The movie Ready Player One revolves around an online gaming platform that connects millions of players around the world online in a single space where players interact and play games in virtual reality. Though, something like that may sound far fetched, Microsoft has laid the foundation stone to making something very similar for gamers.
The tech giant recently announced Project xCloud, which is an online gaming platform that will allow users to play console-quality games on PCs and even mobile devices (including smartphones).
The company showed off this technology at its Inside Xbox event where Microsoft officials streamed Forza Horizon 4 from the company’s Azure data centres to an Android device. The demo was to show how smooth the gaming experience would be and also how easy it would be to stream games from the cloud to mobile devices.
The company’s cloud gaming chief, Kareem Choudhry said that “scaling and building out Project xCloud is a multi-year journey. We’ll begin public trials in 2019 so we can learn and scale with different volumes and locations”.
According to The Verge report, Microsoft has already built dedicated hardware for its data centres so that the current Xbox games and the ones coming in the future will be compatible with the services.
The xCloud service will allow games to stream to devices. Microsoft has been testing the games with the wireless Xbox controllers which are connected to consoles, PCs and mobile devices. Currently, the issue for the company is to battle latency issues which it is trying to do via advanced network techniques combined with video encoding and decoding.
The company was very specific in saying that it is not be looking to replace gaming consoles, but it is looking to provide the same gaming experience on other devices.
Currently, the only companies close to competing with Microsoft in this space are Google with its own game-streaming service that it will announce at next week’s Game Developers Conference (GDC). Sony also offers a similar service called PlayStation Now that lets you play your PlayStation games on an iPad or iPhone.
— with inputs from The Verge
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