Axiom Holographics
6 HN mentions · mentioned in 6 months, 2015–2020
7:43 · 4.4M views · Aug 1, 2011
Euclideon's 2011 technology preview of Unlimited Detail, a rendering approach claiming unlimited geometric detail in real time via point-cloud style data. The company promised more to come while keeping most work secret.
HN mostly mentions it as the infamous voxel demo that generated hype and then faded, with some viewing it as snake oil.
6 comments from Hacker News
Just remembered this interesting provocative video from 2011 - this video As I understood right - to achieve something like unlimited detailed geometry we need to store objects in adaptive vector form which is very fast to render in current zoom level and will need a little bit of computation if zoom also changes a little. And what encoding form of models/geometry will be the fatest way for rendering? From 2d/ui engine perspective it's just a pixel cache and we only need to copy pixels to viewport. And there will be max zoom level where it makes no sense to cache pixels for bigger zoom level because of memory overhead and ability to render straight from original vector representation in realtime. But what is equivalent of pixels caching in 3d world? Due to ability of viewing objects/geometry from different sides/angles (without changing distance from camera to object e.g zoom level) we need to have something like 3d pixel cache which seems like huge memory requirements. Maybe voxels or points/splats? Or maybe just same 2d pixels cache but for each 6 sides of object (like 6 edges of cube) and do some pixel interpolation for intermediate viewing angles?
There was this crazy game ‘Vangers’ that, apart from the most-otherworldly feel I've ever encountered, had terrain in voxel graphics and permanently destructible — and I don't mean shitty Minecraft voxels: [LINK] That was '98. Still wondering why I haven't seen anything like that anymore. I vaguely recall one dude working on a super-detailed engine, down to individual blades of grass and such, but not sure how's the damage model there (that's possibly related to this, but probably not: this video ). There's also the ‘Teardown’ game: [LINK] , and a search for ‘voxel graphics’ on YouTube suggests a few others in this vein. Still not quite the same. As for mobile Lemmings, the Play store tried to sell them to me just yesterday.
This sounds a bit like Euclideon's Unlimited Detail tech demo video, which got some press a couple of years ago and then vanished without trace: this video (Warning. Video may contain critical levels of overhyped vapourware.) To me it sounded like Euclideon had figured out a new wrinkle in efficiently storing and searching very large instanced voxel spaces, and Voxel Quest sounds very similar. While Euclideon's demo was obviously a rigged tech demo, it still looked very cool, and I'm glad that it's turning out that this sort of thing is feasible.
This tech snake oil sucked me in for a while. this video I remember being pretty amazed when I first seen that and followed it for a bit, kinda forgot about it only to look it up recently and find out they've been making a good living selling snake oil and empty promises ever since.
What happened to that australian company that had millions in funding for voxel tech? They seems quite skiddish and didn't want to show all their information in their demos. Did anything come of it? Euclideon - 7 years ago: this video