A startup founded by technology entrepreneur Steve Perlman says it has
developed a technology to deliver video games on demand, an idea that
threatens to eventually take consoles out of the equation.
OnLive Inc., Perlman's Palo Alto, Calif.-based company, planned to
unveil its technology Tuesday night at the Game Developers Conference
in San Francisco.
Seven years in the works, OnLive says it has developed a way to stream
video games without any lag that humans can notice. So the instant you
press a button to shoot something on the screen, the gun goes off.
This has not been possible before, because unlike with music and
movies, which can be compressed or put into smaller files that are
more easily transferred online before being streamed, video games are
interactive and require instant responses. That has meant video games
needed to be played on consoles packed with computing power, like the
Xbox or the PlayStation, or downloaded to personal computers that
could process some of the data that enabled games to run.
OnLive's technology gets around that limitation with a new form of
compression that lets its game servers communicate with players over
broadband connections in real time. This also means OnLive's service
can work on older computers, even those without a graphics processing
unit that has until now been an essential component of gaming. Through
a "MicroConsole" about the size of a cassette tape, OnLive's service
will also be available for television sets.
No comments:
Post a Comment