Recently unveiled games-on-demand service Onlive modestly positions itself as ‘the future of video games’. I think, the guys are indeed too modest; what that in fact did will soon change everything around us, and a bit later us ourselves.
The service is one of the first, ‘early’ birds of so called ‘cloud computing‘, already buzzworded but still a vague concept. But Onlive bird happened to be full fleshed and amazingly feathered. Not only it offers direct, hardware-independent access to all possible rich interactive content (otherwise known as ‘games’), it also easily adds few more fantastic features, such as ‘rich experience sharing’, ‘co-presence’ (thus rapid learning), ‘experience vlogging’ and few more. All that as, basically, a bonus track to the core foundation of Onlive, their capacity to rapidly, near instantly send rich (=video) content via the net.
If we, just a matter of thought experiment, expand these service feature to areas other than games, it is not that difficult to see how nearly everything is about to change, enchanted by Onlive-like mechanics. Can I work via Onlive? Sure I can, using applications of any complexity AND having access to both synchronous and a-synchronoua sharing MMP platform. Can I stream and get back my multimedia ‘experience flows’? But of course (and Sixth Sense indicates that soon I will be able to to all that from any place).
Which basically would mean that we move from ‘cloud computing’ to ‘cloud thinking’, ‘collective intelligence’, Noosphere, Troposphere, whatever. Interface wise: with all my appreciation to the Sixth Sense team, why I need a cam and beamer, if I have – not even glasses – but eye & eye?
Now, what games?
Rainbow End‘s world is boring everyday compared to what can come soon from the onlivers.
PS: With some amusement I don’t see in the careers’ section invitations for top cognitive psychologists and ‘designers of the new human futures‘ to come and join the team.
Playing with the futures, and pasts 