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Join Date: Jun 2007
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Originally Posted by Compulsion  That makes no sense. the whole point of it is that they can stream an image far beyond the capabilities of the users machine directly to them and yet at the same time its rendered on several other users machines? if the sum total of the collective users processing power is less than the total needed to render the images what happens then? and considering the average home pc is far from the latest hardware that's no small problem. | Some people are like me and do 3d graphics development, and refresh our computers every several years. I also don't see the traditional gamer going away. I already do distributed rendering on several computers on a network. Irradiance caching can be saved as maps to be rendered by several computers on a network at once.
This stuff exists for 3d programs *now* ... the difference here is that it will be adapted to virtual worlds.
More from the white paper: Quote: How does the OTOY technology get installed on the end user’s machines?
If a user views OTOY content on a system without the OTOY runtime (i.e. it is a virgin machine), OTOY will then install itself almost instantly through a stub mechanism (usually between 30-100k ) that is downloaded just once (with no more than one click required by the user to install).
Users on thin machines (i.e. old cell phones), that cannot support the native client, would instead be routed to a virtual session of the application, hosted by an available node on the P2P network that scales the content for the thin device in real time.
On a system where the native OTOY client is installed, the runtime
renders the content seamlessly within the host application (as an overlay, palette, embedded frame, etc.). The user never has to quit an application, restart the machine, leave a web page, or do anything other than click ‘OK’. All further updates to the engine are handled transparently.
The OTOY stub manages all platform specific calls made by the runtime. All of the runtime above the stub layer is self-contained and portable to almost any hardware ‘as-is’. The OTOY stub is instantly (and transparently) installed from the URL (in web page, e-mail, document or Instant Message) that references OTOY content.
The stub can be distributed in various forms (web plug-in, exe, media codec, QuickTime plug-in on the Mac OSX, Netscape plug-in for Safari or FireFox, ActiveX control for IE/Outlook) and multiple stubs can reference the same runtime. There is also a versioning system built into the stub layer, as well as digital signature checks for all components that it loads.
How is it possible for OTOY content to work on cell phones and devices without the runtime?
Unlike Java, Flash or managed .NET, which, as of the time of this writing, depend on their runtime libraries being installed locally on end users’ machines for content to run, OTOY can actually use its network of existing runtime clients to remotely host a complex application ‘on the grid’ and retransmit the application window to extremely thin clients where the runtime does not exist at all.
The OTOY system scales and reformats the content on the remote nodes and rebuilds it in a format that the thin device can work with (usually an HTTP stream). The power to do this comes from the unused cycles in the P2P network of OTOY client machines where the runtime is installed. The layer of abstraction making this possible is not just a part of the playback mechanism, but also a core feature of the authoring tools and scripting language which packages all content and code in progressive layers suitable for this kind of scalability.
This means that the key portions of the content (i.e. the scripts and object boundaries) download first and render quickly on even the thinnest devices like a cell phone, while more powerful systems, like a new PC, can keep downloading larger and richer portions of the content (such as extra texture layers like normal maps, HDR data, higher resolution meshes etc.)
| It's in the white paper, like ragu 
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"To begin with," said the Cat, "a dog's not mad. You grant that?"
"I suppose so," said Alice.
"Well, then," the Cat went on, "you see, a dog growls when it's angry, and wags its tail when it's pleased. Now I growl when I'm pleased, and wag my tail when I'm angry. Therefore I'm mad."
"I call it purring, not growling," said Alice.
"Call it what you like," said the Cat. |