Great, now even the Crips and the Bloods are outsourcing.

There was a bird like this who used to harass my cat. He tolerated it for months. Then one day, it swooped down at him to do its usual crap and bam, he plucked it out of the air and murdered it on the spot. Good times.

That was great. It was worth sitting through his shitty rap for the ending.

I remember this episode of GI Joe!

In other news, the sky is blue!

A lot of the assumptions being made here seem to miss the point that this rendering is based on ray tracing, that it is server side, that all that is being streamed is video (thus negating needs for a hefty client, if you can watch youtube on it you can "play" this virtual world on it), and that there are definitely some tricks you can pull based on all of this to make it less problematic than many of you think.

They're raytracing, which means to render a given scene (say, the bar) for one user costs a certain amount, but to add other viewpoints doesn't cost much more, as all you're doing is adding points of view. The scene itself is already being drawn from multiple angles because you have to to bounce the rays properly, so if you're rendering a chair, for example, it doesn't cost much more to output two POV than it does one.

In this way, what you have is a situation where you're rendering the world for 1+n users, where n is the number of extra people who are interacting in a given frame of reference with each other.

Add on top, this is obviously a prototype, probably intended to help generate buzz and/or investment capital, and you have what we see here. Its an interesting idea and while I don't think we've seen the end of client based rendering, nor will we for a very long time, this could end up being very popular for a certain niche of virtual world or augmented reality applications.

It's also possible I'm wrong.