What would be a wild use for the server side rendering technology would be a massive scale upgrade to Google Earth or a similar mapping service. Start with a topographical upgrade, then roads, cities, towns,…. Eventually a highly detailed 3d map of Earth, that you can fly/drive/walk through.

“So, say, for a online world with 200,000 people working at any time, you’d need a server stack of 200,000 computers.”

I don’t quite agree with that. If it is uses ray trace rendering like it says it does in the video and every light source is traced then surely you can have lots of different perspectives captured from the same rendered instance, if that makes sense? It would take a hell of a lot of processing yeah but not the equivalent flops of 200,000 computers. Of course having multicore parallel processors will be the answer to all of this, I think when I read last some boffin at MIT are up to 64 cores on a single die.

I am of course, like your self admitted no expert in this field and don’t pretend to be. Very interesting though!

Sure hope you can embed something a bit more exciting than paint though…are there any links to a development site or similar?

Urgh.

It’s as if no one has heard of the concept of distributed computing before.

3min 20 sec into the video you see Optimus Prime – basically copied straight from the same guy who did the opening sequence.

Now 3:54 into the video a straight rip of more artwork by the same artist!

Now go take a look at the Otoy screenshots. I don’t belive this video has anything to do with Otoy. The published screenshots on their actual website are vastly inferior to those in this video.

If you want to look at the origonal artist’s own website you can find it here. I’m sure there are more examples I have missed.

“By the time technology has evolved enough to make this idea truly feasible, your common-or-garden rubbish PC will have sufficient processing power to render ultra-realistic worlds anyway, thus eliminating its primary advantage.

Hmm.”

You may have hit the nail on the head there Monkfish. This is prototyping/10 year plan stuff.

However, I have to admit, I only have experience with off-line rendering, so I can only judge from that. All kinds of wizardry goes in to real time rendering so who knows. But even with that admittance this still has hhhmmmmm stamped all over it for me.

I was going to go on a big rant on why this won’t work but there’s no point really. If it does work somehow within my life span (and before hybrid quantum/bio computers and hyperspace communications or whatnot), kudos to them.

Also: “In other words, there needs to the the equivalent rendering power to create the image for each person on a server.” – not really. One of the commenters had it right – once you have the physical/meta aspects of the world computed and the geometry all ready for the pipeline, you can take snapshots of the world from multiple viewpoints without much overhead; that’s actually the one thing that makes it even remotely possible. And since it runs on a (presumably) custom-built special-purpose machine, the comparison with graphic cards isn’t correct; there is some level of resemblance (at least with traditional rendering without raytracing), but saying that you need an 8800 for every client is just wrong.

And much more compression should be possible with this than with live video, since you have a complete model of the geometry of the world which you can use to decide how to compress things. Maybe there’s a simplified model running on the client as well.

ohh and
800×600 at 24fps = 263,7 Mbit – XVID 2700 Kbit – H.264 270Kbit
isn’t better than what local processing can do now it’s worse, people don’t pay more or surrender some of the power they have for worse, the do it for significantly more or not at all