The Exigent Duality
New Approach Needed - 20:19 CST, 2/25/20 (Sniper)
Watching this has only reinforced my view that we need to wind down the texture-mapped polygon era: that approach is just too expensive in terms of requiring further and prohibitive die shrinks, and also in terms of asset creation project budgets. It's had forty years and probably trillions of dollars of R and D in total aggregate, and it still hasn't produced photo-realism. From here, there are just too many hard constraints-- some of it in technology, some of it financial-- for it to move much further down the "diminishing returns" wedge.

It's like in software development: when I hit a problem that's requiring me to write tons of or messy code, almost universally I'm trying to solve the problem inherently in the wrong way; almost always after I step back and re-think the big picture, I find a different and sometimes even trivial way to solve the same problem.

The video above shows us an alternative that is definitely worth exploring futher. Someone should make a dedicated video game system implementing that notion: point cloud indexing system in hardware. As someone who specializes in Elasticsearch at work, I understand the power of these kinds of systems: in Lucene, you can have billions of points indexed, and search or aggregate them in scant milliseconds. If you implemented a special chipset to do this in hardware, I don't see why you couldn't cull these billions of data points hundreds of "frames" per second.

Put another way, nothing you see in that "Holoverse" is using triangle-based geometry at all. And graphically even at this "Magnavox Odyssey" stage, it looks almost as good as the very best PlayStation 4 games, even when scaled up to room size! For the home market, the first implementations will look like this: a table you walk around. Apparently in 2018, the tables could be sold profitably for just under 50k USD-- here is hoping various dynamics come into play to drop that price rapidly.

I also can't write a post about this without commenting on how stupid people are too: it's like when people put on "VR" headsets and are trying to grab things... eek gads. With this, people are afraid to "jump" down the "hole", and the guide has to actually explain to them that it's not real... pretty cringey.