ATOMONTAGE today announced that they're officially a company, and that they're looking to leapfrog graphics rendering by doing away with regular polygon-based graphics. The idea isn't new - some have tried it before, and we've even seen this technology being used in no other than No Man's Sky to some success.

However, there have been some technical hurdles that needed to be dealt with (mainly data management concerns, alongside rigid-body physics, soft-body deformations, standard PBR shaders, and efficient playback of multiple volumetric video streams). It appears that ATOMONTAGE now feels they've been able to bring the technology to a level that's enough to do actual development with, using today's powerful graphics processing units.The difference between voxels and the usual polygon-based graphics is as night and day: polygons are basically 2D representations (usually triangles) that are affixed on a mesh-like construct that keeps them in place - it's a hollow graphics world out there, folks, lacking substance and actual volume. Voxels, on the other hand, are known as volume pixels - these actually represent occupied space, and do away with the need for meshes. They can actually be connected without them, and without falling apart, since they're all volumetric solutions that behave as they should. The idea, then, is to put up an amount of voxels in space, and then carve the needed graphics from them, chiseling the finer details that should be rendered.ATOMONTAGE says they've put some 15 years of R&D behind their voxel technology, which has been mostly helmed by Co-founder, CEO and CTO Branislav Siles. Their mission, as their page states it, is to induce "(...) an inevitable paradigm shift in interactive computer simulation and graphics, which allows us to build massively shared and immersive worlds. There, millions of people will work, play, and enjoy each others' unrestrained creative output." We've seen this being said before, and being used - in somewhat less than perfect ways - by some games before (Media Molecule's Dreams and the aforementioned No Man's Sky being two of the most recent iterations, and one needs only look at the images to see that there really does seem to be some more substance to the graphics, some more weight).We'll be here to see - and maybe touch - these voxel-based worlds, be it in AR, VR, or good-old 3D rendering, when, and if they come to fruition.