Amazon App Stream And OnLook Viewer Used To Stream OSGrid

Hamlet Au over at New World Notes recently pondered Could Linden Lab Replace SL Go With Another Service – Say LiquidSky, Leap Computing, or Amazon App Stream?  The answer it seems, is possibly, because in the comments Diva Canto says :

Today, Nebadon and I have set up OnLook (a derivative of Singularity) on the Amazon AppStream. It was surprisingly easy to set up and it works amazingly well. I’m still in shock.

This changes everything.

To demonstrate this, Diva shared a video that Nebandon Izumi had created :

The video shows a stable looking experience running really smoothly. However for more details on this, it’s time to turn to our favourite Delicia Whipsnaps lookalike, Inara Pey, whose original post of Could the Lab use Amazon AppStream to “replace” SL Go? provided the basis for Hamlet’s question.

Inara has followed this up with another post, Using Amazon AppStream to stream a viewer. In that post Inara talks to Nebadon Izumi about the process of using Amazon AppStream. The process is not straight forward, it’s not like using SL Go where you just login and, well, go. However it is feasible.

An important point to note is that Amazon AppStream can cost money and it’s not a flat subscription fee either. However the first 20 hours a month are free, which is explained in Inara’s post by Nebandon :

“What made me think to try was your article,” Nebadon told me as we discussed this initial attempt, although he admitted. “You get 20 hours of free streaming per month with Basic Amazon AWS account (required to access the AppStream service), then its 83 cents per hour. I also tried this on my Android Tablet, but while the graphics were beautiful, input is a problem, and the viewer will need overlay controls like SL Go, which will require development.”

However the initial setup was somewhat time consuming and Nebandon had to install the viewer and then install  VS C++ 2010 re-distributable packages. Then there’s the issue of deploying the package. In total Nebandon estimates that the process took two hours.

So how does this work on devices? In the comments of Inara’s post Nebandon posts another video, this time using a Samsung Galaxy Note 8.0 with S-Pen Navigation with the OnLook viewer and Amazon AppStream.

The fact that this works quite well should not be that big of a surprise because the blurb of Amazon AppStream states :

Amazon AppStream lets you deliver your Windows applications to any device. Deploy your application now. No code modifications required.

So is Amazon AppStream the droid we’re looking for? Well the answer is not quite. The costs, signing up for another service, install the dependencies, getting it all working and on top of that getting it all up to date will be challenging for people. However in a good community hints and tips will be shared to help people. However the most important point at this time is that this hasn’t yet been done with Second Life. In theory, it sounds feasible, in practice, we’ll have to wait and see.

Cloud computing is not going to go away, indeed it’s going to grow. Amazon AppStream is one option, there are others and there are likely to be even more in the future. Whilst the loss of SL Go is a bitter pill to swallow, it looks like we will see virtual world viewers utilising cloud streaming in the present and more importantly, in the future.

For more about Amazon AppStream go here : http://aws.amazon.com/appstream/

I’ll leave you with the Amazon AppStream introduction video. Interesting point to note, the intro starts by saying “Maybe you want to build rich graphical applications that demand intensive compute requirements, like games or virtual worlds“.

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