OnLive duo pitch platform they believe will 'change the world'

"This is gonna change the world." Since our E3 meeting with OnLive CEO Steve Perlman and Joe Bentley, director of games & media development, wasn't filmed, we have no way to convey to you the absolute sincerity with which Bentley said these words. He further assured us, "I left a very successful startup to do this."

Indeed he did -- three years ago, Bentley quit his "architect" job at outsourcing firm LiveOps (where he built software) for OnLive, after seeing parent company Rearden Labs' Mova motion capture technology. And now? Now he's busy helping manage the launch and continued growth of OnLive. He's also busy trying to convince us of the service's promise in the coming months and years.

To begin to answer just how OnLive might "change the world," Bentley and company head Steve Perlman pointed to the immediacy of the service. "It's really about delivering the best games to the consumer on an instant basis. One of the unique things about our service that's really not available on any other service is the idea of rentals. GameStop's closed, Blockbuster's closed, it's the middle of the night and you wanna play something," Perlman explained. "That instant 'I wanna do that now' is what we're really gonna bring to the market that no one else is doing."

And the company is standing behind those words with an offer that's hard to refuse: free service for the first year, via a sponsorship with AT&T. "The main thing we're trying to do, really, is just to get people to try it," Perlman reiterated. He believes that, in terms of this service, playing is believing. That said, he also understands that OnLive might not be for everyone. "Frankly, if you're a competition gamer, and you've got a very high-performance rig, and this is the thing you're gonna tune down to a T, OnLive probably isn't for you."

Who is it for, then? "One example, one of our beta users, was trying Just Cause 2, which is a DX10 game [DirectX 10]. And he says, 'Oh, this is awesome, because I want to try it but I don't have DX10 installed yet.'" And the same can be said for us. When we tested DirectX 11-enabled Dirt 2 on our paltry little MacBook (which, as you might imagine, has no form of DX anything running on it), the game looked great and ran smoothly.

That said, outside of PC and Mac gamers who don't want to upgrade their rigs every few months, OnLive will be targeting console gamers with its "Microconsole" go-between by the end of this year (the Microconsole isn't so much a traditional gaming console so much as it's a hardware liaison between your TV and OnLive's service). The company would of course prefer that release to be sooner than later, but is first focusing on service stability and producing enough Microconsoles ahead of launch.

"We'd like to get it out for some huge Christmas kinda thing, but we'll obviously we'll make a huge splash when we're ready ... we've got guys actually out in China right now talking to folks, getting us factories," Perlman assured us. Between now and then, the service will continue to grow its game library and user base, with plans to ramp up the scale of both as the service reaches what Perlman calls "cruising altitude."

And how will the marketplace UI adapt to an ever increasing list of games? Bentley explained that the current list format "doesn't work when you get to about 50," so regular UI updates will be necessary. "The nice thing about this kind of service, we can be updating the software behind the scenes. In fact, it actually is updated every few days," he added.

When we pressed Bentley on using OnLive's service for non-gaming applications (imagine: FinalCut Pro or Adobe CS5), while noncommittal, he did confirm that it was a possibility. "I think you're gonna see other things ... we'll have other things to announce. It certainly is possible."



What he stressed most, though, was Perlman's other company, Mova, working in tandem with OnLive to create impressive new visual experiences in games. "This face here," Bentley began, as he motioned toward a life-like image that had been projected on a screen before us, "is computer generated -- 100,000 polygons. It's the same thing we used in Benjamin Button to capture Brad Pitt's face. Right here, this is an actress. You can't render this in real time on a standard console. So this is the reason OnLive really exists." Bentley claims that Mova is a big part of the reason that a lot of folks originally got involved with OnLive. "We were mind-boggled," he exclaimed. And mind-boggling can be a tremendous motivator, it would seem -- spurring Bentley to leave a successful startup for a still nascent, unknown company working on the fringes of the game industry.

In fairness, what we saw of Mova was terrifyingly impressive, seemingly crossing the uncanny valley into "Holy crap! Are those human beings or computer games?" territory. Luckily for us, someone, somewhere is working with Mova for games. Though Bentley couldn't say much, when we pushed him on the subject, he laughed and responded, "Uhhhh ... ummm ... there's some people working on it." And though we may not see those games for quite some time, when we do, we'll be seeing the future.









真是自信满满的样子




不知道OnLive的稍微普及下

简单说就是云计算游戏服务，服务器那边做好运算通过高速网络把数据传输到用户家里，用户端的PC或Mac其实就是做个视频解码

根据网络情况的好坏，会决定传过来是SD还是HD的画面

这样中低端的PC也能玩高端PC配置的游戏，甚至PS3/XO上的主机独占游戏

现在支持PC和Mac平台，以后会推出一个主机直接装电视上而不需要PC或Mac了

为保证低延迟，要求用户位于其数据中心的1000英里范围内

米国已经6月17日上线

由于AT&T的赞助，首批用户将可享受一年免费服务（购买完整游戏需要另外付费），一年后月收费4.95美元的优惠

OnLive首发游戏共23款，大作包括《刺客信条》、《蝙蝠侠阿卡姆疯人院》、《无主之地》、《龙腾世纪：起源》、《正当防卫2》、《Mass Effect 2》、《NBA 2K10》、《波斯王子遗忘之沙》、《细胞分裂断罪》等。支持该平台的游戏发行商包括EA、Take-Two、THQ、育碧、华纳、史克威尔艾尼克斯、世嘉、卡普空、KONAMI等

当然，游戏之外的应用也在开发中

太科幻了，不过说实话，这第一个吃螃蟹的能撑多久呢？

引用:

原帖由 小黑屋专用 于 2010-7-10 15:21 发表


上海到关岛多少距离

本服务只覆盖美国本土48个州

不包括阿拉斯加和夏威夷

至于关岛啥的吗……

引用:

原帖由 ps2ngc 于 2010-7-10 17:20 发表
那是不是电脑硬件也没用了？

有用

这个案例里客户端的PC或Mac主要是做视频解码