Fusion Render Cloud

Catching up with post - CES comments, my attention has been captured recently by the press release from AMD, referring to the peta-flop supercomputer project powered by 1000 (one thousand) ATI Radeon GPUs and running... surprise surprise... the OTOY software. OTOY has been mentioned here a few times. I was the lucky one to attend two sessions by Jules Urbach (2007 and 2008) and they were just blowing the audience away... When Jules was presenting his real time rendering software, there was complete silence in the room with an occasional sound of people picking their jaws from the floor... Jules has been promising us the render cloud for some time. Algorithms constructing the virtual reality that is undistinguishabe from real reality running on massive server farms and client computers running just a tiny layer of client software to display the rendered VR.

There is a short interview with Jules on the AMD site (http://www.amd.com/us/fusion/Pages/otoy.aspx). In the background you may notice some scenes from virtual worlds synthetized by Jules. This stuff is at least one year old, so you may only try to imagine where they are now... And where they will be in six months, when the Fusion Cloud is ready. To get some more glimpse of where all this is heading, I recommend watching the CES session by Dirm Meyer, the CEO of AMD (http://www.mogulus.com/amdunprocessed). Even more interesting are the envisioned scenarios of fused gaming and cinematics that will be coming soon. Moving the rendering process to the cloud means the output becomes virtually platform independent, so synthetized VR can be presented on anything, starting from cell phones and ending on large cinema displays, likely with 3D. High end gaming without the need to install and run locally any significan software. That will redefine gaming and virtual worlds. Is this the last frontier to disappear in the cloud?