For PCs and Consoles, the Singularity May Be Near
Imagine a future in which the only devices you use to access applications for work or play are little more than empty digital shells. Imagine a game like Grand Theft Auto or World of Warcraft run not from a local chunk of high-end hardware, but on incredibly powerful back-end cluster servers in office buildings thousands of miles away that contextually pipe visual data over ultra high-speed wireless to the view-screen of your choice.
Imagine a future in which you own neither a PC nor a console. Instead, you own a fleet of cheap display devices (fixed and mobile) with set-top-like technology stitched into inbuilt chips capable of relaying visually cutting-edge information to you instantaneously, on any device you like, anywhere in the world, any way you like it.
The guy who architected Europea's Xbox buseiness, Sandy Duncan, is the latest to proclaim the death of consoles "in the next 5 to 10 years." The thing that got me thinking about where that ultimately leads comes from this:
There is a definite “convergence” of other devices such as set top boxes. There’s hardly any technology difference between some hard disc video recorders and an Xbox 360 for example. In fact in 5 to 10 years I don’t think you’ll have any box at all under your TV, most of this stuff will be “virtualized” as web services by your content provider.
The future of questions like "whither PC or console?" may be irrelevant, in other words, because the answer to the question could turn out to be "neither," and I don't mean because they'll merge and become one box. Instead, the box disappears, supplanted by a series of variously located screens and interface tools (physical or gestural) that allow you to receive, engage, and move information around on the fly.
Think about that. How cool would it be if information simply flowed to various points in your living and working environments the way that electricity flows to every lamp and light bulb in your residence? Now imagine World of Warcraft dialed up and playable as you like, in the same sense that you might tune to the same TV station at different times and on multiple different TVs located in different rooms of your house.
The technology to pass along low-band visual information to "dumb terminals," i.e. display devices with virtually no internal computing horsepower has been around for decades in mainframe and via client/server tools from companies like IBM, Microsoft, and Citrix. It works great for simple office apps and other sundry utilities. Trouble was, the power necessary to run something as CPU and GPU intensive as World of Warcraft and stream it to millions of users in realtime without a hitch or a hiccup was simply unavailable.
Connectivity and parallel processing power are finally catching up, along with technology that reduces or eliminates application redundancy. Sharing the load actually eliminates a huge chunk of that load, savings which can be applied to enhance other aspects of a given application.
Imagine buying or subscribing to a game online that pipes nothing more than visual information to your local view screen, reconfigures the interface dynamics of the game to match the size and interactive capacity of said interface, then lets you engage at whatever level you like without worrying whether you have the latest graphics processor or sound card or CPU.
What do you think? Does a PC-and-console-free future in which games compete for your attention on an external grid-computing playing field sound interesting? Or do you think we'll still have PCs and consoles taking up shelf space as discrete devices in the next 5 to 10?
Replay
Fearless or feckless? Have your say below or pelt me with emails here.
PC World's Marketplace
PC World's Free Whitepapers
tech news tech blogs community & forums laptop prices software reviews downloads
I'm not so sure that it will pan out this way, exactly. I can't imagine this being embraced by the laptop community. America really hates "public" anything. People want to own something on their own terms.
I do see computers becoming more and more integrated into our households, etc.
I alos have to wonder how much of this future depends on what happens to the internet bandwidth/ISPs etc. Ho wmuch more bandwidth would WoW take up if all of the game was tansmitted through the internet as opposed to just the dynamic pieces?
I just think we will always own somesort of hardware that we will call a computer even if it is vastly different from the computers of today.
This is likely to never happen -- Comcast will throttle it. :P
There is no way that there will be a company that can provide bandwidth of that magnitude, no one in the next 20 years not, Verizon not comcast. They don't even reach all the consumers in USA much less upgrade the existing network in 5-10 years. Not to mention a small to medium size company can drop 100000-500000 $$$$ on a rack of web severs the cost would be HUGE for severs that could run games of the ps3 magnitude. Not to mention the economy at its current state and 5 years in the pc biz is not long at all being it has only been around for 30 or so years. Not everyone even owns the simplest pc or has even subscription TV. Come on GET REAL. There is no way with in 20 years that that would happen not to mention many pc users have pcs so they can tinker. Then come huge privacy issues that would make every one apposed. I would pay 5000-10000 dollars for a home pc if that was the only alternative to public computing. Total BS!!!
Rollingstone317: I think you have to think a bit more global here. I agree the currant bandwidth offered to the public in the USA is not near the capabilities that is required for such a network. But as 90% of the Norwegian population and close 80 % of the Scandinavian population has access to hi-end computers broadband/ fiber optic Internet I think 10 years seems realistic for a test drive...
This gets trotted out every couple of years. Sometimes it's IBM; most recently I saw someone at Google had high hopes for it. I really don't see the point. Maybe it was plausible and made sense a couple of decades ago when computing power was expensive, but I still don't see any reason to believe it.
Computing power is getting cheaper and cheaper. It's possible we may have a large-scale architecture like this eventually, but by the time that happens, a so-called "dumb terminal" is going to be more powerful than super-slick ultramodern gaming computers we have now!
I can see advantages with that sort of setup...no more running out to buy the latest game and graphic gear for your pc....the most you might have to do is get a larger display and new controllers...the data is all processed at the game server so all you really have is a tv display and a set of controllers and speakers....
It all sounds like a dream...and it probably will remain just that...why? because no one company will ever be able to actually provide the computing bandwidth necessary to cover the entire planet. Gaming is international; it's not just the US. Ending the availability of consoles will mean that you will now have to supply markets such as south america, africa, china and still manage to keep the millions of users in the US online. The only way would be to build servers everywhere. Then there's the issue of competition. Small upstart graphics companies need to have access to these servers so that the industry isn't ruled by a power few who control access.
two words.... bull.... shit.... the day that anyone can afford, and even want to afford, the cost of the bandwidth necessary to do this would not be in our lifetimes. you cant have "just enough" bandwidth to run this type of application because it is never constant and even a slight drop in stream would ruin the whole experience. no i dont think that people in general would be willing to get rid of physical media and physical processing on a local scale for the purposes of having a server run it for you a thousand miles away. i most certainly would not want to risk losing my information or have to start all over if a server crash occurs or if lag forces the game to end. this whole thing is just what you said, an imagination, a non-happening, an impossibility at present and certainly into the future. i mean i can see the business sense in it (saving money on expensive computer hardware) but not the gaming sense in it (incredible data loads over limited internet bandwidth...)
I agree. Not going to happen. Tons of games have addons and mods and other customization. Also Yuffiek133 is correct. You need more then enough bandwidth so you don't get lag. This also opens up huge security holes with people sniffing out packets being sent back and forth. Personally I prefer having a pimped out PC I can brag about and not just some emachine. This architecture would also put thousands of hardware companies out of buisness with only the best of the best remaining to supply hardware for the clouds. Also, this means the companies could charge whatever they wanted. 100.00 for a "computer" plus 100.00 for the bandwidth. You're looking at 200.00 a month just to be able to check your email not to mention subscription fees for everything from outlook to photoshop since you are only "renting" the software and you don't actually own it.
Bareleif has it more than many here seem to realize. The fact is that the USA is nowhere near being the leader in bandwidth distribution. I love the USA, but just because this isn't going to work for us doesn't mean it won't work for at least a dozen other countries with higher broadband penetration than us. Unless something drastic changes in the next 5 - 10 years, the US will not be participating in the system discused in the article--but several other countries could.