I spent my time listening to the lecture while in Cloud Party.
While computers for some time have had the ability to render a high quality image, it was not until very recently that home computers actually had the ability to render such images in real time. If you had an image and just left the computer to do what it needed to, eventually the image would render, but recently most home computers can not only render high quality images, but they can do it quickly and in real time so that users can do things like enter virtual worlds and play games on them. We heard about Moore's Law, which essentially means that computers have processing speeds twice as fast every 18 months and that GPU's progress at double that rate--which particularly can be attributed to the gaming industry. Now virtual worlds like the one's we've been using can be used on the average computer and render relatively high quality graphics well.
