Dell explains how all this works in fairly rich detail in the video below, but to summarize, Unlimited Detail sheds the usual polygon construction of virtual worlds in favor of a kind of point-cloud construction. Imagine the 3-D equivalent of pixels (like “little 3-D atoms” as Dell says), making up the entire virtual world from little points of color, much as the real world is constructed of tiny building blocks.

This kind of construction isn’t completely new, but it is limited by the fact that each point requires a little bit of processing power. Rendering huge 3-D worlds like the ones in modern video games would require trillions of points, and rendering that many points per frame is impossible by modern computing standards; the real time demands of games make the idea completely unfeasible.

Dell’s software, he claims, gets away with this by acting as a search engine rather than a graphics engine. Build a world out of points, and Unlimited Detail’s software searches, in real time, for only the points in the cloud needed to render a view from a certain perspective. Detailed algorithms search through point-cloud data to find the right “atoms” to build only the scene you need at that moment, which equates roughly to one point for every pixel on the screen. Suddenly, you don’t need to process billions or trillions of points anymore; the underlying points go unprocessed and only the visible ones are rendered.

At least, so says Bruce Dell. Very few people have seen the software in action (he's still collecting his IP protections), and according to Wired companies like Nvidia are skeptical that his concept will work. You can hear it from Dell below and decide for yourself, but if he can deliver on what he promises in this video, gaming will never be the same.

[Wired Gadget Lab]

The game pairs up two human players, one playing the role of a human astronaut, the other a robot. The team must then collect the proper tools and supplies from around their space station environment to fix their faulty generator; one player can't beat the clock on his or her own, so the two must interact to complete all the given tasks in the allotted time.

By studying that human teamwork and social interaction, the group hopes to better hone the autonomous behaviors of its robot Nexi, a humanoid 'bot that MIT is developing to explore better means of social learning and human-robot interaction. The team will then recreate the Mars Escape game environment and display what Nexi has learned from it at the Boston Museum of Science.

Check out the game here. As long as you're playing games at work, you might as well be aiding the pursuit of better robotic intelligence. Just be careful not to overdo it; the more you play, the closer you get to losing your job, and the closer Nexi gets to replacing you.

[MIT Personal Robotics Group via Hizook]

There are two things that are universally true about Tetris: that Russian-style theme music is impossible to get out of your head, and everybody loves Tetris. Which is why we had to take a moment to highlight the Tetris-Bot, a simple PC gaming robot patched together from a digital evaluation module (EVM), a web cam and a Lego Mindstorms robot kit.

The cam is positioned in front of the screen, where it gathers visual data that it feeds to the EVM. The EVM -- the brains of the operation -- puts those data inputs through a series of algorithms, providing an output command to the Mindstorm assembly positioned over the keyboard. It's not perfect, but who's ever played a perfect game of Tetris?

As you check out Tetris-Bot in action below, don't fail to note that the toys of today are so sophisticated that they're playing with the futuristic toys of yesteryear.

[YouTube]