Interesting coincidence. One of my own 'seeing the future' moments also came from OTOY. We were sitting in the Techcrunch house late on Friday afternoon and there wasn't a lot going on. We got an email in our tips mailbox from Jules, the founder and CEO of OTOY explaining that he was in San Francisco up from LA for the weekend presenting at a conference, where he had a booth setup.

He sent us some info on what OTOY was working on, something about graphics processors in a server setup that could stream games to any client. We didn't really understand what he was talking about, since 'cloud' and all that wasn't well defined at the time (this was in '08, IIRC), but there was enough there to pique our interest. We emailed back asking if we could see him that afternoon, and he said that shouldn't be a problem - he was setting the booth up that evening before the conference proper started on the weekend, and it might be the best time since it was quiet there.

We drove up, found his tiny booth - the smallest of the lot, in a dark corner, next to the much larger rooms being setup by ATI, NVidia etc. He had one screen, one PC, a couple of phones and a pocket PC (believe it was an iPaq). He plugged a playstation controller into the PC, opened up the OTOY gaming application and scrolled around a half-dozen or so games on the screen while he explained what was happening.

NVidia had built a server-side GPU cluster which they were trialling out. It was a number of servers each with a dozen or two GPU's built into them which would directly stream their output over the internet (compressed) to the client. He fired up Grand Theft Auto 3 and we watched him while he walked around the city, getting into cars, driving around and then hitting top speed over hills etc. while the framerate didn't miss a beat.

The debug stats in the top corner showed that he was using 60-80KB/sec of bandwidth while playing. He explained that each frame was being sent down over the internet from a co-lo center. The ping time was 15ms, meaning there wasn't much lag. The servers were processing the input, playing the game, and then sending the output back. The codec in the prototype was nothing more than a series of JPEG images sent at 15-60+ frames per second. They said then that they would have something much better than that at some point, and I guess this Javascript + WebGL is what he was referring to.

We still weren't super impressed, since he had a controller and a big screen, so he just as well could have been running a playstation or other console underneath the table.

But then he picked up one of the phones, opened a Java applet and connected to the same game. This time I held the phone while he controlled the player and we had this tiny phone that could not have had more processing power than an early 386 playing one of the newest computer games on the market at the time in full color, at full screen and at full speed. Totally and completely blown away. He switched in and out of other games within seconds.

The next demo was opening up a web browser, pointing it to the web address, then watching the same game render in ~30 fps as the browser pulled down JPEG images and refreshed with JPEG (again, the very simple 'codec'). Utterly amazing.

We ended up spending hours with him, while he explained their plans and how the future of gaming will all be server-side. Since then, I have seen the OTOY name come up again and again related to breakthroughs in cloud-based gaming. These guys are really smart, and really ambitious.

Techcrunch ended up writing up an intro to what we saw a couple of months later (the conference was a private conference, IIRC, and our meeting was off-the-record, if I remember correctly).

The reason why we didn't publish everything right away was because I was very skeptical about some of the claims. He was a very good salesperson, and it is always difficult to distinguish those who are smart and sales savvy but have substance, and those who are just full of shit. Jules and OTOY were definitely the former.

In terms of my questions, I was most concerned about the lag issue and how this would work with users around the world who couldn't be near servers. I went back and forward on tech issues for a while on email until I was very convinced that not only was this possible, but it was almost certainly the future of gaming (why have all these GPU's that can't be upgraded on desktops and in consoles when you can place them all in the cloud - better utilization, better upgrade path, better pricing - eg. all the cloud benefits).

Here is the later story Techcrunch wrote:

http://techcrunch.com/2008/07/09/otoy-developing-server-side...

Here are all the OTOY stories at Techcrunch from the past 6 years, you can see the things they have been working on:

http://techcrunch.com/2008/07/09/otoy-developing-server-side...