Your Euclideon Yearly Fix

Like every year or so, comet Euclideon comes close to us and we get to see what they have been working on. Here is a video they posted a couple of days ago:

As usual, the technology is brilliant and quite interesting. It is still similar to what Nvidia and Olick were able to show a long time ago, but nevertheless a significant feat of engineering. I am just having trouble reconciling the narrator's discourse with what we see on screen.

I was hoping they would tone down the hype in the future. They however named this video "The World's Most Realistic Graphics". I wonder which World they are talking about. In planet Earth, 2014, pretty much any AAA game looks better and runs faster than this.

I'm not sure why they would go and compare themselves to engines like UE4 when everybody knows UE4 will produce far better looking graphics. Same for CryENGINE and even Unity. It is not enough you say it looks better, it has to look better. Jedi tricks do not work over YouTube.

The "conspiracy of fools" aspect is also interesting. The true sign of genius is to see all fools conspiring against you. Somewhere in this video the narrator points that many experts around the web were very critical of the tech. These are the fools. That they got so many fools to speak against them must surely mean they are geniuses.

Well we know it does not work like that. Sometimes the fools just go against other fools. Being criticized does not make you right. Now in this video they claim they have proven all the fools wrong. That has yet to happen. The burden of proof is on them.

I had some secret hopes for this tech to be applied to games, but the tech gap is growing every year. Let's see what happens next year, when the comet approaches us again.

Euclideon Geoverse 2013

Euclideon is back. Here is their latest video:


It seems they put their tech to good use. Their island demo was very nice, and now this is one of the best point cloud visualization I have seen so far. Is it groundbreaking or revolutionary? No. There is plenty of this going around. But this is good stuff.

This announcement may be very disappointing to some people who may have taken their past claims literally. Two years ago they said they had made computer game graphics 100,000 better. They would show you screenshots from Crysis and explain how bad all this was compared to their new thing. Panties were thrown all over the internet.

The reality is today this still ranks below the latest iterations of CryEngine, Unreal Engine and id's Tech 5. It even ranks below previous versions of those engines. Actually I do not think you can make a game with this at all. If you want to have the texture density you have on screen in most games, you would need to store far more information than what they have in the demos shown here. It is a perfect match for the state of laser scanning, where you do not have much detail to begin with. They are not showing grains of dirt anymore, that is for sure.

The real improvement in the last two years? The hype levels are a lot lower.

Unlimited Detail

My baloney meter went off the chart last night while watching this:

It is actually a nice piece of software once you consider what it really is. My problem is what they claim it to be.

If you look closely at the video, they only have a few blocks of data they display in different positions. They claim this is to bypass artwork, that is just copy & paste. Well, it is not copy & paste. It is instancing. It is  what makes this demo possible in today's generation of hardware.

They can zoom-in to a grain of dirt, but they do not tell you it is the same grain of dirt over and over. If they had to show really unique "atoms", this demo would not be possible today. The challenge is data management. They chose the best compression possible, which is to not have information at all.

Something similar is done in this video by the Gigavoxel guys:

In this case you see some fractal volume coming out of the repetition of the same blocks, but it is essentially the same the Unlimited Detail guys have done. Impressive, yes, but no real applications for it at this stage.

Here is another example from NVIDIA research:

Also the classic Jon Olick's SVO demo:

And then you have the very promising Atomontage Engine:

None of these people claim they have revolutionized graphics, that they have made them 100,000 times better. Why? They know better. The problems to tackle are still too big, we are still generations of hardware away.

You see for many years we have known of this Prophesy. There is this One Engine that will come and replace polygons forever. And there is no question this engine will come, maybe in just a few years. Meanwhile, whoever claims to be this Messiah will get a lot of attention. As usual the Messiah scenario has only three possible solutions:

1. It is really the Messiah
2. It is crazy
3. It is just plain dishonest

I'm not sure about anything, but I have a very strong feeling about which one to pick.