As others have pointed out, voxel-based games have been around for a long time; a recent example is the whimsical \u201c3D Dot Game Hero\u201d for PS3, in which they use the low-res nature of the voxel world as a fun design element.<\/p>\n
Voxel-based approaches have huge advantages (\u201cinfinite\u201d detail, background details that are deformable at the pixel level, simpler simulation of particle-based phenomena like flowing water, etc.) but they\u2019ll only win once computing power reaches an important crossover point. That point is where rendering an organic world a voxel at a time looks better than rendering zillions of polygons to approximate an organic world. Furthermore, much of the effort that\u2019s gone into visually simulating real-world phenomena (read the last 30 years of Siggraph conference proceedings) will mostly have to be reapplied to voxel rendering. Simply put: lighting, caustics, organic elements like human faces and hair, etc. will have to be \u201cfigured out all over again\u201d for the new era of voxel engines. It will therefore likely take a while for voxel approaches to produce results that look as good, even once the crossover point of level of detail is reached.<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t mean to take anything away from the hard and impressive coding work this team has done, but if they had more academic background, they\u2019d know that much of what they\u2019ve \u201cpioneered\u201d has been studied in tremendous detail for two decades. Hanan Samet\u2019s treatise on the subject tells you absolutely everything you need to know, and more: (http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Foundations-Multidimensional-Structure\u2026sr=8-1<\/a><\/a>) and even goes into detail about the application of these spatial data structures to other areas like machine learning. Ultimately, Samet\u2019s book is all about the \u201ccurse of dimensionality\u201d and how (and how much) data structures can help address it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" As others have pointed out, voxel-based games have been around for a long time; a recent example is the whimsical \u201c3D Dot Game Hero\u201d for PS3, in which they use the low-res nature of the voxel world as a fun design element. Voxel-based approaches have huge advantages (\u201cinfinite\u201d detail, background details that are deformable at [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":513,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1509,48,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-101263","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-entertainment","category-particle-physics","category-robotics-ai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101263","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/513"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=101263"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101263\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=101263"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=101263"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=101263"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}