The “Break it Down” Blog

Grant Gochnauer sends in news to a video that blows my goddamn mind, I’m honestly not sure what to make of this. Either it’s an extreme mockup, or the graphical/interactive/virtual-world bar that exists today is about to get broken in half and shoved right up someone’s ass.

The video below is supposedly an unauthorized leak of a sneak-peak video of an upcoming virtual world product called City Space. The only tidbits known about the product right now is that:

• It runs in the browser (or “from a phone”) with “no plugins or downloads” — I have absolutely no idea how.
• It uses the OTOY 3D rendering engine
• The video was originally posted to LivePlace.com, which has a WHOIS entry for Brad Greenspan, one of the co-founders of MySpace.

Take a look:

What do you even say to that? The level of realism and detail in the scenes is out of this world, the fact that it’s all “rendered server side” and then apparently delivered to browsers of any kind, even mobile ones makes me think that it has to use some JavaScript based library and just relies on delivering basic images to the client in series?

I’m guessing that’s not the right answer because how could that possible deliver the individual frames fast enough to provide the experience demonstrated in this example? The other thing I don’t understand is regardless of the “rendering on the server”, how could the server be scalable enough to render every single person’s individual perspective in real-time and deliver it to them?

I’m really baffled by all this… but the one thing I do know, is that someone else, again, is doing Sony Home better than Sony (ohhhh burn).
Thanks TechCrunch!