Their technique is based on point cloud rendering. My supervisor has proposed already in 2004 how this can be done on a standard PC. Look at his PhD-Thesis [1].
This technique is usable for static objects as well as for dynamic objects; however, using it for dynamic scenes additional acceleration structures are required (besides of the Octrees) in order to dynamically change according to the deformation of the object. To clarify on several comments made here:
- this is a rasterization technique
- they used acceleration data-structures like Octrees, kd-trees, BVH, ... (which exactly they don't tell)
- the graphic "aesthetics" depends actually only on the artists and not on the technology itself, so not a good point
[1] M. Wand: Point-Based Multi-Resolution Rendering. PhD Thesis, Wilhelm Schickard Institute for Computer Science, Graphical-Interactive Systems (WSI/GRIS), University of Tübingen, 2004.