Here are thousands of them being displayed on an ordinary laptop, using only one core, no special 3D graphics hardware is being used, and it all runs in real-time.
Sounds like a voxel (basically a 3D pixel, or a point) rendering engine. I think I've seen a presentation from NVidia that detailed research into "unlimited detail voxel based rendering techniques" a while ago that outlines basic problems with this approach, namely that models require large amounts of memory and that animation essentially means cloning the same voxels in memory each and every frame. (so essentially, too much memory usage)
Now point-clouds may help by serializing voxel points in some probabilistic structure, but it is still much too memory intensive to recreate large areas with unique objects. For example, notice how the virtual world within the demo looks like everything is just repeated over and over again? This is because it's unfeasible to have completely different models covering the entirety of their game world as that would bloat the memory usage to well over hundreds of terabytes, something that our consumer PCs just doesn't have the luxury of.
Anyways, it's a neat technology but it's in no way original and it doesn't really seem like they've ironed out any of the main problems plaguing these types of rendering technique. More than anything, they've only demonstrated that polygonal techniques can also be used within a voxel engine.
This is truly next generation gaming, I'm more concerned about how these atoms are stored and hope they're compressing it in some smart way to eliminate high latency, and slowness in general.
Here are thousands of them being displayed on an ordinary laptop, using only one core, no special 3D graphics hardware is being used, and it all runs in real-time.
Yeah that's only displaying, still forgetting if this were in game.
Now i wonder how many minecraft haters will come and say what 'Notch is gay! He dont know anything about this engine' and blah-blah-blah.
but his argue about ammount of HDD needed is really convincing.