Latest news with #JeffreyJarvis
Forbes
15-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Forbes
AI Startup Cartwheel, Led By OpenAI And Google Veterans, Raises $10 Million To Simplify 3D Animation
Founders Andrew Carr (L) and Jeffrey Jarvis (R) Cartwheel Cartwheel, a new 3D animation company founded by OpenAI scientist Andrew Carr and former Google creative director Jonathan Jarvis, has come out of stealth with a browser-based animation platform designed to dramatically accelerate the creation of character animation for games, films, advertising, and social content. The company also announced a $10 million funding round led by Craft Ventures, bringing its total raised to $15.6 million. Cartwheel's tools allow users to generate rigged 3D character animations from text, video, or motion library prompts. The platform supports professional workflows, including exports to Maya and Unreal, but also includes a simplified interface designed to let less technical users build animated scenes and characters directly in the browser. Cartwheel's technology reduces the time required for common animation tasks from hours or days to minutes, enabling creators to experiment, iterate, and deploy animation assets at production scale. 'There's this core frustration animators face with today's software,' Carr told me. 'You need huge teams and weeks of effort to do things that should be fast. We wanted to solve that.' Carr previously worked at OpenAI on code generation tools and saw the potential for language models to unlock animation workflows. Jarvis, a designer who helped launch Google Creative Lab and later led the animation-focused studio Universal Pattern. He and Carr started the company together in 2023. The platform supports text-to-motion generation, motion remixing, and in-browser character rigging. Users can search from a curated library of animations or type prompts such as 'cast a wizard spell' or 'do a silly dance,' and receive rigged motion sequences that can be applied to custom or generated characters. Animations are fully editable and exportable, and the system is being designed to integrate into industry-standard environments like Unity and Unreal. Cartwheel's team includes veterans from Pixar, Riot Games, Sony, and Unity. Animation director Catherine Hicks, whose credits include Coco, Toy Story 3, and Inside Out, has joined as head of animation innovation. Neil Helm, known for leading crowd animation on Inside Out 2, Turning Red, and Up, has been named head of interactive animation. They are helping refine Cartwheel's tools and rigging systems from an animator's perspective. The company's early access program attracted more than 8,000 beta users, including creatives from DreamWorks, Roblox, Duolingo, and Take-Two. Many of those users, according to Carr, were exploring how Cartwheel could accelerate background and crowd animation, rapid prototyping, or previsualization tasks traditionally bogged down by time and cost. 'Animation software hasn't really changed in 20 years,' Carr said. 'There's no reason the same rigging or blocking task should take three hours every time.' Cartwheel also includes a character generator trained on licensed 3D assets. Users can upload sketches or models and receive rigged characters in return. The founders were adamant about the importance of training on paid, ethically sourced data, especially as legal scrutiny mounts around AI training practices. Cartwheel enters a growing field that includes Anything World and Wonder Dynamics. Anything World focuses on auto-rigging and animating 3D assets for game engines like Unity and Unreal, offering a large asset library and developer-friendly tools. Wonder Dynamics, now part of Autodesk, enables filmmakers to insert CG characters into live-action footage without traditional motion capture. All are focused on professional animators working primarily on video games, and background characters in commercial animation. Cartwheel's backers include WndrCo, Khosla Ventures, Accel, Tirta, Human Ventures, and Runway, the AI video company. Investors see the technology as applicable beyond media and entertainment, with potential for marketing, education, and e-commerce. The startup's next steps include an API, planned for release later this year, that would allow developers to integrate Cartwheel directly into games or other interactive environments. For now, anyone can sign up and begin animating in the browser at 'The tools of storytelling should be in more hands,' said Carr. 'That's what we're building for.'
Yahoo
07-05-2025
- Yahoo
New York Man Caught Booby Trapping Bike Trails Red-Handed
As the seasons change, so do our hobbies. For many of us here at POWDER, spring and summer means a return to recreating on two wheels. That's why a troubling story about booby-trapped bike trails by Eyewitness News ABC7NY caught our attention this morning, May 7, 2025. According to the news outlet, 44-year-old Jeffrey Jarvis of Peekskill, New York was arrested on April 29, 2025 after he was caught sabotaging mountain bike trails at Blue Mountain Reservation, a popular area for mountain biking just outside of New York City. Jarvis was caught by a trail camera laying large branches and logs across a frequently-used bike trail. The camera was set up by local organization Westchester Mountain Biking Association after tree limbs were found strewn across the trail multiple times. Sam Lee, of the Westchester Mountain Biking Association, told ABC7NY that local riders first started noticing the trail sabotage last year. The tree limbs were 3-5 inches in diameter, and posed serious risks. The org paid for the trail cameras and caught somebody sabotaging trails late last year, but couldn't identify the culprit. Jarvis returned to sabotage the trail this March. A second trail camera placed at a different angle was able to identify him. Tap or click the video below to watch the full story from ABC7NY. Want to keep up with the best stories and photos in skiing? Subscribe to the new Powder To The People newsletter for weekly updates. Jarvis has been charged with second-degree criminal nuisance and could face up to a month in jail, and/or a fine of up to $500. Seemingly-soft consequences for somebody who attempted to hurt others, but at least justice will be served. The Westchester Mountain Biking Association is celebrating Jarvis' arrest on social media. They've dubbed him the, 'Blue Mountain Bandit', and posted the following message on May 1, 2025 to their Facebook page: "Based upon YOUR reports of various limbs and logs strewn across the trail or bottom of giant boulder rollers at Blue Mountain over the past 2 years, several of us deployed trail cams at select trails. It took 6-8 months to get enough photographic and video evidence of the Blue Mountain Bandit in the act of potentially harming or killing someone from the act of sabotage. Last month, we filed a police report and submitted certain fb posts and our evidence, and on April 29th, the perpetrator was arrested for CRIMINAL NUISANCE- and confessed to these crimes. Let's be good ambassadors of our sport and carry on." Let this troubling story be a reminder to keep your wits about you on the single track this season. Trail sabotage and booby traps aren't as common these days as folks have begun to accept mountain biking, but the risk remains. Related: Mammoth Mountain Announces Bike Park Opening Day
