Is there any relation between this class of rendering techniques and the way the BD scenes in Cyberpunk 2077 were created? The behavior of the volume and the "voxels" seem eerily similar.
I doubt Cyberpunk uses more than a special shader for the BD sequences, but what’s a lot more remarkable to me is how similar the idea is at heart. Maybe we’re actually going to see this (maybe sans the brain-implant to record them, but hey) after all. Amazing technology, that’s for sure.
It's a sort of replayable cutscene that happens a couple times in the game where you can wander through it. The noteworthy bit is it's rendered out of voxels that look very similar to the demos but at a much lower resolution and if you push the frustrum into any objects, you get the same kind of effect where the surface breaks into blocks.
Interesting effect. It does look very voxel-y. I'm not a video game developer at heart, so I can only guess how it was implemented. I doubt NeRF models were involved, but I wouldn't be surprised if some sort of voxel discretization was.
If you think about how they created this from the POV of the game creation pipeline, then that probably is the way. If this is done by creating a shader on top of "plain old" 3D assets, then aside from the programmers/artists involved with creating that shader everyone else can go about their business with minimal retraining. There probably was a lot of content to create, to that optimization likely took priority over other methods of implementing this effect.