Maxx Monde

Check it out - although they say some of the graphics in the movie are not rendered on-the-fly, and may be from the artists portfolio, this has got to be the most impressive virtual world demo reel I've ever seen.

If this goes live soon, just watch SL empty out. Seriously.

Link:

LivePlace To Launch Photo-Realistic Virtual World Rendered In The Cloud

Off the top of my head - depth of field effects, global illumination, high-density avatar meshes, animations, shader-like rendering.....

Holy crap, people!

Edit: I've archived the video in case it gets pulled. (I guess they didn't want it getting out too early?) Apparently it already has been on the official site.

Re-Edit: Some people have expressed that it may be a rigged demo. Beats me, but hey -- it sure looks damn nice.

Macphisto Angelus

A new Olympic type LL competition was just announced. Synchronized butt puckering.

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Maxx Monde

Sigh....it seems that this may all be a total sham.

LivePlace To Launch Photo-Realistic Virtual World Rendered In The Cloud

However, I'll just keep an optimistic eye on it, just in case.

Move along, but love the pretty pics!

Wildefire Walcott

It looks damned amazing. Sounds like the content creation is very limited. (You can apply textures to surfaces and have media streams. Period.) But wow does it look purdy.

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Joshua Nightshade

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Shiva Shiskabob

real or fake, it's goddamn awesome. can't wait t'see what'll come of it.

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Panic! Paaaanic!

Is Himushet Anatra inworld. Minus th'pickles.

Lordfly Digeridoo

I'll tell you right now to save you the suspense:

10 million dollars in VC funding gone, the "owners" of this "company" disappearing from public radar with the money.

If you have to steal video from the internet to pitch your idea to investors? You fail.

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Shiva Shiskabob

lol, i want t'belieeeeve.

i will admit there's alot of this that sounds sketchy.

Psyke Phaeton

The avatars they are working on.

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Psyke Phaeton

I don't want my virtual fantasy worlds to be an exact duplication of real life. Then there is no point to escape to them.

Chalice Yao

There's a big problem with the whole cloud rendering approach, really.

Take 20-40 people. Yanno, the usual, avarage bunch hanging at a club, an event, a sandbox, whatever.

Now, take the server the place is running on. Has to maintain connections, transfer data back and forth nonstop, simulate physics...

And now imagine that server also having to render 40 3d environments at once in realtime and transfer that image data in realtime to the clients.


Yeah, that.

Psyke Phaeton

It does seem there is to little bandwidth and computing power. I wonder tho in the future your quad core CPU plus dual core video card might actually be part of the cloud and you might be computing 2 or 3 other peoples information. Not the direct rendering but perhaps enough to make slow computers cope better.

mcgeeb Gupte

Internet is too slow for that type of thing. It's stuff of dreams for now I think.

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Aodhan McDunnough

When the number of users grows then the cloud might be brought to its knees.

But as for streaming, a little bit of tech might arrive in time to help. I'm talking about optical routing which will eliminate some or all routing electronics in some areas to vastly (as in about 1000x) increase throughput at the hub.

Hypatia Callisto

smirks. I sat down and did some research on this, and I hate to inform ya... it's real.

I'll tell you right now to worry you a little bit

Brad Greenspan is one of the principles of the project. He can't "hide" very well - considering he's the original founder of Myspace. The media is pretty well acquainted with the guy (given he's been griefing Rupert Murdoch in the courts, good for him), and he's not exactly poor.

OTOY is a real engine and has been used for professional cinematic rendering for a while. The "lifted" video is artwork done by employees of OTOY and JulesWorld, and rendered in that engine.

The "cloud" is AMD's donation - a showpiece for their newest ATi HD 4000 series processors. Naw, they know nothing about graphics. Nuuh.

But hey, why should I expect facts from a guy who complains about people who can make sculpties ruining his business. I'll be happy to migrate to an OTOY world provided it gives me what I need.

I do see there are technical problems to overcome... but it is not a fake.

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"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.

Hypatia Callisto

Cinema 2.0: The Next Chapter in the Ultimate Visual Experienceâ„¢ Story




oh and... a mix of LightStage and Image-Metrics - yes, Image-Metrics is ALSO real -


and yes, Jules Urbach is a real person and OTOY is a real product, all real enough for OTOY's work to feature on the AMD site itself. The Optimus Prime stuff - well, that is done by Juan Jose Palomo, an employee of the same firm who also has his personal site 3d Blasphemy. But it is rendered in the engine. It's not exactly difficult to rerender your own artwork I do it myself - rerendered a lot of my gems I had originally set up for Carrara, in Modo. OBJ and 3ds files are renderable in multiple packages

This has me kinda excited... I'm curious if they can get over the hurdles. They certainly have more clout for me than a bunch of former "SL Bankers" playing with OpenSim. I realise why they are doing it this way - they want it to be usable on small devices, such as the Eee and iPhones.

Toritoys Tigerpaw

OTOY is really real, Liveplace maybe not so not really real. Here's some fun gossip.

Lordfly Digeridoo

I thought this thread was about LivePlace, not a professional cinematic non-realtime renderer.



Don't worry, it won't.

It's not a fake in the same sense that Maya is not a fake.

It's not a virtual world, then, it's just a rendering farm, in "near-real-time". Good for them.

LivePlace is still bullshit. Thanks for playing Snarkalark, though! The sculpties comment was especially delicious.

MadamG Zagato

Looks like something out of that movie Cloverfield or I am Legend. It has a very eerie vibe...the video does anyway. I kept anticipating a Darkseeker or a monster popping up in the screen. :scared:

Hypatia Callisto

It's the same thing. Read the white paper on OTOY. Liveplace is just ONE project, and it is a project of Brad Greenspan's. (ever heard of MySpace... maybe not. He founded it.)

Liveplace is just an application of the OTOY technology, which has been under development for several years, and lately has taken a quantum leap with AMD backing.

Hey, I know its *hard* to figure out who AMD is. I know... I hear they just make all those ATi graphic cards. Never heard of em. No. Just some bullshit Silicon Valley company.

Surre.

It's been used as that, yes. But, I realised years ago when FPrime came out some years ago, that this was going to happen. Realtime raytracing. Intel has already successfully demoed it themselves.


Modo already does near realtime rendering, raytraced, as does Lightwave. On *older* generation equipment. I should know, I preview my renders that way.

We'll see. AMD is fully behind OTOY, so... I'm not ready to call AMD "bullshit" yet. But hey, your show of faith in LL's server model is to be commended! Me, I've lost that faith.

I'll wait and see what is bullshit and what is not. If it turns out *not* to be BS, I will be there, and you can haz ur empty SL n all ur primz all 2 urself. Won't be the first time I left a virtual world for one that delivered more.

I know that Brad Greenspan is real http://www.bradgreenspan.com/
I know Jules Urbach is real. otoy.com
I know Paul Debevec is real. Paul Debevec Home Page
I know that AMD is real. http://www.amd.com/us/fusion/Pages/otoy.aspx

I just happen to follow a lot of silly Siggraph things, so when I saw the familiar names crop up, I knew I had better look harder.

If they have solved the compression problems as they say...

Well... You read what their goals are.

http://www.otoy.com/site/otoy_white_paper.pdf

Hypatia Callisto

Some of that video is based on the work for Transformers. Most of it is older assets.

The Truth Behind Liveplace’s Photo-Realistic 3D World And OTOY’s Rendering Engine

Read also the following blog:

Ray Tracey's blog: Otoy, Transformers and Ray Tracing

Not really surprising. Industrial Light and Magic (nope, never heard of George Lucas, either, some bullshit guy with some bullshit Star Wars movies, yeh, right!) gave them the right to use their models.

If the white paper is correct and this is a kind of crossplatform OS for virtual worlds - the real possibility is that nearly anyone could develop their own world. Doesn't have to look like the one pictured. I don't know yet if they will pull it off. But folks would be foolhardy to not pay attention to it, IMO.

The Ruby video of AMD, you'll see virtually the same city set.


LL needs some competition, so I wish these folks "good luck". I hope they pull it off.

Hypatia Callisto

god, writing about George Lucas gave me a serious case of Habitat dejavu.

The Lessons of Lucasfilm's Habitat

Hypatia Callisto

Yeah, that thought has occurred to me. I'm very curious what happens with OTOY.

OTOY is the one to watch for, IMO. At least I will be. I know enough of the work from Jules Urbach and Paul Debevec to know better. Heck, there's not a single day I work in my 3d apps that I dont work with some form of technology that Debevec pioneered.

Compulsion

the main problems with it I see are
1. the huge amount of bandwidth needed to stream any kind of images at a useable resolution, most people just don't have that kind of download power and would thus make it a very niche market product.
2. the intense amount of server side work rendering the output compared to just streaming positional data to a client, sure it's a fun idea thinking about 20 or so people connecting and getting real time renders but operating enough server power to render 50,000 connections? forget it, it's just not a cost effective method and that is what will always be at the root of any technological advances move from concept to production.

Hypatia Callisto

It's not entirely server based. It's a mix of server and peer to peer. It's taking more of a Bittorrent approach to the problem.

Lots of clients are also crunching, and it's using a voxel rendering with higher levels of compression. It's a different graphics technology from SL.

SL is geometry based and it all comes down as polygons to your graphics card to render locally. No polygons getting downloaded by OTOY at all.

Can't really compare them.

It's real, it does work as a distributed realtime renderer. What we don't know yet is if it will scale to a massively shared environment.

We already know SL doesn't do this very well either A single sim can only support a limited amount of avatars, it doesn't scale massively at all.

I think it's safer to say we "don't know" if OTOY is able to scale massively. People who state they know, are in fact telling fibs. None of us know. But OTOY does show some promise, and I think the smart thing is to wait and see, and jump on any betatesting that may end up occuring.