it may (arguably) be more efficient to represent certain surfaces that way, but then it becomes unclear how to use standard techniques such as coloring, displacement mapping or normal mapping, on top of this - you can of course represent the surface detail achieved by these techniques with these "atoms" directly, but then the atom count explodes, and is likely far less efficient of a representation, not more.

N.B. that if textures can be replaced by creating one atom per pixel in the texture, then the memory requirements of both approaches are going to be similar - you're storing the same data in the end.

In regards to both of these statements, wouldn't the conversion rate of 64 atoms per cubic millimeter take care of that? The atom count would be a controlled conversion, as well as the rate at which color data was distributed.

Until you guys said these things, I never really fully understood what he was talking about in reference to those numbers. It never dawned on me that he *could* have meant textured surfaces and might have figured out a way to represent color data from "converted textured assets".

Also, while doing more research about Point Cloud once you guys responded, I came across PhotoSynth. Microsoft made a product where you actually do the opposite. It converts high res pictures, into Point Cloud Models. The results are actually quite staggering. I don't know the conversion rate for PhotoSynth, but it seems like a technique similar to that would be ideal for the Unlimited Engine.

I mean, everybody thinks it is a Sparse Octree with Raycasting[/quote]
Wait. Have you even read the topic? Only some (but very popular, you know who ) people have spread such an assumption.

One thing I would love to see in their next demo is a perfect quad around 1km in size tilted on every axis while keeping the spatial resolution.
If memory/disk consumption of this object is still 8% of it's polygonal counterpart I'm impressed.

I'm pretty sure that he also said their engine didn't have LoD.
No LoD on geometry or surface color/normal information is a sure way to get aliasing hell.
We prefilter our textures for a reason and would prefilter geometry if it would allow it. (like voxels do..)

try thinking more outside the box guys, unlimited detail isn't something that Bruce Dell found in some PDF file on rendering unlimited detail. He invented it, basically going against all other current techniques for rendering point data;

My gist of all this, is that the entire world(not just individual models and objects in the world), are sliced into 2D layers, and converged into cartesian coordinates; these coordinates are then during run-time almost magically reverse transformed to their proper screen-space coordinates after already being sorted through some unknown function;

Don't like that approach? We'll octree's have not been able to yeild those results in real-time either; So, lets try and take down the number of cycles, and complicated maths and leave it more simple, that's the only way he could process that much information in such a small amount of time. Accept it and move towards that; Computational Theory;

I'd also say that ray-tracing is really not the answer here as he states Thinking outside the box might be an example of this based on the cartesian idea, that is the screen-space may not be nothing more then some normals right, and just like when righting a script to do reflection, and refraction, you're no more moving a few pixels in the direction of that normal. So lets transform our cartesian coordinates with some dot product to our screen-space normal; what might happen then? Magical reverse transformation of the exact "atom" we need for that point on the screen. Without a lot of cycles; Or math.

This guy's been developing this thing for a long time, and deserves more respect for not having stuck to standards, and simply accepting the PDF's or Tutorials they find on GameDev as their ultimatum.

He went around and beyond, I say you stop fighting it, and embrace it; Just because he hasn't decided to populate it yet, does not mean that it isn't there. Give him time to perfect it, and make some affiliations with physics companies, who can then compute on the GPU while all graphics processing is being done on the CPU. This type of co-proccessing is what is going to make next-gen games next-gen; Be patient;

To my above post which I cannot edit, I ment to say convert the 2D layers to radial, oh geeze I've been confusing those two a lot lately;

As long as he doesn't tell anyone how its done, its utterly useless for anyone.

Skeptical people does not believe because someone comes along telling they have done something. They want you to show it and will immediately ask "how?".

If you claim something extraordinary, you should expect a barrage of tough questions.

And if you answer those questions with snake oil claims that it will solve all your problems and put silly words like "unlimited" into it, then you can expect to not be taken very seriously.