Unbelievable must-see!!!

See the video on the new virtual world 'Cityspace' being developed by LivePlace.
The graphics are amazing and apparently it'll be purely web based with no downloads.

Before seeing this I'd seen nothing that looks like coming close to SL, but my jaw dropped to the ground when I saw this. It's obviously still in development and the emphasis seems to be on user-customised content rather than user-created.

http://www.virtualworldsnews.com/

(Scroll down page to LivePlace article and video)

(sorry for bad link, it always comes up double. Anyway, the real web address is in that mess somewhere!)

I was looking at this yesterday! It'll also be accessible with a mobile (cell) phone. Check out the screenshots here:

http://www.otoy.com/site/start.htm

Otoy is the web plugin that will make this possible. The site claims it offers: "cinematic quality 3D rendering in a browser with compressed content streams that load in seconds".

Those screenshots show what it'll be like to move around. This has to be some new discovery in image-rendering, because those images load *incredibly* fast and are superb quality.

It'll be aimed at cell phone users.



Before:






After (what it'll look like on your cell phone):

Yeah but it's clean and sharp and recognizable for what it is, Yah!

If it works as good as the hype-y video, it'll be a strong competitor for Second Life. I know they got my attention.

Looks very pre-rendered, so save up some dosh while quatro-core computers are still being developed to get anything like that real time.
On top of it, to keep such a simulation fast, they probably have to limit the amount of "avatars" or whatever they plan to name it that you get to see at any given time (if any), and probably also limit textures to default sets (bye bye content creation).

Soooooo what we're looking at in the video seems more like an online game of The Sims with probably some community features instead of a whole world to create and develop by the users themselves, like SL.

If all that is real, then LL is going to be in for a wakeup call. That will blow SL out of the water and will have people jumping ship as soon as they can.

that shocked me, so much so I wonder if it's true??? how many prims to build that, the amount of textures? mind blowing too much. I didn't see any flexis

Well, it has to be true - they needed to build it to make the video!
How it performs on the net and what you'll be allowed to do in CitySpace remains to be seen. But the graphics and complexity is incredible.

Roll on dynamic shadows in SL! ASAP!

The photorealism and rendering speed is fantastic. But I'd like to see how fantasy worlds and avatars look. I noticed the one video referenced by Conifer tended to steer clear of showing much of the avatars. What I did see was very Barbie/Ken-esque figures.

Anyhow...my prediction is that virtual worlds are just going to keep getting better and better. And still Second Life remains the one world where the imagination of the residents rules in terms of their avatars and their creations.

Infrared, check out the screenshots I linked to in the second post. Some of them include avatar shots (albeit closeups for now). The quality of the avatar skin is completely photorealistic from what I can see. In one sideshot of the male avatar's face you can even see the fine hairs on his skin.

This Nurien look like a worry too, certainly will kick Lively's butt, it's out of beta in Korea an hitting USA early 2009
Makes SL's best animations and avatars look like crayon cartoons
No sign of furry's though :/



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MoQh4R1-Vjs

1400 triangles in that long skirt alone?! O.o

Quote from the article:

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

That has me wondering what the UV maps look like, and what the default resolution is? Also, since it's Cloud, there is an added level of security in that the final data sent to the end user is in a format that can't be extracted and re-used for the same application.

I just looked at the Nurien demo as well. Amazing too. Together with CitySpace it all looks worryingly 'next-generation'.

How ironic that the person filming the Nurien demo and lecture did such an amateur job!

ok so we now know why LL is being so user friendly to us.

Intriguing, but it looks "too good to be true". I can't imagine the sort of computing power they would need to have tucked away somewhere to render full lighting and reflections at that level of detail, in real-time, even if 99% of the buildings and streets and plants were static pre-calculated objects. You still have to recalculate for any changed textures and the like.

The replies to the article also seem to indicate that the video is misleading at best, and fraudulent at worst, with the first 30 second clip having been appropriated from a source that never claimed to be real-time rendered 3D content.

Worth keeping an eye on, but take it with a huge grain of salt.

There was talk of this on another forum, the video is suspitiously stolen from here.
I assume this is a pipedream 'pitch video' of what could be. It isn't realized.


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

I'll take all of your stuff when you go.

There's mores stuff on the Nurien site, if you can read Korean you can probably login to the world.

Unquestionably. The opening scene of the demo is the 3dblasphemy video, produced several years ago.

Not sure about the "oops, this video wasn't supposed to be online for 3 hours" but whatever. Otoy is supposedly very low polygon stuff as well, so none of this adds up.

The presentation is interestingly similar to Philip Rosedale's approach to presenting Second Life to various audiences. I guess the big difference is what Philip is presenting is real, and here today.

Ya, I read about that. It does seem very much a "too good to be true" sorta thing. The detail is so rich, and the lighting is amazing. Many of the promises made by it seem unattainable. I noticed that we did not see, for example, the interiors on those opening buildings when we were being told they have all their rooms inside. That woulda been a big, big shot.



Oh ya. We're too that point where people have seen SL, have seen the shortcomings, an wanna do it one better.

"I'll believe shit when I see shit."
Bernie Mac

Nothing wromg with dreaming. SL was once just a dream after all. And nothing wrong with giving a little heat to the Providers. Can't say I'd be interested in it on my cell phone, I can barely see the numbers when I make a call, and how powerful a machine would something like that need to run on a pc?

*BTW, I can't find my cell phone. If someone finds it, give me a call.

Possibbly true but as far as Graphics engines go it's interesting how hard card like 8800's seem to work to run SL in high quality mode then when we compare what we see for that to other games available, you start to think the SL graphics software is like an old 70's car engine with a big loud exhaust shoved on it an some pretty plastic looking engine covers. While the opposition are using Formula 1 technology. To go faster with smaller Hi tech engines more efficiently.
Doesn't it slow us down to reload textures and objects like floors and walls we only loaded yesterday? When hell storing a hundred or so default textures on our hard drives as we saw them in world, might cover 50% of what we keep reloading now. Especially if people were encouraged to use the default red brick wall texture instead of adding a new one to the data base anf spent the bandwidth on important things like movement and custom textures/animations.
Yes SL has best content creation still for scripting, etc, but if the people buying cool looks all head to other worlds like this because we are offering black & white TV, then creators are left with only other creators and more reason for customers to say "I'm not putting cash inworld to pay $100L for that shirt"

I found your cell phone and have your number now, but every time I use it to ring you, it says user engaged?