The Xbox One you bought might be the last console you ever need to buy. At least if Microsoft's new cloud gaming solution leaves the research labs sooner rather than later. Microsoft Research has just published their work on DeLorean – a speculative execution system for mobile cloud gaming.
Cloud gaming has the potential to make your console (and gaming PC) obsolete. The biggest hurdle to overcome before we reach this gaming utopia is latency. As you probably know, latency is the time interval between an initial input and the output. Latency is normally measured in milliseconds.
Most gamers deem the responsiveness of their game unacceptable when the latency in exceeds the 100ms threshold. Something that isn't that uncommon with most cellular and Wi-Fi networks.
DeLorean is a new system from Microsoft Research that uses speculation to enable low-latency continuous interactions in cloud gaming. Latencies of up to 250ms can be masked by the DeLorean system.
The magic of DeLorean happens when the system produces speculative rendered frames to the gamer. It does this by combining future input prediction, state space subsampling and time shifting, misprediction compensation and bandwidth compensation. If you understand any of this you're going to want to hit up the source below to read their paper that goes into greater detail.
What does this mean for you, dear gamer? It means we might have a future where you can play a twitch shooter like Call of Duty on your Windows tablet. Microsoft has already tested the DeLorean system on Fable 3 and Doom 3. Gamers who played those two games on the cloud preferred DeLorean to other available cloud gaming solution.