Graphine has been around for 15 years and is best known for its high-resolution texture display middleware.
The company provides streaming and compression techniques used in games and interactive 3D applications. It was at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco that Unity Technologies announced that it had bought the Belgian company. Unity is an American firm of Danish origin, which is best known for its Unity game engine. The game Pokémon Go in particular turns on the latter. Graphine is currently headed by Aljosha Demeulemeester.
He founded the company jointly with Charles-Frederik Hollemeersch and Bart Pieters, who had come to know each other at ID Lab, imec’s research laboratory at the University of Ghent. In recent years, the company has been the focus of investments by the imec.istart and PMV accelerators, as well as VLAIO subsidies. “We are excited to bring our technology and know-how to the huge user base of the Unity development platform,” says Demeulemeester. “Streaming is an essential technology for highly immersive and detailed virtual worlds.
“Graphine technology is currently used by some very big names in the industry. The popular game PUGB, the Belgian game developer Larian Studios and the game companies Wargaming and Funcom among others exploit Granite SDK, the software product of Graphine. For their part, NASA, Boeing, and CBS are using it to improve their interactive 3D applications.
