haha! I must admit I take a little pleasure in hearing this. I’ve only ever been a game developer, and tech demos have always annoyed me a bit with their ‘look how easy it is to make this tiny scene with limited interactivity look good!’ Wolfgang Engel says something like ‘be extra careful of techniques that haven’t actually shipped in a game’, which applies perfectly to tech demos.

The underlying technique described in that paper is not different than many of the other SSAO techniques. While I’ve often griped about the merits of “SSAO” techniques, someone said to me, “You know.. for disliking SSAO you sure do read a lot of papers about it.” The fact is that this family of techniques serves a purpose and adds something interesting to real-time applications. It may not be strictly ambient occlusion and may end up looking like a low-passed edge filter in many implementations .. but it’s got the name SSAO now and there’s no point in bickering about terminology I thought Megan Fox had it right when she called her implementation “Crease Shading”.