Bruce Dell is the brain behind Euclideon, the Australian start-up that has been in and out of the news for many years now with updates on their Unlimited Detail technology, a technology which uses a point search algorithm to produce stunning computer graphics at a fraction of the system resource cost of the current polygon system that is hegemonic to computing worldwide. It’s revolutionary stuff, although critics say it’s only potentially revolutionary and really harsh critics even say it’s a hoax! Most recently, the company released a video titled Euclideon SOLIDSCAN – Capture Reality. The video shows footage of the real world scanned using their SOLIDSCAN technology and then reproduced. It’s enticing to think what game developers, building construction and other industries can do with this technology. But not everyone’s convinced and there is a pattern to the questions and comments being posted on YouTube, social media and forums. So, Bruce Dell has kindly agreed to answer some of those common questions …

Johnny Gatt: Hi Bruce thanks for joining us. Can you tell us a bit about Euclideon?

Bruce Dell: Sure, thanks for having me, Euclideon is an Australian company that is trying to rebuild every part of 3D graphics in a better way. Most graphics we use in the world today are made of polygons, which are like little flat pieces of cardboard. This system is very limited and it’s not very good at doing certain tasks. We are making 3D graphics out of little xyz atoms instead, this allows us to make graphics that are much better and a lot more like the real world.

Johnny Gatt: A lot of people say your system can’t do animation, what’s your response to this?

Bruce Dell: When a company says it’s going to rebuild all of graphics that’s a really big task. Remember the existing polygon graphics system is 20 years work from thousands of people, we are only a team of 30 yet we are trying to rebuild the whole thing from the ground up. The reason people say we can’t do animation is because we haven’t shown any animation, and the reason we haven’t shown any is because we don’t show things until they are finished otherwise people always criticise the elements that aren’t yet complete. Animation is working at 80% and we will be releasing two games next year.

Johnny Gatt: This is an image of a tiger animation that bruce has shown me under NDA, but with permission to post this screenshot. The animation not only shows a very fluid moving creature but also fully demonstrates lighting and shadows and everything else people have been demanding that Euclideon demonstrate. The model was actually built out of Blu Tack. This allows them to properly scan in natural stretches and movements between joints without the model falling apart. This is amazing news for sculptors and artists whose talents will still be highly sought after in future gaming. When you look at the Star Wars series of movies, everyone agrees that the Empire Strikes back Yoda was far better than Yoda in Episode 1 which was computer generated and not scuplted. If you are able to take that natural looking artistry, then scan it and then animate it, we’re in for a real treat.

Johnny Gatt: Can you tell us what platforms the games will be on?

Bruce Dell: So I’ve checked regarding what I can and can’t say and apparently I can say two things. The first is they will be released on a new hardware platform that comes out in 2015, and the second thing is it’s not Oculus Rift but it is fully 3D.

Johnny Gatt: Can you tell us the genres?

Bruce Dell: Yes the first is an adventure game with a sword, solid scan forests, and a lot of alien type monsters. The second is a cute, clay scanned adventure where you ride giraffes. Can’t say more than that I’m afraid.

Johnny Gatt: Your latest video shows a way of copying the real world into computers, how does this work?

Bruce Dell: If you have ever seen laser scanned data before, it looks like a cloud of little points with lots of holes. We worked on a way to seal up all the holes and re-blend the colours according to the different angles.

Johnny Gatt: Having the ability to make 3D copies of real world environments is pretty useful technology that opens up a lot of new markets. Why do you think no one has created this before?

Bruce Dell: As difficult as it is to do it right, the bigger problem is it makes so much data, far more than a computer can display or load in to RAM if you are using polygons. There is an inferior system called polygon meshing out there that runs great with flat walls, but it doesn’t know what to do with plants or grass and it murders the model afterwards by down scaling the detail to what a computer can handle. It’s great for single objects but can’t do full environments, forests or cities that is why we built this better technology. Basically if you aren’t using unlimited voxels ( little floating computer atoms) then you can’t copy the complexity of the real world.

Johnny Gatt: Two years ago you brought out a video that showed an island where even the dirt on the ground was made of voxels. At the time a lot of people said the video was a hoax. It seems pretty clear now that the technology is real as you’ve been selling it in the Geospatial industry for the last year can you tell us who is using it?

Bruce Dell: Some very big companies have licensed the right to use our technology but we are under NDA so only they can make the announcement, apart from that we have our geoverse product that a lot of railroads, governments and construction companies now use to manage multi-terabyte laser scans.

Johnny Gatt: Among the objectors one of the most vocal was “Notch” Markus Persson the creator of Minecraft. He said that your technology was a scam, you were lying and you were a snake oil sales man. Now that the technology has progressed to the next stage of being able to copy the real world, do you have anything to say to him?

Bruce Dell: Notch might have been strong in his language but he wasn’t wrong for doubting our claims. If Minecraft suddenly announced they would make their islands down to the grains of dirt and scan in their graphics from the real world, I would have said exactly the same thing about him, as these really are very big claims. He states very correctly that it must be impossible because if it was real it would use terabytes of data and take an unusable amount of time to load. Whilst his calculations are a bit off, he still is right about the problems he points out, that’s why last year we released our new technology that streams straight from the hard-drive or from an external server. Basically loading is gone for us and memory size virtually doesn’t apply either. RAM is expensive, hard-drive space is cheap ($40AUD a terabyte) if you run straight from your hard-drive you have about a thousand times more memory to play with and that’s why we can copy the real world and run it on laptops.

Johnny Gatt: Do you think he should apologise?

Bruce Dell: No. Notch is no fool he left plenty of room in his posts for the fact that this could be real and he would love for it to be so but the numbers just don’t add up. I don’t think “Notch is wrong” and needs to drop ten honour points, he might not like the way we market but I’m sure he cares about technology just as much as we do and he doesn’t mind who makes it better. His issue was he won’t tolerate the public being deceived and that is as he interpreted the situation at the time. I don’t normally care too much for the bible but there is a proverb I like, it says “Correct a fool and he will hate you, correct a wise man he will love you”. I think Notch is more of the latter then the former.

Thank you Bruce for your time.

And some 2k shots from the video :