This one really doesn't.

Those of you who haven't played World of Warcraft, or at least slogged through Second Life, may have found Rattner's speech interesting. Unfortunately, to anyone else, it came off as "Intel R&D discovers Second Life." While the focus of the speech was on hunting for the "3D Web", the majority of the speech focused on dissecting what makes things like WoW and SL work: presentation, user content, persistence, social interaction, and modeling/physics.

Here's what Rattner himself said was the real takeaway: "The key difference is that now it is technologically possible to do this [create a 3D Web]; it is socially acceptable to do this, and it is culturally appropriate to do this." Rattner mentioned cultures like those of China and Korea, where people are (ahem) dying to play. (My comment, not his.)

The speech took an upturn when Rattner moved into what he called "paraverses," such as virtual worlds, to perform real-world applications. In a recorded video of virtual surgery by a Dr. Cutting (yes, really), a virtual demonstration of a how-to for repairing a cleft palate was presented. The next step, as an additional demo showed, would be to actually model the skin (with elasticity and tensile strength), muscles, and virtual sutures, so as to train the surgeon via a simulated operation. That, in my mind, was a much more practical application of what Rattner was talking about. Computationally intensive, too, which benefits Intel as well.

Rattner went on to postulate that this simulation could be used to enhance existing virtual spaces, so that interactions between avatars and virtual objects would need to be modelednd interpreted by the virtual browser. (The assumption is that there is a 3D space that could either be hosted or user-created.)

This all could require a hundredfold more computational power both on the server and the client than is currently being used. Of that, about 20 times more graphics power will be needed, he said. The key there is apparently going to be ray tracing, where the actual photons of light are modeled to give the scene more of a realistic appearance.