

LivePlace To Launch Photo-Realistic Virtual World Rendered In The Cloud - entelarust
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/08/11/liveplace-to-launch-photo-realistic-virtual-world-rendered-in-the-cloud/

======
bilbo0s
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.

~~~
ojbyrne
Certainly my first impression was Buzzword Bingo - we win!

------
nickb
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

~~~
DarkShikari
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...](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/51/JPEG_JFIF_and_2000_Comparison.png)

------
bprater
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.

------
prospero
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.

------
shafqat
So basically the whole thing is a scam?

