HardOCP got a huge scoop this week by interviewing Euclideon CEO Bruce Dell on some of the claims and allegations about their “Unlimited Detail” technology.
The Euclideon approach is one of creating more efficient processing and is not about throwing more power at old technologies. Bruce’s unique approach to 3D graphics has come about due to his isolation from the rest of the industry. He was not professionally educated in 3D graphics and all of his employees mentioned that they had to go through a steep learning curve to grasp the alien approach to building 3 dimensional world “Bruce Dell style.”
The interview itself is fairly long, running over 40 minutes. He maintains his claims of unlimited detail and shows some preliminary (very preliminary, from 7 years ago) animation support, and continues to claim they have “no memory limits” due to some revolutionary “compaction” algorithms, that he won’t go into details on.
I still think that his technology is the same technology used in many other point-cloud rendering algorithms, they’ve just tweaked it for more gamer-uses. They do discuss the allegations from Notch, mixing some praise and insults hand in hand. He shows earlier versions of the technology from his personal development (still full of lots of replication), and various stages of development.
They get a little more in-depth into the algorithm as well: Basically they’ve got a Point-cloud rendering algorithm joined with a screen-space optimized search algorithm, so that they can quickly search their space along a ray-tracking type path.
I still agree with Notch, and think their major limitation is memory & disk space. Until they release some numbers on their compression and storage I have to claim all their “unlimited” statements are blatantly false PR.
Now, one thing I think that Euclideon may have in their favor is upcoming Cloud Technologies. Their current scenes are plainly relying on heavily re-utilized blocks of data simply rotated and cloned around the scene. This is how they’re reducing their current storage requirements (combined with their data compression schemes).
Like Notch claims, maybe they need 1000 Terabyte hard drive to store their scenes, but if that can all be stored in a giant Google or OnLive storage cloud and accessed remotely then they have a chance to truly revolutionize graphics. I can imagine a setup of something like OnLive just shipping screen pixels back to users, accessing compute & storage remote, would be impressive.
