LiveSpace- Real time cloud rendered photo-realistic city

[Jetsetlemming]

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2008/08 ... bbish-pcs/

It's like woah. The info is sketchy and the website was taken down, leaving nothing but a contact email, after people found it, but that video was saved and reposted, and if it's real it's goddamn amazing, and kinda scary.

Here's the video: http://blip.tv/file/1165390/

[Defrag]

Apparently a similar/the same clip was on some artist's portfolio page, so I'm sceptical as to whether this is realtime. Furthermore, I'm not really banking on their business model. They need powerful hardware to make this thing a reality. Imagine having a game of Half-life, but in addition to the servers required to just run the main game logic, each client connected has to have hardware set aside to actually render its view of the world. It sounds extremely expensive. While it's an interesting model for crap PC users, imagine you've bought a powerful PC that could do much of the work itself; are you going to be happy about having to pay more just so that they can duplicate effort that could be palmed off to your own PC?

Moreover, since all of the rendering is done on the server, how on earth is it going to support interactive games and applications? Ever play quake in the pre-quakeworld days when you had to wait for your keystrokes to be acknowledged by the server before your client would update your position? It was horrible. Unless you were on a LAN, it was basically unplayable. You can skip around network problems when you have a predictive game client code, but if you're rendering the actual IMAGE on the server and the client is a dumb display, then I don't think they can predict much at all, if anything. For latency of anything over tens of milliseconds, it'll probably be horrible for anything that we would consider to be an interactive game. This is going to be a serious constraint in terms of what they can actually do with the technology and the sorts of games they can support. On rails and social sorts of things are doable, but things like driving games or first person shooters? I really doubt it.

Finally, imagine the bandwidth this will take. Even using optimised image difference algorithms & some sort of compression, I'm betting it's going to take serious bandwidth to do, especially at normal computer resolutions, let alone the upper HD resolutions.

It looks really cool, but unless they have amazing solutions to all of these problems, I can't see how it can work. There are a lot of very smart people out there, so I'm not saying it's impossible, merely ... very, very difficult. I will look on with interest!

[D3ads]

If they manage to pull this off, I'll be extremely impressed, what I'm seeing so far is amazing in itself.

[FrieChamp]

As Defrag elaborated on this before me - it sounds too good to be true. I remain highly skeptical.

[DelaZ]

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

but

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/07/09/ot ... echnology/

[Algor]

Viral marketing.

[Thrik]

What a hilarious load of shit. The TechCrunch article is hilarious.

Surprising, though. TechCrunch is an absolutely huge site and generally reputable.

[Warby]

there is some scenes in the video that looks super awesome and others that look like complete shit and he talks in the same enthusiastic way about both of them. lol i bet the voice over and the video footage was recorded at two different places and 2 different times he probably just read his lines fomr some piece of paper and didnt even see the video while doing so