• 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.