The Ashes

Games available these days are demanding much more if we compare it to games available 2 years back. Games like Crysis, GTA 4, Assassin’s Creed need a very high end graphics unit, fast processing speed and storage space that is more than 10 GB. A normal user is not able to upgrade his PC rapidly, in order to play such demanding games. Seeing this a startup company OnLive has come up with a revolutionary idea which can change the whole gaming industry.

                                               [image of Steve Perlman from Venturebeat]

Steve Perlman is an entrepreneur and inventor who has got many successful projects and 80 patents under his belt like underpinnings of QuickTime Technology, The thin client surfing web, by using a Television as display. Steve Perlman has another hell of an idea which he has named OnLive. The company has developed a technology that will compress data to help in computation of a game to be done at a distant server rather than your  PC.

OnLive has decide to launch this project today on Tuesday 24th of March 2009 at SF Museum of Modern Art. To be exact less than 4 and a half hours are left. According to Perlman, the company will reveal more interesting features and projects in the near future.

This is video gaming on demand, where we deliver the games as a service, not something on a disk or in hardware,” Perlman said. “Hardware is no longer the defining factor of the game experience

[news source Venturebeat]

The question that rises in my mind is how much this technology will be able to compress data to send that instantaneously so that you don’t have to compute data on your computer ay more and secondly how fast an internet connection should a person need in order to play the game.

                                               [Concept Image of the project from Venturebeat]

The advantages I see are that a user wont be needing a high tech gaming machine. Secondly  the game will be installed on a server that will help a user to save storage space on his machine.Thirdly, computers in shape of netbooks can be used as gaming device. Its a cross platform project as it will be available on the Internet a user will have access to sit regardless of what machine or operating system he has. Thinking of drawbacks, I wonder what steps will they take to control piracy as it is a cloud based system.

Well stay tuned because in less than 4 hours and 20 minutes more the picture will be revealed to us from OnLive. Below are some images of the project. If you want to know about more on it check out venturebeat as these are guy are in touch with Steve Perlman and OnLive.

                                                    [a network of people using OnLive.]

                                                      [interface to select different games.]

                                                         [another look of OnLive interface.]

                                                [USB device that will make things happen.]

                                             [All of the above images are from Venturebeat]