Well, after watching the industry for a couple decades now what I can tell you about stuff like this (based just on my personal experience and opinion) is that if something truly is revolutionary *and* feasible on current hardware, operating systems, etc, etc. *and* can be done affordably, etc. then... it will probably be made available, OR at least bought/used by some large company.
It's not that common for really great, practical technology to just disappear. The main situation that happens in is when a big company buys a smaller one for their tech, their staff, or whatever, and then either kills the product(s), or stops updating them, or that sort of thing. This is sort of what seems to have happened with Nik Software and Google, who bought them a couple years ago. Google was only interested in the Nik technology for use in Google's online photo systems, but many people relied on Nik's plugins for Lightroom, Photoshop, etc. which now have not seen updates for at least a year. Quite frustrating.
Anyway my point is that when we see demos of cool tech, it may well be really capable of that, but it may also be *only* capable of that, or a highly limited set of scenarios. There are almost always caveats, gotchas, stringent requirements, etc. So they've got a fully animated character working in a raytraced environment in realtime, cool! Did the model require any special preprocessing or conversion? Are there any limitations on geometry density, texture size or format, etc? How about scene size? What about interactivity (besides changing lighting)? How far from an actual, interactive game is this?
Also, it's very uncommon for one person or company to achieve something truly new without it being achieved in a similar, comparable, or otherwise competitive fashion by another company within, say, a year. That's just the way competition incentives work. It does happen of course that something may be really unique for a while, but it's certainly the exception rather than the rule.
Long story short: if you never get access to it, best to assume it wasn't as good as you thought/hoped it was anyway.
- Oshyan
