John Carmcack was talking about something similar to this, and i'm pretty sure he's pushing graphic tech companies to have similar technology
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Id_Tech_6and holy **** i just watched the explanation on how it works...and the sound of it is you couldn't do much in the way of real time lighting or animation, but this would revolutionize draw distance at least. The other thing is...that is all running in software..i wonder how much processing power it takes to search through a point cloud for 345,600 pixels
thinking about this technology..its genius, and kinda stupid they didn't come up with it sooner.
how would Wii do it? Well I don't know the actual specs of the Wii, but I do know the actual specs of the gamecube. The gamecube can do 20 million polygons a second which is 337,500 triangles a frame at 60 FPS. Now games today are made out of polygons, but the type of polygon of choise is a trangle. triangles can be bent and stretched on all three points in every which way, but polygons have a limitation in that you need to load three points into memory each with their own x,y,z coordinant, because of this you can't sift through a file to process it, you have to load the whole file into the system and then process the information. With this point cloud technology you only have to load a portion of a file at a time and process it and thats where the power leap occurs. Normally, when processing polygons you have a lot of unused memory that you can't see. This eliminates that for a super efficiency boost, however files will be HUGE, and unless there is a lot of ram then things will constantly stream off the disc, which may cause your disc drive to fail.
oh and Nurbs? Well actually you could manipulate the point cloud data in real time with some nurbs calculations, but you would probably need a whole new co-processor for that. Interesting time we live in though. Oh, and combine this with
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallax_mappingand we should have realtime shrek processing machines by 2012