Voxels?

I was browsing the superinformation highway, and found something about voxels, (specifically, the voxlap library, written in C). I've learned that voxels lost the war against polygons, and now we all are stuck to them, and to silly clipping problems

But voxels are a pretty cool guy, they can represent real objects and even mechanisms with various resolutions using voxels as 'atoms', and they are not afraid of systems without 3d acceleration.

So, /prog/, tell me, in your opinion, why are voxels so ignored, and what could be the practical application that will make them a 'mainstream' technology?

In case you dont know shit about what i'm talking about, watch these

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjmRPjnWJ5g
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zl9CiGJiZuc

15 March 2011

Dear Supporters,

We’ve been more secretive then a bunch of ninjas lately and subsequently we have received many emails asking for updates and in some cases confirmation of life.  Please know that all is well and work is progressing very nicely.  We’ve been hiring a few new people to work on tools and polygon conversion and work here progresses smoothly and according to schedule.  Polygon to voxel conversion is still young but is working as expected.

(A simple polygon object, converted to Unlimited Detail)

At completion we will be able to import objects straight from CGI movies directly in to games, which will be quite an improvement over the current system of having to rebuild them all by hand.

Polygon conversion is important to our customers as most artists have been trained in such programs as 3DS Max and Maya and we feel it will be best for everyone if we can make our technology fully compatible with what exists so that no retraining is required.  No retraining does not mean that there won’t be big changes. Artists of 3D graphics will no longer have a “Polygon Budget” they are completely free to make whatever they want with as much detail as possible. 

 We are often asked if the work is encountering any sort of problems. Whilst the engine is working fine and tools are progressing very well, we do have a small dilemma in that we wonder where we can find any content that is worthy of the technologies abilities. What I mean is : where do we get polygon trees that have as much detail as the real world ?, were do we acquire realistic polygon objects ? People have not been this free before so there was not any reason to create such objects with massive levels of detail. If anyone can assist with directing us to some immensely high detailed 3d models we would be most grateful.

As for demos we still can’t give any release date but we are working as hard as we can and we hope we will soon have something that we can humbly submit to the approval of the public and hope that our efforts have been well pleasing to you all.

Once again thank you all for your support.

      Kindest Regards

               Bruce Robert Dell