Flash on the Cloud: Lightning
With clients becoming thinner by the day and the desire to cut costs of CE devices, I’m wondering if OTOY type technology really is the future of experience viewing. For the uninitiated, OTOY enables extremely thin clients to explore rich 3D worlds via server side rendering. Below is a YouTube video of an OTOY demonstration. You could almost imagine the death of video game consoles via this type of technology in the years to come.
With this amazing proof of concept in the bag, I’m wondering if the same thing could be done to the Flash Platform.
Now, I’m not talking about the Flash Player simply just steaming OTOY content, I’m talking about actual SWF’s being rendered server-side and the result being streamed to a super thin Flash Player on the client end. Obviously this opens a huge amount of questions about cost, infrastructure, delivery, etc. But with the arrival of OTOY I know this can be done.
A “Lightning” system would allow for instant application upgrades, not just on the application level, but on the runtime level also. Custom installs of the system could allow operators to build in custom Player API’s to take advantage of hardware/needs on the cloud without worrying about the clients runtime compatibility. You would pick up some other free features such as simple P2P setup, etc.
With the Flash Player becoming heavier and more feature rich by the day. And the ever increasing demand for killer thin client solutions, it seems that a “Lightning” strike could be inevitable.
OTOY Demonstration:
Hi Alex,
Excellent point. It’s one we are exploring seriously. OTOY has a system for streaming flash, Java and x86 apps very efficiently through the server side system that also handles our 3D content.
In one of the OTOY video clips on TC, you will see MS windows paint exe streaming in with full interactivity on a wall. In addition to running on any 3D surface in OTOY, this app could just as easily stream to a regular Flash, Java or HTML page element.
Simpler 2D content like Flash is really easy to do this with (much less bandwidth than 3D viewports), and has lots of uses. For example, we have been able to get flash 9 content working on the iPhone’s Safari browser ‘automatically’.
Jules Urbach
OTOY