GigaVoxels at Siggraph

Cyril Crassin will be giving a talk at Siggraph 2009 on the subject of voxel raycasting and he has published a new short paper:

Beyond Triangles: Gigavoxels Effects in Video Games

Some screens of raycasted voxel scenes with the GigaVoxel technique here

I also found an interesting blog (via Timothy Farrar's blog) called EnterTheSingularity, which features a very interesting and in-depth post about the "perceived" latency of cloud gaming services:

http://enterthesingularity.blogspot.com/2009_04_01_archive.html

The author (Jake Cannell, programmer on Mercenaries 2) has been thinking through the idea of cloud games quite well.

Gaikai, another cloud gaming service

http://www.gamespot.com/news/6212860.html

http://games.venturebeat.com/2009/07/01/gaikai-demos-how-to-serve-games-over-the-internet/

Perry said the games can run on less than a megabit a second of Internet bandwidth. Most DSL connections offer around three megabits a second, coming downstream into the home. In the demo, Perry said, the server was about 800 miles away, which results in a round trip (ping rate) of 21 milliseconds. That’s a split second and not really noticeable. For a server much closer, the ping rate is about 10 milliseconds. While both OnLive and Otoy used custom servers with graphics chips, Perry said his service can run across low-end custom servers.

Perry contends the ping rate is fast enough to play most games. He showed racing games such as Mario 64 and other games such as World of Warcraft and Eve Online, all playing without downloaded software. He also showed how he could use Adobe Photoshop across the server.

Naughty Dog's Uncharted 2 does cloud computing

Naughty Dog gave a live chat yesterday in which they mentioned cloud computing as an engine feature.

Excerpt from the live chat:

2:37	[Comment From Pound_lb003] What crazy technical terms can you throw at us, that the ND Engine 2.0 boasts?

2:38	[Comment From wsowen02] How varied are the environments this time?

2:40	[Comment From Luke] You told us the snow is going to be the best snow we ever saw. We got some footage of that snow in trailers, but can you tell us more, of how this snow is going to work? By the way, you're an awesome company Naughty Dog.

2:40	Evan Wells: Screen Space Ambient Occlusion, deferred rendering, cloud computing, paralax mapping, high dynamic range tonemapping, per object motion blur, cascade shadows, sub surface scattering simulation...

Source: http://blog.us.playstation.com/2009/06/30/uncharted-2-live-chat-with-naughty-dog

Seeing the term “cloud computing” among all these other high-end features, shows that it has reached a similar drool-inducing status. I wonder what exactly is being computed in the cloud and if it is similar to what OTOY is doing. Probably wishful thinking, but maybe there is a link with PS Cloud, as Naughty Dog has also contributed a great deal to the Playstation EDGE tools (together with Jon Olick). Naughty Dog is the best game developer on consoles in my opinion (especially in the fields of graphics, animation and cinematic storytelling) so it wouldn't suprise me if they are the first console developer to jump on the cloud computing train.

update: Interesting info about PS Cloud:

http://playstationlifestyle.net/2009/06/29/sony-drumming-up-a-digital-storm-with-playstationcloudcom/

Ever since the trademark filing of PS Cloud, speculation has been buzzing. The trademark covers “entertainment services, namely, providing an on-line video game that users may access through the internet”

We have found more evidence of PlayStation Cloud being accessible “through the internet”…

While doing some research, I performed a who is lookup of the domain playstationcloud.com. The results of my query showed that SCEA San Diego Studios is the owner of the domain.

SCEA San Diego recently mentioned while speaking to Gamasutra that they would be “exclusively” working on PSN game development. This goes against all speculation so far pegging PlayStation Cloud as a social networking service. Of course Sony San Diego could very well be developing a service or application, for the PSN with PlayStation Cloud.

Whatever PS Cloud is, it seems as though it’s going to be coming from Sony’s San Diego Studio.