Software Claims to Render Unlimited 3D Details

[Sabre]

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32-year-old Bruce Dell of Australia is claiming that his new software will render unlimited, hyper-realistic graphics without the use of polygons. If his claims are true, this new technology could spark the next evolution in gaming, repeating the changeover last seen in the 1990's when polygons replaced pixels.

Called Unlimited Detail, the software doesn't require special hardware, suggesting that the entire process can run off a single-core CPU. In fact, Dell said that the software will render graphics on anything from a PC to a mobile phone without the need for a GPU.

The software works by acting like a search engine, digging through trillions of voxels--the 3D counterpart to pixels--in a cloud to quickly render a scene. "We can build enormous worlds with huge numbers of points, then compress them down to be very small," he explains on the software's website. "The Unlimited Detail engine works out which direction the camera is facing, and then searches the data to find only the points it needs to put on the screen."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-ATtrImCx4[/video]

Sounds like a very good idea, as anything that is a departure from the norm is bound to bring great new technologies, but something about it looks off to me.... not sure what it is. The Crysis engine looks better :/

[snaab]

It sounds promising. Sounds like it could still benefit from ever increasing processor speeds, but that will always be the case. It's a mighty task, reinventing the wheel!

[zaxrex]

I may be looking at it wrong, but it seems very similar to weather and transport look up models.
Take 'x' thousands of parameters, plug them into your massive calculation engine, let it run for a few days, and catalog the iterative results. The point of use display matches parameters of input in the catalog and shows the pre-calculated display.
To me that is what the guy says when they use a search engine to find the results, like Google.
It searches for something that is already there, it doesn't make new stuff.
When you only have to show one object (animal) from one of any known and pre-computed aspect ratios, you can duplicate and propagate them into as many pyramids as you like, but how it looks was already predetermined.

I dunno, am I missing the point?