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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.

via HARDOCP – Euclideon & Unlimited Detail – Bruce Dell Interview – Euclideon & Unlimited Detail – Bruce Dell Interview.

Graphics, Science euclideon, interview

It was about a year ago when we first brought you the news of “Euclideon Geometry’s Unlimited Detail Real-time Rendering engine all based on Voxel-rendering.  Haven’t heard much from then but now they’re back with another video showcasing their engine and some information.

Hi everyone. We’ve been working very hard and we hope you like what we’ve made. This is just our 1 year report, after which we will probably go quiet again while we finish our work. This demo only shows what was ready at the time, we have a lot of really good stuff here but we are keeping it secret for now. (Yes grumpy forum people, we do have animation, but you’ll just have to be patient.)

I wouldn’t have paid much attention to it, until I saw Notch (Creator of MineCraft) discussing it.  He saw the same thing I originally noticed:

In the video, you can make up loads of repeated structured, all roughly the same size. Sparse voxel octrees work great for this, as you don’t need to have unique data in each leaf node, but can reference the same data repeatedly (at fixed intervals) with great speed and memory efficiency. This explains how they can have that much data, but it also shows one of the biggest weaknesses of their engine.

The technology is interesting yes, but I still think there is a lot of smoke-and-mirrors in their presentation.  They’re heavily constrained by memory limits so the bulk of their demonstrations rely on heavily tiled space making it nothing but referencing to a single memory block.  Trying to do this for anything unique is going to hit the memory wall really quick, as mentioned in this other post by Notch:

* One byte per voxel is way lower than the raw data you’d need. In reality, you’d probably want to track at least 24 bits of color and eight bits of normal vector data per voxel. That’s four times as much data. It’s quite possible you’d want to track even more data.
* If the data compresses down to 1%, it would still be 1 700 three-terrabyte hard drives of data at one byte of raw data per voxel.

All that said, watch the video and decide for yourself.  Fact, or Fiction?

‪Unlimited Detail Real-Time Rendering Technology Preview 2011 [HD]‬‏ – YouTube.

Science algorithm, euclideon, voxel