I’m Impressed

As a professional software developer, I understand how things work.  I understand technology.  Most of the time, when somebody shows me a piece of software, or a service, I think to myself, okay, whatever.  That’s really not that impressive.

This shit is impressive.

How the f does this guy play any arbitrary hardware-intensive audio/video game in a browser with no plugins?  In real time?

This technology actually makes me wonder how he does this.

Actually, I’m lying.  I have an idea of how he does this.

Technology has existed for a long time to trap hardware output of DirectX/OpenGL – both video and audio – and stream it into a common video format like an uncompressed AVI.  It would be simple to reroute the output of this method to a web stream viewable by anyone.

The input is much trickier.  Even assuming you could forward any mouse/keyboard/joystick/peripheral input from the client browser to the server, how would you translate that into input to the game?  Most games, particularly World of Warcraft which this Dave Perry guy demonstrates in the video, go through great measures to make sure external software processes cannot control game IO (i.e., you can’t write software that controls your character in WoW automatically for you).

Even if you could, how can you forward all mouse and keyboard actions in real time from browser to server without some kind of browser plugin?  Javascript?  Eww!

Okay, it’s pretty obvious that the technology here is more similar to VMWare’s remote console or even Windows Remote Desktop than some kind of browser->internet->hosted process pipeline.  Maybe this is some kind of new feature of cloud computing?  Something like Remote Desktop, but designed for single processes?

Okay, even then.  You stream all of that data – realtime graphics (30+ fps) and audio, in unde r 1mbit of bandwidth?  Even more impressive.

The hardware costs for this service must be enormous.  Imagine a server with super top of the line graphics hardware.  How many 30+ FPS instances of DX10 games (whose settings, by the way, could be cranked up to enormously ultra high quality by each user) could a single server run?

I’d really love to know how this stuff works.  And how it is going to be commercially viable.