Updated: Video: LivePlace Developing Cloud-Based, Photo-Realistic World?

LivePlace may be developing a new virtual world with photo-realistic graphics built on OTOY, a technology for serving up those high-quality graphics with only a small plugin to the browser or installation to a PC, mobile device, or console. That lets CitySpace "live entirely on the Web" with "no plugin to download and any device can access it." The LivePlace domain is owned by MySpace Co-Founder Brad Greenspan, who also owns the video site LiveUniverse. Oddly, TechCrunch spoke with Greenspan, but he isn't quoted and the video that originally appeared on LivePlace has since been pulled down. That's prompted some skepticism along with the suggestion from commenters that elements from the otherwise breathtaking video, which purports to show off 3D models created for CitySpace, have been pulled from this site's pre-rendered video. I reached out to LivePlace last night for confirmation and haven't heard back yet.

UPDATE: TechCrunch heard from Greenspan and it sounds like the video is something of a joke.

If the video is genuine--or even if most or some of it is--it's certainly impressive. Some of the graphics, all rendered on the servers and then streamed to the user, actually look better than the screenshots offered by OTOY, and the capabilities discussed are promising. some Shots are exactly the same as those on OTOY (e.g., the subway system shown off at about 5:50), but, of course, they could have been models designed for CitySpace and then shown off on OTOY. Importantly, all the models and scenes reportedly feature real-time lighting effects that add a sense of realism.

Every building's window opens to a real internal space, which, if owned by users, are entirely customizable with textures, streamed in video that's viewable by anyone with an avatar in the room, and shared documents or even desktops (and apps if uploaded to the server) from PCs and Macs.

The avatars, also customizable, are also pretty richly illustrated with a default 120,000 polygons apiece.

"We have a lot of rooms in CitySpace, so there's really no limit to the number of users or the number of rooms they have that we can host," explains the video's narrator.

There are also public spaces, like offices, that can be customized for organizational use and other public spaces for shared use by all avatars. The video shows off cities based on New York and LA, but if you're more suburban, the world comes with 22 different sprawling homes to build in quieter neighborhoods.

All of that would be impressive on its own, for any new virtual world. What makes CitySpace particularly impressive, though, is its flexibility. The OTOY runtime is less than 800k and is meant to run on any device, automatically scaling the graphics of the world to the device's specs. You can check out the PDF white paper here.

If it's all true, CitySpace is certainly impressive. With a combination of graphics that would rival large, downloaded clients and the ease-of-access and portability of something like Lively or Vivaty, CitySpace could be all things to all people. Of course, until more news comes out, that has plenty of people thinking that it's too good to be true.

[via TechCrunch]

Comments

[Digado]

Apparently, the first minute of the video seems to have been 'stolen' from this portfolio:

http://3dblasphemy.com/personal/CITY.html

Which makes it an unlikely story all together, as it was made 4 years ago and mentions nothing about server side real time rendering. The 'infinite light bounce' makes the story even more unlikely, the massive amount of bandwidth required is not compensated by cloud computing.

[Intellagirl]

Wow! Assuming that you want a virtual world that is ultra-realistic and that you only want to be able to customize objects via textures, this is awesome. The camera angle and lighting almost make the machinima look voyeuristic or like a crime scene.
Intellagirl

[nic mitham]

Putting the buzz around this video aside, isn't there an irony in this space though?

The closer to reality a virtual world can be made, isn't it going to have less impact? In another words if it looks just like the real world then maybe people just view it just as that. Walking around an empty city isn't that much fun (ask Will Smith).

This is turn re-emphasises the important of narrative, theme, purpose and rationale for the virtual world to exist - the reason for being there.

Of course we're going to eventually get to photo-realistic virtual environments soon but the focus always has to be on the concept.

[Spiderman]

I'm struggling to see how they would have enough processing power to render a detailed 3D scene for tens of thousands of customers.

[Spiderman]

After further thought:

I suppose they could provide the service for a small number of customers with a large wallet. Customers that like the idea of renting use of a super computer for a few hours just to play a cool video game.

[Pavig Lok]

One thing folk may be forgetting is that processing demands scale with device. Current small device screens can easily be driven at extremely high quality by today's graphics cards. Running this for a reasonable number of small clients could be possible. PC monitors though with perhaps 4x the pixels would demand 4x the resources and bandwidth.

If it's possible and this is a real demo, and takes off; well i'd be buying up amd stock right now - the service model needs to integrate a hire/purchase plan on amd hardware, i'd imagine a few cpus and a graphics card per every few subscribers. An expensive service to run :P

If it took off though, i'd imagine it'd make Secondlife and Twitters expansion woes look like small cheese. Hosted applications are nothing new. Citrix has been doing it for nearly 20 years. Extremely rich 3d worlds like this though are orders of magnitude more complex and hardware heavy to run.

Just as Citrix Metaframe (now called xenapp) hasn't taken over the office space due to scaling issues, I'd assume (outside vertical markets) this won't either. There are plenty of gochas in creating this level of hosted application infrastructure.... but don't listen to me, just google the arguments between the Citrix (big server) solution and the ASP (application service provider = light server requirement, lightweight client) camps. There's plenty of solid arguments against the heavy server way of doing things.

OTOY technology could just as easily be applied to a client like second life - in fact exactly the same model has been used to demonstrate the SL client on an iphone or java phone (in japan). Much as I like realism, these simpler server side clients probably have a better chance of success - unless you feel that realtime raytraced shadows and puddle reflections are a killer application on the iphone...... personally I think there's a place for it, in very specific instances, but not as a general thing... at least not for a while.

The cost, hosting and scaling issues of providing the service to hundreds of thousands of concurrent users simply seems too insurmountable in the near future.

Not that I don't _want_ it to be true :P

[ArianeB]

Sorry folks, every aspect of this says "fake".

From the supposed technological breakthroughs in server side real time rendering, to the whole concept of a 3D virtual world in a pre-built city (do these guys even bother with any market research?), to the whole supposed "real time" video with obvious edits, fake zooms, stills, no sign of an interface, and no avatar movement except in the first 30 seconds that we know were stolen from a rendered movie clip. All signs point to "post rendered" video.

[len]

Putting the real of fake issue to one side, this catches my attention:

"The closer to reality a virtual world can be made, isn't it going to have less impact?"

Eye of the beholder: it depends on the application. For game players, for fantasy buffs, that may be true. For first responders to an incident where stairwells, entrances and exits, locations of people and the ability to insert different business object models (eg, if a building collapses, where are the best places to start looking for objects that were inside the building; if a fire starts in one part of the building and the hottest location is elsewhere, are there combustibles or hazardous materials), the ultra-realism has benefits.

This is precisely the problem of having a ranking of technologies driven by artists who are not practical users. It isn't devaluing the artist's opinions; it is valuing the customer's requirements.

[Ordinal Malaprop]

I have some perpetual motion magic bean bridges for sale as well. Virtual ones.

What utter rot.

[Mark]

This is totally fake, anyone with any common sense will be able to tell this.

Imagine a server rendering the world for a million users at a time, in the detail showed here...

Acess via a browser, no plugin required? Even Gmail can't get their simple Ajax site working FFS..

This is nothing more than a lame attempt at getting some gulible investors onboard.

[alex]

the video of the street is a creation of 3d blasphemy a spanish 3d artist...
parece robado!
is stolen!!!