and Agarawala sing the praises of cross-disciplinary learning, and each took courses in the humanities in their respective undergrads. “You have such an edge over everybody else,” says Agarawala, who studied music and art history.
Adam Lesinski, Justin Ho, Winson Chung, Agarawala, Patrick Dubroy and Adam Cohen pose in front of the Android mascot outside Google HQ in Mountain View,California, 2014.
They still meet weekly to think creatively, discover new tech and analyze the latest industry tools. “By staying on the cutting edge, you can put yourself in a really good position going forward,” says Agarawala. He also strategically experimented with small side projects while developing Animal Company to ensure the company’s success.
“Google has this great philosophy, the 70/20/10 rule. Spend 70 per cent of your effort on stuff that's going to make you money this year, 20 per cent on what’s going to make you money in the next five years and 10 per cent on something that can make you money in the next 10 years,” says Agarawala.
— Original story by Adam Elliott Segal for A&S News