Unlimited Detail Real-Time Rendering Technology Preview 2011

[KevE]

A buddy pointed this out to me. Has anyone seen this & what's your thoughts?

Being and enthusiast MMO and RPG gamer, I’m always looking for new ways to improve my experience in massive open worlds. I got to see more than I was able to film for the video and I have to say that I’m truly excited about what this technology has the potential to do for future games and other applications as well.

Now i have no clue regarding the inner workings of graphics but how awesome would this be if legit. Only time will tell i guess.

The HardOCP Article
HARDOCP - Euclideon & Unlimited Detail - Bruce Dell Interview - Euclideon & Unlimited Detail - Bruce Dell Interview

The 40min video interview with creator Bruce Dell -
Euclideon & Unlimited Detail - Bruce Dell Interview - YouTube

Note: Author John Gatt's linkedin profile. A bit dodge no?
John Gatt - Australia | LinkedIn

Mods, If it's been posted already then feel free to delete this thread.

 

[Oj0]

Another one of these? This idea has been beaten to death over the last few years. Question: Why do we need the game engine rendering on an atomic level when your monitor can't display anything smaller than a single pixel?

 

[KevE]

There's others?..lol, guess this is what happens when you've been stuck under a console for for so long.

 

[McDangerous]

I think that's the point of the engine, Oj0. The engine actually computes which atoms (or groups of atoms rather) are displayed in each pixel, and as such, each pixel displays the exact colour required to make a detailed image. The said it in one of their previous videos, I'm sure of it, that's why it can run point cloud data in real-time. I'm pretty sure I posted this up before Kev, or maybe it was on another forum. Personally I think it's awesome, as I'm a very big fan of ground breaking tech, the advantages it could possibly bring.

 

[KevE]

McD, re selecting groups of atoms - is this why his objects are no longer square?..because it's kind of building up its own new specific polygons? Am i on the right track?

..i eagerly await photo realism in games & it will be a massive bonus if it can be done on mainstream hardware.

 

[Pyro]

For displaying static graphics it seems great, but you still need to animate things. One of the nice things of how they've advanced polygon based rendering, is in how objects can move. Moving 100s of points each carrying 100s of vectors is much easier than moving millions of atoms. I also wonder how much memory would be required to carry all those atoms. On a textured item, you need geometry, but you can save a lot of memory on the fine details by having it stored in textures. If every atom has to be stored in memory, you lose that economy because you HAVE to load the full object. I'm sure they perform some type of LOD, but exactly how it works and will scale remains to be seen.

The key though is animating things.

 

[R3aL1Ty]

Im loving the look of this and hope it can come through but my next concern is what will it do to current hardware and what will be needed ...

 

[Squidnite]

Whatever it may be, real or fake and/or static, it still looks really cool I get the point of it, its just whether or not they can make all that stuff move without melting hardware

 

[Oj0]

The conclusion on each of these is always the same...

To quote the video, the island in the video is one km^2. Let’s assume a modest island height of just eight meters, and we end up with 0.008 km^3. At 64 atoms per cubic millimeter (four per millimeter), that is a total of 512 000 000 000 000 000 atoms. If each voxel is made up of one byte of data, that is a total of 512 petabytes of information, or about 170 000 three-terrabyte harddrives full of information. In reality, you will need way more than just one byte of data per voxel to do colors and lighting, and the island is probably way taller than just eight meters, so that estimate is very optimistic...

...They’re hyping this as something new and revolutionary because they want funding. It’s a scam. Don’t get excited.

Or, more correctly, get excited about voxels, but not about the snake oil salesmen.

Source

We spoke to an Australian physics engine developer with experience of Bruce Dell and Euclideon. His company dealt with Bruce Dell years ago, when Euclideon was seeking funding for the Infinite Detail project. Said company declined to fund the project, citing issues with memory management, particularly when it came to animations...

Source

After further Googling, the first mentions I can find date back to 2003. Eight years later we have a static and very square island. Why? Because designing infinite detail would take infinite time...

 

[KevE]

In the 40min video interview he clearly says that they are NOT accepting funding as the Australian goverment has provided the needed funding. He must have some serious b@lls to scam them no?

He was apparently running the real time island demo on a gaming laptop using only the cpu so if this is to be believed then its obviously not hardware intensive.

Scam or not, i'll be keeping an eye on this for sure.

 

[Oj0]

Start manipulating the infinite detail and watch it crawl. You can keep an eye on it but eight years later there's still nothing worth seeing.