Unlimited Detail - gaming / CGI future or vaporware?

[Skele]

Sounds great, I can't wait to mess around with the soon-to-be-released SDK.

Hopefully it's free to use.

[Ad Bot]

[rkynick]

"Thank you for your Email, I am afraid our focus has been on speed over anything else, and we are busy optimizing and are up to 25-65 fps depending on whats on screen. We want to be able to bring the system to the point were we can say we are as fast as a graphics card but much more powerful, once speed is out the way we will begin the import of laser scanned point cloud data, at that stage Unlimited Detail should look completely real. Like I said we have no new pictures but ill attach an old one that I dont think is on the web. It doesnt look like much but its actually quite interesting from a technical perspective because those balls and the bottle are really small models which round off and smooth out when they get close. There was always a problem when you use point cloud data ( we say that because voxels have such a bad name , poor little things ) the problem is if you get close to an object the points either separate or they turn in to 2D rectangles to stay joined together, we have had great success this week with a new system that combines the point based on the points around them and smooths them off , thus keeping a nice real looking image, rather then blocky pixels.

The cancellation of larabee in its original form is unfortunate for us because we had hoped to release UD at the same time as larabee and ride the media wave of showing that we can do more with out hardware then they can do with hardware.

Once again thank you for your email, its been a nice break from programming but I must return to my techno slavery now.

Kindest Regards
Bruce Robert Dell"

More information can be found at their website, as well as another video which explains more. Feel free to leave a comment if this interests you.

http://unlimiteddetailtechnology.com

Edit: Seeing as this video has gained a fair amount of interest, I'll post a quick description of how it works here... This description can be found on their site, via the link above.

How does it work?

If you have a background in the industry you know the above pictures are impossible. A computer cant have unlimited power and it cant process unlimited point cloud data because every time you process a point it must take up some processor time. But I assure you, it's real and it all works.

Unlimited Details method is very different to any 3D method that has been invented so far. The three current systems used in 3D graphics are Ray tracing polygons and point cloud/voxels, they all have strengths and weaknesses. Polygons runs fast but has poor geometry, Ray-trace and voxels have perfect geometry but run very slowly.

Unlimited Detail is a fourth system, which is more like a search algorithm than a 3D engine. It is best explained like this: if you had a word document and you went to the SEARCH tool and typed in a word like MONEY the search tool quickly searches for every place that word appeared in the document. Google and Yahoo are also search engines that go looking for things very quickly. Unlimited Detail is basically a point cloud search algorithm. We can build enormous worlds with huge numbers of points, then compress them down to be very small. 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 it doesnt touch any unneeded points, all it wants is 1024*768 (if that is our resolution) points, one for each pixel of the screen. It has a few tricky things to work out, like: what objects are closest to the camera, what objects cover each other, how big should an object be as it gets further back. But all of this is done by a new sort of method that we call MASS CONNECTED PROCESSING. Mass connected processing is where we have a way of processing masses of data at the same time and then applying the small changes to each part at the end.

The result is a perfect pure bug free 3D engine that gives Unlimited Geometry running super fast, and it's all done in software.
... 

[Sirrus]

It seems like this would just take a beefy processor more than a good graphics card: from the sound of it, it seems like to do this it requires a lot/i] of math.

[Skele]

It seems like this would just take a beefy processor more than a good graphics card: from the sound of it, it seems like to do this it requires a lot/i] of math.

A graphics card is a dedicated processor.

[Starcraftman]

I think the biggest problem at the moment would be the insane amount or ram this would take to work properly.

[Sirrus]

A graphics card is a dedicated processor.

Touche.

[Zenthos]

I think the biggest problem at the moment would be the insane amount or ram this would take to work properly.

Yea, it would make the processing speed the same looking at any amount of detail, but it would take a stuffload of ram. Video cards would have tons of ram if this broke through...


The more I think about this, the more it makes sense... stuff this would be awesome.


Edit: I also like how they say how bad some of those polygon pictures are... and they're from Crysis...

[Daedalus]

Looks amazing.

[Jess]

Maybe in like 2015 will this work :p

[dkamm65]

Maybe in like 2015 will this work :p

Maybe in 2015 you'll realized this tech is already working fine.

[Skele]

Maybe in 2015 you'll realized this tech is already working fine.

It's working but it most likely won't be used for gaming for a few years, and even then not by everyone.

[Jess]

It's working but it most likely won't be used for gaming for a few years, and even then not by everyone.

[Littledude]

hmm he said 32 bit was the end of the color race but I has 64

[Moybus]

The reason it's possible is that it only loads as many points as pixels on your screen. So unlike our current system, it doesn't render the entire map at once. If there's a bunch of stuff in a house that you can't see inside, you won't render that stuff, because there is simply no need to.

It's the same idea as to why nobody bothered to go past 64bit color, you can't see more colors than that for the most part.

So since you can only see as much as the pixels on your screen, why render more?
It's a brilliant idea.

[Thorax]

The reason it's possible is that it only loads as many points as pixels on your screen. So unlike our current system, it doesn't render the entire map at once. If there's a bunch of stuff in a house that you can't see inside, you won't render that stuff, because there is simply no need to.

It's the same idea as to why nobody bothered to go past 64bit color, you can't see more colors than that for the most part.

So since you can only see as much as the pixels on your screen, why render more?
It's a brilliant idea.

But it would still have to track collisions and stuff.