[alexscheelmeyer]

Regarding the technology used. In this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWujsO2V2IA you can see lots of artifacts and also talk of point cloud data, so it is clearly not raytracing but rather point data rendering. All the repetition seen is because of the memory constraints. The point data is probably preprocessed and compressed in numerous ways, which makes it very difficult to do animations. But as others have mentioned, even as a last resort they should be able to just use this technology to render terrain/background and then use polygons for moving/animated objects. This would probably also utilized current technology better as the polygon pipeline would not just sit there unused.