I've recently been finding out about a cloud gaming service called OnLive. I first saw it a few years ago, and was completely blown away. This sort of thing is supposed to be impossible. The service seemingly broke the laws of physics! If you watch the genius of Steve Perlman giving an iTunesU lecture it all makes sense.
OnLive runs Windows games (and potentially games for other systems in the future) in the cloud, in a data centre on very powerful gaming rigs. After downloading a small 1mb piece of client software available for Mac(OSX), PC(Windows), PC(Linux-soon?) and even your TV through an inexpensive micro console, you are able to play any game on any system.
The virtual game runs on a virtual system on a virtual graphics card streamed to any system, it uses custom hardware in the data centre to compress the video signal taking only 1ms per frame! This means you don't need a powerful computer or console to run a game, you never have to upgrade expensive graphics cards, there is nothing to download, and your games are saved in the cloud with your OnLive account. You can even post video of your gaming prowess instantly without the need to make or edit video files. What OnLive have achieved is truly staggering!
If you can do this in the cloud, you could do anything!
I can start a game on my iMac, play a bit more on my Sony Laptop, move to the TV and play some more, carry on where I left off on a netbook that has a graphics card and processor that would normally not be able to run the game at all. There is an OnLive viewer application available for the iPad, iPhone, and Android, which will soon also be able to play games. Imagine playing a Windows game on the iPad which looks like it is playing on a top of the range very expensive PC gaming rig!
Check out this video of my driving skills playing DiRT3 on the Mac using the OnLive service. This game is not available for the Mac, but runs like a dream. The frame rate in the video looks fairly low, but that is only because I am recording the whole screen at 30fps. The actual fps is very smooth, even on my modest broadband setup.
The OnLive cloud gaming service is coming to the UK 22nd of September!
