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Comment by robfitz | Hacker News Reader

Calling their tech "infinite detail" instead of "voxels" feels no different than calling the iphone screen a "retina display" instead of listing its resolution details. Good marketing is not inherently evil.

Here, though, they're suffering a huge PR backlash, which I suspect is because they're out-marketing the work of passionate amateurs and academic researchers instead of e.g. big phone companies.

It admittedly does feel dirty not to give due credit in this scenario, but I can also empathise with their desire for a descriptive term which can resonate with the general public.

On an unrelated note, I'm often impressed by how large a portion of the game development community manages to stay aware of the bleeding edge in their field. I haven't seen any other arena where that's quite so much the case.

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"Infinite" has a specific meaning. Had Jobs said "infinite pixels" he'd have suffered the same backlash. "Infinite detail" is deceptive because we know there's a practical limit. "Retina display" has no similar connotation. They chose that phrase so they could then give you a definition. "Infinite" already has a definition.

Wouldn't a fractal voxel octree generation algorithm technically be "infinite", though? You could zoom into objects as far as you pleased, and never run out of detail—which seems to satisfy any practical usage of the term "infinite detail" I can think of.

This gets into subjective perceptions of the detail in question. Mathematically, you are correct that fractals have infinite detail. Visually, however, it's noticeable when you've run out of interesting fractal detail and that the technique has failed to produce more detail (that the brain will acknowledge as such.)

Had they said "fractal detail" not only would they have received less grief for it, but they would have provided us with an explanation for part of their system. That last part seems to not be something they're inclined to do.

The detail needn't be fractal to be infinite though. It could be procedural e.g. a rough surface could be given infinite detail by using a pseudo random algorithm.

Looking at http://kottke.org/10/02/insanely-deep-fractal-zoom my brain keeps on accepting waves of new detail.

It's trivial to get 'infinite' detail when the data is repetitive. The way they claim it, they should be able to zoom into molecules, atoms and then quarks and so on. Anything else is not really infinite detail in the context of graphics.

They probably can zoom into atoms because there are only so many different types of atoms and there are only so many quarks. So it seems even then their claim holds. On the large (buildings) macro level that might hold as well. Many details in a building, in a city are similar. A window on the left side of a house is the same as windows in the right side of a house. Even trees are similar (hell, they are self-similar, you can use a fractal to build them). Textures are often similar and repetitive.

Yeah there is this intermediate level of detail between the molecules and whole buildings (like surface imprefections, dirt) that might not be as repetitive. On the whole however I don't think their marketing claim is that fraudulent.

>Here, though, they're suffering a huge PR backlash, which I suspect is because they're out-marketing the work of passionate amateurs and academic researchers instead of e.g. big phone companies.

From my perspective, I'm more frustrated with how they don't seem to be producing anything. They just release a PR video every year that is about the same as the PR video they released the previous year.

Until they actually produce something useful, I have no problems referring to this stuff as vaporware.

I think they aren't calling it voxels because it works differently. I have a feeling that while the data is likely stored in a voxel-like fashion, the way they are reaching in to the data and extracting it is completely different.

If you recall that tech that was shown a few years back of being able to quickly zoom around a ridiculously large image, because you only need to look up the pixels that are going to be on screen, I think they are doing the same thing with the voxel data here. Which does make it new tech, and does make it 'infinite' in that it could probably handle an infinite data set. Hardware can't, but that's a different issue.

However, the problem with their tech will be anything dynamic, as most people have already said.

I think Notch's point of the memory requirements are critical as well. For non-repetitive detail, at the levels they are talking at, it would require google size data centers to just store the data for a single 1 km x 1 km game level.

But that also makes the incorrect assumption that each of those voxels must be populated -- which isn't necessarily the case. In fact, more will be unpopulated than populated, I would expect.

Good point. Still, I wonder what the data requirements of even a sparse voxel world of this resolution would require?

Generally, I expect it would be equivalent to the surface area of all objects.

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