Real time rendering, server side

Apparently the video above is an example of the realtime rendering, at the server, then streamed down to a Treo 700 at 240kbps. WOW. There is some discrepancy regarding where this video came from and how much of it is actually from a real test, but still, if even some of it is... The game just changed. What's more is that they company that is working on this, OTOY, has commented on the video and said,

The 14 mins of real time rendering in this material is streaming live to a Treo 700 at 240 kpbs. This was captured on March 2007, the server was running an ATI RX 1900 GPU. The tech has improved massively since then (as has the HW we now run on). There was never intention to show any part of this to the public until we could include voxel rendering and Lightstage based characters. I think anyone who liked what they saw, will find the final project much more impressive.

Again, wow. So that would potentially mean that your computer could no longer be relevant to the quality of the graphics. Although in reality I think this will never happen, because if 100 people are using the environment, that would mean 100 renderings happening at the same time. Hell, doing just 1 taxes the hell out of a computer, so I am not sure that there will be an advantage for at least quite a while. However, at the mobile level, the resolution does not need to be as high, nor the framerate, so I could see potentially a few dozen users being rendered on a single beefy machine.

Sign me up, i wanna play in virtual worlds on my iPhone. lol.