3 ms·

The failure was around tech. We are not there yet. Speed of light is what needs to be overcome in order for this kind of service to be viable. Until then no amo

The failure was around tech. We are not there yet. Speed of light is what needs to be overcome in order for this kind of service to be viable. Until then no amount of money, business development, marketing, brand reputation will ever make this viable.

mountainb 4y ago
Using the (discontinued) Steam remote dongle over wireless device to put a game from my computer in one room to a TV in the living room about 5-10 yards away introduced noticeable latency to a game. Obviously things like Stadia are a lot worse. There is only so much that can be done with this kind of technology. I think people are more tolerant of it for specific use cases like being able to play any game you want on a hotel internet connection while you're traveling for work, but given how affordable hardware is it doesn't really make sense as a home entertainment service except for the third world, which was not their target market anyway.
londons_explore 4y ago
The speed of light delay actually wasn't the main issue. It was only a small part of the total latency. Wifi connections having high jitter (ie. usually the link is 1ms, but sometimes spikes up to 100ms) was a big issue. Poor software design was also a big problem - so big in fact they had to modify the android OS and Chrome to have a special low latency rendering mode that cut out chunks of the compositor. Both Windows and Mac also have issues with getting data from the network card to the screen in less than a few milliseconds. They could have pretty much solved the latency issues with a basic predictive neural network that predicts 'given that this set of keys have been pressed, and the screen looked like this, and this number of milliseconds have passed, what will the screen look like?'. Such a neural net could be very small, since effectively it will just deal with mouse movements, panning, scrolling, and maybe flashes like gunfire. On a per-pixel basis it would simply provide motion vectors and an additive R/G/B figure.
giraffe_lady 4y ago
I've played like 400 hours of endgame destiny on it during the pandemic, it's fine. The criticism that you need to be near a major city may be valid, I don't know because I'm near a major city. The wifi latency is a bigger factor than the rest.

mountainb 4y ago

Using the (discontinued) Steam remote dongle over wireless device to put a game from my computer in one room to a TV in the living room about 5-10 yards away introduced noticeable latency to a game. Obviously things like Stadia are a lot worse. There is only so much that can be done with this kind of technology. I think people are more tolerant of it for specific use cases like being able to play any game you want on a hotel internet connection while you're traveling for work, but given how affordable hardware is it doesn't really make sense as a home entertainment service except for the third world, which was not their target market anyway.

londons_explore 4y ago

The speed of light delay actually wasn't the main issue. It was only a small part of the total latency. Wifi connections having high jitter (ie. usually the link is 1ms, but sometimes spikes up to 100ms) was a big issue. Poor software design was also a big problem - so big in fact they had to modify the android OS and Chrome to have a special low latency rendering mode that cut out chunks of the compositor. Both Windows and Mac also have issues with getting data from the network card to the screen in less than a few milliseconds. They could have pretty much solved the latency issues with a basic predictive neural network that predicts 'given that this set of keys have been pressed, and the screen looked like this, and this number of milliseconds have passed, what will the screen look like?'. Such a neural net could be very small, since effectively it will just deal with mouse movements, panning, scrolling, and maybe flashes like gunfire. On a per-pixel basis it would simply provide motion vectors and an additive R/G/B figure.

giraffe_lady 4y ago

I've played like 400 hours of endgame destiny on it during the pandemic, it's fine. The criticism that you need to be near a major city may be valid, I don't know because I'm near a major city. The wifi latency is a bigger factor than the rest.