John Carmack and the Future of Graphics

I stumbled upon an interesting article/podcast located at http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=411#carmack in which John Carmack talks about the future of game graphics. For those who don't know who John Carmack is (shame on you) he is the person who wrote the Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, and Quake game engines. A quick summary is that John thinks that the future of graphics are going to be voxel based using a compressed data structure he is calling a sparse voxel octree. Voxels are essentially 3D pixels with the word being derrived from volume pixel. Voxels are used in many scientific and medical applications but tend to be slow and very memory hungry.