OK watched it now.
From what I can tell they are using
voxels plus procedural generation. Neither is anywhere near new.
There is also a lot of trickery going on in that vid that isn't easy to spot for someone who hasn't programmed gfx.
Take this shot.
Notice the distinctive pattern in which the objects are arranged. Thats a fractal pattern. Very cool for unlimited detail, but not useful to an artist since it does only that pattern. Notice also that the objects are all the same. Effectively this means that the GFX stack can just "copy paste" them. That means you get many many times higher FPS counts than you usually would...unless you actually try to use it to render something that isn't all the same (which you kinda would in a game & they haven't done).
Next look at their claims: "Unlimited detail"...and then they proceed to
quantify the detail in kilometers & mm. Unlimited is by definition not quantified.
The mention of kilometers is a bad sign in itself, because in a digital world it is meaningless since scale is arbitrarily chosen. i.e. It will only fool people who don't know whats going on.
Look at this pic of their island. Look specifically at the reflection of the sky in the sea. That effective is created by adding a semi transparent water layer & positioning a skybox image behind it. Which is *exactly* the technique they just mocked the other developers for using (static cardboard image in the distance). Notice also that the palms are all exactly the same, which again creates the illusion of performance that isn't really there (copy paste).
They have also copped out of one crucial issue: "We are a tech company, not a game company". They used this to justify that the artistic side isn't 100% yet. Exactly that is the crucial issue. You see not only do big game dev have to stick to polygon budget, but they also have limited artistic time & artistic resources per each object that the artist has to design. You can easily get to a passable looking world with procedural technique, but you quickly hit a wall with it...a very solid wall. Look at the (vertical) sides of the island in the 2nd pic I posted. See how it repeats? Exactly the same can be achieved with a simple single texture (and add
mip mapping for zoom). Same thing for the rock. Their one scanned rock is very nice...but how are you going to create 20 entire levels? Scan 1 million rocks & plants etc? See how they haven't really solved the artistics problem.
In summary: It is an impressive tech demo, but they layered a ridiculous layer of deception and unrealistic claims on top of it. They present it as new technology (its not) and claim to have solve problems they haven't actually solved. Nor have they actually shown that it is feasible to build a game environment comparable to modern games with this tech (they are perhaps 80% there, but it gets progressively more difficult the closer you get.
In fact, minecraft is 20 steps ahead of them. They've got a fully destructible, moving & commercially profitable voxel based game. Hell I think they even use procedural generation too.
