While we could continue to talk about the CA’s intention to acquire NetQoS, there are other stories out there that we’d like to cover. For example, Spawn Labs just announced the “Spawn HD-720,” which is essentially like a Slingboxfor console video games.
For those unfamiliar with the Slingbox, it’s a device designed to work with broadband connected homes that allows you to watch television, streaming from your home cable/satellite/fios/antenna/HTPC/DVR, etc., to a web page you can access from anywhere – including mobile networks. You can switch between video sources, change channels, or access your DVR’s program selection as well. Naturally, this requires a large amount of upload bandwidth (more for HD media) and download bandwidth on the other end to match.
None of this was particularly difficult – SlingBox has been around – and operational – since mid 2006. The biggest barrier, of course, is throughput. Broadband simply had to hit a certain penetration point in people’s homes to make SlingBox feasible as a way to watch television content.
The question is – if you can watch TV through Slingbox, or DVDs through Slingbox, or even PVRs through Slingbox, how come we haven’t been able to play video games through Slingbox? It’s a matter of latency – and that is, that the Slingbox experience is not affected by high latency. In fact, you could argue that delays on the order of seconds (rather than the normal measurement, measured in milliseconds) is not even a detriment to the Slingbox experience. Because video watching is essentially one-way communication, getting all the information within a reasonable time frame is more important than getting most of the information now.
Video gaming is interactive, and with two way, time-sensitive communication (i.e, I press the button to make Mario jump, Mario jumps, and the computer displays Mario jumping… before the goomba runs him over), is sensitive to latency. In this case, performance in the sense of low latency connections – on both ends of the connection, is more important than high-bandwidth connections. With latency, the controls are sluggish and, quite frankly, too annoying to be fun. And any game that requires split-second timing, like, say “Splosion man” would be unplayable with too much round trip latency.
Imagine if you will, that a goomba is heading towards Mario, and the player wants Mario to jump on the goomba. Human reaction time is about 215 milliseconds. That’s how long it takes you to press the button. This is an easy feat for most practiced gamers.
But now let’s imagine that’s happening on a connection that’s got 100ms of delay each way, making a total of 200ms round-trip latency.
- At 0ms, the goomba appears. It travels at – let’s call it 10 inches per second.
- At 100 ms, the goomba is 1” closer to Mario. But only now does the player see the goomba appear.
- At 315ms, the player finally reacts to the goomba, and presses the jump button. The player thinks he’s jumped when the goomba was 2.15” away from the start, but in actuality, the goomba was 3.15” away.
- At 415ms, the computer gets the signal to have Mario jump, and Mario jumps – but he aims for a goomba that’s 2.15” from where it started, and by this time, the goomba is 4.15” inches away. Mario obviously misses the goomba, but the player doesn’t notice it yet.
- At 515ms, the player is shown that Mario missed the jump by a country mile.
Spawnlabs’ new “Spawn HD-720,” which allows you to play the game consoles you have in your home from anywhere in the world, doesn’t eliminate this problem, though they have undoubtedly done everything they can on their end to reduce latency – especially in the time it takes to compress video. Even then, however, the developers at Spawnlabs will admit to you that “distance matters” and that a fast (as in latency) connection is required for gaming.
“We plan to ship with an average end-to-end latency of approximately 100ms across a local area network, yielding a terrific and natural-feeling game play experience,” says the company. “Playing across the Internet will typically add another 25-75ms of latency.”
Mario missed the goomba in the example above, but in actual play 100ms is not that bad, and people can get used to the controls by learning to anticipate lag times – kind of like driving a different car with a little looser steering. Too much delay, however, and the game can be unplayable because the control just isn’t responsive.
This is different from OnLive, by the way, in that Spawnlabs is providing a point-to-point solution using your own gaming hardware doing the backend processing (in other words, your Xbox) while OnLive wants to put gaming in the cloud. Both require very low latency – better performance – rather than throughput.
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