Brilliant! My company had a short spell in the very early 90's where we dabbled in 3D product visualization for clients with 3D Studio on DOS. At the time we were writing add-ons and engineering tools for Autodesk products and exploring other fields we could use our talents. While it never went that far for us commercially I still love to follow how the 3D modeling world has transformed since then. From 2-3 hour renders to 60 FPS today on MUCH more complex models... demos like this still get me excited.
Following the details link on youtube yields what wtracy found. Looking around the site, I managed to dig this [0] up, which, judging by the filename, will be used in their Siggraph talk. Unfortunately, it is still very brief and doesn't expand much on the preview. Here's [1] the paper that it references, which does give more detail about voxel rendering.
Though I haven't looked very much into the techniques in voxel rendering, it seems animation, to this point, has been only a theoretical possibility and a huge setback. That Crassin et al. can achieve a reasonable framerate on such complex scenes struck me as a very big achievement. We'll probably have to wait a few more months for more details, though.
The information given is so utterly vague that I could be completely wrong, but: As far as I can tell, all their geometry is still polygon based. (I saw a few references to polygon counts in the video.) I believe that it is the lighting that is volumetric.
If I understand correctly, they use both in parallel: low resolution, animated voxels for the light map, and high resolution, detailed rasterized polygons for the final rendering pass.
