Yes, that was my conclusion also.
Sounds both great and unfeasible, for different reasons. There's not much that can be said about it at this stage, given that they're not disclosing what they're actually doing.
Voxelisation has been used for many decades - there's nothing special about it, it's used for various purposes, particularly in multi-resolution shape analysis, and for array indexing for efficient fast search algorithms. Ultimately, in this context, it's just a different representation of the same data. If you tried to create the same level of detail with polygons, graphics cards simply wouldn't be able to cope. Basically, it takes graphics
processing away from being a bottleneck when wanting to get ridiculous detail. Sounds great, doesn't it?!
The problem is that you've still got to:
- draw it - imagine the amount of time artists would have to spend to map out a world in that level of detail! The only way you could get around it is by having an awful lot of re-used stuff.
- store it - rather than processing, I can imagine that storage would become the real bottleneck! Imagine having to store all of those data particles! For a whole game world, that sounds completely unfeasible. Again, the only way to do it would be to be reusing stuff over and over again. That's probably why their demos look so repetitive, being created from only few unique objects.
The claim of "unlimited graphics power" is true in the sense of processing being relatively independent of detail level. However, that doesn't mean that you can necessarily represent the game world in such detail, and subsequently store it.
It would be interesting to know what they're doing to overcome these problems. Surely they will have to have a limited number of unique "structures", with game worlds being defined by a set "arrangement" of such structure objects... note how in this context "structures" and "arrangement" feels a little bit like a generalisation of "textures" and "polygons"...
Maybe fast large storage volumes could form part of their game-plan, when they're talking about the technology being potentially feasible in the near future...
As for animations... that would require a bit more thought. I certainly wouldn't say that it's impossible... just that the solution isn't immediately obvious.