Hellbinder
"People at [H] no longer have the ability to think
- Joined
- Apr 30, 2003
- Messages
- 50
Forgive me if someone has all ready hammered on this point. Mr. Dell said laser scanning was used to produce the objects shown in the demo. The raw data for each point would be as follows:
-3 floats for position (x,y,z) @ 4 bytes each
-4 bytes for color (R,G,B,A)
That gives a total of 16 bytes per point in the point cloud. If an object contains 500 million data points (as I believe is the figure he gave for the rather lovely elephant in his demo), then the maximum amount of storage space necessary for the raw data would be:
16 bytes * 5.0E8 / (1024 byte/kilobyte * 1024 kilobyte/megabyte * 1024 megabyte/gigabyte) = 7.5 gigabytes
That's for one object. Compression could knock the size down a bit, the amount depending upon the compression technique used. Regardless, it will be a non-trivial amount of data. A scene with any degree of complexity at that detail level would require several Blue-ray's worth of data.
I don't see this being feasible until we have significantly increased storage capacity. Perhaps we'll see this once holographic discs with Terabyte capacity start arriving on scene, and we're at least 5 years to a decade from large-scale commercialization of that technology. I don't take issue with the fundamental technology being showcased, but I do take issue with its specific implementation, its current practicality, the lack of technical details and the rather fantastical claims being made.
One day this will surpass polygonal rendering, but today is not that day.
The major problem you all have is that you are approaching what they are doing from your own view point and you make no attempt to think outside of your own view point. You have all already been shown a live working engine demo with at least 150 unique objects in it where each one is made up of anywhere between millions to trillions of pollygons and it all fit on one DVD and ran on a latop (single core, in software) at 15 FPS. which is impossible according to what most of you are already assuming yet it has been done. Which should tell you there is a lot more to what they are doing than a simple search algorithm.
This is similar to my recent play through of the game limbo. Many times a puzzle seemed impossible and as frustration mounted i would even say "This is impossible" out loud to nobody... but then all of a sudden a light would go on and i would see the puzzle completely diffferently and what was impossible was laughably easy. why? because i approached the problem from a completely different point of view and method. It was indeed "impossible" the way i was trying to force it to be done, but it was as easy as pie once i changed my point of view.
They are clearly coming up with completely new ways of thinking about several areas at once, not just one, and applying them together.
if you are the only one working on a radically new way of doing something and everyone else is stuck in a rut. the LAST thing you would want to do is go to some tech show with white papers and help everyone else with more money than you take your ideas. even in patenty form it would be dangerous. I am sure there are patents on the way, and papers on the way, but not until they are ready and for good reason.
It blows my mind how most of you are already looking at something that is "impossible" according to you, yet real and verified with a hands on live test and still you insist its a scam... that is totally utterly foolish.
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