Video seen on TED talk, well THIS may be the new human interface we need, after the keyboard, the mouse and the touchscreen.
Services and applications are amazing, watch the whole video and look at the example taken as illustration, kudos to MIT!
Thanks Andreas for twittering it!
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OnLive is a new video games on demand service that may just change the way you play PC games. The brainchild of Rearden Studios founder Steve Perlman, formerly of Atari, Apple, WebTV and more, and Mike McGarvey, formerly of Eidos, the technology looks to revolutionize the way computer games are brought home. Instead of spending hundreds or thousands of dollars on the latest video game hardware that will make games like Crysis playable at nearly maxed settings, let OnLive’s servers handle the processing. All that’s required is a low cost “micro console” or a low end PC and a broadband internet connection…We too were a little suspicious of OnLive’s capability to deliver perceptually lag-free on-demand games. But then we played a hasty online game of Crysis Wars on the service today and became a little less suspicious. It seemed to work.
Cloud computing (see my article here) is coming to Games also. I was/am really skeptical about the lag, and how to make it usable, but if beta testers are reporting that it is working and that big names like EA, THQ, Codemasters, Ubisoft, Atari, Warner Bros., Take-Two, and Epic Games have endorsed it: well it deserves more than a look!
You need 1.5 Mbps to play it in 720p, wow with a fast 3G network it may work also (beware to the lag in that case, but who knows they seem to have some magic, but you don’t need 720p on a phone for now so half the bandwidth should be enough!).
This would work tremendously well for raw video also of course.
OnLive is not alone Gaikai has a slightly different approach, using the Adobe Flash player to stream its games, and seems more focused on MMO (Massively Multiplayer Online Games)
Gaikai is taking an approach to massive worlds that others have to bring virtual worlds like Second Life to mobile devices. Instead of relying on a client-server approach to transfer data about the world, it’s streaming video to the player and recording input and sending it back to the servers over an encrypted channel.
They are renting some CPU/GPU/Bandwidth and Software to a end user with a thin Client … the exact definition of HaaS (Hardware as a service) aka a Cloud Computing based service.
What is really interesting with this kind of technologies is that game console hardware is no more relevant! … OnLive is pushing its own box, low cost:
OnLive’s micro console, a simple, low-cost device that’s about the size of your hand. It’s simple tech—there’s not even a GPU in the device. It simply acts as a video decoding control hub, with two USB inputs and support for four Bluetooth devices, and outputs audio and video via optical and HDMI connections. The micro console is expected to be priced competitively, “significantly less” than any current generation console on the market and potentially “free” with an OnLive service contract.
Well can’t wait to see it coming, and the next big question will be: will it work for Mobile Gaming? Definitively breaking the fragmentation issues for the game developers, no worry about CPU/RAM, etc … only about battery life 
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