SL Go from OnLive is of course going, but the ideas behind it and the fact that there are Second Life and OpenSim users who would like to see a similar service developed has been discussed. In my previous post I looked at the work Nebandon Izumi had compteted with regards to getting the OnLook Viewer working with Amazon AppStream for OSGrid.
However there are other people looking at options regarding this too and one of them is Bright Canopy who state :
We render SL on powerful machines and stream it straight to your device
Android, iOS, Chromebook, Mac, Linux, anywhere
Say hello to freedom
Bill Glover of Bright Canopy, has been commenting on Inara Pey’s recent blog post. Bill has also setup a blog : Bright Canopy Blog. The blog so far has a total of two posts, but both of them are absolutely fascinating when it comes to streaming Second Life.
His first blog post was : Notes on Streaming SL With Amazon AppStream, which contained a report of trying to get Second Life working with Amazon AppStream. Although it did work, Bill summarised the experience as :
I’m in a hotel room in Reno for a conference, but I’m grabbing what time I can to do some quick proof of concept stuff.
I setup a stream with the Firestorm and was able to use it from both a Chromebook and an Android phone. It was really very responsive over a hotel wifi network, but there are many caveats.
tl;dr: It works, but it’s expensive and nowhere near being useful for just casually streaming SL without some custom client development and viewer integration.
The link to the blog post has a lot more information and is definitely worth a read. However Bill didn’t hang up his pen there, he’s actually moved on to a second experiment : And Then There Was Frame.
Ok first things first, what is Frame?
Run any software in a browser
“Frame is both the future of software distribution and personal computing in the post-mobile era I’m going to call ubiquitous computing”. Forbes
Now the reason why Frame is in the frame is largely because :
Nikola Bozinovic, founder of Frame, contacted me and offered to help us out. Frame has a very mature and polished platform for sharing Windows apps over browsers and even native clients on PC, Mac, Tablets and Phones. They have really done alot of work here, and the performance and management tools are about a year or more ahead of Amazon’s AppStream offering.
That sort of help will certainly assist someone when it comes to testing.
At the moment, The Bright Canopy testing is at the very early beta phase. I have had a very brief look, I’m not in a position to comment too much and I also think that commenting at this stage would be a tad unfair.
What I will say is that I was able to login to Second Life with a Firestorm viewer via Google Chrome. I could move around and I could teleport. There’s definitely potential here. However it will take a lot more testing to see how well this sort of setup can scale.
If you would like to take a look or apply to join the beta, then head on over to the Bright Canopy website and join the beta.
Bright Canopy website : http://www.brightcanopy.com/
ach < 2 days later & Beta is closed already !
Yeah, it seems that they may have had more interest than they were ready for at this early stage. You can still signup for pre-launch and you’ll be kept abreast of developments.