The official site is here, Perry’s blog post (with video) about it is here.
A snippet from the blog:
(4) This server is not hosted by a Tier 1 provider, just a regular Data Center in Freemont California. Also, I’m not cheating and using fiber connections for our demos. This is a home cable connection in a home.
(5) We don’t claim to have 5,000 pages of patents, we didn’t take 7 years, and we do not claim to have invented 1 millisecond encryption and custom chips. As you can see, we don’t need them, and so our costs will be much less. ;)
Ooh, burnnn.
I would’ve liked to see the controller or mouse/keyboard in the video as well, since I’m pretty sure the lag is just as horrendous as in these OTOY demos: one, two.
Still, it’s cool to see how far they’ve actually gotten in what I assume is a significantly shorter timeframe than OnLive. Of course, as a L337 hardkore gamer I’ll probably never use this but it could still be cool for dramatically expanding the gaming audience.
It will be interesting to see how artifacty the video looks like in real life, rather than when hidden behind another layer of video compression like in this demo.
I don’t see how this could ever work for the masses and twitch based gameplay at current speeds, I can’t even download *‘HD’ stuff from netflix reliably yet.
Average ping is somewhere around 100ms, so if you’re playing an online game, you’ve got the ping to the game server, and the ping to the Gaikai service to your hardware is another 100 ms. And you can’t do any sort of clientside prediction for that second 100 ms, so you’re going to end up with a sluggish crapfest.
In multiplayer games I’m sure the servers you play on will essentially be local to the server rendering your stream. It is extremely unlikely you’ll be able to jump in to a game on any dedicated server out there. They’ll be Gaikai hosted.
What’s interesting here is in how the business model completely differs from OnLive. Since the technology is first and foremost designed as a platform for publishers to build on and put on their own sites, it gives far more incentive for higher-quality experiences, not to mention more potential for funding to get local servers up in more places.
