OnLive: What Does it Mean for CG?
OnLive, the new cloud-based game service announced at GDC by Steve Perlman, founder and CEO of his Rearden incubator, caused quite a stir. Obviously, that was the intent. Will it work? Will it revolutionize gaming? If you recall, Perlman also caused quite a stir a few years back at SIGGRAPH, when he announced Mova's Contour Reality Capture system in Boston. Well, Contour was a key component in Digital Domain's Oscar-winning VFX work on The Curious Case of Benjamin Button: it was used to volumetrically capture Brad Pitt's expressions. And, as Perlman tells VFXWorld, it's a key component in the development of OnLive as well, which is still in beta before its planned winter launch in North America.
With such investors as Warner Bros., Autodesk and Maverick Capital, OnLive intends to deliver some of the latest and most advanced games instantly, on any TV, PC or Mac via a sleek, inexpensive MicroConsole. In addition, OnLive is supported by such publishers as Electronic Arts, Ubisoft, Take-Two Interactive Software, Warner Bros. Interactive Ent., THQ Inc., Epic Games, Eidos, Atari Interactive and Codemasters.
The Perlman pitch ("No high-end hardware, no upgrades, no endless downloads, no discs, no recalls, no obsolescence") was followed by a private demo (including a sneak peek at Geni4, a new CG human prototype) and then a Q&A.
Bill Desowitz: What's been the key challenge in pulling this off technically?
Steve Perlman: The engineering behind getting that cool [MicroConsole] to have no delay with an HD TV stream, running through a DSL or cable modem connection from a server that's a 1,000 miles away was tricky. First of all, there were the perceptual science issues: How you perceive compressed images and so forth?
BD: And the secret sauce?
SP: We have a new technology we developed, which is interactive video compression, which will stream the video down with effectively no latency so that the screen updates on your TV set or your computer screen are faster than human perception, so that it feels like the game is running locally, even though it's running remotely. Of course, that offers lots of advantages: the games are always updated, we have the latest hardware every six months -- we'll put in the newest NVIDIA or Intel or AMD chips -- and there's no piracy for games. And you can have a level of performance for graphics intensive games that have never been possible before.
BD: And how do you achieve that?
SP: What we do with OnLive is every six months there are better servers. So if they want to plan a game out three years from now, they just look at Intel, NVIDIA and AMD's roadmap and it will tell them they're level of capability. Plus there are things that are impractical to build into a PC or a game system that we can do. For instance, there was some new silicon announced that can do realtime ray tracing. We can go and build that into servers that have games that use that and a publisher can count on everyone with a Mac, a PC or a TV having access to that, whereas it's a tough bet to make to build that kind of silicon into a new game platform. You're going to see a level of graphics realism that no one's ever seen before.
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