Revolution in Graphics?

wilton writes "A technology genius has Silicon Valley drooling - by doing things the natural way, writes Douglas Rushkoff in today's Gaurdian. This project has been going on for a couple of years now, they have demo's for Windows and Be. The ideas is to not use rendering and polygons to create scenes. Instead build it up from a molecular level, with apparently amazing results. "

Comments

Constructive Solid Geometry

[cd-w]

/begin{rant}
Constructive Solid Geometry (as used in POV etc.) is also an alternative to polygon-based rendering.

For those that don't know about it, with CSG the scene is built up from primitive blocks (e.g. cones, spheres, cubes, rods, etc). More complex objects are made by using boolean operations (AND, OR and DIFF) on the primitives. For example, a ring can be made by subtracting (DIFF) a rod from the centre of a sphere. Solid textures can be applied to the resulting objects, and raytracing can be used to produce shadows, reflections, transparency, etc.

Unfortunately, CSG and raytracing seem to have been overlooked by the graphics card manufacturers. The new effects proposed by 3dfx (motion blur, soft shadows, etc.) can be achieved very simply using stochastic raytracing. Raytracing has a reputation for being very processing-intensive, but I am convinced that it could be done efficiently in hardware, and the quality of the graphics would be far greater than polygon rendering.

In relation to the article - the Psi technique looks interesting, but seems to have very limited scope for application. IMHO, graphics card manufacturers should look at raytracing and CSG instead.
/end{rant}

Signal/Noise=0

[jonathanclark]

Don't bother reading the article. It contains no real information and it's obvious the reporter is dancing around the subject.

I don't know exactly what is being refereed to here, but many alternatives to polygon rendering have been around for ages. Simulation of the light reflection/refraction at the molecular level has been an ongoing area of research in the graphics community. The problem is as you get closer to real-life, exponentially more processing power is required. We can only hope for better and better approximation methods. Further, the fundamental laws of physics governing lights at the quantum level are not fully understood.

I'm highly skeptical that a 22 year is doing any work in this area. This work had very little application in the real-time graphics community, why should Nintendo be interested?

Perhaps they are referring to voxel rendering, which can be done in realtime and a more likely project for a 22 year old to undertake (who hasn't?) A large problem with voxels is the amount of memory required, so either the shapes must be generated on the fly procedurally or it must be compressed using curves/wavelets or a combination of both. The article mentions "parabolas and ellipses," so this might be what is being talked about? Voxels are in no way a representation of something "on a molecular level."

I'm impressed the reporter managed to write such a long article without saying anything.

Um. Critical thinking suggested.

[Daniel]

This sounds like a hoax. A big hoax. Here's the giveaway:
He decided to use the Nintendo GameBoy as a standard for how much computing power a machine should have...and developed a series of simple equations that can be used to generate waves, textures, and shapes.
Does anyone here know why polys, especially triangles, are the basis of most modern graphics systems? No? I'll tell you: it's because they're *EASY TO DRAW*. The equations are as simple as you can get; almost everything becomes linear interpolation and therefore only needs a single addition per pixel line. Waves are likely to need some sort of transcendental function (such as sine or cosine) to function properly -- something that requires either a massive hardcoded table, or a LOT of CPU time. Not to mention the need to toss either fixed-point or floating-point numbers around. GameBoys are 8-bit, aren't they? That doesn't give you much precision.
Remember how you used to draw parabolas and ellipses in maths class?
Um. There are three possibilities for drawing these:
-> Use the equation directly. This involves a square root. Square roots are slow.
-> For the ellipse, you can generate it using sines and cosines with a parameterized equation. The resolution on the parameter will determine how choppy the outside looks; even a resolution of 1 degree took a while on my TI-85 back in high school :)
-> Iterate over the ENTIRE DISPLAY, applying the generic conic equation to each point; use this to find boundaries. Incredibly tricky, requires a square or two for each pixel, and is generally going to be a pain. (for the ellipses this is a little simpler, since you can bound it by the major and minor axes)
Each element of such a display will require much more computation that a polygon; you could save a few polys this way, but I don't see it being the sort of revolutionary jump they describe.
The article then goes on to state some fluff about plants and carbon atoms, claiming that quantum equations are 'simple' (I wish!) and suggesting that "Barbalet"'s stuff is built "from the ground up, just like nature does it." This isn't true, even if what they said is true, and has nothing to do with molecules and plants; he would be building his images up from shapes -- different shapes than are standard now, perhaps, but still just shapes. No image built "from the ground up, like nature does it," requiring the transmission of every molecule, is going to even be manageable by modern computers, let alone result in stuff that can be transmitted over modems and wires more easily than graphics images.

The more charitable explanation is that this is a highly confused journalist who has run into ellipsoid 3D graphics or something similar and thinks it's cool.

Daniel