That is untrue. I was there. He was unable to show anything in real time – he said his computer and network connection weren’t working. All he showed were pre-rendered videos. So much for cloud rendering – all you need is a 3G wireless card – or not, if it’s a whole sham, which it seemed like to me.

So last week a lil’ ol’ controversy cropped up regarding a video that LivePlace, owned by Brad Greenspan of MySpace fame, posted but says wasn’t supposed to be posted or made public…alas it got out there and the virtual community we…

And comparing myspace to this is idiocy, although I know myspace is your most favorite thing in the world and you aspire to build something so shitty and ugly. People will absolutely pay for something like this…look at WoW, EVE, and others. Even on 2nd life, people often pay for stuff, just not to actually play.

Please, learn to read, and practice on another site.

I think it is more likely that they just have a very complex and dynamic baking system (”dynamic baking”, is that an oxymoron?) which has all the necessary lighting, texture, and model data ready to go, and the final renderer has actually very little to do (cast avatar shadow and calculate reflections). The dynamic part is that the baking changes as the primary light sources change (sun, street lamps, etc) and any user-created changes.

In other words the only thing it calculates is when something changes. This means only reflections and your own shadows (and avatars+shadows of others) when you are flying around a city, since everything else is baked in until the time of day changes. Supposedly they can even have on-the-fly terrain changes, which means only that is calculated dynamically until it stops changing, and then it bakes itself in.

NO.

http://www.gara...e.php?qid=52582

I have some experience with game programming on both DX and OGL, and I know for a fact you can not render every single possible scene in even a tiny 3d space.

I was thinking that since the FLV flash video is only 320×240 that they could make a 1280×960 back buffer render per GPU

The 1280×960 square of video memory could render 16 @ 320×240 .flv sized scenes.

So instead of 1 GPU handling 1 buffer at a time, it could do 16 @ 320×240 .flv sized ones to be streamed to a flash player with red5 or FMS. So 1 GPU could do 16 users.

But that would look like @ss. What they are showing is high res encoded down to FLV, and that would be terribly expensive resourcewise. I don’t believe it.

Right now a typical web 2.0 application will server tens of thousands of users per server.

“If the monthly fee on average is $10, this is $640/month/server”

Firstly, consider that Brad Greenspan is doing this. It will instantly be compared to MySpace, just as Vidilife was.
That being said, there was a huge campaign by MySpace competitors to make them lose users about 3-4 years ago.
Rumors were spread that Tom was going to start charging people money to use MySpace. Tom would repeatedly come on and disclaim those rumors.

They’ve conditioned people along with Facebook so well to expect social networking to be free, that a pay model will never work now. Lively and 2nd life added to that in the context of city space.

So now you have these expensive 8 GPU servers with no revenue except for some ad placement in the virtual world, which isn’t that lucrative, and traditional internet adverts which are very unprofitable on social networks.

First, I think the focus would be mobile devices as there’s no competition there. Even if they don’t figure out a way for businesses to subsidize the cost, people now are willing to pay.

Let’s assume that a server can handle 8 (number of GPUs) x 4 (users/GPU) = 32 *simultaneous* users. Of course, those users won’t pay 24×7. And even if there will be peak hours, let’s multiply 32 by a factor of just 2, i.e. 64 paying users/server. If the monthly fee on average is $10, this is $640/month/server, i.e. the server pays off in 8 months and then you start generating revenue. They may have pricing plans – free, mobile ($4.95), standard ($9.95), HD ($19.95), etc. Plan limitation could include number of hours per month, time of the day, peak/off-peak access, max resolution, max FPS, etc. Given people will be buying/renting space/stuff, there will be extra revenue. Advertising will bring additional revenue and eventually transaction fees from real purchases mad eat the VR shops will gradually become a major profit source, too. Buying stuff for yourself, gifts for others, or shopping together with friends and then receiving the stuff in the real world… the possibilities there have almost no limits!

Weird that they’d go the voxel rendering route. Hardware usually doesn’t accelerate the drawing of voxels. Graphics hardware can draw triangles very quickly. Usually any voxel algorithm would need to be resolved to a triangulation method which then can be handed to the hardware for quick drawing. But even so in this case, it doesn’t seem to make much sense. Anything you can do with voxels you can do with triangulated models. Unless they plan to have the ability to tunnel holes and have deformable terrain of sorts; I can’t see why they’d go the voxel route.

More info:
http://www.flip...eleration.shtml

(note that the link is from 2000.)
There was an old game that used voxels called outcast. Do a youtube search for it to see how it looked back in the day.

I guess in fact they don’t need to do that. Here is my guess.

1. Given a city model, it can be rendered according to camera location, orientation.

2. If users are only allow to walk on the street. Which reduce the possible rendering camera position and possible orientations.

3. If user can only move in fixed speed.

4. Given 1, 2, 3. The possible camera positions, orientations are limited.

5. The render farm render all possible scenes in system. They are marked by positions, camera orientation.

6. Assemble all rendering scenes according to users’ camera position, orientation and pace and stream the whole scene out.

7. We can add one more parameter, time of the scene. So a city can have 24 hours and the change of Sun, Moon.

So the problem is reduced to how to assemble those scene fast enough and streaming them. And because it will be a movie, so one important thing is to find the difference between two scene and compress them quickly.

If they want to add users’ avatars, the avatars may not need to be ray-traced. But just a object overlay in the scene.

No offense, but I hope not a lot of publishers decide to use this stuff.