Fair enough... kerkythea is a newer, Maxwell style renderer, so it's quite possible they are doing something with AO i don't understand properly. I also seem to recall some paper by pixar where they were working on fast AO by using point clouds. Perhaps this is an example of that tech ?

In any case I still think it's not gonna be so easy in firefly. Wouldn't mind being proven wrong of course as it is a PITA issue.