LivePlace To Launch Photo-Realistic Virtual World Rendered In The Cloud | Hacker News Reader

LivePlace To Launch Photo-Realistic Virtual World Rendered In The Cloud

techcrunch.com

10 pointsentelarust7 comments

The video that is being shown is a rip off of a movie that is actually fairly famous in 3D graphics circles. It has been around for years, at least 3 by my count. This demo was made almost certainly without the author's permission. Further, it demos only video editing skills, as the actual rendering was done years ago. It is interesting that they are leading the viewer of the video to believe that this is a world in the cloud that is being rendered real time. It seems a little less than honest to me.

By the way, the video can be found at:

    http://3dblasphemy.com/personal/CITY.html

For those who are interested, the 'tell' is that the camera angles are exactly the same as those in the 3D Blasphemy video. Additionally, the apartment that is rendered a few minutes into the video is rasterized and not raytraced, like the city is.

I am curious, now, to see OTOY in action. I know I am starting to smell a paper tiger, or perhaps vapor ware.

Certainly my first impression was Buzzword Bingo - we win!

From their "about" paper... a lot of these are pretty incredible. I don't know what kind of a team they have but many games companies would have hard time claiming even half of these innovations.

OTOY 1.0 features:

* super fast software rendering (surpassing many DX7 and DX8 cards at 640x480) with 100% support across all types of systems (see http://www.otoy.com/city/)

* simple to use scripting language - very easy migration from Flash, Director or C++

* average 6-8 week development time line for games

* scene graph and collision system optimized for very large worlds - ranging from infinite terrain to indoor scenes

* proprietary compression for Audio (2x better than MP3), lossy image (5x better than JPG, 1.5x better than JPEG200), lossless image (2x better than PNG) and lossless data and text (25% better than ZIP)

* voxel space rendering for cinematic scenes

* imaging support in software (hand optimized ASM code for x86 on Intel Macs and PCs): includes all Photoshop and Director blend modes, real time full screen dilation, glows, blur, toon shading, convolutions, flood fills, color keying, CMYK/HSV/RGB conversion, vector drawing, noise effects, flare generation.

* Real time switching between full screen, windowed, and embedded

I'm going to guess that if they even have most of these features, they've probably just stolen existing technology and called it their own. Much like most "high performance proprietary video compression methods" these days are just ripoffs of H.264 (see SVQ3 and RV30/RV40), I would not at all be surprised if even their non-vaporware tech is copied.

1.5x better image compression than JPEG-2000 is rather easy; H.264 can pull that off handily with intra compression. 2x better than MP3? They're probably using HE-AACv2. 2x better than PNG isn't difficult either; lossless wavelet or just something FFV1-style should be sufficient. 25% better than zip? LZMA.

Of course, eventually people will realize that almost all this stuff is patented up the wazoo...

Another thing I found rather amusing was "5x better than JPEG, 1.5x better than JPEG-2000"; implying that somehow JPEG-2000 was over three times better than JPEG...

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/51/JPEG_JFIF...

I call bullshit.

Raytracing an entire city with quality exceeding that of any video card on the market -- and do it in the cloud in real time?

Mind-blowing and seductive, but impossible with today's technology.

I wonder how reponsive this really is. A fair number of people get nauseous when there is a ~250ms lag between their command to move (i.e. moving the mouse to look up) and their view actually moving. A lot more would find it irritating, at the very least.

That being said, I can't wait to try it out myself.

So basically the whole thing is a scam?

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