Guys, have you heard that Notch developed some technology where he can store an entire, unlimited-sized world in a single short string?!

There's a lot that can be done in cool and interesting ways and is worth exploring, but everything has a downside. What's really really disappointing about this guy is that he ignores the downsides, even when he's supposedly addressing concerns other people raised.

Off the top of my head, here's things that made me go "does this guy know what he's talking about?"
-Misinterpretting Notch's post as saying "This is super easy". The actual words Notch used were "It’s a very pretty and very impressive piece of technology."
-All that talk about just "pushing a button" and now the bitmap is resized for different platforms and that that's all they need to do (I really don't know what he was trying to say here). Clearly the hardest part about developing games for multiple platforms is resizing the graphics.
-His tesselation explanation. Was it just me or was he just describing parallax mapping? TBH, I don't know much about this
-"Level of distance" and the demo that 'proved' they weren't using it (though I do believe them that they're not, just that demo is totally non-conclusive)
-Him counting or estimating the number of polygons in games these days.
-Acting as if the 500K triangle mesh he scanned from the elephant is unfeasible for games and as if normal mapping it to reduce polygons would be particularly difficult
-Comparing triangles to "atoms" isn't fair in the first place. Just as fair would be to compare "atoms" to texels since atoms seem to have to do the work of texels as well as triangles.
-And the big one: claiming it's unlimited but then not saying what he means by that just insisting that things are "infinite" or something.

Also, they should try to find an interviewer who sounds more knowledgeable and unbiased next time.

-Misinterpretting Notch's post as saying "This is super easy". The actual words Notch used were "It’s a very pretty and very impressive piece of technology."

It’s a very pretty and very impressive piece of technology, but they’re carefully avoiding to mention any of the drawbacks, and they’re pretending like what they’re doing is something new and impressive. In reality, it’s been done several times before.[/quote]-Notch
The point made was that their exact technique hasn't been used yet. Whether that's true or not is up for speculation. They showed the videos that Notch showed and "compared" them to their system. I hate their explanation of Atomontage which arguably is trying to do something identical to UD.

-His tesselation explanation. Was it just me or was he just describing parallax mapping? TBH, I don't know much about this

Tesselation often uses a displacement map input. It takes a patch and generates more triangles as the camera gets closer. His explanation was right of the current usage. (Unigine uses tesselation in this way).

-Him counting or estimating the number of polygons in games these days.

20 polygons per meter? That's a pretty close estimation. Turn on wireframe on a game and you'll notice how triangulate things really are. Characters are usually the exception to this.

-Acting as if the 500K triangle mesh he scanned from the elephant is unfeasible for games and as if normal mapping it to reduce polygons would be particularly difficult

You need POM or QDM would really be needed to get the grooves right including self-shadowing. It's not as cheap as it sounds. I agree it would be nice to see the comparison between the two techniques when it's done.

-And the big one: claiming it's unlimited but then not saying what he means by that just insisting that things are "infinite" or something.

For all practical purposes I assume. I guess most people read into that too much. They gave numbers of how much data they're rendering in the demo to show how large that number really was. The infinite instancing does skew this number.

What do you guys make of his claim that "we're not using any rays"?

That part struck me. I don't understand whether he just meant "we are not raytracing", or whether he's really saying they aren't tracing a ray from the camera point into the scene to sample their geometry structure.

I think they're using "rays", whether or not they call it that in code.

I think we can interpret Bruce Dell's claims of "unlimited" and "infinite" to mean infinite interpolation. That is, they always draw one "atom" per pixel. If their data structure doesn't go that deep, they have some method for interpolation.

Calling that "unlimited detail" is obviously disingenuous.

He also might mean that rendering an object from a given distance isn't dependent upon how detailed that object is. That is, you could make an object infinitely more detailed (ignoring the spatial requirements), and it'll never dig deeper than level N, where level N is the level at which each atom maps to one pixel on the screen.

This last feature is cool. It's the 3D analogue to Carmack's MegaTexture tech that's in Id's latest engine. Watch this video by John Carmack. At 2:46 he says:
"In addition to allowing us to create huge amounts of detail on things..., it also has this additional benefit that any work that's done on the surfaces here is guaranteed to have zero impact on the performance, stability, resource utilization, any of these things."

What he's saying is that you can add an arbitrary (not infinite) amount of detail to any particular object, without bringing down performance in the rest of the world. This is awesome, and Bruce Dell should feel cool about having implemented this in 3D, but this is not the same as "unlimited detail". He is doing himself and his company a disservice by stretching the truth. The truth is that he's implemented something that John Carmack, having coined the term "Sparse Voxel Octree", would have put into his game if it was in any way practical for games. It is not in any way practical for games at the moment, and Bruce Dell doesn't seem to have made any novel contributions that make it practical for games.

If he just started saying "detail that's limited only by how much you can store on your harddrive" rather than "unlimited detail", people wouldn't be reaming him. That doesn't sound as catchy to investors though.

Can't the same scanning be done with polygon models? Or there aren't any free software that can reduce polygon counts arbitrarily by a mouseclick?

I guess it could, but you'd have to convert it and then check it to make sure it's optimized. Ideally this uses the same data that you get from the scan itself, so there's no need to look at the data after scanning it in.

I think a lot of people are reading way too far into his marketing speak and nitpicking him for it. What he said is no worse than anything any marketing rep/president would say about their company to the public when announcing a new product.

I guess it could, but you'd have to convert it and then check it to make sure it's optimized. Ideally this uses the same data that you get from the scan itself, so there's no need to look at the data after scanning it in.

I think a lot of people are reading way too far into his marketing speak and nitpicking him for it. What he said is no worse than anything any marketing rep/president would say about their company to the public when announcing a new product.

That's not true. In the video above, John Carmack is completely honest about the abilities of his technology. He could call it "unlimited detail" if he wanted to, but he doesn't. That's because he's a person with enough integrity to tell the truth.

The fact that you so easily give a pass to lies because they're made in order to market a product says a lot about you. You might have a future in business, your ethics are slimy enough for it.

Looking at this from a pure marketing perspective, Dell seems to have done wonders -- everyone is talking about his tech. But we don't know if he's made a critical mistake. If the public at large starts talking about his extreme exaggerations, who knows what his investors will do. I hope they sue him to get their funds back, personally. I'll stop there -- we don't know if he's committed actual fraud because we don't know what he told investors behind closed doors.

@way2lazy2care: Marketing has it's limits too. I haven't heard many marketing people claiming "100000 times better graphics" and feeling sorry for poor ATI/AMD and nVidia for pouring millions upon millions of dollars on the ugly triangles... Also, mathematics put a limit at the compression ratio when you do lossless compression (see information entropy). Replicating the same elephant and tree 1000 times does not increase the entropy much. If you want to replicate a real (not procedurally generated and with instancing all over the place) square kilometer island at milimeter detail, however, you are hopelessly screwed no matter your compresion techlonogy.