Earlier this evening, as early adopters across the country started getting acquainted with their iPads, a very interesting (albeit short) video landed in our inbox: Crysis running on the just-released device. We’ve embedded the video below.
No, Apple hasn’t secretly packed a state-of-the-art desktop graphics card into the groundbreaking device. We’re told the game is running on OTOY, a service that uses extremely fast computers in the cloud to handle the game’s graphics rendering and then streams the output to your computer via the web (which means your computer, or in this case, iPad, needs a relatively small amount of processing power to run the game). → Read More
Slingbox owners love their devices. They allow you to watch your home television content anywhere you are in the world with an Internet connection. A new startup, Spawn Labs, launching today at TechCrunch50 wants to extend that concept to video games.
But Spawn Labs offering is actually a bit more robust because it includes a social element as well. A key part to playing video games is playing them against other people. And with the Spawn HD Pro appliance, you’ll be able to do just that. Say a friend has an Xbox 360 in California and wants to play a game against you, but you’re in New York. From New York, you would simply install the Spawn Player application on your computer, and you could remotely connect to their system, to play a game. → Read More
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. → Read More
When we first looked at OTOY about a year ago, the small company was trying to deliver a server-side 3D rendering technology that could allow modern video games to be played on basically any client. A lofty goal, for sure. Then OnLive was unveiled in March at GDC, and it sent ripples around much of the gaming world with a similar concept of cloud-based gaming (both good and bad). But OTOY believes it has a more lightweight and elegant way to do things, that is also more extensible. And it has a couple of key partnerships to prove it: EA and AMD.
Let’s run through some of the details quickly: OTOY is 100% browser-based, and works is all modern web browsers. All it requires is a broadband connection, and that will give you 720p (HD) graphics, with no plugins and no downloads. There is also a way to get 1080p graphics, though that’s a bit more intensive, obviously. But they key is that this is all done on OTOY’s servers and transmitted down from the cloud to run on whatever client you want, basically instantaneously. → Read More
Today during an Industry Insider Series keynote at CES in Las Vegas, AMD CEO Dirk Meyer and OTOY CEO Jules Urbach announced that AMD has been working on what it’s calling the world’s “fastest supercomputer ever”, designed “to break the one petaFLOPS barrier and to process a million compute threads across more than 1000 graphics processors”.
The supercomputer, dubbed the “Fusion Render Cloud”, will run OTOY’s graphics rendering software, which as we reported last July, is intended to deliver high-end 3D graphics through the cloud by preprocessing them on servers before delivering them over the web to thin devices. → Read More
Last week we posted a video that presented LivePlace, a 3D world with an incredible amount of detail. The impressive technology behind it is called OTOY, a streaming platform that allows developers to generate movie-quality renders “in the cloud”, which can then be streamed to more modestly-powered computers and even mobile phones. For more information on OTOY, see our intro post here. The video was available to the public at LivePlace.com alongside the ambiguous headline “Live or Virtually Live?”, but apparently nobody was supposed to find it. Soon after we published the post, LivePlace removed the video from its servers. Brad Greenspan, the entrepreneur behind MySpace who owns LivePlace, says that the site was never meant to be seen by the public, explaining that it was for internal mockups, viral videos, and “something similar to a Funny or Die episode.” That explanation doesn’t sit well with me, but it’s unlikely we’re going to get anything more substantial out of Greenspan. So what about that 3D virtual world – is it a sham? Jules Urbach, founder of OTOY, explains that while he can’t comment on what Liveplace is doing (or why they released the video), virtual worlds running on the rendering engine in the video are on the way. He says this video isn’t representative of his system’s capabilities (which have actually improved since the footage was shot), and is actually just a number of random clips spliced together by Liveplace: “The 14 mins of real time rendering in this material is streaming live to a Treo 700 at 240 kpbs. This was captured on March 2007, the server was running an ATI RX 1900 GPU. The tech has improved massively since then (as has the HW we now run on). There was never intention to show any part of this to the public until we could include voxel rendering and Lightstage based characters. I think anyone who liked what they saw, will find the final project much more impressive. The whole aim of our work last month on the Ruby demo for AMD was to show that the quality of offline and real time work is identical starting with this generation of GPUs. The following presentations this month are just introducing Lightstage and how it makes characters (or any CG object) look 100% real in those real time environments. The virtual worlds these technologies are going to be applied to → Read More
LivePlace.com has posted a video displaying a very impressive render of a 3D virtual world called City Space. At this point very little is known about LivePlace, other than that the WHOIS lists the domain’s owner as Brad Greenspan, one of the co-founders of MySpace. Note: It appears that in the 20 minutes since I spoke to Greenspan about this post, someone was told to take LivePlace down (apparently nobody was supposed to find it). Update: They’ve taken the video down. We’ve republished a copy, below. The other nugget of information found in the video is that the game is running on OTOY, the 3D engine that renders graphics in the cloud. The technology allows relatively weak computers (or even mobile phones) to display incredibly detailed graphics comparable to those seen in Hollywood movies. Note: We’ve put up a slightly modified version of the video at the request of OTOY. We’ve removed a 10 second sequence that was originally intended for an unaired Audi commercial. OTOY’s Jules Urbach says that the room will be in the future virtual world, but asked that we remove the scene for now. The video shows a massive virtual city filled with towering skyscrapers, parks, user-customized apartments and houses, public meeting places, subways, and everything else you might expect in a metropolitan area, all beautifully rendered by the OTOY engine. The game also features impressive real time lighting, reflection, and weather effects that rival those seen in detailed 3D games (and even some movies). At this point it appears that gameplay will be focused on human avatars, who can own their own living spaces and offices, buy and sell goods at a virtual mall, and interact with each other in public places. While there are a number of online games that offer impressive graphics (though none of this caliber), the real potential behind LivePlace and the OTOY engine is the cloud-based rendering engine, which allows games on almost any computer to play without needing a powerful graphics card. OTOY has been developed to work in any browser without a plugin, which makes the barrier for entry into this virtual world much lower than Second Life. Of course, we have no idea when City Space will actually launch, so it’s far to early to hail it as the second coming of social online worlds. Update 2: According to this comment, portions of the video are taken → Read More
Imagine you could play video games – and immerse yourself in virtual worlds – with 3D graphics comparable to those found in blockbuster films like Transformers or WALL•E. And then imagine you could experience and control those graphics in real-time from any internet-enabled device, whether it be a desktop computer, set-top box or even iPhone. Sound far-fetched? It doesn’t to Jules Urbach, founder and CEO of a Los Angeles-based company called OTOY, who has been working with microprocessor manufacturer AMD since 2006 to make the idea of server-side graphics processing a reality. If all goes as planned, 3D rendering will become just another computer task that jumps from the client to the cloud. Call it gaming as a service (GaaS) if you will. No more Xboxes, no more PlayStations, and no more souped-up PC towers. Just a monitor, some controls, and a way to receive and display frames generated by a powerful server farm. But let’s take a step back for a second. Before it’s even possible to deliver movie-quality graphics through a thin client, there must be a way to produce those graphics – and in real-time. Movie producers have the luxury of knowing ahead of time just how they want their frames to look. Visual effects studios like Industrial Light and Magic don’t have to respond to user inputs, so they can spend hours rendering each and every frame. Game producers, however, rely on engines that must respond quickly to user behavior and serve up graphics at near-instantaneous speeds. That reliance constitutes perhaps the main reason why in-game graphics have lagged behind their big-screen counterparts for years. Just the other week, however, AMD announced an initiative called Cinema 2.0 that promises to narrow the gap between movies and games with a new RV770 GPU. To demonstrate the power of AMD’s new consumer graphics cards, Urbach and his art teams in Spain, Canada and the US pulled together a set of videos that approximate the CGI you’d expect from movies. He took us through an overview of that work here: Most of his demos focus on recreating Autobots and Decepticons from the Transformers movie. And the results are very impressive, even if they don’t quite match those found on the big screen. The stills at the bottom of this post are from voxel-based animations that were rendered in real-time, such as the one embedded at the top of this → Read More
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