Let’s run through the quick checklist for the recently semi-announced “LivePlace“, who claims to do some pretty nifty things with distributed server side rendering.
- Buzzwords like “Cloud Computing” and “Virtual Worlds”? Check.
- VC Capital Funding? Check.
- Implausible Technology that doesn’t stand up to basic analysis by an industry professional? Check.
Say hello to serverside cloud based renderered virtual worlds. Somehow, against all odds a small unheard of Silicon Valley company has developed a real time renderer that not only exceeds the current best of breed distributed real-time rendering research projects by huge margins - does so in a way that’s scalable to deploy a major concurrent project on.
Doesn’t anyone in Silicon Valley do basic fact checking with a technical adviser before giving capital?
Assuming this company has actually succeeded in developing such a renderer (big if) isn’t there the additional problem of bandwidth? Let’s be kind and say the average user has a 1024×768x32 screen - that’s 24mbit of data that needs sending 30 frames a second (720mbit/sec), now yes you can use some video encoding to cut that down significantly - but that’s a heck of a lot of data, and the compression is going to induce processor load seizures too.
The answer to the above question is apparently not.
There is a big reason we do client-side rendering today, and that is it distributes the load better than any “cloud”. 100,000 clients = 100,000 processors, 100,000 graphics accellerators, etc. Yes some of them suck and can’t do pretty graphics (Intel I’m looking squarely in your general direction), but the rendering they can do is going to be better than what a foreign service can do for you, and it’s going to be speedier - not only do you not have to wait 200ms ping and a x megabyte download to happen before you see the results of your movement.
While I am not claiming that this technology couldnt be made to work - it’s just not going to be pretty, I dont believe it will scale anywhere near effectively, and the bandwidth requirements alone are going to cause some very tough questions to be asked about whether this will run at all. (After all - anyone with a internet connection fast enough to support this is going to probably have a decent video card anyway.)
Count me very skeptical.
Shouts to Belaya for adding to the snark contained within this post.
I wanted to believe!
Anyway, it seems the real use for now is doing quick turnaround for studio projects and commercials. Don’t know how they’d make it work for a virtual-world thing.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/07/09/otoy-developing-server-side-3d-rendering-technology/
Some noisy YouTube videos in there about it.
Maxx Monde
12 Aug 08 at 7:42 pm
Thanks for providing a voice of reason!
I like the point that we *already* do our VW rendering on the cloud; the cloud consisting of all of those client machines out there computing away. There must be a buzzword in there somewhere…
Dale Innis
12 Aug 08 at 8:38 pm
[...] Adam Frisby
LivePlace - You've GOT to see this demo - SLUniverse Forums
13 Aug 08 at 5:32 pm
I think it’s “interesting” that the “leak” of that video came the day before this piece:
http://adage.com/digitalnext/post?article_id=130278
showed up in Advertising Age, which appears to have originated in some PR from “Jules Urbach, founder of Otoy and LightStage”!
Brendan Tripp
13 Aug 08 at 7:09 pm
Hey guess what “the cloud” is a stupid word for a webserver.
Gee you mean I can pay for the incredibly fast rig at home that could handle the 220 fps (I won’t even go into TechCrunch claiming this is done sans plugin, HTML can now do streaming audio and video and http udp or similar messaging? Neat!) AND I get to rent a server in a datacenter that in order to handle these graphics would be 3-400$ monthly minimum?
What a great “green” technology at a time when we need to conserve. OpenSim can run in your home or school on existing or “closeted” computers.
No problem I will turn in the car and start walking everywhere who needs that kind of convienence anyway? This is the only way I could afford this Phantom Console level vaporware (US spelling
if it was even possible which it aint. FYI you could even Play Second Life or use Excel this way, if you dont mind long pauses that is.
Gee Adam this is a killer blog you have it runs “in the cloud”.
G2 Proto
14 Aug 08 at 4:28 pm
lol interesting, Adam you know as well as i being in Australia that hosting on this level is many thousands in au data center and as a result we use US servers for hosting so the return path is always around 10 hops and between 200-300ms.
I’d like to see a server side rendering solution deliver lag free fluffy experience for us.
I wish them good luck, but its abundantly clear to me that client side rendering is the way to go.
But oh now computers and 3d graphics cards and ram are so expensive these day !!! haha (for those who missed it yes that’s sarcastic lol 1gb ram for 30 bucks, don’t come whinging to be about Vista needing ram)
Norgan
15 Aug 08 at 7:41 am
The whole thing leaves me confused, but thanks for the technical background, because it makes clear that there are significant hurdles to what that video snippet offered.
I am curious however on your take of this other demo of OTOY in a browser:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwTcvk5IuB4&feature=related
Dusan Writer
15 Aug 08 at 5:13 pm
…and just to add to the discussion, because part of your post was about hardware limitations, but according to the OTOY maker it’s the newest generation of hardware that makes it possible.
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July 9, 2008
OTOY Developing Server-Side 3D Rendering Technology
Mark Hendrickson
53 comments »
Imagine you could play video games - and immerse yourself in virtual worlds - with 3D graphics comparable to those found in blockbuster films like Transformers or WALL•E. And then imagine you could experience and control those graphics in real-time from any internet-enabled device, whether it be a desktop computer, set-top box or even iPhone.
Sound far-fetched? It doesn’t to Jules Urbach, founder and CEO of a Los Angeles-based company called OTOY, who has been working with microprocessor manufacturer AMD since 2006 to make the idea of server-side graphics processing a reality. If all goes as planned, 3D rendering will become just another computer task that jumps from the client to the cloud. Call it gaming as a service (GaaS) if you will. No more Xboxes, no more PlayStations, and no more souped-up PC towers. Just a monitor, some controls, and a way to receive and display frames generated by a powerful server farm.
But let’s take a step back for a second. Before it’s even possible to deliver movie-quality graphics through a thin client, there must be a way to produce those graphics - and in real-time. Movie producers have the luxury of knowing ahead of time just how they want their frames to look. Visual effects studios like Industrial Light and Magic don’t have to respond to user inputs, so they can spend hours rendering each and every frame. Game producers, however, rely on engines that must respond quickly to user behavior and serve up graphics at near-instantaneous speeds. That reliance constitutes perhaps the main reason why in-game graphics have lagged behind their big-screen counterparts for years.
Just the other week, however, AMD announced an initiative called Cinema 2.0 that promises to narrow the gap between movies and games with a new RV770 GPU. To demonstrate the power of AMD’s new consumer graphics cards, Urbach and his art teams in Spain, Canada and the US pulled together a set of videos that approximate the CGI you’d expect from movies. He took us through an overview of that work here:
Most of his demos focus on recreating Autobots and Decepticons from the Transformers movie. And the results are very impressive, even if they don’t quite match those found on the big screen. The stills at the bottom of this post are from voxel-based animations that were rendered in real-time, such as the one embedded at the top of this post.
But the rendering of machinery poses far fewer challenges than producing humanoid models that suspend disbelief. To achieve the organic in addition to the inorganic, Jules has worked on a project called LightStage that takes panoramic shots of real humans in motion and turns them into animated 3D models. Watch below as Jules explains how the Lightstage works:
All of this is just an extension of what has been done by technologists so far to mimic reality within virtual experiences. Urbach’s bold and particularly innovative proposal is that he can deliver these experiences through the browser. While we’ve seen 3D games delivered through the browser before, this time it’s very different.
“First of all, OTOY-powered graphics can potentially go far beyond those found on any consumer device because they aren’t actually rendered by whatever hardware is sitting on your desk, resting in your hand, or laying on your living room floor. In the video below, Urbach shows how AMD graphics cards installed on the server (rather than the client) can be hooked up to work in parallel and deliver highly complex graphics from afar, in the form of pure frames.
The main limitations are bandwidth and server power (i.e. how fast the client can receive frames generated by the server, and how fast the server can generate those frames for all its concurrent users). Urbach claims that his technology can deliver up to 220 frames per second (fps), which is overkill for most monitors and the human eye. As for lag, he experiences 12-17 milliseconds on the west coast (where his current test server is located) and 100 ms in Japan. The compression codec used to deliver these levels of performance was developed internally, although with help from AMD’s engineering team.”
LightStage was promoted this week, built on the OTOY technology, in conjunction with the unveiling of the ATI RadeonTM HD 4800 X2 graphic card:
http://adage.com/digitalnext/post.php?article_id=130278
Now, I’m know nothing about technical stuff as you well know, so your thoughts are so useful.
Dusan Writer
15 Aug 08 at 6:00 pm
220 FPS??!? *falls out of chair laughing*
I will be happy if they can even experience a consistent 40, which took a LOT of upgrades to achieve on my desktop for Oblivion, let alone SL!
–Tim (Alan_Kiesler)
PS: Say hi to Bel for me.
T_S_Kimball
20 Aug 08 at 8:19 am
Miss ya, Alan!
Bel
22 Aug 08 at 2:07 pm