What can’t the “Cloud” do?
Last week I saw an announcment about a product that will essentially move your gaming experience into the 'cloud'. A company, onLive , is currently working on a piece of hardware that you will use to connect to their remote service via the internet. This will allow you to play various games and from what I can tell these include some of the newest most resource demanding titles.
At first thought this is a great idea and kind of the next step in the future of gaming. Or is it? There are a lot of factors that go into making this thing work well and the obvious two are is bandwidth and latency. Playing today's online multiplayer games you can stand to work with around 200ms of latency because there is usually netcode that helps to account for it. With this system they are proposing I would assume any latency would be catastrophic (not in a world ending way of course) to the playability of the game itself. Unless the system in the cloud is accounting for a delay of say 200ms then you are always going to be a step behind the real time action.
I am curious as to what protocol they will be using (guessing in house developed since they have been working on it for over 5 years) and how it will compare to some of the things from Citrix (HDX), Teradici (PCoverIP), etc. I know they are obviously playing in different spaces but in the end it all comes down to SBC (in most cases). Based on some things I've read the requirements are moderately steep to play smoothly. What I'm wondering is if this new technology applied to the business/enterprise world would actually translate into better performance for multimedia? Games are going to be, for the most part, more demanding in the screen refreshes and the dependancy on latency greater. If they can get HD quality running over the internet smoothly I wonder what their technology would do to get basic windows apps and/or multimedia to the end user.
I'm not one to buy into most of the current 'cloud is the answer' hype that has been going around since last year but this implementation may be one to watch.
"What can't the cloud do?" Right now it can't make me a sandwich...I'm hungry.