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Using point-cloud construction rather than polygons, the software promises digital environments that are 100,000 times more detailed than the current state of the art

Now Dell is back with a company called Euclideon and a new video describing the progress he’s made on his software over the last year. And again, it looks pretty impressive if completely unverifiable.

The idea, on its face, doesn’t sound impossible. Basically, Unlimited Detail eschews the usual polygon shape construction for a point-cloud construction for his virtual environments. But an infinite number of 3-D atoms would require an infinite amount of computing power to render. Even a small number of detailed point-cloud objects would require tons of computational wherewithal.

Unlimited Detail circumvents the computing power problem, Dell says, by acting like a search engine that figures out, in real time, which points need to be rendered to create a certain view from a certain perspective. So only the “atoms” that are being viewed in a given frame from a certain perspective are actually rendered at any given time. The rest go un-rendered in the background. Less rendering means less computing power consumed.

In the video below, Dell describes in perfect exhilarated-Aussie just how awesome this technology could make our video game worlds and other virtual environments. Unlimited Detail can now pack one million atoms into a single virtual cubic inch, allowing for unprecedented detail. And it could make such environments less virtual, allowing game designers to “scan” in objects from the real world and present them as they look naturally, making video game worlds a kind of hybrid reality with some parts real and some parts engineered by artists.

This is all assuming that Unlimited Detail really works. Dell and company are still keeping a lot of secrets and have said they’ll probably go quiet again after this one-year progress report so they can finish up their work. So, once again, you’ll have to judge for yourself.

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]