Other World Notes: Can OnLive Bring Second Life to All?

"You could design the next Second Life on this!" That's the words of serial entrepreneur Steve Perlman, as he demoed his new OnLive streaming service to me yesterday.  It's an impressive streaming technology that can deliver high-resolution videogames to any PC, Mac, or TV with a broadband connection. (Daniel Terdiman has a good write-up here.) During the demo, Perlman spent some time suggesting that OnLive could remove the demanding 3D graphic card requirements of Second Life, and help grow its adoption. However, there are challenges with the service, including heavy broadband usage; here's my take on GigaOM.

Comments

[Mitch Wagner]

I've been beating up Linden Lab recently for requiring GREATER graphics and processing power, when the industry trend is in the opposite direction. People aren't buying more powerful computers, they're buying less powerful, cheaper computers -- netbooks and mobile devices -- making Second Life less accessible.

If OnLive makes me wrong, well, I'll be very happy about that.

OnLive seems to be moving in the direction the industry is going -- dumber clients, but plenty of bandwidth.

[CronoCloud Creeggan]

It's simply not feasible. The hardware requirements would be extremely high. They would need to be able to encode HD level video on the fly and send it out fast. It would also require massive bandwidth. If playing PS1 games on a PS3 via remote play with a PSP over a local network still doesn't run at 100% full speed. And that uses low resolution video!

Not to mention, some broadband ISP's have or want to implement bandwidth caps. This stuff would surely eat up a lot of a monthly allotment.

[Negko deVinna]

If this is possible and they associate to Linden, then we could say bye bye to our current client and hello to a rendering-like-crysis new graphical experience for SL, not mentioning the 50 avatar-in-a-sim broken barrier...
I know a few textures that will look blurry :)

ok, time to go to the church burn a candle...

[Arcadia Codesmith]

Well, apparently it's not just feasible, it's done.

We'll see if OnLine is the killer app for thin client, but if Linden Labs is smart (wishful thinking, I know), they're already looking at the feasibility of implementing something similar. This tech is custom-made for user-created environments that are currently rendered client-side.

[ArianeB]

After thinking about it, the way Second Life works and the way OnLive works are incompatible with one another.

For a game to work on the OnLive system, the environment of the game cannot change. Every desktop and console game out there has unchangable 3D environments that are stored in the game files. This is what makes on the fly rendering possible.

Second Life is all about a constantly changing 3D environment. That's kind of the whole point. It makes SL a bandwidth hog. There is no way that OnLive is going to use extra bandwidth to talk to SL's servers, considering all the bandwidth they will be using for video.

I can imagine how a 3D virtual world could work on an OnLive type of service, but it won't be Second Life or any Open Sim structured service. It would have to involve building on your computer and submitting to the grid and waiting for the grid to update.

[Marco Mugnatto]

"For a game to work on the OnLive system, the environment of the game cannot change."

You can't be more wrong! Onlive is the solution to all SLs problems! Imagine if all the virtual world data of Second Life is hosted on the same servers as the Onlive service.

The Onlive server can then render all user's screen instantaneously and send only the results to the client, the same way it does for all the other games.

When the user create a prim, the prim's data will go directly to the SLs database that is running on the same server!!!

Not only this will allow a new kind of SL that has graphics as good as Just Cause 2 while keeping the capability of allowing user created content, but also copyright on this content will be far more secure, because copy bots rely on client rendering data.

[Consumatopia]

Marco, I'm not sure, but I think what ArianeB is talking about is OnLive's need to have servers scattered all over the country to minimize latency and transmission costs. For SL or something similar to work, all the clients running on all of those OnLive servers have to talk to a central SL server, or at least talk to each other.

That said, transmitting all of that data from SL to the OnLive servers shouldn't be more expensive than transmitting it to SL clients individually--at least two clients running on the same OnLive server could share cache. I think it could be done, but I'm not sure who's willing to spend the research money to figure it out.