Unlimited Detail Wants To Kill 3D Cards

Sounds like a good implementation of Ray-Tracing. Lighting and animation are going to be major hurdles to overcome, followed by tools.

It sounds a little to me like the old "once the polys get small enough, everythings a particle system" approach. Sure you save lots of GPU by essentially doing away with surfaces and textures (by making everything a floating colored dot) but you then have to contend with massive storage, manipulation, and filtering problems.

They might be at the stage where they say "we'll just make everything a point! this'll be cake! all our renderer will have to do is figure out which points to show." and not yet at the phase where a they come to realize that a room full of monsters will require 100 gig of ram.

I listened to their explanation and it sounds a bit shady. First they used that old salesman trick of using a British accent to appear smart, so that was already a red flag.

And then their explanation of the secret to their technology sounded rather ridiculous. They said that their technology was like the google search engine or like searching for the word "money" in an MS word document (the latter was the lamest attempt at subliminal messaging you are likely to find outside of a political ad). Needless to say that is a very silly explanation.

Of course a lot of graphics systems have methods where they determine what elements are supposed to be visible and render only those elements. But that is not something that will give you "unlimited detail".

So yeah .... shady.

I agree that it sounds a fair amount like ray-tracing.

More specifically, the method of searching for color on a point-on-screen basis as opposed to a plethora of triangles overlaying each other sounds like ray-tracing in my mind. Though, even as I write this, I'm still second-guessing my position now that I've had more time to think about it.

Either way, what makes it impossible for them to use the current algorithm they're using to evaluate lighting on the point they discovered to be the one that's rendered, as well? ... I wonder how they properly anti-alias it (and there would very likely be aliasing on those questionable/edge-of-object 'points')? Render a larger scene then scale and sharpen it, or something?

[edit: As a side note, why on earth would this affect the graphic card industries? The substantial math involved could likely be converted int matrix multiplications, and we already know graphics cards are stellar at that ]

Another thing I wonder is, if their "search" system, what kind of indexing is required? How long does it take, and can you re-index on the fly? Their demos have a conspicuous lack of any kind of movement at all, much less dynamic geometry.

And what about shading? Shading typically require surface normals, something that's not readily available from a mess of points in 3d.