This is the penultimate punch line in today’s “Penny-Arcade” Webcomic. It is in reference to a company called “OnLive” which promises to use virtualization and cloud computing to provide broadband, server-side gaming in the browser. The server renders the entire game, then sends back 60 images per second to a browser window. This means, theoretically, that older hardware can “play” complex games.

The big concern, of course, is latency - how many milliseconds does it take from the time you press the button until the button press is registered on the game server, and how many milliseconds does it take for the computer to display the results? In a video interview, OnLive’s CEO, Steve Perlman, handwaved those concerns away:

“If we had a significant amount of lag, it would be unusable. So we had to develop a new technology that would allow the game to run – a lot of the game to run – in the server center. And then really to send tiny pieces of the game down through your DSL and cable modem connection, very very rapidly, with no lag… your computer screen or your TV screen updates so fast that perceptually, it’s as if the game is running right there.”

The video game industry is particularly noteworthy for hype. For example, the Phantom console promised direct game downloads in 2004 – that turned out, of course, to be a scam. And let’s face it – there’s no such thing as “no lag” unless you’re planning to roll out TCP over Quantum Entanglement.

But there’s no doubt that the idea that OnLive proposes is feasible. That is, there’s very little difference between this technology and Cisco Telepresence, only, of course, instead of displaying an image of the opposite partner in the conversation, the image displayed is a computer-simulated hallucination that was pre-rendered and flattened from three dimensions to two. There really is no technical difference between the two.

Yes, it could be done.

But the question is, of course, will something that should work in theory work when it is field tested on the much less predictable conditions of the larger Internet (rather than on corporate LANs or WANs). Ultimately, OnLive relies entirely on network performance to remain feasible, at a time when many broadband providers are purposefully degrading Internet access in one way or another to prevent overcongestion.