Last week we posted a pair of videos showing off OTOY, the upcoming server-side rendering service that can stream complex 3D games to your computer through any web browser. It’s a very impressive technology, requiring no plugins or lengthy installs — just open your browser and you can instantly jump into a game of Crysis or GTA4, streamed in HD quality.
Today we’ve gotten our hands on a clip proving that when OTOY says its technology will work on nearly any browser-enabled device, it means it. As the video below shows, OTOY is going to bring modern games like Crysis and GTA 4 to your mobile phone.
The phone in the video is a Samsung Omnia, which was released to the public last summer (in other words, you don’t need a cutting edge phone for the technology to work). The game is running through the phone’s built-in browser, with no installs required, and is being controlled via a Xbox gamepad connected wirelessly. OTOY Chief Strategy Officer Mark Tseng says that the company is working on a variety of control schemes, allowing users to control games using a phone’s accelerometer, onscreen gamepad, or external peripherals like the Xbox controller.
OTOY will work over Wi-Fi or a 3G connection (the company has it working speeds as low as 1.5 Megabits per second), though Tseng says Wi-Fi works best. He also notes that the technology will work on the iPhone, going on to emphasize that it should work on nearly any device — we can likely expect it to work on the Palm Pre, Android, and most other smartphones as well. At this point the company isn’t willing to divulge how pricing will work, though Tseng says more details will be coming soon.
This is very powerful stuff. Imagine being able to whip out your cell phone and join a quick raid in World of Warcraft, or play through a mission in Grand Theft Auto. I see this as being particularly appealing for MMO’s, which tend to attract especially devout players who would love to be able to access their accounts away from home.
Of course, mobile phones are becoming powerful enough to render 3D graphics on their own — the iPhone offers a slew of games with complex graphics, and the iPhone 3GS is able to support even more detailed games. But these graphics won’t rival modern console or PC games for many years, and you’re going to always have to continuously upgrade your hardware if you want to stay current. Once you have a phone that supports OTOY you shouldn’t have to worry about upgrading your hardware, as all game processing is being done remotely.
But streaming games on mobile phones come with its own set of issues. Unlike your home PC, where you can normally count on a stable connection, many of us play games on our phones while we’re in transit, when you can hardly rely on your cell phone’s reception to hold up. But even if they have to stay stationary or jump on a Wi-Fi connection, this is a service that I’m sure many gamers will be salivating over.
Probably expensive to get good ping times, and it’s got to be expensive to server-side process those games. Though I’m all for it, latest ARM Cortex A8 processors come with decently powerful OpenGL 3D graphics hardware acceleration that can be added into any mobile phone or cheap ARM laptop device. Though I guess that 3D hardware acceleration in collaboration with server side cloud computing for 3D rendering could be the best solution.
Looking at the popularity of Wii and DS, it’s kind of obvious that the majority of gamers don’t care much about the complexity of the 3D games. So basic 3D games should be just fine for most people.
So the most important step that needs to happen in my opinion, is for Nintendo to allow any third party hardware to run emulators of Nintendo’s old consoles and be allowed to download those old games and play them at very reasonable prices. Kind of like micropayment. People would pay $1 or $0.50 per day per game among all games released on NES, SNES, N64, GB, GBA consoles. Same thing for newer Wii and DS games on the Wii and DS, so Nintendo really needs to start selling all their games as downloads on their hardware and to be used on any other hardware with up to N64 and Dreamcast emulation possible on the latest embedded 3D graphics hardware acceleration available for mobile phones and cheap $100 ARM based laptops.
that is amazing! cant wait for this technology to be released.
Great article and nice scoop. This technology looks impressive, and not just for games. Imagine being able to use your phone and some server-side magic to do some Final Cut-style video editing on the go.
Cool technology, but I don’t see it being practical.
First: Lag. I can’t see this doing better than 150ms response times, which makes for horrible gameplay.
Second: Controls. How do you control an FPS on a cell phone? The best I’ve seen so far is the G1’s doom port and even that made for some horrible controls (small keys, etc.)
Both points are definitely valid. I’m not a fan of on-screen game pads, though I wouldn’t mind just carrying around a small Bluetooth controller in my computer bag.
As for the lag, OTOY says that it won’t be an issue. I’m still skeptical, though these guys are obviously very smart. I’m hoping they’ll surprise us.
I’m hoping they surprise me as well, but I don’t see it happening.
Unless they have rendering farms at ISPs, latency will be too high. You can’t cut back the latency; the only think they could possibly do is transmit all possible states the client might be in depending on moves — and having the client choose which is correct. That would take a whole lot of bandwidth.
Over 3G, with its very high latency, I really can’t see this being possible/tractable.
They would probably compress the data since the screen res on a phone isn’t that high. So bandwith needs would be less than on a normal computer.
Let’s say you are doing 20 fps. At a 150 ms, latency you need 3 frames pre-rendered.
For simplicity, let’s say there are 4 actions a player can take every frame.
That produces 64 possible frames that must be sent in advance. In other words, we’re taking about sending 1280 frames per second.
A drawing at a phone’s resolution is 500 kb. We’re therefore trying to send half a gig of data RAW per second (just in video)
We would need a 2000:1 compression ratio for this to even be possible over current networks. Not happening.
One problem…
lag.
One solution…
future.
You’re not going to be able to play WOW this way, because a dedicated WOW player will need an entire keyboard to use all of their custom bindings for all of their items/spells etc. No way could that even be replicated with a controller, much less on a touchscreen.
Even for FPS games, what does it matter if it’ll play on any cell phone if you need to carry around a separate controller?
I wonder how they got it to work with an Xbox controller. My impression is that the wireless protocol on that thing is proprietary and not standard bluetooth.
Very cool technology, however I am extreamly curious as to how they intend to scale their infrastructure to support many thousand of simultanious players following their public launch and subsequent role out.
It all seems VERY VERY processor intensive; I was lucky enough to catch the live screencast of the wolframalpha launch, they required rack upon rack of processing power distributed across 5 purpose built data centres in order to return their results. When you consider that wolframalpha primarily processes just text and images it becomes relatively easy to project that oToy will need VAST amounts of processing power in order to stream realtime instantly rendered video to thousands if not millions of users simultaneously. I wish them luck; executed right, it has the potential to be a real GAME changer
This is an incredible company that has the potential to be the next $1bn+ Internet giant.
I don’t think FPS are really the games for this technology (lag), but rather big games such Civilization 4… These games need nice graphics and lots of processor time to compute the strategies, but don’t need response below the millisecond
This is stunning. How is this possible!!! Adios Nintendo DS
Maybe adios Sony PSP
Once again killer apps are moving to the browser making the platforms themselves moot.
When I saw the very cool demo last week, this was what I was hoping for, but assumed most mobile networks wouldn’t yet have the speed to handle it yet.
I’m amazed to see so much push-back against this technology. Doesn’t make sense to me. We complain that we can’t get instant view of any film we want, but when somebody offers instant play of any game, why do so many people rail against it?
I don’t think people are railing against it per se. I think most people agree the tech is incredibly impressive. There is a healthy amount of skepticism though when scaling is brought up. Can this really scale to thousands and millions of users without bankrupting OTOY? That’s the billion dollar question.
Checkmate Sony and Nintendo. Microsoft, time to whip out your wallet for an acquisition.
This technology is a definite step, no leap, in the right direction. Lag and playability are secondary issues which will be solved later. No client hardware upgrades for the latest and greatest games? No problem! Browser based 3D modeling tools? Watch out 3D Studio Max!
This will have the same advantages and disadvantages as Onlive http://www.nota...me-about-change
They will need a large amount of bandwidth just to perform at even cell phone resolutions. It may be good for gamers if you consider you are renting the game not buying it , which the article above mentions.
Screw the games, when they flip this on to be able to control remote desktops, they’ll get a $1bn+ acquisition offer.
Imagine, one computer accessible anywhere, any device. Hell, if they did it right, they could own the one computer, then you just need to buy dumb terminals. Internet access is almost ubiquitous already. This is certainly possible in the next few years, and as people get used to doing everything in the cloud, this will become a no-brainer for many.
Is there any information on the technology they are using to bring this to browsers sans-plugin?
Any word on how they wirelessly connected the Xbox controller to the phone? That looks like a great idea!
But that would need stable connection to play games on phones while in transit?
Pure VAPORWARE!
this is more hype than reality. it will not work due to bandwidth and streaming issues. the gameplay will never be enjoyable for fast action games (turn based / RTS may work). Vollee has been trying to do this for years now and i dont think they have made any significant progress. I think, before you hype this up any more and post more blogs on this, please test out an actual live action game on your own phone.
http://EDUmobile.ORG – iPhone Training Program Online
Bummer, this could take the control away from Apple-iTunes-iPhone.
Watch for Apple to block this in Safari.
Jeff, I totally agree that this is a huge threat to Apple’s App Store and the market they’ve made with iPhone and iTouch games. If they block this, it might send a lot of gamers to other cell phones, especially if WOW is part of the deal. Would be interesting to see how the market plays out.
Investor Scam, pure and simple.
Just a few reasons why:
- It’s not financially viable to run a cluster of machines powerful enough to run Crisis at 720p, let alone 1080p, at 60fps on full details. They claim up to ‘20 users per GPU’ – when even the fastest GPU today struggles with the above for ONE user
- Added compression on the fly problem: You need to compress the 1080p video feed on the fly, and without lag. There is no technology today that can do this on a mass scale without lag. Lag of 300ms would render just about any game unplayable.
- No plug in or app required: like, what, no even flash? How can you possibly render video at that frame rate and resolution without a dedicated app or plugin? How about control mappings, etc? It doens’t make any sense?
Only lunatics and wannabe geeks beleive this is real. Everyone else is laughing their asses off. This is another investor scam, albeit a very good one.
Hmmm… wonder whose technology is behind this?
http://sites.am...Pages/otoy.aspx
http://blogs.am...essed/tag/otoy/
http://www.amd....~129744,00.html
Apologize for the directness.
Sounds promising, but still not fully baked.
I can do this trI can do this trick on my ds right now using a flash kart and my desktop. I run a remote access program to control my desktop from my ds and vola anywhere there is wifi I can play my pc games.
Of course this is done through custom programs and not available for most users.ick on my ds right now using a flash kart and my desktop. I run a remote access program to control my desktop from my ds and vola anywhere there is wifi I can play my pc games.
Of course this is done through custom programs and not available for most users.
Bandwidth nothing, it’s the latency that makes me wonder. I can believe the Wifi works, but OTA using 3G is a real stretch. The round trip ping times there are really sad. Maybe with 4G and up…
I don’t use OTOY before . what’s features they are ?
Thanks all.
It is amazing how much better OTOY makes the resolution in a game. It looks as good as it would on a TV or arcade. It is technology that injects games with better RAM and pixels to create a game of graphical sharpness.