The Great Kulu: Technology Demo

Technology makes tremendous progress year after year, which is especially visible in the computer world, where everything basically doubles in power every other four or five years. Graphics engines have come a long way as well, since it can be rather amazing to see the difference between how video games look liked in 2005 and how they look now, what with the DirectX 11 bling and all.

NVIDIA could not pass the chance to show off their latest achievements and they have thrown together a short tech demo in order to amaze us with the capabilities of their trademark PhysX engine. The Great Kulu is actually a small experiment that aims to showcase the soft body simulation techniques employed by their latest software and GPUs, although it is fully interactive and you can admire it in real time, sort of like a video game.

To better illustrate the progress, a big, gelatinous creature is used to portray the soft body simulation technology, which looks like a cross between a mole and Cthulhu. The demo starts innocently enough, with the abomination safely trapped into a force field and you running some tests on it, by tickling it with some sort of taser, for whatever scientific reason. Naturally, the force field fails and you have to run as fast as you can, to avoid being dragged into oblivion.

Running is the last thing you would want to do, on the other hand, since you wouldn't be able to watch the octo-mole slowly make its way through a narrow corridor. The soft body simulation is indeed mesmerizing, given the fact that the creature emulates the slimy movements of a snail in a very believable manner.

The graphics are also very good and the small environment created for the demo is packed with detail and high-resolution textures. Although you do not get to see much, other than a few classic sci-fi corridors and the gooey slime itself, there is another room toward the end of the demo in which you can find some sort of cocoons, which are also very soft and they pulsate whenever you use the tickle gun on them.

As you probably expect, the real-time simulation of a soft-body this size takes its toll on the machine, even when the environment is very narrow and there isn't much of anything else happening on the screen. However, the prospects are great and a lot of interesting things can spawn out of this technology, although most of them would be quite frightening.