The following video was picked up at TechCrunch and has generated as much mystery as awe.
The video was lifted from a company called LivePlace which is nothing more than a text placeholder site promising a “virtually live” experience. And judging by the video, it may well be.
What’s astonishing about the video is the claim that it renders in real time and runs on OTOY, a 3D graphics engine that renders using “cloud computing” (otherwise known as really fancy servers). The promise of OTOY is that not only can 3D spaces be realistically rendered, in real time, but that they can be delivered to ANY Internet-enabled device: your iPhone, say, or browser.
What’s at question here, however, isn’t that the technology is powerful and almost eerily realistic for a virtual world, but whether LivePlace is, well, for real.
The domain itself is registered to Brad Greenspan, one of the founders of mySpace – so it’s not too far fetched to imagine that he’s funding a virtual world initiative as real as, well, the real one. What’s unclear is how much of the above video is from test renders of that platform, how much from a 3D artist, and exactly what it all means.
The discussion at TechCrunch gives a pretty good idea of the debate, but regardless this is a pretty slick piece of video and hints at the promise of real-time Web-enabled 3D environments.
I talked it over with some 3D pro’s and the promises made in the narrative are 99% certainly impossible. What you are looking at, can only be done real time by raytracing, a highly experimental technique currently in development by IBM and Intel for off-line environments.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKqZKXwop5E
The ‘unlimited light bounce’ would create many, many megabites (and depending on the environment even gigabites) of data and the cloudcomputing is a nice story, but doesn’t make up for the massive amounts of data that still need to go back and forth through internet connections.
also notice the quality of the OTOY visuals – looks like any standard graphics engine, certainly not the kind of visualization as displayed in the movie.
And as techcrunch comments note, the first minutes have been stolen from a portfolio movie CITY – it has been made 4 years ago and definitely isn’t ‘real time’.
Still its nice to see what could happen probably within the next 5 to 6 years – but the best indication of high end virtual worlds today is still HOME and Blue Mars
PS my best guess is it was the ‘pitch video’ to win over major investors such as Greenspan to look into developing a high end virtual world. It would account for the narrative making the promises ‘as yet to be developed’ – ‘user generated content’ with a shot that’s obviously not user generated content at all (its obviously part of the model in style and composition) and the use of material they didn’t develop.
Totally agree Digado – just sooo tantalizing.
I’ve been keeping an eye on OTOY though, at the very least it holds promise, especially if their version 2 promises hold true.
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