Unlimited Detail Technology

Unlimited Detail Homepage:
http://unlimiteddetailtechnology.com

Part 2 is here !
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THaam5...

Edit: Seeing as this video has gained a fair amount of interest, I'll post a quick description of how it works here... This description can be found on their site, via the link above.

How does it work?

If you have a background in the industry you know the above pictures are impossible. A computer cant have unlimited power and it cant process unlimited point cloud data because every time you process a point it must take up some processor time. But I assure you, it's real and it all works.

Unlimited Details method is very different to any 3D method that has been invented so far. The three current systems used in 3D graphics are Ray tracing polygons and point cloud/voxels, they all have strengths and weaknesses. Polygons runs fast but has poor geometry, Ray-trace and voxels have perfect geometry but run very slowly.

Unlimited Detail is a fourth system, which is more like a search algorithm than a 3D engine. It is best explained like this: if you had a word document and you went to the SEARCH tool and typed in a word like MONEY the search tool quickly searches for every place that word appeared in the document. Google and Yahoo are also search engines that go looking for things very quickly. Unlimited Detail is basically a point cloud search algorithm. We can build enormous worlds with huge numbers of points, then compress them down to be very small. The Unlimited Detail engine works out which direction the camera is facing and then searches the data to find only the points it needs to put on the screen it doesnt touch any unneeded points, all it wants is 1024*768 (if that is our resolution) points, one for each pixel of the screen. It has a few tricky things to work out, like: what objects are closest to the camera, what objects cover each other, how big should an object be as it gets further back. But all of this is done by a new sort of method that we call MASS CONNECTED PROCESSING. Mass connected processing is where we have a way of processing masses of data at the same time and then applying the small changes to each part at the end.

The result is a perfect pure bug free 3D engine that gives Unlimited Geometry running super fast, and it's all done in software.

• Category

  Gaming

[Dummy838]

I don't really understand this. What I can see in the footage is that there are few actual models in the picture, they just repeat the same few models over and over and over again. Does this mean that they can make an infinite number of copies of one model, but it only uses the resources of one? How the hell does that work?

[mapc777]

Actually, if you go to the Euclideon website you'll see that they've gone into non-gaming business because it's a hell of a lot more lucrative. :)

Also they probably want to have a bit of cash to be able to pay for lawsuits when other companies try to rip their tech off.

[Kernel Kev]

Sorry what exactly is "darter"?

[Kevin Stanislawski]

Or maybe no one wants to adopt a system that renders (no pun intended) the video card / pc upgrade battle cash cow obsolete. In fact--I'm nearly certain this is the sole reason we haven't seen this tech implemented anywhere.

[Sevenixzp]

His argument is so fundamentally flawed. The more detailed a 3D model (number of points/vertexes defining an object), the more computationally expensive it is to move or animate (or detect that is has moved), detect collisions and apply physics, and destruct (possible terrain destruction). Also, the term "unlimited detail" is utter bullshit. The only way that is possible is to have dynamic 3D generation, like fractal patterns or tessellation.

[Renan Obscura]

7:49 not following?! not believing!

[Willie D. Washington]

Seeing as this came out 3 years ago, I guess it's a lot harder to implement than they originally thought. The proof is in the pudding. Let us taste it, Quipster99!

[hombacom]

@ayporos Ehm how about dynamic features instead of everything being static?

[19ACE93]

Thank you for the response, that made a lot of sense :)

[ayporos]

But to come back to the prime calculation the most important caveat to this approach of theirs is when you realize that the prime-number algorithm stays relevant even if you have 100x stronger hardware.. that simply means you can run the algorithm 100x faster.. the 'UDT' approach is not future proof in that sense that you can never get detail beyond that stored in the original point data... While an improvement over our current limitation of polygon/texture count/detail it is still limited...