Microsoft’s DeLorean Could Solve Cloud Gaming’s Latency Issue
All they have to do is hop into the time travelling DeLorean they’ve rigged up, go to the future, and simply steal the solution to low-latency gaming from their hosier counterparts.
Okay, the actual news isn’t as fun. Microsoft Research has been heading up a project that targets the latency times that make conventional gaming hosted on a remote server so unbearably slow. Their egghead idea? DeLorean — a “speculative execution system” capable of masking up to 250ms of network latency over the cloud.
Combining bandwidth compression, state space subsampling and time shifting, as well as input prediction and misprediction compensat— Listen, I’m trying to say DeLorean predicts the future. It renders frames of “future possible outcomes” and sends them to you ahead of time, giving the illusion of no latency.
The research team has already tested DeLorean on two high-profile titles — Doom 3 and Fable 3. The results were terrific. Users preferred the prediction system to current means of cloud gaming. With DeLorean, all anyone would need is an internet connection and a TV. ‘Course, Microsoft wouldn’t be Microsoft if they didn’t somehow work DeLorean into their Xbox offering.
You can read Microsoft Research’s full paper on the subject here. We’re not exactly at hover car stage yet (that’s 2015, duh) but latency-free gaming is the, like, the seventh best thing down from that.