What textures? With a purely voxel world, you do not have textures. It also wouldn't be a very efficient way to stream either, as generating a procedural texture/model is fairly processor intensive. For stream you want fast access to data, generating data on the fly is the opposite of that. IMO it seems like you're just…
As far as I know, and when sifting through their BS, that is exactly what they're doing, data is contained on a central computer, and streamed to the user.
No, it's not just the compression that takes a long time, yeah you do that before you ship. But you have to decompress it as you stream the level in and that'll still take a freakin long time for so much data.
If I were them, I'd have built a server side solution for handling a really high octane, high detail scan for use in something like arch-viz, and the software to funnel the rendered image down the web streamed as a web application. That kind of thing is viable.
Rexm you are still stuck on the "it only renders the pixels on the screen, hence there is no limit on scene complexity and unique data". I am not sure you have real industry experience with things like cache, ram, streaming and diskspace and how this data travels from one to the next.
And Carmack's been talking about this tech years ago anyway. He's done serious research and development, went even further than this guy - instead of instancing everything he looked into data compression and fast streaming from storage to build a unique world. They've probably had their reasons to stick with polygons for…
Also, you can't keep the data compressed in memory because there's no hardware support to address it and use it. Runtime memory issues can be overcome with a streaming system. Again Olick's paper has info on this one so we have a point of reference. Although I do remember it wasn't 100% perfect, there were some issues with…