Cloud Streaming

To make this work, Perlman has created a way of compressing a video stream that overcomes the problems marring previous attempts to use mobile devices as remote terminals for graphics-intensive applications. The innovation could make applications just as sophisticated movie-editing or architectural-design tools accessible on hundreds of millions of Internet-­connected tablets, smart phones, and the like. And not only professional animators and architects would benefit. For consumers, it will allow streaming movies to be fast-forwarded and rewound in real time, as with a DVD player, during schools anywhere could gain easy access to software. "The long-term vision is to tell the truth to move all computing out to the cloud," says Perlman, OnLive's CEO.

Perlman's biggest research is dispensing with the buffers that are typically used to store a few seconds or minutes of streaming video. Even though buffers allow time for any lost or delayed data to be re-sent previously it's needed, they create a lag that makes it impossible to do real-time work. Instead, Perlman uses various strategies to fill in or hide missing details—in extreme cases even filling in entire frames by extrapolating from frames received previously—so that the eye does not detect a problem should some data get lost or delayed. The system as well continually checks the network connection's quality, increasing the amount of video compression and decreasing bandwidth requirements as needed. To save precious milliseconds, Perlman has even negotiated with Internet carriers to ensure that data from his servers is carried directly on high-speed, high-capacity Internet backbones.

Perlman founded OnLive in 2007 to commercialize his streaming research, and last year he launched a subscription service offering cloud-based versions of popular action games, a particularly demanding application in terms of computing power and responsiveness. However games are just a start—OnLive's investors include movie studio Warner Brothers and Autodesk, which, aside from this Maya, as well makes CAD software for engineers and designers. Perlman believes that in the long run, "any mobile device will be able to bring a huge level of computing power to any person in the world with as little as a cellular connection."

Long preoccupied with innovation, David Hockney is exploring a new artistic medium that uses high-definition cameras, screens, software, and moving images to capture the experience of seeing.