The demoscene is a subculture of computer art that specialises in creating non-interactive audiovisual content to certain set limits. This bit of art, called ‘Elevated’, is an example of the ‘intros’ subcategory, which limits programmers to either 64kb or 4kb file sizes. The above example is 4k.

Watch that video again, and consider that everything – music, landscape and lighting – fits into 4,000 bytes – the equivalent of 800 average english words. That’s *nothing*. That’s less than nothing!

But it’d be difficult for this tech to be integrated into games because it’s so compressed – although file sizes would get smaller, load times would increase massively. In tech, processor speeds are considerably more limited than storage, so for the moment expect this to stay a tiny subculture.

If you want to check it out for yourself, then you can download the file from Pouet, but you’ll need a pretty impressive graphics card to do it justice – it probably won’t work too well on your office PC. Expect to see a black screen for a few mins while it loads, too.

Elevated (via RPS)