Cloud-streamed gaming services like OnLive and PlayStation Now have yet to be made widely available to markets outside of North America and Europe, and high latency has made such services unplayable from far flung locations like Australia so they're all geolocked anyway.
However, Microsoft Research
seems to think that tyranny of distance might be a solvable problem, having recently outlined their findings on a project they're called "DeLorean" that is essentially an advanced form of client prediction that instead of just guessing a single most likely outcome for each user movement, calculates several.
In this paper, we present DeLorean, a speculative execution system for mobile cloud gaming that is able to mask up to 250ms of network latency. DeLorean produces speculative rendered frames of future possible outcomes, delivering them to the client one entire RTT ahead of time; clients perceive no latency. To achieve this, DeLorean combines: 1) future input prediction; 2) state space subsampling and time shifting; 3) misprediction compensation; and 4) bandwidth compression.
To evaluate the prediction and speculation techniques in DeLorean, we use two high quality, commerciallyreleased games: a twitch-based first person shooter, Doom 3, and an action role playing game, Fable 3. Through user studies and performance benchmarks, we find that players overwhelmingly prefer DeLorean to traditional thin-client gaming where the network RTT is fully visible, and that DeLorean successfully mimics playing across a low-latency network.
Masking up to 250ms of latency? Surely like usual client prediction it won't be without side effects, but if it pans out and makes high latency cloud-gaming feasible, that would be particularly good news for Australian gamers.