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Hoax or Legitimate?
What are your thoughts on this: Unlimited Detail Technology - Home
As you can see there is a video on there. They claim this:
"Unlimited Detail is a new technology for making realtime 3D graphics. Unlimited Detail is different from existing 3D graphics systems because it can process unlimited point cloud data in real time, giving the highest level of geometry ever seen. If this all sounds a bit technical to you, just press the "What is it ?" button on the side and we will try and explain things in a bit more detail."
Does this sound possible to you?
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It's sort of an hoax. It is based on real-live technology that is still under some sort of development; voxels.
What you see in there is a poor attempt at trying to make it look like voxels are ready to be implemented in computer gaming and others. But the scene is static with just a camera motion. There's practically no zoom (one of the biggest hurdles to overcome because voxels demand huge amounts of disk space if zoom is implemented), there's no proper shadows or dynamic lightning, and the scenes are almost entirely composed of repeated images on the screen.
The annoying repetition of "unlimited detail" is of course false. Conceptually it is true, but this technology limitation is primarily in disk space. There are people in these forums that can be a lot more precise about why this is so.
In any case this could be a future for 3D rendering if we ever reach a point where our current computers processing and storage powers have raised by a magnitude and we can actually produce viable editors for it (right now it is still mostly a boring menial task). Some much better examples of what can be achieved follow:
YouTube - Sparse Voxel Octree (SVO) Demo by Jon Olick
Atomontage Engine - Home (my favorite)
You should find plenty more if you look for voxel on the web
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Voxels are cool and a few early Novalogic games used them. AFAIK Novalogic is the only company that released a 6 DOF voxel engine. After that they moved onto triangles like the rest of the world.
Voxels have a lot of potential and are used in medical imaging applications but as of right now the PC hardware does not support them and probably won't either for some time or ever. I see the future of graphics hardware moving more towards curved surfaces - IE: You could define an object as a series of bezier curves or splines in 3 space and the video hardware would figure out the vertices.
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I just want their network gear...
Soma
