Adventures in Steam In Home Streaming part I: Steam and non Steam games streamed to your HMD of choice with head tracking over the cloud ...

I have so been looking forward to this, after teasing GabeN and Valve for years about bringing the cloud and streaming to our ever expanding Steam archives...spoiled as I have been Using Gaikai and onlive TOGETHER to play multiple streamed games on one lowly tablet PC ...

I have played Crysis 2 and Battlefield 3  on Atom powered tablets at rig speed thanks to the cloud(s).. but till now I have needed Splashtop to stream games from my Steam archive.... Note I use the word archive ...because 100s of games and the best part of decade on I do not have time to keep downloading and re downloading to different machines..

First let us establish that Steam In Home streaming fulfills the basic aim of cloud based gaming ... to be able to do so asymmetrically ..by this I mean using a very low powered non gaming device like a Windows 8 tablet circa 2011 .. or iGPU powered device which I term the IHS Target, to play a game from a more powerful gaming Rig ..the one too many of us are chained to 

Steam In Home Streaming Beta Test 1 : A little ARMA III and COD Ghosts and how to start the thing 

Steam In Home Streaming: Battlefield 4 + Windows 8 Desktop 

The first thing to note is you can stream your desktop and ergo any non Steam App or game.. 

this means we can IHS games from Origin ...like Crysis 3 in the picture above and also Battlefield 4 : as long as you have these games set up to run in Windowed mode .. just run it border less ..and you will not notice the difference ..

my first few days of testing using the Acer Iconia 6120 and Lenovo X220T non gaming tablets show that IHS works ..and works well with one limitation: as long as you keep your remote res at 720p .. 

This is over a 120 meg broadband connection 

In comparison using the same set up Splashtop is able to readily stream 1080p content without lag ..go higher than that though and you will start to see issues ..


Steam In Home Streaming: Streaming to 2 target PCs dual screen+single screen Windows 8 tablets 

we can easily IHS a game to one target , but why settle for just one target..

At the moment 1080p streaming is beyond the Betas capability..but you know this will come good in the end.. by 1080p streaming I mean the source resolution to be streamed from the host .. As an example check out the difference between 1080p and 720p source streaming with a game of X Rebirth :

Steam In Home Streaming: ARMA III vs Tiny Deathstar vs Youtube Dual+Single Screen tablets 

And now for really cool stuff ... Steam In Home HMD Streaming with Head Tracking Over Cloud... this is a way to take VR mobile

Using Steam In Home Streaming  to mobilize VR : Over the cloud head tracking (without perceptible lag) and HMD gaming 

In the following video I am playing Arma III  streamed to an iGPU Intel HD3000 powered X220T using the Cinemizer OLED HMD and Zeiss headtracker :

Firsts :
1. Head tracking transmitted over cloud without lag : I can do this using Splashtop too, but IHS brings unique benefits ..which I will show you in my next article on the Titanfall Beta. 

just to show you this is no fluke ..some more Arma III played over the cloud , with head tracking working over the cloud connected to a Cinemizer OLED HMD 

Note this is 2D , there is nothing to stop us doing this in 3D .. more on this in my next article 

Limitations of the current Beta 

1.720p streaming , i.e  remote PC source res of 720p and target PCres of 720p are the limits of this current Beta for comfortable gaming experiences 

2. Joypad control is not transmitted over the cloud .. you cannot use the Xbox 360 pad yet .. although some joypad buttons were working for me...

And astonishing revelations of GabeNs greatest gift to Steam fans?

1. Full screen streaming is possible and with it for the first time the possibility of cloud playing 3D games .. 

2. We can stream the desktop and anything on it 

3. Including Origin and non Steam games and Apps 

4. There seems to be little or no, actually none that I could detect input lag

Zeiss head tracking, touch and legacy control were transmitted and worked as if I  were gaming on the remote PC itself.

5. I love that there is nothing to install, no app to launch or update , log on is simple and effortless ..you start Steam and you are already there ...

6. Mulitple target PCs can be connected to one remote and we can instantly flick or throw the game from the point you are at between them .. 

7. Mulitple cloud services can run at the same time on the same target PC from the same remote PC . Throughout this test I used Splashtop whilst using Steam IHS . Thanks to Windows 8 pane switching you can see and interact with the results on one tablet screen.

The relevance of Steam In Home Streaming

I cannot emphasize enough how important IHS is to PC gaming, I have been screaming for this functionality and teasing GabeN for a couple of years for this functionality . That Valve delivered is way cool. 

What could be better ?

1. IHS running from cloud .. 0 need to install or download your games even to a remote PC 

2. IHS on Android and iOS platforms 

3. 1080p streaming optimisations ( they will come this is just a Beta) 

4. Better support for joypad over cloud control 

5. GabeN cans the Steam Machines of yester year and replaces them with a Valve Pocket PC ...that we connect to our HMDs and take VR and HMD Steam gaming mobile ..

Prediction

Half Life 3 will launch as the first 0 install , totally cloud based IHS playable game , laugh? A lot of of people laughed at the thought of having to log onto register Half Life 2 on something called Steam ..not so long ago...

next up I combine IHS with Titanfall ... 3D over the cloud HMD and Head tracking gaming .. making VR mobile..

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