Better Reality, a polish company, has developed a technology called Thorskan that allows to scan an environment in 3D and convert it to a 3D model. The result is rather impressive and the following videos show a realtime 3D scene created with the Thorskan engine:
The Thorskan engine should be used in some upcoming video games…
This will work really well for Id tech 5 like engines, but anything with realtime lighting or dynamic things wont work well at all.
This seems great for a demo, but we are not ready for a terabyte game yet :). Most people even disliked Rage with its “tiny” 30GB.
But it’s a good idea… instead of spending months/years in modelling complex worlds, you just scan and take existing ones
And here is the game using this tech!
http://uk.ign.com/articles/2014/01/08/get-even-where-next-gen-shooting-meets-dark-souls
It does look very good but like roboman said there are a few issues when it comes to use it in video games (for now):
Everything is baked and image based, so if one wants to change the lighting he’s gonna have a bad time.
The only material used in this demo seems to be lambertian so no nice specular reflections and stuff.
The geometry is fixed, so just removing a brick from the floor, or moving a door one meter to the left might be quite annoying.
Although I think this kind of tech could be very useful to scan small objects with high fidelity (BRDF sampling and all) and then use them in an engine!
Userul for crimescene investigators…